•A Lesson In Gaslighting
There's a psychological technique called gaslighting which is incredibly potent especially in persuasive situations.
A few nights ago I was watching TV, just flipping around aimlessly, and came upon an old episode of M*A*S*H. In this episode, BJ is bored and to entertain himself he cooks up a plan for amusement at Winchester's expense.
BJ takes a pair of Winchester's pants and in their place replaces them with a pair two sizes too large. When Winchester eventually puts the pants on, BJ asks...
•A Return To Bondage (No! Not That Kind Of Bondage)
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage." --Sir Alex Fraser Tyler (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and historian
This quote...
•Accomplishing Everything You Want By Eliminating Reversals
Ever hear the idiom 'sink or swim'? When sharks stop swimming, they die. That's where it comes from.
As humans, if we stop moving, stop progressing, stop learning, we don't literally die or sink, but we stop growing and may even experience a figurative death.
Growth happens on all levels of our existence including physical, financial, emotional, spiritual, and when we stagnate emotionally, and we're feeling 'stuck' this may be the result of a 'reversal'. If you can reverse these reversals...
•Base Desires And Persuasion
I spend a lot of time thinking about persuasion. Over the last year and a half I've spent a tremendous amount of time thinking of self-persuasion and self-mastery and as a result have noticed some phenomenal results in my life.
The only way to make progress in the outside world is to make progress on your inside world.
By asking the right questions you will naturally lock on to the right answers. I've been using this as my guide and have begun to ask myself the right questions.
I'm talking...
•Becoming Magnetic
A woman I know, an extremely spiritual person, recently shared with me the following: 'I used to have unfortunate beliefs about myself and I received back from external influences unfortunate results. When I decided to take control and raise my resonance, to be the change I wanted to become, to allow abundance and love come flow through me, absolutely everything fell into place. I am now living a life of leisure with a beautiful husband and I can draw what I want into my universe at will.'...
•Beyond Boxes
If you're in the world of sales, it is quite likely you have gone through traditional sales training and learned that there is 'a way' or maybe `one way' to sell. Maybe it was the Carnegie method. Maybe you learned 'features and benefits'. Maybe you learned some other easily definable, package-able way to sell to affluent clients or prospects which sort of hammers away at their defenses and attempts to corner them into buying your product or services. These techniques are responsible for...
•Choosing A Talisman For Affluence
Amulets have been used throughout the ages to protect the holder from trouble. Talismans are objects that bring luck. Both have been around since the dawn of man. Literally. I don't have proof, but I wholeheartedly believe that the first man ever saw a rock or shell and picked it up and thought to himself, 'This is a special item which will bring me luck and protect me from evil.'
And as the thought escaped his mind, the little rock or shell became imbued with meaning. It might not have been...
•Clean Out Your Trash
There's a common saying, 'taking three steps forward and two steps back'. We've all felt this sort of frustration at some point in our life. Luckily you're reading this article and I have an exercise to show you how to eliminate the 'two steps back'.
By focusing on something, you're going to draw it to you. Focusing on anger brings anger. Focusing on being a money magnet, draws money. Focusing on love brings love. It makes sense then that when we focus on forgiveness, we draw healing and...
•Cleaning Out Your Attic: The Fundamental Advantage Of Forgiveness
"Forgiveness means that you do not hold others responsible for your experiences." ~Gary Zukav
If you're like me, you have a garage or attic or basement full of junk--old clothes that don't fit or that are outdated, boxes of children's toys, paperwork you'll never need or even look at again. We have sentimental attachments to things that are just taking up space.
These items, while maybe not physically holding you back, may be psychologically holding you back. They are definitely weighing you...
•Contrary: Dealing With Polarity Responders
What's a polarity responder? We've all had dealings with them. They are someone who no matter what the situation, statement or issue at hand, has to respond in opposition. 'It's a beautiful day.'
Polarity responder: 'It's too hot. And there isn't enough shade. I'm not comfortable at all in this weather.'
Ugh. This is the sort of response you will get to any and all comments or questions by a polarity responder.
