The Gift Of Persuasion Skills, From Me To You
Here is the first of 11 tracks. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Archive for July, 2009
Top 10 Tips For A Persuasive Presentation
Following are 10 simple guidelines to keep your speech and verbal packaging on the right track.
• Don’t use jargon or technical language unless you are sure every member of your audience understands the meaning.
• Don’t use profanity or slang. In general, using profanity damages your credibility. Be sensitive to whatever language your audience might find offensive, profanity or otherwise. Avoid name-calling and other forms of abusive language.
• Speak in everyday language. You want your audience to relate to you and to feel as comfortable with you as possible. Use language that will make you seem familiar and easy to follow.
• Keep your language simple and clear.
• Keep your sentences short. Use as few words as possible unless you are painting the picture–just one idea at a time.
• Use words that will engage the audience. Use “you,” “we,” “us,” and even “I” if you are relating a personal experience.
• Don’t use vague and abstract words. They muddle your meaning and confuse your listener.
• Don’t talk down to your listener by using pompous and pretentious words. Be direct; don’t bluff or beat around the bush.
• Use verb-driven language. By using verb-driven language, you will arouse a greater sense of action and motivation. Using these kinds of verbs will make your statement more convincing because your audience will engage their emotions, consciously and subconsciously. Verbs that are abstract or overused do not communicate excitement.
• Have a good time doing the above. If you dread what you are doing it will show. Think of the big picture and all the good that comes from your presentation for everyone involved.
The Exponential Success Roadmap
The journey to success starts with belief, proven principles and a burning desire to change. A lot of it will boil down to how your mind is programmed and whether you have given yourself permission to win.
Let’s revisit the good old days of sitting in math class. Take the mathematical operation 4 + 4, for example. The answer is 8, right? What if we keep the same numbers, however, but change the operation—say, 4 x 4. The answer is 16—the same two numbers with a different operator yield twice the results. Now think about 4 to the fourth power, or 256. Again, same numbers but the resulting figure is exponentially greater than the one we started with. This is what I mean when I talk about the Exponential Factor. Using the same raw material—you—we can create massive success just by thinking about and approaching things differently. By changing your outlook and the way you operate, you can exact profound change.
Andre Maurois imparted the now-famous anecdote: “If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.” Small things usually do make the biggest differences. That’s just working smarter, not harder.
We know that it is not about working twice as hard. For example, Olympic champion Peter Vidmar used to always be the last gymnast to leave the gym. Surrounded by many very gifted athletes, he felt that he didn’t have the natural talent that some of his competitors did. He knew that he couldn’t practice or work out twice as hard as they did. Hour for hour, he gave it just as much as they did. He made one minor adjustment, however, and it paid off with big dividends. He always just added on another fifteen minutes or so to each workout after everyone else had left the gym. When he went on to win a gold medal over those he felt were more innately gifted, he attributed the extra fifteen-minute workouts as being a key to his success.
My challenge to you is to keep coming back to this website and I’ll show you how you can have the Exponential Factor. The result will be exponential success with no limits. Some people are satisfied with minor successes throughout their lives. Adding to their lives a little at a time is good enough. Others want to multiply the joy they have and the goals they want to accomplish. Then there are those who demand the most from life and want to achieve success exponentially. Just remember, it starts with how you look at it. It’s the same basic building blocks, but exponential success just has a better plan and execution.
How To Use Silence In Negotiation & Sales
Sometimes the right word is no word. On occasion we need to remain silent and let the other person talk. We have heard in sales that the first one to talk after the close loses. After the persuasion process and the final decision is ready to be made, make your proposal and shut up. The silence is nerve-wracking, but it’s a critical time to let the prospect make the decision without you rambling on and on about the product or service.
How often have you noticed a sales rep overselling a product? You were ready to make the purchase by handing over your credit card. The sales rep felt you needed to know everything about the product and he started to fill you in. This caused doubt to creep into your mind and you ended up leaving, telling the salesman you would think about it. When someone has been persuaded and convinced, there is no reason to say any more. Strike when the iron is hot!
More communication is not necessarily better persuasion. In fact, the less you talk, the smarter people think you are. The more you say, the more common and less in control you appear. Many individuals try to impress people with what they know by flaunting all their wisdom, but usually this strategy is just a turn-off.
