Dear Persuader,

Spring is an exciting time for me, an exciting time for my continuing students, and an exciting time for MAXpersuasion. Spring is when our new students join us.

For existing students, the early weeks of a new MAXpersuasion year are a chance to review and reflect on all that has been accomplished. For new students, it’s a whole new world opening up, a world resplendent with both breakthrough techniques never before taught, and tried and true strategies and persuasion practices culled from the wisdom of ancient works to modern.

I find when beginning a new journey I like to have a map. I like to know where I’m headed and the many ways I can travel to get there. With this in mind, the first thing I go over with new students is the core philosophy of persuasion, the organizing principles that we’ll be studying as we proceed.

Orienting ourselves to maximize our learning begins with harnessing intention. To the extent our intention is working on our behalf, we will experience an amplification of the learning process, an acceleration of how well we do, and an effortless easing of the negative to positive in our lives.

Think of intention as our compass. It guides our behavior and our words, keeps us on track, and helps us anticipate what we’re going to need to make persuasion happen and create the results we desire. The intention process begins with initiating communication with our Other-Than-Conscious mind. This is a two-way road, allowing us to interact with and guide our Other-Than-Conscious to act within our parameters and by our request.

The next step is to externalize what we’ve begun inside with the process of creating trust and rapport with our prospects and clients. Trust is at the heart of every persuasion. Start with this simple truth and you will go far. There’s a name for (attempted) persuasion without trust: coercion. Trust can be learned as can the process of rapport building, and as we begin to build upon our skill sets of persuasion, these are two of the building blocks.

Once these are established, The Cleveland Method will go on to teaching you how to fully and completely get to the core of what your prospect or client wants, not on a shallow level (i.e. I want a new house), but on a deep core value level (i.e. I want to provide security and comfort for my family). This information is pure gold. With it, you can quickly and adeptly tailor your presentation to fit with exactly what your client wants. Instead of throwing all sorts of useless information at them (as with features and benefits selling), you are zeroing in on EXACTLY what they want.

As we continue on our journey together we’ll learn language strategies to create results the likes of which you’ve never before experienced, we’ll discover how to determine specifically what our prospects are saying and determine their models of the world so that we can better direct our words and actions for results. We will go through suggestion patterns which is all about knowing what to say, but also what NOT to say. (There is a list of words that will muddle up any presentation, discussion or communication and that list will be revealed and explained.)

Another core element of our process is the concept of framing. Is it a miserable gray day outside? Or is it a perfect day to cozy up to the fireplace and watch a movie? The frames we set for ourselves, our families, our clients determine how successful we will be. Frames exist in every human interaction and are really the structure of how we view the world. Knowing and understanding these unlocks tremendous opportunities that will make your skills soar.

After we’ve oriented ourselves to working with this powerful knowledge with the utmost integrity, The Cleveland Method delves into social influence skills. This information is dangerous in the wrong hands and have been used throughout history for evil (Hitler’s mass control techniques, cult indoctrination) and for militaristic benefit (the Chinese stratagems, mind control techniques generated in the U.S. military). We also learn how to eliminate resistance and use social influence always ethically and with integrity (without which, a sales person will never rise above mediocre).

We learn about core drives and how to manipulate (not a bad word) these core drives of our clients to sell. We discuss metaphor and storytelling as a way to deliver a pointed, pertinent message that will first, put our clients into a trance, and then easily drop into their subconscious the things we want them to think, feel, believe. Sound powerful? It absolutely is.

Metaphor can be thought of as the ultimate delivery system. I go through many strategies to make using metaphors easy and powerful. We then learn and apply The Hero's Journey to our personal stories and craft those stories to become so powerful that they'll surely sway all those that hear them.

As with any good road trip or sojourn, there is always a fair amount of “soul searching”, that kind of figuring stuff out on a deep level that happens when you have nothing but the open road in front of you. One focus of The Cleveland Method is Universe System.

We use this as a way to re-define the structure of our own selves on a personal, business and public level. The results of taking action with ourselves and using pinpoint precision to identify what's important in our own lives is so powerful and so extraordinarily important in our businesses. When you become capable of truly defining yourself, you'll find that it opens more doors than you ever thought possible.

I’m so excited to begin this journey with you now. If you have ever thought for even a moment that you'd want to study with me... now is definitely the time.

I've just restructured, repriced and revamped my coaching group for the launch of it's 7th year to make it a no-brainer for anyone who has a need to increase their income.

Please contact Kim at kim@maxpersuasion.com or (775) 562-4625 for registration and pricing.

To your success!
Kenrick E. Cleveland
@KenrickC

We’ve all had this experience: a song comes on the radio and we’re transported back to a time and place ten, fifteen, twenty years ago or longer. Maybe it was a song that reminded us of a time when we were struggling through a broken heart, or maybe it was just the opposite, the soundtrack for our first true love.

