Practical

Influence:
How to Increase Your Sales
Without Lying, Begging Or Bullying



Copyright 2017 Teppo Holmqvist


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author,
except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.


First Edition 2017

Editing: Jukka Srkijrvi, Noel Boaz, Anthony Escarega, James Scott




Legal disclaimer
This book is designed to provide information and motivation for our readers. It is sold with the
understanding that the publisher is not engaged to render any type of psychological, legal, or any other
kind of professional advice. This book is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, to diagnose or treat
any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, consult your own physician. The
content of each article is the sole expression and opinion of its author, and not necessarily that of the
publisher. No warranties or guarantees are expressed or implied by the publishers choice to include any of
the content in this volume. Neither the publisher nor the individual author(s) shall be liable for any
physical, psychological, emotional, financial, or commercial damages, including, but not limited to, special,
incidental, consequential or other damages. Our views and rights are the same: You are responsible for
your own choices, actions, and results.


Visit
http://www.realworldinfluence.com
for additional material and information about upcoming seminars.



 Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
How to Read This Book
References and Acknowledgements
THE MINDSET
Myth of the Extrovert
Motivating Others
Being Honest
Danger of Hype
(False) Positive Thinking
Building Value
Realize Life Isn't Fair
Overcome Poverty Consciousness
Make People Feel Good!
Cultivate a Complex Lifestyle
Keypoints
THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
Perception
Perception and Imagination
Perception and Attention
Forming New Associations
Adaptive and Reactive Brain
Rationalizing Your Behaviour
Illusion of Free Will
Cognitive Biases
Outside Conscious Awareness
Categorizing Information
Importance of Context
Linguistic Triggers
Subliminals
Symbols and Metaphors
Are We Defenceless?
Keypoints
STATE CONTROL
Self-Control
 Letting Go
Controlling Your Own State
Grounding Your Body
Awareness
Expanding Your Visual Awareness
Developing Your Emotional Awareness
Overcoming Your Own Projections
Congruency
Being Powerfully Congruent
Congruency as an Indicator of Success
Focusing on Your Intent
Keypoints
APPLICATION: INCREASING YOUR EXPRESSIVENESS
Controlling Your Intensity
Opposing the Space
Respecting Personal Space
Using Your Voice
Inflection
Tonality
Speed
Rhythm
Breathing
Smiling
Eye Contact
Touch
Keypoints
RAPPORT
What is Rapport?
The Feeling of Sameness
Getting Lost in Rapport
Rapport Doesnt Equal Familiarity
Rapport Increases Social Mimicry
Science of First Impressions
Being Categorized
Pay Attention to How You Show Up
Creating a New Category
Building Rapport with State Management
 Maintaining Comfort
Choosing the Right Position for Interaction
Changing Your Own Position
Tracking Your Progress
Keypoints
APPLICATION: MEETING PEOPLE
Professional Context
Choosing the Right People to Work With
Interviewing the Prospect
Manage Expectations by Giving an Overview
Empower Your Customers
Calling In
Overcome the Tendency to Linger
Casual Context
Where Should I Meet People?
Starting the Interaction
Building Familiarity
Keypoints
ACQUIESCENCE
What is Acquiescence?
Becoming the Object of Fascination
Perception of Authority
Being Recommended
Embodying the Need
Glamour and Costuming
Being Fascinating
Establishing the Point of Focus
Diluting Your Leverage Too Thin
Avoiding Analysis Paralysis
Remaining Silent
Importance of Course Correction
Cycle of Constant Testing
Working with Discomfort
Increasing Responsiveness
Leading People in Small Steps
Reinforcing the Behaviour
Varied Reinforcement
 Opening Loops
Locking On
Tension
Proximity
Keypoints
APPLICATION: DEMONSTRATING UNDERSTANDING
Nobody Talks Like That!
Validating their Reality
Stating Observable Facts
Opening a Choice
Echoing Language Back
Utilizing Abstractions
Familiarity and Repetition
Repetition
From Global to Specific
Suggesting a Motivation
Cause-and-Effect Statements
Connectors
Cold Reading
Wealth, Health and Relationships
Fishing for More Information
Providing a Summary
Presuppositions: Leading a Person
Manner Adverbs
Factives
Temporal Clauses
Keypoints
EMOTIONAL CONNECTION
What is Conditioned Response?
Eliciting Emotions
Shifting Your Own State
Practical Elicitations
1. Eliciting the State
2. Accelerating the State
3. Affirm the State
Choosing Your Trigger
Forming the Trigger
 Setting the Trigger
Using the Trigger
Setting Triggers to Objects and People
Keypoints
APPLICATION: GATHERING INFORMATION
Eliciting a Customers Buying Processes
Decision Making
Definition
Motivational Strategies
Towards
Away
Driving Emotion
Logical Levels
Values and Emotions
Leveraging Value
Changing the Definition of Value
Eliciting Personal Values and Motivators
Focusing on the Value
Motivator
Keypoints
FRAMING
Importance of Context
Social Identities
Your Role: The Inner Frame
Their Role and Higher Ideals
Peer Group and Social Consensus
Implication
Changing the Context
Redefining Relationship
Exclusion and Inclusion
Association
Words to Use