Polarity responders are easy to spot. Personally, I love to deal with them. I...
•Creating Group Rapport
Public speaking is hard. I remember starting out in this business, a business which necessitates a fair amount of public speaking, and before each big seminar I'd give, I would have huge anxiety for over a week prior to the event. My family would avoid me, even the dog knew not to interrupt me. Gearing up for events was chaotic and intense and only lead to a huge let down after the event (despite the event's success) because it was a huge release of energy.
Slowly my comfort with public...
•Exploring Curiosity: Hunger For The Unknown
When we are born, we are open and curious and fascinated at the new world around us. We are sponges. And as we develop, and if, and only if, our basic needs are satisfied, we grow to the point of requiring self-actualization.
Learning. Curiosity. Creativity. Knowledge.
If you are interested in persuasion, odds are, you've got most of your basic requirements met. You've moved on to this higher level of consciousness where you want to absorb more and more of this field of human nature,...
•Flexing Your Persuasion Muscles
Over the last few years I've become a new man. How? Well, I'm finally becoming congruent with my thoughts and my body. I've shed over one hundred and forty unwanted pounds of fat. A new lease on life and a new attitude toward the gym, as well as a drastically revised relationship with food have combined to achieve huge results for me.
When my weight was at its height, I was over four hundred and twenty five pounds. I was diabetic and near death having experienced what the doctor suggested was...
•Frame, Reframe
My transcriptionist lived in New Orleans until August 28, 2005, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit. She and her boyfriend and their four cats evacuated with two cars full of valuables and art and 'irreplaceables'. They rode out the storm in Tennessee in a pet friendly hotel.
Eight weeks later they arrived in Portland after having gone back to New Orleans to pack up their belongings. For many months after they moved the reaction, when people would find out where they were from, was, 'Wow,...
•Framing Baby Killers
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anais Nin
The ability to frame a situation is considered 'spin' by politicians and media pundits. It's the ability to situate your view on an issue to your advantage.
There's the 'Nuclear Reduction Treaty' which on it's surface sounds like a pretty good idea. But in the world of 'spin' what something is called is not necessarily what's inside and in a very Orwellian twist, the actual substance of this treaty is to prolong the...
•Framing The Big Picture
The most powerful concept in persuasion is framing. When we look at the overall, big picture we can see most everything we do and say as a frame. When I suggest examples based on religion and politics, I'm not (NOT!!) endorsing one side or another. I'm simply showing where our blind spots exist, where we have holes in our arguments. if you have a belief that you fervently or fanatically believe in, you might just be blind to the other side of the issue.
When we talk about the...
•Full Of It
Confidence... when we interact with our affluent clients and prospects, we need to exude confidence. We need to show them what we are made of. There's a point where confidence becomes over confident and self assuredness becomes arrogance. These are not good things to be full of. Being competent, self assured and having a solid sense of self are excellent things to be full of.
Persuasion relies on our prospects perceptions of us. The reputation of people who sell isn't always flattering or...
•Going With Your Gut: How To Self Calibrate
The Oxford English Dictionary defines intuition as "the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process".
Isaac Asimov said of it, "Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading."
How is your relationship with this aspect of yourself? Can you find your own way through a situation with incomplete data? Are you able to balance the left...
•Hocus Pocus: Reframing Sugar
I recently came across a banner ad on the internet that read: "Skip artificals. Go natural. Sugar: sweet by nature. Only 15 calories per teaspoon."
Hmm. . . seems like they have a fairly clear message. Too bad it's completely absurd.
What's a person to think from this one little banner ad? Their main frame is artificial is bad, natural is good. I can almost get on board with that. Sure. They go on to presuppose that mother nature would never harm us. . . well, I don't know about that, but...
•Hopping Into Someone Else's Skin
We've all heard the saying, you can't know a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes. This technique is a figurative expression of that saying. It is about how to gain rapport by putting ourselves inside the person we're trying to persuade. Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
As we step into the skin of our prospects, we experience them...
