Mosaica Web

“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you’ve been paying attention at all to the news, you’ve likely noticed that there are lots and lots of things to worry about — from man made disasters such as the deficit, antibiotic resistant viruses, crumbling housing market, weak dollar, extinction of polar bears, to the acts of nature such as tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, et cetera. I could go on, but I’ve decided to make a very conscious decision to nurture the beautiful things in life and positively impact the present.

I will admit, it’s a challenge. We are pushed on every front to interact with fear and scarcity. In life, it is my desire to act as a catalyst for abundance, courage, beauty and and strength, by way of self-persuasion as a way to shift reality. I am doing this by switching the frames of everyone I come in contact with.

This is all to say that I’m opening up myself to new ventures. I will always, first and foremost be your go to man for persuasion. Part of persuasion, learning persuasion, teaching persuasion, has always been about hope and abundance, especially in a world that seems sadly lacking in both. This renewed focus is about filling the void and not with stuff (though, I do love stuff — technology and books especially) but to begin to excavate the inner depths with old and new resources and aligning with the proper mindset.

The law of resonance works like this: say you’re an unbelievably happy, upbeat, positive person, and you are working with a very depressive, negative person. . . well, it’s like the rock and the hard place. Either their energy will come up to meet you or your energy will begin to be depleted. Most likely, the two levels meet somewhere in the middle. That’s how it works on an unconscious level, at least.

As a teacher, it is one of my goals to bring the law of resonance to the consciousness of my students, so that events and people around you are no longer capable of pulling down your energy. The vibration of everything affects you and fortunately, these vibrations can be changed and brought up to meet you, but only if you are mindful and deliberate about making that happen.

This isn’t to say there won’t be moments where you need a little support in life, some fortification, someone to build you up when you have challenges. And I am geared to be that for you. I’m relentless about enriching our lives through pure, unadulterated hope.

There are opportunities everywhere if you have the eyes to see them. Even problems we might come up against contain the seeds of their solutions. We all have seeds, many seeds, that we can nurture, bringing focus to what we want to draw to us.

My goal is to teach you to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” -Patanjali (author and yogi)

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, when you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. To me this saying expresses the limitations we place on ourselves, unnecessary and unconscious limitations, limitations that box us in, keeping us from growing to our full potential.

There is good news if you’ve been going through life as a hammer, especially if you’re not accomplishing what you want to be accomplishing — all that needs to take place is an internal shift in attitude and this shift need not be difficult.

What the heck does that mean, Kenrick? Well, if the way you’ve been addressing challenges hasn’t been working for you, it’s time to try a new approach. Can we agree on that? I mean, the definition of insanity, as given to us by none other than Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

When we’re children, we learn quickly that knives are sharp, irons and stoves are hot and we avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Well, what happens when we’re adults? We ignore the deep knowing and continue to hammer away at things in ways that don’t work for us.

In relationships of all kinds, when we make decisions, what is it that keeps us thinking we have to be a hammer banging away the the world which we view as nails. It’s habit. Maybe there’s a little apathy mixed in there. Laziness, perhaps. All the usual suspects that keep us stuck in our small models of the world. On the up side, now that you’re aware of it, you can change it.

My approach in life is that I am a magician and everything in my life is a opportunity to create what I want, what will be best for me, for my family, for my students, what will bring the most good to what I do in life.

I didn’t always know I had this ability to create what surrounds me. Because of this, I wasn’t always happy in life. There was a lot of trial and error and stumbling because I always believed, as I had been taught, that work is hard, good things come through struggle. Once I gave up on that notion and decided that all good things come easy to me, I realized I was able to receive good things easily. I began to create my universe full of pleasure, joy, and success, none of which are ‘hard work’. I realized almost in the blink of an eye, that the one thing I was struggling against was myself and the limitations I imposed upon myself.

Isn’t it time you stopped being a hammer and chose something expansive and empowering?

In sales, your best bet is to appeal to your prospect’s and client’s emotions. Forget about the logic (for the most part) as it comes in a distant second to emotions. The following story is about how powerful emotions can be. Some college students experimented with this and the results are astounding.

Before class the students all got together and agreed that if the professor moved to the right of the classroom, to the student’s right as they were facing the classroom, the students would sit up and pay close attention. They would be attentive, quiet, smile, and nod approvingly at the professor. But if the professor moved to the left of the classroom, the farther left he went, the students would cut up, act out, throw things, look away from the professor and act disinterested.