Establishing a Training Space
Exciting Groups
Bypassing Analysis
Suggesting Amnesia
Expressing Interest
 Compliments
Flirting
Teasing
Nominalization
Changing the Meaning of an Emotion
Keypoints
APPLICATION: OBJECTION HANDLING
What Are Objections Really About?
Becoming Aware of Used Language
Pre-Empting Objections
Finding the Reason for the Objection
Unfreezing Decision
Working with Resistance
Acknowledging Resistance
Redirecting Resistance
Distracting Resistance
Using Pauses
Asking Questions
Taboo Breaking
Shifting Perspective
Leveraging Resistance
Challenging Objections
Using Conditioned Responses
Keypoints
HALLUCINATION
Emotional State and Ownership
Building an Expectation
Ownership
The Last-Minute Resistance
Weaving Vivid Imagery
Shared Experience
Minimizing Resistance
Utilizing Novelty
Playing with the Time
Building an Expectation
Temporal Distance
Sidestepping Resistance
 Keypoints
APPLICATION: STORYTELLING
Limitations of Storytelling
Power of Proverbs
What Kind of Stories Should You Tell?
The Borden Formula
Hoffer Formula: True Believer
Campbell Formula: Heros Journey
Bridging to the Story
Ambiguous Suggestions
Pivot Words
Missing Referential Index
Quoting
Applying Humour
Nested Story Loops
Keypoints
SELF-AFFIRMATION
Consistency Principle
Endowed Progress Effect
Self-Affirmation
Offering a Loaded Choice
Asking for Favours
Keypoints
APPLICATION: CLOSING
Indirect Closing
Changing the Frame of Reference
Contrasting
Anchoring
Matching
Keypoints
FINAL THOUGHTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
No matter what you are doing, you are selling yourself, your ideas or your
products to other people. Because of this, influence is the highest-valued skill in
free society, as it is the only way to get what you want without resorting to
violence. No matter what you are doingbe it sales, teaching or just dating
your success is closely tied to how many people you can get to say yes.
Getting those yeses allows you to have the kind of life you want to live.
But everyone knows that getting those yeses isnt always easy. Sometimes
it feels like you are arguing with a brick wall. Sometimes you feel like you are
doing everything correctly, but at the last minute the person just backs out for no
apparent reason. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, it seems like your
customer doesnt even understand your well-meaning proposal. It is so
frustrating and it has happened to everyone.
My name is Teppo Holmqvist and I am a sales consultant. I personally
prefer to call myself just a guy who knows a lot of stuff, because that is what I
do. I take a specific topic, immerse myself in it fully, and a few years later come
out as an expert in it. I don't focus only on theory, but learn how to use that
knowledge in practice. Im not particularly slick, inspirational, or flashy, but my
colleagues tell me I have a serious knack for making information accessible and
easy to understand. This is why they thought that all that knowledge and
experience would be wasted just lying in my head, so they convinced me to
write this book.
This book is meant to help you get those yeses more often so that you are
able to live more of the kind of life that you really want to live. I want to
challenge your own personal beliefs about influencing others and show you that
you dont need to lie, beg, or bully to be highly influential. As a matter of fact, I
want to show you that a lot of things you might have learnt previously about
influencing others are counterproductive. They are based on a different era
where you could become highly successful simply by pounding your potential
prospects into submission. Your potential prospects are far smarter than they are
typically given credit for and if they start to smell fertilizer, they will shut you
off. It is really your ability to provide people what they want that is going to
make you a winner.
This book is meant to make your life easier. It is meant to help you to get
more sales, get more for less work, forge better relationships, and improve the
quality of your life. While the context used in this book is traditional sales,
thinking this book is only meant for sales would be underselling it, because the
actual techniques are content free. No matter what you are doing, you are selling
yourself and these techniques work equally well when doing negotiations,
therapy, dating, networking and even parenting. There is no context where these
skills cant be used, but learning them requires effort. But with the right kind of
attitude, with willingness to put forth effort to learn these skills, you will be
surprised how much your ability to influence others will improve in the span of
just a few months.
If you are an absolute beginner, this book will give you a roadmap that
allows you to get an idea of how different pieces fit together. If you are just
getting interested in sales, you will learn things that will hopefully save you from
years of frustration. For more experienced people, this book will help you spot
where you might have made mistakes in the past and help you to fix them. If you
are an expert at influencing others, you will get an excellent overview on the
most important skills and you are also likely to discover new strategies and
techniques. With all this being said, lets get started.
How to Read This Book