•How To Activate Your Affluence
My belief is that we create our own destiny. The lives we have are the lives we have made for ourselves--good or bad.
My students in MAXpersuasion are either living the good life or on their way to it because as we expand our universes we get exactly what we want out of life.
I've been thinking about the concept of affluence lately--from principles to thoughts to action to the realization of it.
If you really want to realize your dreams, and I assume you do, then installing an affluent...
•It's Time To Bury Cold Calling
Endings are hard. Sometimes we cling to people, places, things, that we've outgrown, because of a nostalgia, or out of habit.
It's like having to put a beloved pet to sleep. It was the best thing, the most humane way, but it's just never easy.
As we grow, learn, strive, we have to let go of ways that we functioned in the past, ways of being that no longer apply to our present selves.
There are two things in sales that are not persuasive and will absolutely hinder your results. This article...
•Kicking Negativity
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." --Seneca, Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD
Whoa! Things seem to be in a state of flux at this moment in history, don't they? Just turn on CNN and you'll see how topsy turvy things are with doomsday and apocalypse on the horizon. It's enough to turn even the most well adjusted, reasonable person into a confused, pissed off obsessive ready to jump off a bridge. I say, keep your rudder in the water and make life work.
Many of my...
•Language Pattern: Awareness
"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." - Henry Miller
Words thrill me. I find language magnificent. Linguistics is an incredible world.
I've been studying persuasion for over thirty years. If I think about it though, I've been studying the language of persuasion. Aside from mirroring and matching, and physical anchors, persuasion is about words.
The Awareness pattern is essential...
•Larry Craig's Incongruency
The movie 'The Usual Suspects' has a great interrogation scene.
The detective says to the suspect, "The first thing I learned on the job, know what it was? How to spot a murderer. Let's say you arrest three guys for the same killing. Put them all in jail overnight. The next morning, whoever is sleeping is your man. If you're guilty, you know you're caught, you get some rest - let your guard down, you follow?"
When the whole Larry Craig fiasco came out, I thought back to that scene.
For a...
•Layers Of Complexity In Life And Persuasion: I Am An Onion
I love a good metaphor. An especially powerful metaphor for me lately has been that of an onion. The Cleveland Method deals with a deep understanding of our core drives and unconscious motivations. When we focus inward, only then can we genuinely understand others.
In recent months I've noticed a tremendous amount of growth in many of my students who have been applying persuasion techniques not just to business and sales, but to every facet of their lives.
One of my students, an adviser who...
•Learning Persuasion
I had a student ask me recently, "Kenrick, how do you keep track of all of these persuasion strategies? Every time we have a conference call or seminar, you pull out another technique adding to the dozens and dozens of techniques we've already learned. I can't even remember to use the 'unconscious hello'."
I responded to my student by saying, 'When you learn a new language, are you fluent in a week?'
When you learn a new instrument, are you playing concerts within a week?
The subject of...
•Loops: Language Patterns For Persuasion
Persuasion is made up of a lot of ingredients and one of the most powerful techniques is the language pattern. The temporal pattern loop is one of my favorites.
When we open loops in the minds of our prospects, it creates a tiny vacuum that the prospect really wants to have filled.
In order to understand open loops, there are three important things to know: The first is, people need to have closure, a definitive answer, a yes or a no.
"I'll need to think it over," is a common open loop that...
•Luxury: It's All Relative
"The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury." --Charlie Chaplin
I'm not sure that's the saddest thing I can imagine. I get the premise behind the thought but ultimately, there are so many things sadder. I'm a huge fan of luxury myself. Yet as a pragmatist and a realist, I can see the pitfalls that may lure the average person into believing they have a luxurious, rich life because of the outrageously priced goods they've racked up on their credit cards.
In a article on MSN,...
•Master Your Fears
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear."--Mark Twain
I found an interesting thing when I looked up courage in the dictionary. .. 'the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc. without fear or bravery.'
This struck me as interesting because it's the one time I'm not sure I would agree with the dictionary. To me, courage is doing something in spite of fear, not with an absence of fear. Bravery, for example is a way of...