As you drift back in your memories to that girlfriend or a boyfriend, remember having a date with somebody that you really wanted to date. And if you didn’t have any dates in high school then pick another time.

When I was sixteen years old I met my first wife. Around that time Chicago had a song that was popular, ‘Twenty-Five or Six To Four’. To this day when that song comes on the radio I remember the new Toyota Celica GT that I had and the drive up the Columbia Gorge off into the middle of nowhere to see her and the excitement that coursed through my body and mind as I thought of being able to spend some time with her. To this day I hear that song and I’m there all over again. I’m in the memory, driving east on 84. The car has that new car smell. Chicago is playing on the radio. I have an incredible sense of power and anticipation and I’m trilled to be alive.

That was over thirty years ago and it’s crystal clear. And I’m taken back by a song.

Maybe right now in your marriage or with your significant other you have a song that when you hear it both of you say, ‘Oh, that’s our song,’ or maybe you’ve had an ‘our song’ in the past that you can remember.

What is that phenomenon and what does this have to do with persuasion?

It’s called anchoring and anchoring has everything to do with persuasion.

Music has the ability to put you in intense emotional states. These emotional states are connected with the stimulus of the memory. They travel through neuro-pathways of emotions and memories that words and language cannot. And sometimes music affects us so intensely that we want to share it with others, but a song that touches me deeply may not touch you as deeply. It’s extraordinarily individual and powerful. Aldous Huxley said, ‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’

We’re constantly exposed to things that we have been conditioned to react to. It’s often been said that we are far more reactive than proactive. The human brain is really more on automatic pilot than it is a conscious device. We think we’re conscious. We have a vested interest in thinking that.  But we’re really not.

Most of the things you do are habitual. The deepest core things you do are obviously and completely automatic. How long can you pay attention consciously to your breathing? Seconds? A minute or two? But you sure don’t do it twenty-four hours a day. What about when you’re sleeping? If you had to consciously remember to breathe, we wouldn’t be here.

The key to this for persuasion purposes is, what if we could elicit an emotion and get it up to a peak and pair it with a unique stimulus so that any time we used that stimulus it reminded it of that emotion? That would be a pretty powerful tool, wouldn’t it?

This is not to say we’re going to elicit our prospect’s musical history and play the songs and attach that special, happy, excited or calm feelings to ourselves, but if you can understand the way anchoring works through the example of ‘our song’, then you’ve internalized the concept of anchoring.

And, you can use this knowledge by eliciting your clients’ strongest emotional states that are immediately usable for anchoring purposes and what would those be? Criteria. When a person tells you their highest criteria, it makes them emotional. They’ll feel it. And when that happens, you can pair it with some unique state. It’s just that simple.

Dear Persuader,

'Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.' --Albert Einstein

The concept of change is a difficult one to define.  Sometimes things seem to stay the same for huge periods of time. Many people do their absolute best to hold on to things vehemently hoping to stave off the inevitable—their houses, way of dressing, hairstyles, friends, familiar belongings surrounding them all remaining the same giving them a sense of comfort, security.  This is a sad misconception. Holding on to outdated ways does not keep us more secure.

The world around us is constantly changing. The weather changes, time changes, seasons change… there is absolutely nothing we can do to hold back and working against it is incredibly detrimental to our growth.

I’m now in my late forties ready to make personal and professional changes which both excite me and scare me. And I face this thrill/fear with an eagerness to embrace the inevitable growth these changes will bring.

Now that we’re a little way into the New Year, it’s time to take inventory of what needs to change for you.  I wrote a little bit about resolutions at the beginning of the year. This is a basis for change for some people, a nice trigger. However, larger changes come at you at unexpected times, not on a predictable timetable, many times without our consent. (Scary.) And managing our fear over these changes is really the key to happiness and fulfillment on all fronts.

If you’re one of the many people with the fear of change, this is for you, a new start, a chance to stop robbing yourself of the opportunities available to you with a little risk.

The first thing to realize is that your resistance to change is emotional. And emotional resistance is really difficult to overcome. It can be done.  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and how each and every emotion we have is a choice. This has really struck a chord in me and given me a new found sense of freedom over what I choose to feel.

Sometimes this resistance is ennui, a general weariness (not to be mistaken for laziness) and what is required in this instance is a sincere desire to push past. For other people change is a fear losing something valuable and a fear the unknown. Valid, both, but remember, regrets are seldom about things we tried, and often about the things we were too afraid to try, the chances we didn’t take.

Part of what I am changing has to do with really exciting developments soon to come in what I am offering at MAXpersuasion. Please stay tuned for new classes, new opportunities to expand your persuasion and your life.  If you would like more information about classes starting soon, please contact Kim at kim@maxpersuasion.com and ask for a run down. Otherwise, stay tuned… there are many exciting changes to come.

Here's to your success!

Kenrick E. Cleveland