The intended goal of this book would be to provide the pure essence of
influence. So long as a person has an IQ that is above 70, and hasnt lived their
whole life isolated from human civilization, you can count on these operators to
be available for your use. When you understand these time-proven psychological
operators, you dont need to rely on tricks and routines to influence people.
Instead, you are just leveraging what is already deep inside every person. For the
sake of clarity, this book divides the operators into seven groups, which will be
discussed in much greater detail in their own chapters:

1. State control: Ability to control your own state and pay attention to
others
2. Rapport: Creating a feeling of sameness between two people
3. Acquiescence: Getting the other person to follow your lead
4. Emotional connection: Connecting emotions to your product or
service
5. Framing: Contextualizing the interaction and putting an idea or
belief into a different perspective
6. Hallucination: Skill of creating vivid and compelling imagery
7. Self-Affirmation: Making a person commit to a given behaviour

Each operator is followed by an application chapter that puts things you
have learnt into practice. Theory chapters can be read in any order you want, but
with application I assume you have familiarized yourself with all of the
operators introduced before the chapter. This is simply to keep the structure and
make sure that I dont need to go over things again and again. For your reading
leisure, each chapter also ends with a recap that summarizes the most important
key points into a nice, tight package.
As you start to read this book, Ill be your personal coach on influence.
Like great boxing coach Angelo Dundee, I cant last in the ring with a top-
ranked heavyweight more than fifteen seconds. However, he knew how to bring
best out from Muhammad Ali and make him the greatest boxer the world has
ever seen. My intention is also to bring the best out from you and this is why I
want you to promise me something. Im not asking you to believe anything that
Im saying. Im not even asking you to agree with me. Im merely asking you to
go through this book at a leisurely pace, and if you see something that fits and
works for you, just take it and use it. What doesnt work for you, just let go of it
and let it be.
This is important also because I also ask you to not judge these strategies
by what I have personally achieved or done. When it comes to learning material
like this, you should be comparing your progress only against yourself, not
against what others have done. Every human is different and your own life
experiences will shape what kind of challenges you will have with this material.
Furthermore, it is too easy to fall into the trap of hero worship. Many trainers
love to cultivate a perception of success and having almost superhuman
capabilities, because once they have it, it makes it easier to separate people from
their money. For me, the problem with this is that people tend to take everything
you say literally and beat themselves down if they cant match your made-up
fantasy world.
I want to keep things real and I have no qualms admitting that my lifestyle
is also quite modest and simple regardless of my own personal skill set. The
reason for this is investment. Nothing in this life is free. You are always
investing at least your time to getting more, and the more you want, the more
you must devote your time for this pursuit. It is just not the amount of time that
increases, but also the amount of risk. People also often make the mistake of
thinking that having more of something will always make their lives better.
If they would ever reach their fantasy, they will quickly realise there is
really a point of diminishing returns. This is also true for this material. For me,
the important part of mastery is to simply know when you know enough about
a given topic and you should constantly evaluate if are you getting a good
return rate for your invested time. For instance, lets take this book. My goal
was to create a book that would be useful for anyone interested in influence
beginner or absolute master. Lots of the material in this book was written for
extremely dedicated people who want to make influence instinctive in their daily
life. That doesnt mean that you need or should learn everything that is written in
this book.
It is simply not realistic to even expect that a person who has 9-5 day job,
family and life to lead could spend months, years, or even decades on mastering
influence. And it is not even necessary. Your average person would be perfectly
happy if he could just learn the fundamentals of state control and rapport
building. Just the ability to stay cool under pressure and make connections with
others is enough to make almost any person wildly successful in the modern
world. Instead of thinking you need to learn everything, you should ask yourself
what level of mastery is enough for you. Mastering all the material presented in
this book will take at least five years of continuous hard work and most people
dont need that level of skill. Your time is better spent somewhere else.
Under any circumstances, dont try to read this book in a single sweep.
There is simply too much information to digest and unless you are a world-class
expert in influence, you are going to feel overwhelmed by all the given options.
You will also notice that through the book I am using some rather manipulative
examples to drive a point in. To set the record straight from the beginning, I
dont approve using those strategies at all. However, my intention is also to
make you wake up and realize how you are being manipulated by others. In any
case, the best way to read this book is to take your time and think carefully about
what is being said. There wont be many fluffy sentences, and if something is in
the book it is there for a reason. Quite often, you are better off if you think about
what I said in literal terms. Also, you should pay attention especially to any
bolded statements. They contain the keys for understanding the whole influence
process.
References and Acknowledgements