•More Linguistic Pitfalls
Seems like some of my readers are paying attention and that's awesome. I wrote part one of this article a while back. It talks about eight common and avoidable pitfalls we have in language. In the article I wrote about 'but', 'if', 'try', and 'might' and how these words dilute the power of our language and dull our ability to persuade. Well, a few of my more observant readers noticed that if there are eight pitfalls and I only cited four, there must be four more traps out there with the...
•Motivation Through Adversity
I've struggled with my weight my whole life. As far back as I can remember, I've felt bad about it. I was stuck in a body that wasn't what I wanted, that didn't fit with how I really saw myself and to me, it represented a weakness. Andrew Carnegie once said, "People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents." In my heart and mind, I felt this struggle was keeping me from self mastery and frustrated the heck out of me....
•Old Fashioned Sales: Features And Benefits
If you've ever cooked noodles you know that you can determine if they are done by throwing the noodle against the wall to see if it sticks. If it does, then it's done. When I think of 'features and benefits', I think of someone throwing a whole pot of noodles against the wall to see what sticks.
What is 'features and benefits'? Well, Dale Carnegie would say that by listing all of the features of your product and all the benefits that will come to you as a result of using this product, that...
•Paying Attention With Patience
For a few years of my childhood I lived on my grandfather's farm. He used to have me help him plant trees.
I said to him, "Grampa, I can't wait for all the vegetables to grow so we can eat them, but I especially can't wait for the apples from this dwarf tree."
My grandpa replied, "This tree isn't even in the ground yet. First we have to plant it. Then it has to mature, and then apples will appear, but you won't be able to eat those apples. This tree won't have apples you can eat for several...
•Persuading Through Personality Segmentation
'A part of me really wants to buy your product.' What does 'a part of me' mean? When someone says, 'well, part of me wants this, but another part wants that', what is that person talking about? Well, for one, this is a way for us to talk about our experiences. It's also a way to assign blame to a force greater than or at least different than our 'self'.
What you need to consider, however, is that the words we speak are things, actual, tangible things, as real as the computer keyboard I'm...
•Persuading With The Thirty Six Chinese Stratagem
"So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will win a hundred times in a hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you win one and lose the next. If you do not know yourself or your enemy, you will always lose." -Ancient Chinese Proverb
I love to learn. One of the fields of study I have most enjoyed and which has brought a huge amount of insight and is entirely relevant in relation to persuasion, are the ancient Chinese proverbs known as the...
•Persuasion Through Competition
Lately I've been really dedicated to working out and recently I noticed something interesting at the gym. My gym is most definitely not a meat market. A very large percentage of the patrons are there because they care about their health and not for dating purposes or to see and be seen.
However, on occasion, I've noticed that as I ride the stationary bicycle, someone will hop on to the one next to me and I pick up my pace a little. It's not a conscious decision, really, but my other than...
•Persuasion Through Isolation
Last year I saw a documentary about the cult leader Jim Jones called "Jonestown: The Life And Death of People's Temple". It is the history of the murder/"suicide" of 913 members of the People's Temple in Guyana through photos, clips, recordings and interviews of surviving members.
The Reverend Jim Jones was a master at getting people to join his "ministry" because he reached out to people who were disenfranchised and he preached equality. This appealed to a larger community and he expressed...
•Persuasion Through The Competitive Spirit
My life has changed dramatically as a result of my commitment to exercise, and in particular, my routine at the gym. And I noticed something interesting one day as I was working out.
Despite this not being your run of the mill gym, I can't help but notice on occasion, when I'm riding the stationary bike or elliptical machine, that someone will get on the one next to me and I very unconsciously begin to pick up the pace a little. It's possible this is my other than conscious wanting to show...
•Persuasion Within The Pink Bubble
"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, Of all things physical and metaphysical, Of all things human and all things super-human, Of all true manifestations of the head, Of the heart, of the soul, That the life is recognizable in its expression, That form ever follows function. This is the law." ~Louis Sullivan
As an architect, Louis Sullivan understood the idea that form follows function. Having designed the skyscraper, he was responsible for creating the modern...