Class began. They followed through with their plan and it didn’t take but about a half an hour and the professor was pegged into the right side of the room, standing there for the entire rest of the class with the students absolutely gobbling up everything he said, excitedly listening, nodding, smiling and showing their approval of all that he was doing.

The next day the students decided that they would do the exact same thing but just reverse it. As the class began the professor was already off to the right of the room. Immediately the students would cut up and act up and act disinterested and as the professor would go to the left of the room, they would act interested and they would do what they should. It took not too long and the professor was pegged over into the left side of the room.

The professor was absolutely unaware of what was going on (on the conscious level) but was intensly affected by them (subconsciously).

Why? Well, we like it when people approve of us, we love to be smiled at, we love encouragement, we love to know we’re having a good impact on people, we love it when people have interest in what we’re saying and doing. These are all fundamentally emotional reactions.

How would you like to be able to affect people in that same way and get them doing things and responding to you in ways that up to now has been happenstance?

Something very important to remember when you’re selling is that people are led to make decisions based on their emotions. These emotions bring people to their decisions and logic cements or breaks that decision. Logic is a very minor part. Each person is slightly different, but generally, decision making is based 80-85 percent on emotion and 15-20 percent on logic.

If you are making your living persuading but aren’t using emotions well, you will most likely never make much money, at least the cards are stacked strongly against you. A person who can make strong logical arguments but is not adept at utilizing emotion has the cards strongly stacked against them.

So how do we do this? Well, stay tuned for an upcoming article for more information about getting to your prospect’s and client’s emotions.

“It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.” — Pablo Picasso

Sometimes in persuasion, the thing to do is to get provocative. I’m not talking about being inappropriate or crass, I’m not talking about being overtly sexual, but I am suggesting that you access the core drives a little, those primal drives that link each and every one of us as human animals, and specifically I’m thinking of the drive to reproduce.

When you hear the word seduction your mind probably thinks of sex or luring someone away from proper conduct or accepted mores. Another definition of seduction is to win over and attract. Sounds a lot like persuasion. We are literally enticing someone into our mindsets or desired outcomes.

A friend of mine told me that they flirt with everyone they come into contact with — men, women, waitresses, mechanics, grandmas, grandpas, all ages, nationalities, shapes, and sizes. At first this struck me as incredibly weird but as I began to watch him, I noticed that what he called ‘flirting’ I recognized as being very charming. When I reframed his flirtatiousness as charm, I fully understood his reasoning.

Here’s another way to view this: it’s rapport with a twist.

Not everyone can pull this off and absolutely, there’s a time and a place for everything. A caution for women: men are highly susceptible to flirtation and charm and very clear boundaries should be maintained at all times.

Here’s another way to access this powerful motivator, simply insert into your conversation words that are titillating. This is a more subtle way of stimulating this drive that can give sometimes vague, sometimes intense triggers of that core drive.

Phew. . . did you catch that? I was just giving an example and got a little carried away, but now you get the idea.

Don’t go too off the charts with this one or people might think you’re creepy, but there is great benefit in turning on the lights and bringing these things out into the open to expose how they can turn us into better persuaders.

So while I may not exactly admit to being a flirt, I will say that I do enjoy the process of charming as a way to persuade and, in general, a way to make people feel good.

The first time I heard of being in ‘the zone’ it was from an athlete who described a run they had taken where everything was perfect — the speed, the temperature, their breath, their body with ease and elegance, moving down the path. The zone can be achieved in all things — sports, writing, selling — and is something we all would do well to strive for.

There are days when I’m speaking to my students on a coaching call and days when I’m giving in person presentations where I’m “on”, where I know I’m affecting people deeply and meaningfully. Of course I strive for that each and every time and hit the mark most days. (I also know that we all are prone to an off day and instead of getting down on myself for the rare off day, I view them as lessons on what to improve instead of dwelling in the ‘oh woe is me’ mentality.)

I have a friend who’s a massage therapist. She told me a story about how after nine years of doing massage, she finally felt she gave a really phenomenal massage for the first time recently. She said, “I have known on several occasions when the massage I’m giving is awful, where I’m not going to see the person again under any circumstance because I’m absolutely not connecting with them or they aren’t connecting with me, but I never could tell when I was giving a really good massage and I think that’s because I wasn’t giving really good massages. I think I was giving mediocre massages that people were appreciative of just because most of the time when we’re touched in a healing way, it feels good whether it’s amazing or not.”

This shocked me and intrigued me. I had to know what had changed. How, after nine years, did something switch from mediocre to phenomenal. I asked, “What did you do differently?”