This book is meant to be a practical guide on influence, not a textbook on social

psychology. However, I know some of the claims in this book may seem
outlandish if you dont already have a strong background in this type of material.
For this reason, you will find more than two hundred forty references to
particularly important, peer-reviewed studies through the book. My focus has
been primarily on things that cant be verified easily by a little bit of
experimentation or observation (e.g., brain studies, conditioned responses,
linguistic triggers, etc.). For getting a good grasp of the basics, I can recommend
two remarkable books: Robert B. Cialdinis Influence and Eric S. Knowles
Resistance and Persuasion. Stay away from all the imitators.
My intention has been also to credit every particular strategy to its
inventor. Unfortunately, this hasnt been possible in many cases, because I dont
even remember where I learnt the specific concept in the first place.
Furthermore, most of the people teaching this kind of material have been
shamelessly stealing other peoples material and presenting it as their own
creation. More than often, I have credited a technique to someone only to later
on notice someone with whom they had been associated had taught the same or
similar technique sometimes even decades earlier.
All this being said, I want to give specific endorsement to two people: Tom
Vizzini and Kim McFarland. When it comes to teaching influence, there are very
few people that can provide as good results as they do. Constant innovators, they
have seen their material being ripped off again and again by people they have
been working with. I want to set the record straight, especially because at this
point they are two of the few people I feel I can honestly endorse. Their website
can be found at http://www.essential-skills.com.

THE MINDSET
Before getting into nuts and bolts of this book, I want to address what I think is a
healthy, abundant mindset for using this material. Everything starts from the
mindset and as unfortunate as it is, many people have been taught toxic mindsets
about sales, influence, and influencing others. Some of this advice will probably
feel like common sense, but certain bad ideas have just become so pervasive that
they often affect your behaviour, whether you are aware of it or not. I want to
clear off these toxic mindsets right from the beginning and show you dont need
to be a smooth talker, pushy, or lie to people to be influential.
Influence is the keyword here, as this book is all about influence, not
persuasion. Whats the difference, you may ask? When you are persuading
someone, you are trying to convince a person to do something that you believe
they wouldnt want to do. Influence, on other hand, is all about helping people to
overcome the obstacles that prevent them from taking action they should be
taking.
Think about it. How many times have you had an idea of some wonderful
thing that you just knew would solve another persons problem, but that person
is too afraid or stubborn to try it? How many times have you heard people give
the oddest objections and beliefs about something, which you simply know
arent true? Wouldnt it be great if they would just keep quiet, listen and
experience what you are offering, and only after experiencing it make an honest
and informed decision about its usefulness?
Influence aims at empowering people to make the best choices with the
limited resources that they have. Because of this, influence always starts with
you, as a person who wields influence, having the other persons best interest in
your heart. If you cant interact with a persons best interest in your heart, why
you are interacting with him in the first place? Are you really that desperate and
needy that you are willing to ruin your own personal reputation and integrity for
short-term gain? Think about that statement for a while. Leading people
powerfully and enabling them to make a decision is quite different from just
trying to manipulate them into doing something they dont want to do.
If you are leading a person towards a new experience, it is also important
to make sure you are relieving a person from a burden that they truly want to
get rid of. Influence should be all about finding a solution that works for the
customer, not about working as the customers warden or otherwise trying to
dictate their ethics. This seems to be especially hard for those who are involved
in spiritual, teaching, or healing professions, because nowhere else I have seen
people so hell-bent on trying to impose their ethics on everyone else. Although
no one has asked that of them, they assume that their ethics and personal beliefs
are simply superior to everything else and everyone should follow them. If you
are planning to use these skills, do us all a service and dont indulge in this kind
of behaviour.
Myth of the Extrovert