•Pitch Your Pitch, Ditch Your Script
"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." - Peter F. Drucker
What is a pitch?
A pitch is designed to attempt a logical series of steps in order to arrive at a desired outcome.
What is a script?
A script is the same thing as a pitch.
As I see it, there are two ways scripts and/or pitches can be useful. The first is they can be useful to learn something new and the second, they can be used to persuade the write of...
•Powerful Persuasion -- Eliciting Peak Emotional States With Music
I'm sure you've had this experience: you're driving down the road, listening to the radio, and suddenly you're transported back to a memory from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. A song, maybe not even a great song, or a song you particularly liked very much back then comes on the radio. Maybe it reminds you of a time when you were in love, or when you were heartbroken, or when you were having the time of your life with friends.
You drift back into your memories to that girlfriend or boyfriend,...
•Powerful Persuasion: Metaphors From Around The World
I understand that the concept of 'energy' seems a bit new-agey to some folks. Personally, I find it to be an integral part of understanding the 'self'. Understanding the self, is the first step in learning persuasion.
Recently I taught a seminar in Tucson and focused almost exclusively on core drives. I absolutely believe that when we understand core drives we can put our fingers right on our prospect's and client's triggers, triggers which are universal.
Chakras are an ancient Indian...
•Rapid Rapport With Storytelling
So say you're face to face with a brand new prospect. They've heard a little bit about you, know of your reputation, maybe they even have an idea what kind of a person you are and yet, they still may have some defenses, defenses which you are going to need to overcome before they trust you and want to commit to business with you, before rapport has been established and they can feel good trusting you completely.
Stories speed up rapport and trust incredibly. They allow your clients to quickly...
•Repetition In Threes: Soothing Persuasion
"Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, and when you have it, you have it all over." -Elvis Presley
Rhythm is something we feel before we're even born. . .our mother's heartbeat. Then come lullabies and rocking chairs and bouncing the baby to soothe. Rhythms lull us as babies and lull us as adults.
Rhythm is the goal of the pattern of repetition in threes. We use this lullaby effect to embed suggestions.
The number three has symbolic power in our society. Think of the Holy...
•Saying Yes
"All that man achieves, and all that he fails to achieve is a direct result of his own thoughts." -James Allen
John Lennon, at the height of his popularity, had his heart captured by one simple word: yes. He was rich, talented, desired and loved by people all over the world and had the option of nearly any woman he wanted. And 'yes' was what did it for him.
He attended an exhibit in England and Yoko Ono was one of the artists. The piece in question was a ladder which led to a tiny sign and a...
•Scapegoating And Persuasion
Seems like for a while there nearly every car in the U.S. had a "United We Stand" bumper sticker. These stickers imply that our standing united was our only salvation. When we don't stand united, what happens? Of course, we fall divided.
So is this true? If we were to buy into the idea at the center of the political platform of defeating terrorists by standing united and spreading our democracy everywhere, will this bumper sticker's admonition keep us safe? If we blindly agree with all the...
•Self Persuasion Through Organization
If you're anything like me, you're a very busy person. Not only am I busy with regular things--teaching, family, health maintenance--I'm also in the midst of a moving, requiring an added list of what needs to be done. It's hard to believe how much has to be done in a day and because this is on my mind, I'm inspired to write more on the topic of organization as I believe it has helped keep me on even footing in a time of change.
I don't care much for chaos. If things need to get done but...
•Seven Steps To Not Becoming A Millionaire
1. Wait for approval from society, from your family, from your friends, from your colleagues.
2. Be an innovator. (Innovation is a slow process which doesn't necessarily pan out. Instead of inventing something new, improve on what already exists. Copy. See what works and jump on the bandwagon. Do it better, more powerfully, maybe with a twist. The Wright Brothers didn't have the original idea of creating an airplane, but they kept working on it and didn't give up until it was perfected.)
The...
