"The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."  ~NELSON MANDELA

Dear Persuader,

I noticed a sticker on the back of a truck recently. “No Fear” it said.  I thought it a bit arrogant and silly.  Our core drives of fight and flight are predicated upon the fact that there ARE in fact things out there in the world to fear.

If we’re walking down a dark alley at night and hear footsteps or screaming, we need our fear to jump start that adrenalin.  If we’re out in the woods camping and something starts to growl deeply at us, we’re going to want that fear to kick in.

And how about a near miss while driving?  I once had an experience while on my motorcycle that got that jolt of electricity and that ‘hell, it’s good to be alive’ feeling afterward.  These are physical fears. Fear of being mugged, mauled, hurt, hit. . . but what about fears that prevent you from doing things?

These are really the things we should concentrate on having “no fear” about.  It’s not about hang gliding or dare deviling, but about taking the real risks in life that cause growth to happen.

Emotional fear is most definitely something that can hold people back.  It can stop us from using our persuasion abilities in a tough spot, it can prevent us from following up on sales calls or reaching out to prospects.  It can prevent us from reaching out and connecting to a significant other for fear of getting hurt.

Pushing through this fear will give you more levels of bravery and fearlessness.  It takes you past something which once was difficult into a new paradigm of potential.

Most fears are beliefs which you think are true.  Not which are true, but which you think are true.  They can stem from an emotional paralysis leaving you feeling as if you have no choice in the experience of the fear itself.

Fear is a feeling. It is not a state of events.

I once saw an exhibit of “outsider art” where one of the projects was created by a developmentally disabled man by the name of Michael Bernard Loggins. It eventually became a book called “Fears of Your Life”.

This is an incredible exploration of the things we (humans) have the capacity to be afraid of from the tangible to the utterly absurd.

My advice to you is to create your own book of fears or at the very least, a top ten or top twenty list.  Assess yourself honestly in this. . . maybe it’s a fear of clowns, that’s okay, maybe it’s public speaking, that’s a big one.

I’ve known many people who had potential but were afraid to succeed. This one is not in my realm of comprehension because I strive for success, but it’s very real and stunts the growth of many people.

Now that you’ve got your list, it’s time to identify which are rational, i.e. stemming from a real threat, and fears which are irrational, i.e. clowns.

This is really about facing your fears and your blockages to growth.

To overcome them, try the EFT method of tapping them out (if they seem to be stunting your progress) or meditate on them and realize where they may be holding you back and how very possible it is for you to conquer them.

To your continued success!

Kenrick

I like the way Abraham Lincoln said it best, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

Now, I don’t know how many of you have actual enemies, arch nemeses, rivals, foes or adversaries. These descriptions seem pretty extreme, but sometimes in business, rivalries happen.  They key is not to let them define us or impede us because unlike movie villains, most people are really just looking for friendlies.

Everywhere people go, they are looking for a friendly face. They are looking for someone to acknowledge them. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re going, or what you’re doing, people look for this acknowledgement.

In our world, people are all the time sending out the signal looking for friendlies. All the time they are searching for people who are going to be nice to them.

And the world ignores them.

Know this going in: as persuaders, you’re going to get ignored. You’re going to “put yourself out there” and people will flat out disregard you, as if you don’t even exist. People will ignore your signals of ‘hello’ and that’s okay. They don’t know any better. Forgive them. You know better and you’ll know how to influence them in a heart beat the second you lay eyes on them.

How is it that what people really want is to be acknowledged and yet, they end up not paying attention to other people? Well, we’re conditioned. We’ve set up our boundaries. Protected ourselves from rejection by rejecting first.  Sheltered ourselves from disappointment by avoiding engagement. And sometimes, for those of us who live in larger cities, we’ve attempted to eliminate some of the impact from energy siphons and “crazies” and have instead opted to look at our shoes or appear otherwise occupied instead of giving a little nod or smile.

And despite all of this, despite the fact that you WILL be rejected, let us commit to stop ignoring people and to cutting back on our own rudeness.

This rudeness, while not confined to the US, is not as prevalent if you go to other countries. Other cultures are quite different in terms of their unconscious hellos and a general openness to greeting people.