A lot of people have this idea that the person who has the most influence is a
smooth extrovert who talks all the time and has a snappy comeback for
everything. This image is so pervasive that it is even commonly accepted as the
template for a successful salesman. However, this is a myth. No matter what
certain experts tell you, you dont need to be flamboyant, outrageous, loud, or
extroverted to influence others. As a matter of fact, these qualities often work
against you. Why? Most of these people just talk too much. They continue
talking and talking, hoping that something sticks. In addition to not giving the
person any space to tell you what he really wants, it is really hard to truly pay
attention to someone if you are talking all the time. You are also playing directly
into all negative stereotypes of slick salesmen who are just trying to sell others
crap without really having any consideration for their needs. Being slick just
makes the other person feel sick. Because of how our brains work, people have
a hard time trusting you even if you would be absolutely honest in your intent.
This is why to influence others successfully, you need to listen. Everyone
you meet has his own past. His own experiences. His own background. All these
things influence how he thinks and believes the world operates. There is no way
for you to understand the person if you arent making an effort to do so. This is
important, because only after you have proven your understanding to the other
person are they willing to be led by you.
You need to also develop empathy and learn not to judge other people. The
famous author Terry Pratchett once said that the greatest sin you can commit is
to treat people as things and this is one of the most important lessons you can
learn regarding empathy. Even though we rarely want to admit it, we have a
tendency to divide the world up into stereotyped monolithic groups like the
rich and the poor, where everyone in the group behaves the same. In addition
to doing a great injustice against the person in front of you, you are greatly
limiting your opportunities to connect with people. This is also important to
understand, because our brains are constantly searching for information that
supports our current worldview. The brain is literally doing its very best to
ignore anything that doesnt match our worldview, and even more so, avoid
anything or anyone it has learnt to have negative emotional associations with.
This is a main reason why so many people are sabotaging themselves from
becoming wealthy. We idolize rich people and their efforts. At the same time, we
are told that money corrupts and is the root of all evil. Rich people are often
presented as greedy and selfish. Media spends lot of effort exposing scandalous
lifestyles of the rich and bold. All these messages affect our minds and shape
how we relate to and identify with wealthy people. After your mind has created
negative association with a specific group of people, it does its very best to avoid
becoming one of them. You dont want to become wealthy, because deep
inside you believe it will corrupt you or make you selfish. Obviously, this kind
of negative social conditioning is not limited only to wealthy people. I have seen
many cases where people have been struggling even with getting into the middle
class, because they have so many negative associations with that label.
This is why you need to learn to evaluate each person on their own merits
and stop generalizing one aspect of your customers life to the other parts of
their lives. For example, if someone is having a hard time understanding how
computers work, that doesnt make him inept in other parts of his life. When you
are making a gross assumption like this, you are intentionally clouding your own
perception and hindering your ability to influence someone. Just show up
relaxed and allow the customer to tell you what he thinks. Thats all. People will
give you everything you need to influence them if you just keep your eyes and
ears open.
Motivating Others

Many people make the mistake of believing that through your words, actions,
and behaviours you can create demand. That by being highly persuasive, you can
make a person make a specific decision. That with a silver tongue you can create
motivation. This is a myth. Many companies have died on this false belief, and it
can make you waste tremendous amounts of energy and time, trying to motivate
people to do something they dont want to do. The real question is why would
you even need to motivate someone?
Like legendary salesman Harry Browne pointed so elegantly in his book
Secret of Selling Anything, everyone on this planet is already motivated by
thousands and thousands of different things. Everyone has plans. Everyone has
dreams. Everyone has already at least some kind of idea of what they want or
like. They might not be able to verbalize these motivators, but they are still deep
down there, ready to be satisfied. Your job as a master influencer is not to
motivate people, but to find out what they are motivated about. When you know
what motivates a person, you just show how your proposal can help them
achieve what they want to achieve.
This is also true for sales. You are selling solutions, not products. Your
product or service is a solution to the customers needs, and it has been designed
for that purpose. This sounds obvious, but one of the most typical mistakes
marketers do is that they define their products potential market by demographics,
not by the problem you are promising to solve. For instance, you dont really
take aspirin because you are sixty-two years old, but because you have a
headache. Equally common is that a product is created only because someone
wants to sell it. They dont know who they are marketing it to, what need it is
going to satisfy, or if there is even a market for the product! Sure, you may have
the urgent problem of getting more money, but what is the customers urgent
problem you are promising to solve?
One of the greatest advertisers to ever to live, Bill Bernbach, once said that
a gifted product is mightier than a gifted pen. Your skills only convey a
product advantage, not create it, and the better your product is, the less influence
you need to exert to sell it. Of course, too many people are forced to sell
products that they just know to be total junk due to currently uncontrollable
circumstances of their life. You might even personally be in this kind of position
where you dont like how your company is conducting business. If this is the
case, my friendly advice is just to drop it. Just drop it. It is really that simple.
You will feel rejuvenated for making the decision, and there is always demand
for a salesman who actually knows what he is doing. Just find a new product to
sell, one that you can stand behind proudly.
Being Honest

