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NOVEMBER 2003

PERSUASION 101 - THE BASICS 1.1
John Johnson & Angel Nieves

To paraphrase Richard Bandler, "Human beings will tell you all you need to know - and they'll show it to you!"

Everything you need in order persuade anyone is constantly being given to you - in real-time. With practice and an adventurous attitude your persuasive skills will develop.

So what are some of the components you can sort for?

When people communicate with you, they are delivering to you volumes of information you can use to influence, gain (and maintain) rapport and understand where they are in relation to where you want them to go. One of the ways in which they do this is by communicating with you using sensory language.

Here are SOME (there are way more) examples of sensory language:

“Now, why would I want to familiarize myself with someone’s sensory language?” you ask. You do this for two basic purposes:

1. To understand how they are re-presenting their experience at that moment in time. You need to understand this because – meeting someone in their model of the world is vital in the persuasion process. In short, you have to now where they are – first BEFORE you can direct them elsewhere.

2. This also ASSISTS in creating rapport, which is essential in the persuasion process, thereby making the intended party more receptive to your message.

Once you have familiarized yourself with sensory language the next step is to feed the words you recognize back to the individual. You can feed back the same sensory words you hear, or you can substitute OTHER sensory based words from the SAME SENSORY SYSTEM. Now we aren't saying to carelessly mimic the person without any sense of direction/outcome.

Oftentimes disagreements and conflict arise because people are out of rapport. Speaking to someone utilizing their sensory language can help you get back in rapport.

OK, here is a sample skit below. The setup is that APPLE wants to get rapport with ORANGE.

ORANGE: Hello
APPLE: Yeah, what's up?
ORANGE: Today's such a bright and sunny day, isn't it?
APPLE: It feels alright. I like the howling sound of the breeze.
ORANGE: We aren't seeing eye to eye.

Has Orange started on the right roll? If you answered "NO' to this then you are correct. Here is a possibility of how APPLE could have handled the situation:

ORANGE: Hello
APPLE: Hello
ORANGE: Today's such a bright and sunny day, isn't it?
APPLE: Yeah, the sun's luminous and the day's so clear. Isn't it great?
ORANGE: Heck yeah. We're on the same track.
APPLE: Picture this idea. Seeing we both like today's weather let's go up the mountain where we can get a bird's eye view of things. What do you think?
ORANGE: Looks like a plan.

This month, start by paying attention to the sensory language a person utters. Here are three great ways to practice recognizing them:

1. By watching reality (as opposed to entertainment) TV programs such as news based shows, political commentary, reality TV (Survivor, Real World, Blind Date, Joe Millionaire, etc). These are good to start with (A thought just came to us. All suggestions above - are all entertainment. So what we have just said will be virtually impossible to do. Darn it!)
2. Discretely eavesdrop on conversations and note the sensory language used.
3. Pay attention to the sensory language that others use when communicating with you.

Go out and practice. Are we loud and clear? Got a handle on it? Get the picture?

© 2003 Persuasion 101 - all rights reserved

Q: Which of these is hogwash?
1. The belief that persuasion skills are only useful to sales people.
2. Leftover scraps of food given to hogs to eat.

A: They're both hogwash. (Which has nothing to do with bathing pigs.)

Why Persuasion 101? I ask myself. Because EVERYTHING is persuasion, I answer. (Who needs imaginary friends?) Not just sales. Everything: politics, leadership, seduction, therapy. It's all persuasion. And if you aren't the one doing the persuading, then you are the one being persuaded. And further more, if you haven't learned masterful persuasion skills, you've got no business working with people. You are cheating your clients, your loved ones and everyone else in your life.

If you are an NLP practitioner or any therapist in any modality, how dare you work with people and take their hard earned money if you haven't mastered persuasion skills? People are counting on you, putting their well-being in your hands, and you must deliver. You have to be able to persuade the most stuck person that change is possible, that they can change and they can do it now. You must be able to sell them on the idea that their current set of behaviors is only one choice out of a plethora of possibilities. You must get them to buy into the notion that they can move on to new ways of thinking, feeling and responding. And you must convince them that you are the person who can make this happen.

Whatever your job title, if people are involved your real job is Professional Persuader.
My brother is a research scientist at a major university. Where's the sales process there? It's not in the test tubes or the Petri dishes, although I've heard him talking to them trying to persuade them to behave the way he wants them to. But it is in the papers he writes as he attempts to explain what he has been doing and why the results are significant. It is definitely in the grant proposals he seems to spend half of his life writing.