•Sprouting Paper Seeds: Manifesting What You Want
I lived on my grandpa's farm as a kid and he taught me some very important life lessons including the Biblical verse: As you sow, so shall you reap.
There is a magic to growing things from seeds which we've planted. When we tend to sprouting seeds, when we give them fertile soil and water, when we nurture and care for them, these seeds grow into a bounty of life. This can be taken both literally and figuratively. There is a caution when we start growing something to tug at the sprouts in an...
•Storytelling Persuasion
'Facts and figures are forgotten. Stories are retold.' -Jeffrey Gitomer
If you're mathematically oriented then MAYBE you'll remember the charts and graphs someone shows you in a presentation. And sometimes charts and graphs are really necessary to get to the specifics, but the real power of persuasion in presentation is the story.
Not long ago, I used to believe I wasn't very good at telling stories. It wasn't a shyness on my part or esteem issues, but I didn't really understand that my...
•The 'Away' Perspective: Persuasion Continuum Of Towards And Away
When I teach my students about the towards and away continuum, I get asked the following question a lot: Isn't an 'away' person just a really negative personality type? I want to start out by saying, no, not necessarily. I won't deny the fact that there are truly negative people out there, but a person who is inclined to move away from a problem as opposed to running towards an outcome, is not fundamentally negative.
We've been taught from a very early age that 'if you don't have anything...
•The Blame Game
"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy." -Wayne Dyer
I've noticed an annoying and...
•The Downfalls Of But
I really like you, but...
I agree with you, but...
Your hair looks great, but...
How do these three examples strike you? Do you get the feeling that what's coming next might not be very agreeable?
Learning to have a precision with language is one of the most important aspects of persuasion. The big 'but' is a negator which will cost you persuasive power.
'But' weakens your ability to persuade. This is across the board--in print, in conversations, in e-mail, in all forms of communication....
•The First Step Of Persuasion: Create Your Universes
"Civilization advances as more and more of life's essentials are absorbed by the unconscious." -Diane Ackerman, "An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain"
The mind fascinates me--especially the unconscious/subconscious mind. The other than conscious is an integral part of my work in the persuasion field. In her amazing book, Diane Ackerman explains that our brains need space without volume because the conscious mind, the thinking part, can only hold a finite amount of...
•The Forbidden As Persuasion
'Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.' - Geoffrey Chaucer
Forbidden fruit. . . some believe it started with the apple in the Garden of Eden. There was only one thing Adam and Eve were asked not to touch, and that's what they wanted more than anything (or at least, that's what she wanted more than anything).
And look at our culture today. . . we've got people confessing to various oddities in taxicabs, on talk shows, we've got secret societies, hidden cameras, underage drinking. . ....
•The Persuasive Power Of Supporting Evidence
I got a call from an acquaintance a while back. He said, 'Do you remember the conversation we had about Africa? Well, I checked my e-mail and found, unbelievably, that I won an international lottery which originated in Africa. I'm just convinced that everything happens for a reason, aren't you?'
Before I responded, I thought about this a moment. 'You know, maybe you're right. Everything does happen for a reason. It's a very fortuitous thing that you called me today to tell me about this, for...
•The Power Of Belief
The term baggage is definitely an overused pop psychology term in our culture. We use it to describe the excesses and useless junk we carry around with us from our worst childhood memories to when our romantic relationships went bad to all manner of past problems we can't seem to shake or get rid of.
It's as if we've packed away tightly all of these sorrows and frustrations and grief and resentments into metaphorical suitcases which we continue to carry around with us and which continue to...
•The Power Of Imagination
"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice." --Wayne Dyer
Recently one of my elite coaching club members and I were having a conversation and it reminded me of a great technique which I've used a lot with very positive results. This is an elegant exercise in how to manufacture a positive outcome. This outcome can be in general, and can also be laser focused on all aspects of our lives. . .relationships, health, wellness, business, finances. ....
•The Power Of Persistence
"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." --Dale Carnegie
When there's no hope at all, most people think 'this is the end. . . after all, no hope means there's no possible way to win'. For me, and my fellow persuaders, this signals a challenge, an opportunity, a call to action. I believe there is always hope.