Several years ago I visited a Latin American country where I was woefully ignorant of their particular way of greeting. And I say woefully, because I had not only misinterpreted, but I had judged in the process.

After getting off the airplane, I noticed the greeting first in the airport. A man tipped his head back and pushed his lips out. Instead of immediately realizing that this was in fact a greeting, I took it that the man was trying to hit on me. Here, if you purse your lips at someone, it’s an indication of, ‘Yeah, hey, I’d like to kiss you.’

And so I was off put and became increasingly disturbed as the day went on because wherever I’d go, I’d encounter this same treatment. Had I all of the sudden become a very desirable commodity in the gay community? No. Was I giving off a vibe that this was a part of my personality? Again, no. I was not. And yet, here I was confronted over and over again with men suggesting, in my mind, that they wanted to kiss.

Huh? Well, as quick as I like to believe I am. . . Eventually, I noticed a fellow member of the group I was with doing the same thing, and this man was most definitely not interested in other men. Once I saw this, like a lightning bolt, as if the blindfold of my limited cultural frame had been taken off, I began noticing EVERYONE doing this.

Of course, once I realized this, I immediately began to mirror the behavior and all of the sudden, my discomfort became acceptance in this culture that was new to me.

Practice your “unconscious hello” everywhere you go and be sure and tell us all your successes with using it on the blog below.

Kenrick

“That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Dear Persuader,

I had a dream about shoes last night.  Shoes have always been sort of an issue for me because I have large feet and it hasn’t always been easy to find ones that fit me (especially before the internet existed and before I had the means to have custom made shoes).   This dream was about a quest for the perfect pair and it began with the frustration of never being comfortable, having blisters, feeling exhausted at the end of the day, having to loosen the laces after a few hours, really being miserable on a daily basis because my feet hurt like the dickens.

And then finally I experienced the excitement of finding a pair that fit perfectly and comfortably.  Like Cinderella and the glass slipper, I went through ups and downs in this dream and it put me in mind of the Hero’s Journey and how anything we struggle with can be put to good use in the stories we bring into our persuasion.

It boils down to inspiration and relevance.    What does your topic have to do with your business?  What does it have to do with where you are today?  Do you feel passionate about it?  Is it topical and interesting?

My dream was very detailed.  The shoes I eventually found molded perfectly to my feet and it felt like I was walking on air after I put them on my feet.  There was no tightness or pressure.

I started out by telling you how much pain and frustration was involved and moved into the pleasure and satisfaction of finally finding a good fit. This outcome became more important because I started out by telling you about how uncomfortable my feet were at the beginning of the journey.

With your stories, your journeys from darkness to light, from poverty to affluence, from sorrow to happiness, from instability to security, you can give your prospects and clients glimpses into who you are and where you’ve come from to create the person you are now.  A very useful side effect of this is that these glimpses into your inner workings create deeper rapport and an almost instant trust (if crafted well).

Did you become a financial advisor because your father died at a young age leaving your mother to struggle to support your family?  Did you get into real estate because you grew up with a friend whose family lived in a small apartment?  Did you make mistakes you’re not proud of but which taught you valuable lessons about honesty and integrity?  Fill your stories with emotion and personal revelations and all those things which did not kill you, but made you stronger and more powerful and I can guarantee you that not only will they connect you deeper to your prospects, but they will connect you deeper with yourself.

Come up with a few stories and polish them.  They can be one minute long, two minutes, five minutes, and they can be touching or humorous.  The key is to link them back to you, your product, and your service.

Be sure to post your thoughts and comments... even your journey on the blog below.

Here's to the hero in all of us.

Kenrick

Dear Persuader,

“Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” ~Robert Graves

Logic versus instinct.  Reason versus intuition. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to choose one way of thinking over the other because both are absolutely necessary in order to be good persuaders of ourselves and others.

However, in the West, specifically the educational system in the U.S., our schooling has focused 99 percent of its time developing the logical, reasoning aspect of the student/citizen.   I believe this is a huge mistake.  It’s like cutting off one of our senses (actually, it’s not ‘like’ cutting off one of our senses, it is cutting off one of our senses).  And the self actualized person necessarily begins on a journey of developing the other side of our natures.