The Power Of Persuasion
Learning how to persuade and influence will make the difference between hoping for better income and having a better income. Ask yourself, how much income and money have you lost with your inability to persuade and influence.
Now, I’m sure you have seen some success, but think of the times you couldn’t get it done. Has there ever been a time when you did not get your point across? You were unable to convince somebody to do something? Have you reached your full potential? Are you able to motivate yourself and others to achieve more and accomplish their goals? What about your relationships? Have you ever had a time when you couldn’t convince your boss or convince your coworkers? Face it, everyday, there are times you can’t get yourself to do the things you know you need to be doing. Self persuasion alone is priceless. Now this includes success mastery and personal motivation. The ability to get yourself to do the things you want to do, when you don’t feel like doing them. What skills or techniques are you lacking?
Everything you want in life, you need to persuade to get. Usually what society teaches us is not necessarily correct. They think force, or coercion, or rewarding people is the way to go. Many people are using what we call military management, which is short term compliance, but we want to talk about long term influence.
I have studied persuasion because I have been in the world of sales, I know what it is. I know what it is like to not have the right skills, because when I had my first job in persuasion, I didn’t get it done. I talked to a lot of people and made a lot of friends, but I couldn’t get them to take action. I soon realized that with everybody that I talked about and every job that I ever had, it’s all about persuasion, motivation, leadership and influence. Many times we are not getting the results, the revenue, or the respect from people around us. This is why persuasion and influence is a critical skill. As we study and research the ultra prosperous we find the common skill is the ability to persuade and influence.
This is the most important skill, but we find an interesting paradigm: it is the skill people work on last. As we pursue our wealth or want to work on real estate, set up a website, market a book, convince our children, motivate coworkers, start to grow a business, sell a product or service, what happens is we don’t see much success or we hit rock bottom and realize how much money has been lost, how many relationships have not been saved, how many people we could not convince to our point of view. Then we study human psychology and persuasion. It is like buying a car without an engine. What is going to start your engine of success? You can learn all the tools in the world, get all the degrees offered at the local universalities, but until you can understand human nature, motivate others and energize and persuade people, you will be left behind.
Check List For Face to Face Negotiation
In our age of ever-expanding communication possibilities, researchers have been drawn to answer the question of which communication mode is most likely to lend itself to successful negotiation. Although the answer is undetermined, Face-to-face communication has been proven to have a greater possibility of alleviating miscommunication. When you're in person, you are more apt to pick up all the nuances of the exchange. That way, you will be better able to gauge what the other party is thinking and to determine the direction in which the negotiating is headed. For the same reasons, it is also easier to create and maintain rapport. If there is already a fair amount of tension in the air, however, negotiating by phone can take the edge off, can provide breathing room and can minimize the effectiveness of any pressure tactics that may have been employed. E-mail's main advantage is that both parties have control over saying exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it. Since there is no ebb and flow to live conversation, the involved parties can keep the floor as long as they want. On the flip side, e-mailing can tend to make the negotiating parties less restrained and more impulsive in their communication. This rashness isn't always a bad thing, but it definitely can be if tensions exist. One study found that abrupt and unmannerly exchanges occurred 102 times when negotiating via e-mail as opposed to only 12 times when negotiating face-to-face. Understanding Personality Directions The more you understand personality directions, the better you will be able to customize your negotiation tactics. A personality direction is the way in which we lean most of the time in terms of the way we act and react to most stimuli. We hate to be boxed in and categorized, but the reality is, most of the time we are predictable. Sure, people aren't going to be 100 percent predictable all the time, but the more discerning you become, the more you will see how predictable individuals really are. Each individual's personality direction will dictate how you customize your message. When you analyze personality directions, ask yourself the following questions:
I. Is your audience mostly logical or emotional?
A. Logical people:
B. Emotional people: II. Is your audience introverted or extroverted? A. Extroverted people: B. Introverted people: III. Is your audience motivated more by inspiration or desperation? A. Desperation-motivated people:
B. Inspiration-motivated people: IV. Are your audience members or prospects assertive or amiable?
A. Assertive people:
B. Amiable people:
Getting Inside the Closed Mind & Learning To Change It
Life is change; persuasion is change. As a Master Persuader, you must be able to create and motivate change. Understand most people will resist change and burrow into their comfort zones. We tend to follow the path of least resistance. However, change is the only thing that can lift us up from where we currently lie. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.” We all want to become a better person and to be “stretched” to accomplish more things, but we are stuck in our daily patterns.