Sales has such a bad reputation, because it is commonly believed that most
salesmen sugar-coat their products, if not blatantly lie about them. This alone is a
reason why honesty is your best policy. When you are honest about your intent
and just openly admit that you arent sure if the product is right for the customer,
it tends to disarm a lot of resistance people have. You dont ever need to worry
about what your customers think about you or your product either. There is
simply nothing that can refute what you have said. You literally dont have
anything to fear, because you havent done anything that could come back to
haunt you. This is why you should always ask yourself if you are willing to live
up to the image you are giving to the other person or at least doing your best to
strive toward it. If you are willing to do that, then proceed. Otherwise, back
down and think clearly what you can really promise to the other person. When
you learn to promise only things that you can keep, you dont need to worry
about lying to others.
This is not just a philosophical assertion, but something that is also backed
by compelling research. For example, according to study made in 1993, when
jurors heard a lawyer mention a weakness in his own case before the opposing
attorney could point it out, jurors evaluated him to be more trustworthy. That
perception of trustworthiness also influenced their overall verdicts. In similar
fashion, when companies publicly admitted their failures to be the result of
internal causes, their stock prices grew nearly always faster than those
companies that attributed their failures to external causes. Customers have been
also found to be more likely to buy from an online store if it showed its
competitors prices, even when those prices were lower than theirs (Williams,
Bourgeois & Croyle, 1993; Lee, Peterson & Tiedens, 2004; Trifts & Hubl,
2003).
Science is very clear on the effectiveness of honesty, and it has been also
often said that the fastest way to any kind of success is to sell less and help more.
Like the famous motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, has said, You can get
anything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.
Your success in this life is solely determined by your ability to find out what
other people need and show how they can get it. This is absolutely true, but what
people dont often realize is that being genuinely interested in helping others
will make you almost impossible to resist. Why? Do you remember that person
you really didnt like, but when they helped you, you just couldnt say no to
them? This is due to the difficult impossibility of resisting someone who is
genuinely trying to be helpful, even if they are just bumbling around. Therefore,
honesty and helpfulness arent just ethically right things to do, but they also
turbo-charge your ability to influence others. Success does not come from trying
to convince and trick people to do things they dont want to do.
Danger of Hype