My brother-in-law is a design partner in an architectural firm. Where's the sales process there? It may not be in the actual drawings but he'll tell you it's way more than half of his job. Convincing the client that his design is exactly what they wanted and more, and that the building really must be this way. That this is the best proposal they've seen. And then dealing with the builders to get it built properly and on time.

And what about in the non-professional arena? What about relationships? Your relationships with your spouse, your children, your relatives. Good heavens, do I even have to make the case? Isn't it clear that here, perhaps most of all, you must possess top-notch persuasion skills? Don't you want to be more persuasive to your children than the drug pusher at the playground or the hormone crazed boys at the party? Don't you want to be able to persuade your spouse that that new wide screen TV is a good investment? Or that "No, honey, those slacks don't make your ass look fat."

Now, let's be clear. Persuasion is not what some people think of as sleazy sales practices. No one wants to be like the proverbial used car salesman. (But by the way, if you ever were going to buy a used car, wouldn't you want to know their sales techniques? You could prevent yourself from being taken.) The word "salesman" carries with it the baggage of these stereotypes with their cheap suits, false claims, and unhappy, ripped off customers.

Persuasion is a higher-level generalization. Persuasion includes sales but is not limited to sales. Being a persuader means you are guiding a person to a new belief, one that they adopt and then believe all by themselves. The word, "persuade" comes from the same Indo-European base as produced the English assuage, suave and sweet. When you persuade a person you become on the same team, on the same page. Rapport is deepened.

Of course, once you learn these skills it is incumbent upon you to use your skills with integrity. At the end of my Sleight of Mouth trainings I usually paraphrase old Superman comics and admonish my students to use their genius for good instead of evil. The good news is that, for the most part, life seems designed to teach us that. For me, to be persuasive I must congruently believe that what I'm saying is accurate. Otherwise it just doesn't work. I can have all the skills in the world, but they just don't gel if I don't believe the content of what I'm saying. When I do, my communication becomes congruent consciously and other than consciously, and the skills flow sweetly.

You know, Tony Robbins once said, "The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made!" But he was only kidding. (Or was he??? (cue scary music, evil laugh, thunder and lightening.))

Doug O'Brien is a certified and licensed Trainer of NLP and Hypnosis. He teaches a variety of classes in NLP including Sleight of Mouth, Ericksonian Hypnosis, and NLP Certification trainings. Look for his NLP Certification coming in January 2004. Go visit his site today: www.ericksonian.com

Sometimes you'll be faced with the task of persuading someone who is being, shall we say, unreasonable. Their emotions have gotten the best of them, perhaps, or maybe they just don't like what you represent to them for whatever reason. I know what it's like to be there. I work in a hospital and spend most of my "persuasion time" in either the locked Psychiatric Unit or the Emergency Department. You don't get more "unreasonable" than some of the patients I've seen.

I'm a lazy persuader. I tend to realize that most of what people know about communicating is intuitive and natural, so I have learned to pay attention to my own other-than-conscious signals and trust them. Your unconscious can keep track of much more information than you think.

The psych nurses called me to help them with a man who was very angry with them for reasons that only he knew. When I got there, he was sitting (which is a good thing, generally speaking, for an angry person to be doing when you're in front of them) and ranting to himself. The charge nurse stood aside and waited for me to say some magic words. (She'd seen me work before.) I listened for a bit and then opened my mouth to say something I thought was particularly persuasive, and I received a little nudge from the back of my mind. It went something like this here:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!

So I did.

I listened for a little while longer, got some more information, thought to myself, OK, it's time to talk now, opened my mouth to say something I thought would be even more persuasive than the first thing, and there was that, um, still, calm, gentle voice again:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!

OK, OK, so I shut up and listened some more while he ranted. Then he gave me what I thought was a truly important bit of information, and I was glad I had paid attention to my unconscious urgings to be quiet. With that key information, I again went to open my mouth to say something powerfully persuasive, and you'll never guess...

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!!

Now, I consider myself an intelligent fellow, and I can take a subtle hint. So I shut up for good. I sat and listened, just as I had before, making the little facial expressions and nods and grunts that demonstrated I was honestly listening to what he had to say. And within a minute or so he calmed down. And then he realized he was out of line.

The truth is, that's all he needed. Someone to hear him out, to take in what he was saying without trying to convince him he was mistaken. The more he talked, them more I listened, the more he talked himself out of what he was saying. And I didn't have to say a thing.