“It’s the strangest thing,” she said. “I didn’t have my mp3 player in the office. And usually when there’s no music, the client wants to talk, but I made a conscious decision to have it be completely silent. And then I imagined myself on the table, almost as if I slipped into their skin, and simply listened to what their body wanted. And when I was done, I felt I had been in a trance for an hour.”

In my mind, she achieved the zone. And whats more, she achieved the persuasion zone. Because what does this sound like but rapport? She figuratively slipped into her client’s skin. She could feel what they needed and knew how to meet them at that level.

This can be done in absolutely every one-on-one work situation or personal situation, it can be done in absolutely every group situation, and the first step is to become aware that this is what needs to happen.

A recent study out of the J. F. Kennedy School for Government at Harvard has found that even momentary sadness causes consumers to increase spending.

We know, as persuaders, that consumers buy based on their emotions and gut instincts. Part of how we access these emotions is through criteria elicitation and appealing to their core values. The Harvard study, entitled, “Misery is Not Miserly: Sad and Self-Focused Individuals Spend More” will be published in ‘Psychological Science’ in June 2008. The study shows that people spend more when they are in sad or inwardly focused states of mind as opposed to people in neutral states of mind.

When we as persuaders use anchoring and peak emotional states to sell, we are utilizing a feeling of self focus (and on occasion, sadness, especially in the case of people with an ‘away from’ orientation.)

The researchers incited a heightened self focus with the participants and combined that with the participant being shown either a sad video clip or a neutral video clip advertising the product in question. The people who watched the sad clip offered 300% more than the neutral participants.

It’s my suspicion that if the researchers had also show a happy, upbeat clip of the product that it too would have increased spending. Why? Because it is an increased emotional state. And further, if the researchers had known about the towards and away continuum, they would have developed an even deeper understanding of peak emotional states in advertising and sales.

Towards and away is a powerful tool in determining how your prospect responds in specific contexts. We don’t all view the world through rose colored glasses. What this means is that there are some people who will respond positively to a negative attitude.

If you’re a financial adviser and you determine your prospect’s deepest criteria is ’security’, you can then determine the orientation by asking the question, ‘What will having financial security do for you?’ Depending on the answer, you can fashion the language you use to that orientation, whether towards or away.

If they say, ‘Well, I’m tired of worrying about my finances. . .’ That’s an away from. If they say, ‘Well, I just want to stay in control of my finances. . .’ That’s more of a toward orientation.

With the away from person, you don’t want to be optimistic, just as with the toward person, you don’t want to be pessimistic. Tailoring your language in such a way that you bring more “pain” to the away person and more “ease” to the toward is really the key to selling.

I don’t think the Harvard study got it wrong, but I do believe they only uncovered part of the story.

“It is necessary, then, to cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” -Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich or Financial Success Through Creative Thought

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” -Melodie Beattie

Why is gratitude important? When we are grateful for what we have, we draw more things to us to be grateful for.

At the end of each of my coaching club calls, I suggest my students all pause daily to go over all of the things in their lives that they are grateful for. This isn’t something that should be expressed only on Thanksgiving or as a weekly Sunday prayer, but needs to be integrated into your daily lives, permeating all of our interactions.

Experiencing gratitude does not have to be limited to when someone gives you a gift or does you a favor. True gratitude is about looking deeply at our lives and understanding how truly lucky we are to be alive at this moment in time.

Every night and every morning I think of gratitude. I have a huge list, as do all of us, of things I am so truly thankful for: family, colleagues, students, friends, health, financial success, employees. I am thankful when it rains because I know that the Pacific Northwest is lush and green as a result of this rain. I am grateful when it’s sunny, because it really rains a lot here.

Throughout my day, I pause occasionally to extend my gratitude to the simple and complex things I experience. I consider other people’s situations, whether they be more challenging or less, and I am aware that the struggles or lessons I’ve endured have made me who I am and brought me to this point in life and I am absolutely grateful for that.

There are going to be times when being grateful isn’t easy — times that are trying or difficult. Maybe your health is bad. Your body isn’t working the way it should. Instead of cursing it for what it can’t do, be grateful for what it can.

There’s an old Irish proverb that says, ‘Count your joys instead of your woes; count your friends instead of your foes.’ I love this. It’s all in where we place our focus. It’s all in what we choose to highlight and what we choose to minimize.

As you begin to take notice of all that is good in your life, this gratitude will turn your life around.