When it comes to selling anything, there is always one strategy that is far more
powerful than practically anything else you can bring to the table. That is simply
proving your claims. As amazingly simple as this should be, most marketers
these days just hype their products. They believe that it is that big benefit that
makes their prospects head turn. Just promise a thousand and one different
things and the world will be yours.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view),
consumers are far smarter than the advertisers often give them credit for. They
are cynical and smart, and immediately after they even feel you are trying to pull
the wool over their heads, they will shut you off. And for a good reason.
Especially these days, your average consumer is bombarded by thousands of
different advertisements every day and they have learnt to screen all that noise
off. This is even truer in the magic land of the Internet, where response rates
have plummeted year by year.
Even then, hype is the preferred tool of manipulation for those who dont
have anything of real value to contribute. From motivational speakers to MLMs
to Internet Marketers, the formula stays the same. In this formula, products
arent products, but just glorified marketing brochures meant to attract as many
people to the authors website as possible. There, the author starts to sell you
more and more expensive information products and seminars, which hint that
answers you are so desperately seeking will be revealed in the next product. In
reality, that next product is just the same old junk slightly re-packaged. This
process is then repeated until the prospects credit card has been squeezed empty.
If the scammer really knows his stuff, he has also often (against all FTC
regulations) ganged up with several other authors who hype the product as the
best thing since sliced bread. People may be wary of hype, but if everyone seems
to be hyping a specific product, you easily start to believe there must be
something to it. The worst of the worst doesnt even stop here. Instead, they sell
the victims contact details to random boiler rooms that try to squeeze the rest of
the money from the victim.
Im rarely this negative, but after seeing so many people being abused by
these groups, I believe it is something that is important to bring up. Hype is
fools gold. It is a toxic wasteland that traps the simple, unlucky, and desperate
while repelling everyone else off, and this is why you should demonstrate in
very clear terms what your product can do for your customers. Anything,
literally anything, that can be used as proof about the power of your service
should be used. Demonstrations, real testimonials with full names, guarantees,
news articles, video clippings ... the list just goes on and on. Whatever you are
marketing, make having proof the alpha and the omega of your sales strategy
and never make your claim bigger than your proof. This is why you should also
always strive in your own interactions to under-promise and over-deliver. The
more proof you have, the less persuasion and hype you need to use.
(False) Positive Thinking

I always encourage people with whom I work to adapt a positive and optimistic
mindset. However, there is a huge difference between being optimistic and being
a happy idiot. In the modern self-help industry, one of the most enduring and
damaging concepts is the cult of positive thinking. It assumes you should stay
positive and upbeat no matter what happens. No matter what, you should never
whine or complain. You should always stay in a hyper-energetic state of mind
where you charge toward your obstacles and smash them. This is neither realistic
nor feasible because it is literally impossible for anyone to always be positive
and upbeat, except in the reality of Coca-Cola advertisements. Life has its up
and downs and sometimes it will most definitely suck. You also need downtime
to integrate what you have learned and gain introspection.
Surely having that particular positive mindset cant be that damaging, can
it? It is certainly unrealistic to think you need to be positive all the time, but it
surely cant hurt to try to be so, right? Actually, it can be extremely damaging
because any time you are unable to achieve this impossible goal, you will begin
to wonder what is wrong with you. You will begin to feel helpless and frustrated.
You will beat yourself up about it and then feel even worse. When you get over
those negative states, you try to feel even more positive, more energetic and
decisive. The highest of the highs is followed by the lowest of the lows. You are
literally training your brain to have major mood swings and this cycle is
essentially the recipe for depression and bipolar disorder.
This mindset is also a form of distraction. When trying to look at
everything from a positive perspective, it limits your problem-solving capability.
It makes you less prepared against potential personal threats because everything
is supposed to go perfectly as long as you stay positive. And finally, you are far
less capable of dealing with any kind of emotional distress caused by setbacks
because you havent learned suitable coping strategies. Being optimistic doesnt
mean being nave and sometimes a good dose of cynicism is exactly what you
need.
Obviously, cynicism can also turn into a trap. Many people would want to
make a bigger impact in their surrounding society, but even after overcoming
their own fears find themselves unable to do anything productive. Either they
feel overwhelmed by all the odds or they just rationalize to themselves
everything is fine. Why is this? Cynicism is commonly thought to be the way to
rebel against the society, but it is first and foremost a coping strategy. For many
people, cynicism isnt a tool for critical inspection, but a default distance for
operating within modern society. Instead of empowering the individual, cynicism
just becomes another way to conform to surrounding society. It encourages
passivity and submitting yourself to how things are. For getting anything done in
this life, it is important that you get rid of overt cynicism.
It should also be noted that many dubious multi-level marketing and
telemarketing companies, self-help groups, and cults exploit these two polarities
all the time to keep you distracted. The request to be positive all the time
prevents you from questioning what you have been taught or otherwise asked to
do. It also allows your superiors to project blame back onto you for any failures
because you obviously werent positive enough for success. At the same time,
they play on your cynicism and paint everyone outside the group as being
corrupted, hateful, or clueless, making them convenient scapegoats for personal
failures.
Building Value