As you go through the Pre-Persuasion Checklist, find out how resistant to change your audience is likely to be. Will persuading them be like breaking through a brick wall or a cardboard box? Are they ready to make changes because of their circumstances and surroundings? Are they already trying to change? Some of your prospects will oppose you and blatantly resist your persuasive message. This is great news–this means they are listening and it’s a sign of involvement. If the audience gives no feedback, then they are not involved in your message.
There are three ways people make changes in their life. One is through drastic change. This could be a heart attack, a personal tragedy, or losing a job. These events force people to change their lives. They did not feel a need to change until threatening, life-changing events occurred. The second is through gradual change. This is a process that evolves from events or personal relationships. Gradual change happens over time, so much so that you usually don’t notice that it is happening. The third way people change their lives is through internal change. This can come from inspiration or desperation, but either way, you have consciously decided you are going to make changes in your life.
To get change to stick, you must make sure three things occur, whether within yourself or your audience. First, there must be a long-term, enthusiastic commitment to change. You have to decide there is no other option. The second thing is that you must be willing to pay the price, persisting even when you feel weak. Third, you have to know where the change is taking them. How is this going to affect their lives? What are the end results?
The biggest obstacles to change are lack of motivation, lack of knowledge, and fear. People will not change if they don’t know where that change is taking them. We naturally watch out for our own future and want to prevent harm from reaching us. As a persuader, you need to create a vision for your audience, one that shows them what they will be like in the future. If you can get people to see themselves in the future and witness where that change will take them, they will be more willing to embrace change. Understand that people will resist change unless sufficient reinforcement and tools are provided to assist them. Without having this knowledge, their attitudes won’t change, and if their attitudes won’t change, then their actions won’t change.
Motivation is a call to action. It inspires change, movement, and focus. It is what makes the world turn. The Art of Motivation is a must for Master Persuaders. How do you motivate in such a way that prompts people to take the actions you want them to take? How can you plant the seeds to encourage motivation? As a persuader, one of the keys to success is to motivate yourself and others. We have all had days when we did not feel like doing the things we knew we needed to do. It is useless to persuade and have others agree with your point of view if you can’t get them to take action.
Many think motivation is useless because it doesn’t ensure long-lasting results. This can be seen in what I call the Desperation Cycle. The Desperation Cycle shows how human nature influences us to take the easiest path instead of the best path. In persuasion, we need to pull people out of the Desperation Cycle and into permanent, long-term motivation. We all know we are creatures of habit. We are like water following the path of least resistance. As creatures of habit, we dwell in our comfort zones. This is a place where we don’t have to think or spend much energy analyzing our surroundings. In this zone, we become complacent, comfortable, and resistant to change. We live by habit and routine.
We don’t stretch or strive for excellence in the comfort zone. We consider change only when the pain of our current situation becomes too intense to ignore. Fear of the unknown and fear of making mistakes are also reasons why we stay in our comfort zone. We love our comfort zone because it is a safe place where we can reduce our mistakes and keep our failures to a minimum. Mark Twain said, “A cat that steps on a hot stove once will never step on a hot stove again but neither will it step on a cold one.” The comfort zone is safe and warm, but it keeps us paralyzed and unmotivated.
In the Desperation Cycle, we first feel safe in our comfort zone. Then fear even begins to creep in there. We realize we haven’t accomplished any of the things we need to do. Suddenly, we fear what we are becoming, where we are going. As we contemplate this destination, we panic and work frantically to save ourselves. This frantic rehabilitation lasts just long enough for us to see exactly how steep the hill is going to be, or how long the marathon really is, and then the excitement dies. We numb ourselves to these stark realizations and find ourselves lulled back into the comfort zone.
Let’s say you have a high school reunion coming up and, over the past number of years, you have been enjoying some of life’s finer foods. Over the years, your pants have become a little tighter and tighter. You don’t want to go the reunion in this fat stage. You begin to fear what it’s going to be like to show up at your reunion looking this way. Panic hits and you vow that you will lose weight before the looming event arrives. You starve yourself. You even start to exercise. The pounds come off and you go to your reunion. Then the cycle comes full circle. You get home and think it’d be nice to continue shedding the pounds, but you realize it’s harder than you thought. You begin to enjoy the finer things in life again, just a little bit. The weight returns and you start the cycle all over again.