True, some people are more predisposed to the intuitive -- artists, musicians, writers, philosophers -- and it comes very naturally to them. Others of us have to make a very conscious decision to nurture instinct and intuition.

So how do the intuitionally challenged begin to flex this muscle?  First step is to begin to check in to our bodies.  I know that sounds a little odd, but many of the “sighs” of instinct and intuition are very body oriented.   Think of how some people describe it, “I just felt it in my gut,” or “I had a lump in my throat”.  The physical manifestation of instinct can feel sharp and intense, or it can be a slow burn that spreads.   Part of the reason it’s hard to pin down is because people experience it differently.

The key is: pay attention.  And once you begin to hear it, you must begin to trust that small voice inside of you.

What does this have to do with persuasion?  Well, think about it.  How do people make decisions to buy?  It’s not logic, I can tell you that.  People buy based on their feelings and then they back it up with logic.   If we understand how our own feelings, intuitions and instincts work, we’re in a better position to understand how our prospects and clients are processing their decisions to buy or not buy.

So what to do when you begin to feel it and begin paying attention?  Well, start going with what it’s telling you.   If the path you’re on is dark and feels unsafe and the hairs on the back of your neck are standing on end, quickly get to safety.   If the person you’re hoping to make a deal with strikes you as untrustworthy, don’t push forward just because you want to make the deal but trust yourself to know the situation lacks integrity.

Albert Einstein, a very logical and highly intelligent guy by most everybody’s standards once said, “The only real valuable thing is intuition.”   As you work to develop yours, you’ll begin to understand the truth in this statement.

To your success!

Kenrick

PS... Don't forget to post your comments to the blog below.

Dear Persuader,

I want you to think about the process of persuasion a little differently today.  I want you to think of it as a spark, a spark that creates fire, okay?

If you’ve ever used a magnifying glass and started a fire with a little piece of paper or wood, you know that you have to focus it.  You’ve got to have that so finely focused that it ignites from the heat.   If your focus is too broad, you may get that paper warm but it's certainly not going to ignite.

You need to focus the client so strongly on what they want that all of the sudden it’s going to burst into flames.   And, one of the things that will burst it into flames, that will take it to that next level so fast and so powerful is that level of rapport you can bring to the table, that spark of interest that you can get them to feel as a result of what you’re doing.

I want to speak about that spark of interest for a moment.  I want to speak about it in a way that you probably haven’t heard me talk about before.  I’m not going to talk about using their predicates and I’m not going to talk about using their tone of voice... I’m not going to talk about any of that.

What I want to talk about is you thinking about this in terms of a spark of interest, a spark of personality, a spark of rapport.  And I want you to put that image in your mind and if you put that image in your mind then here’s how it would look as I see it.

You start off by gauging the level of interest that the client has, you immediately apply your magnifying glass to begin to magnify that level of interest.

Now, who’s magnifying it?  You or them?

They are.  You’re providing the questions that cause them to go inside and focus more on where the spark hits, and that spark is a magnetic personality that makes the person feel good about what you’re doing and makes them turnaround and come your way.

It’s a spark that happens through belief.  You need to believe so much in what you do and in who you are and in what your products are, that you simply focus on that belief in light of what they’re there to do and magically you’ll feel that spark happen.  I say magically... you can break this into a million different strategies but I’m telling you, if you’ll put this one in your head and run with it for a little bit, you’re going to see that you start creating dramatic results and fanning big flames of desire, and that’s exactly what we want to do.

So focus on that magic.  There’s magic in imagining that you have a spark that will bridge the gap from their few questions to a burning desire and all you have to do is create the heat.  And the heat’s created by focusing them in on what it is that they want and need along with your spark of personality that can get them to start to see the value and the benefit that you’re bringing to the table.

And it happens more in your mind than anywhere else.   In your belief that you’re creating that spark, it exists... and now the flames of desire.  I want you to put in your mind and I want you to see with every client, and I want you to be able to tell me afterward, if I were to ask you, when did that spark hit?