Because, you see, inside every "unreasonable" person, there's a calm and peaceful person who'd rather be in charge.

©2003 Michael DeBusk - all rights reserved

Michael DeBusk has been involved in Healthcare Security for twelve years and was an Emergency Medical Technician for eleven. He's been trained in a variety of methods of violence control and prevention, hostage negotiation, and sales, as well as being trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP(tm) and as an Ericksonian Hypnotherapist. Michael resides in the northeastern Maryland, USA.

Researchers at Boston University Medical School studied films of people having conversations. The researchers noticed that the people talking began (unconsciously) to co-ordinate their movements (including finger movements, eye blinks and head nods.) When they were monitored using electroencephalographs, it was found that some of their brain waves were spiking at the same moment. As the conversations progressed, these people were getting into rapport with each other.

The phenomenon of rapport is well known in the world of NLP and beyond as a starting-point for influential communication. It's mentioned in countless NLP and influence texts, and crops up in most sales training programs. Yet what 'is' rapport, and how can you use it to help yourself and others?

What is rapport?

Rapport has been described as what happens when we get the attention of someone's unconscious mind, and meet them at their 'map of the world.' It is more commonly understood as the sense of ease and connection that develops when you are interacting with someone you trust and feel comfortable with. Rapport emerges when people are in-sync with each other.

Rapport is an emergent property of the system (group), like a fit of the giggles or a pregnant pause. As such, it's not possible to 'cause' or 'do' rapport; you can however massively increase the likelihood of rapport emerging when you are communicating with another person.

Mirror, mirror…

On a basic level, we like people who are like us. One way to help rapport to develop is to mirror the micro-behaviours of those we wish to influence. Any observable behaviour can be mirrored, for example:

· Body posture

· Hand gestures

· Head tilt

· Vocal qualities (pace, rhythm, tonality)

· Key phrases

· Blink rate

· Facial expression

· Energy level

· Breathing rate

· Anything else that you can observe…

To mirror another person, merely select the behaviour or quality you wish to mirror, then do that behaviour. If you choose to mirror head tilt, when the person moves their head, wait a few moments, then move yours to the same angle. The effect should be as though the other person is looking in a mirror. When this is done elegantly, it is out of consciousness for the other person. However, a few notes of caution are appropriate:

· Mirroring is not the same as mimicry. It should be subtle and respectful.

· Mirroring can lead to you sharing the other person's experience. Avoid mirroring people who are in distress or who have severe mental issues.

· Mirroring can build a deep sense of trust quickly. You have a responsibility to use it ethically.

1) Practise mirroring the micro-behaviours of people on television (chat shows & interviews are ideal.) You may be surprised at how quickly you can become comfortable as you subtly mirror the behaviours of others.

Pacing and leading

Pacing and leading is one of the keys to influencing people. It refers to meeting them at their map of the world (pacing) and then taking them where you want them to go (leading.) Rapport is a basic, behavioural signal that you have met someone at their map of the world. The simplest, most effective test for rapport is "if you lead, they follow."

2) Choose a safe situation to practise mirroring an element of someone else's behaviour. When you have mirrored them for a while, and think you are in rapport with the person, scratch your nose. If they lift their hand to their face within the next minute or so, congratulate yourself - you have led their behaviour!

Skilled communicators have a wide range of behaviours they can mirror to build rapport. You can find a way to mirror virtually anything you can observe.

3) Increase the range of behaviours that you can mirror, and introduce deliberate rapport-building into situations where it will benefit you and others (nb. Use your common sense and choose low-risk situations to practice in.)

More advanced

Many people (especially in sales) are familiar with rapport-building techniques and are particularly aware of body posture mirroring. Crossover matching involves matching another person's behaviour with a different behaviour of your own (e.g. matching their breathing rate to your head tilt, or their eye blinks to your foot-taps.) This is a way of building rapport that is very difficult to detect, and still highly effective.

Summary

Building rapport through mirroring is a powerful way to build a sense of trust and connection…

1) Practise mirroring the micro-behaviours of people on television (chat shows & interviews are ideal.)

2) Choose a safe situation to practise mirroring an element of someone else's behaviour.

3) Increase the range of behaviours that you can mirror, and introduce deliberate rapport-building into situations where it will benefit you and others (n.b. Use your common sense and choose low-risk situations to practice in.)

Next time

Next time we'll be looking at more ways to make you more influential. Keep looking for more ways to enjoy becoming more flexible than you ever thought possible.

©2003 Jamie Smart - all rights reserved
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