Many years ago I had a cat who was the very embodiment of persistence. I had a giant...
•The Process Of Change
'Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.' --Albert Einstein
Change is hard to define. Some changes, such as significant weight loss or selling a house in the current market, seem to take a very long time (or at least that's what it feels like). Other changes happen instantly, irreversibly, like the loss of a loved one. Many people are highly uncomfortable with change. They hold on to things trying to avoid the inevitable. One of my grandmothers had the same hairstyle...
•The River Of Affluence
"The real 'haves' are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real 'have nots' are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor." - Eric Hoffer
How does it strike you when...
•Too Much Choice
This has happened to me. Maybe it's because I don't normally do the grocery shopping. I've gone into the supermarket or drug store for a tube of toothpaste and found myself confronted with three or four dozen varieties of toothpaste. Why? It's a fairly simple substance. We use it every day, hopefully twice. So why are there so many to choose from? We've got cream paste, gel, gel with sparkles, whitening toothpaste, some with baking soda, others for sensitive gums. There's toothpastes for kids,...
•Touchy Feely Persuasion
In previous articles I described an overview of the representational systems of communication: visual, auditory and kinesthetic, and the benefit of knowing what these systems are as they relate to rapport. In another article, I went into more detail about the visual aspect and here we are dealing with kinesthetic language, the feeling words that people use.
In our quest to gain rapport we continue to build upon our ability to learn how people construct their realities and how they interact...
•Ulterior Motives Are Not Always Sneaky
A student of mine recently posted a comment on my blog after having read an article. She noticed I used an example of a presupposition with the relationship in question being between a teacher and student and she suggested that maybe I was being sneaky using the example, as if my intention was to persuade her to continue to be my student.
I get this sort of question a lot. People find out I'm in the persuasion business and they assume I am attempting to persuade them and bend them to my will,...
•Using Rhythm And Vibration To Gain Rapport
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." ~Buddha
This exercise may feel a little New Agey, but indulge me a moment and you might just find that even esoteric information can help with your sales and in gaining rapport with your affluent prospects and clients.
Imagine this: everything in the universe vibrates. Everything does. The next step in sales is to imagine your prospect vibrating. In your mind, imagine the speed at which...
•Vak Revealed
As we persuade our affluent prospects, it is useful to match them and be like them as much as we possibly can.
Persuasion, at its core, a highly individualized process. How do we attain the individual recipe for each prospect quickly? We effectively learn these techniques to learn how their minds think.
Our minds work in three major ways with one more predominant and usually in combination with other other ways.
(1) seeing, (2) hearing and (3) feeling.
The technical terms are visual,...
•Viewing American Politics From The Perspective Of Martians
I'm being silly, but indulge me here as I veer off into the realm of fantasy. Not *that* kind of fantasy, but the world from a Martian's perspective.
Say we're explorers from Mars sent to Washington D.C., in human form, in the year 2007.
What would be our conclusions about American politics were we to come down fresh, understanding very little of the political system?
We would understand immediately that there are purported to be 'two sides' (the validity of which is up for debate), and the...
•Ways We Learn: Small Pieces Of Persuasion
A student recently asked me, "Kenrick, how the heck do you keep track of all of the persuasion strategies you know? Each time we have a coaching call, it seems like you pull out some new strategy. I can't even remember the basics like using the unconscious hello. How can I remember to remember?'
So I asked my student, "Have you ever learned a second language?" He said, "Yes." I asked, "Well, were you fluent within a week of starting it?"
And I asked him, "And have you ever learned to play a...
•When Friendlies Attack
I like the way Abraham Lincoln said it best, "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"
I don't know how many of you, my readers, have actual enemies,arch nemeses, foes or adversaries as these descriptions seem somewhat extreme, but in business at the very least, sometimes rivalries happen. What is important to remember is that these rivalries need not define or impede us. Contrary to what we see in the movies, most people are really just looking for a friendly face....
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