You should be able to say, "Well, it hit when I said...", or "When he or she said...".  You can tell, you can feel it, you can hear it, you can see it, and if the sale didn’t happen, you’d probably respond by saying, "I never did feel that spark, Kenrick, it just didn’t seem to happen."

If that takes place, I want you to begin to analyze why. Was it because they didn’t have a real need or a real desire?  And be very careful not to jump to the conclusion of yes, because my next question is, were you able to sufficiently focus them through your magnifying glass and create the heat that comes when they think about their values and their beliefs as it relates to their questions and what they’re needing from your company?

For you advanced persuaders, I want you to focus on the image.  For those of you that are lesser advanced, I want you to focus on the strategy and the image and you may have to do it part by part which is absolutely fine.  Go at it part by part.

So, the first part is the interest and the interest comes by focusing them through the magnifying glass of their desire, which is another way of saying, their criteria and their values.

The rapport I want you to think of as a spark, a spark that happens as a result of you focusing in on just how madly in love you are with your products and your services, with your company’s values, with the way you are able to interpret and deliver those values and services, that get people to want to be with you.

In other words, you’re coming in with the magnifying glass of criteria, you’re focusing it through the questions that you’re asking, and then you’re making that magic leap through that nebulous something that you and your company possess and you need to focus on that nebulous something and feel it in your heart and feel it transfer to the client.

If you’ll use that strategy, I guarantee you that you’ll start to see things through different eyes in a short period of time.  You’ll start to imagine things happening differently and you’ll be able to focus on what your clients are doing in a very different way.

Kenrick

P.S. Don't forget to post your comments on the blog below.

Dear Persuader,

By now, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while or if you’ve taken a seminar, been involved in my coaching club or gone through one of my self study courses, you know that the basis for persuasion is the ability to build rapport and the basis for rapport building requires questioning your prospect or client with the magic questions “What’s important about. . . ?”

Well, here’s another way you can ask the ‘what’s important about’ question.  This way is to create a fantasy in the mind of your listeners and in doing so giving them permission and the opportunity to answer either silently or out loud to you.  This works phenomenally in a group setting (and works phenomenally one on one, so whichever way).

Here’s an example.  Say you’re speaking in front of a group, you might say, “You are walking along a road by the beach and out near the water, you see something that catches your eye.  You look at it and you walk over to it.  As you get to it, it’s just out of the water so slightly and you kind of dig it out of the sand a little bit and sure enough, it looks like an Aladdin’s lamp.   You think to yourself, wow, could it really be?  You rub the lamp and out pops the genie, with a magic wand in his hand and he says, ‘If I could grant you any wish you wanted as it relates to your business, what would it be?’  How would you answer this question?”

Let your group think about this for a moment.  Say, “I want you to answer that question in your mind right now silently, and I’ll give you a minute just to do that.”

The beautiful thing about imagining and fantasy is that each and every person in the room has a very richly textured, complex idea of what they are viewing, which is highly personalized.  You’ve just accessed the criteria of an entire room full of people.  How cool is that?

Using a magical environment such as a genie in a bottle on a beach also has the benefit of pulling people out of their shells and lulling them to a place of receptiveness to the rest of what you’re going to say.

Why does this work?  Well, here’s a little bit of theory behind it.  School teaches us that vertical thinking is the be all end.   They start with an overview of a subject, like the base of a pyramid, and then build up from there until we get very specific.  Horizontal thinking teaches us how to gain a wider view about things, encompassing more and more, becoming so expansive that we can hardly believe how much there is.

When we get really vertical, we become logical, systematic, and we have a right-wrong, good-bad, black-white mentality.  When we start going too horizontal we get too metaphysical, too out in the zone, and too much into meditation or something, and we don’t take any action.

However, if we start horizontally and we do a big scan of what’s going on and then we get down to the vertical, we win, really, really big, because we can implement the right things

If you want to stay with your fantasy for another question or two you could say, “Now suppose the genie says, ‘Before I grant this wish, what’s important about that?’”

You’ll get people to really open up and come up with answers that really move them instead of just a politically correct answer which you could care less about and accessing both their horizontal and vertical views of the world.

Give it a try and post your stories on the blog below.

Kenrick