In modern western society, we are constantly being bombarded with messages

about rich people and what they do. Nine times out of ten, these messages
revolve around how the person is spending his money. Because you are
constantly bombarded with these messages, your mind starts to associate being
rich with spending money. Many people are driven by the desire to be rich and
successful, but that desire is channelled into consumption.
However, what is really happening when you just consume things? You are
not gaining wealth, but just destroying it. The importance of this little statement
cant be stressed enough, because rich people are rich and stay rich only because
they receive money and build wealth. They create value. However, it is this
hidden social conditioning of wanton consumption that sabotages many peoples
attempts to build wealth. Your mind simply focuses on consuming value instead
of creating new.
Therefore, it is absolutely important to always keep in mind that in any
interaction, you are creating, sharing, and building value with others. Every
business interaction is based on the interest to exchange value. Every negotiation
is based on an interest to find an agreement that serves both parties. Even with
your friends, you are bringing some value to the relationship. Love,
understanding, honesty, it doesnt really matter. You just need to start to carefully
think how you can be of service to your community and realize that even the
simplest things can be of great value to others. After that, find practical and
sensible ways to offer your services. For me personally, it took a long time to
realize that the only thing you really need to make money is to go out and be of
service to others.
Unfortunately, building value has also become such a hollow and
meaningless word in the corporate world, because it is so subjective. Everyone
knows Craig the Consultant. He is that guy who talks all the time using
codewords like this: Oh, you just need to leverage your core competencies in
order to increase your awareness of functionality so you create client-centric
solutions that build more value for your customers. Makes perfect sense, right?!
But for some reason, Craig doesnt show or tell you any practical means for
doing so. It is practically a joke at this point, and it is also a remarkably good
way for a scammer to hide any inconsistencies and shadiness of their sales
message.
Realize Life Isn't Fair

The life is all about building value for the others, but at the same time many
people have learnt to think of this as being unfair. Lets make one thing clear
right from the beginning: Life isnt fair. I have an absolute conviction that there
are certain higher ideals we should strive for like universal human rights, free
access to healthcare and education, and a safety net for everyone unfortunate.
However, these are only ideals that we should strive for and something I hope to
see during my lifetime. No matter how much we wish for them to be true, the
reality is that real life doesnt (currently) work this way. For each sale you make,
someone else is going to lose that sale. For each promotion you get, someone
else is going to lose that promotion. For each date you make, someone is going
to lose that date. For every winner there is going to a loser. For all the talk about
win-win scenarios, the harsh reality is that someone is always going to lose. As a
wielder of influence, you really need to decide on which side of the equation you
want to be.
Furthermore, I believe learning this material will help you to be more
ethical in your life. How so? Think about people around you. How many of them
are relying on threats, bullying, begging, or downright lying to get what they
want? And how well that does work for them? The harsh reality is that many
people are forced to compromise their values and lose their integrity simply
because they dont feel like they have any other options. With these tools, it is
possible to live with real integrity and follow your own rules. Of course, you can
use these strategies to sell people crap, but that will always backfire in the end. If
you want to be treated well, treat other people well.
In the end, the process itself isnt unfair, but those people who abuse it are.
So long as you are not relying on cheating, threatening, or abusing the other
person to make the exchange, any deal can be considered fair. Value is always a
subjective experience, and if the other person didnt find enough value in what
you are offering, then there wouldnt be an exchange. I want to emphasize this,
because it is not your task to dictate how much value something has for
someone. So long as you or your offering is perceived to be worth the asked
valued, the other party is willing to pay it. And while asking for what you want
is important, equally important is to be generous. By sharing your time and
knowledge with others, you are enhancing their value. This will improve your
value in their eyes and when you connect with the right people, everything gets
so much easier.
Overcome Poverty Consciousness

Poverty consciousness is a mindset where you believe there are not enough
resources to go around. Not enough money, not enough love, not enough
opportunities. While you might currently think like this, this mindset is a huge
trap. When you are in a resource-poor state of mind, you are often unable to
perceive even the most obvious opportunities presented, and it reflects in your
interactions with other people. Even more destructive is that poverty
consciousness makes you believe you need to have more to start. It creates
artificial boundaries for your personal power, because you are putting power
outside you, into things that you dont yet have. You just start to wish you had
more and ignore what you already have.
In reality, you have far more resources and knowledge than you realize.
You are a unique human being with unique experiences and skills. The main
reason why you cant perceive these resources is because you are defining them
as normal. Your resources have become such a common part of your daily life
that you dont think about their existence. They are just there like air, and this
happens to everyone. I have coached some extraordinarily powerful people, and
like everyone else, they are often stuck only because they dont look closely
enough at what they have.
It is also remarkably easy to get too fixated on thinking of money as only
way to get what you want. Instead of focusing on building wealth, you just focus
on the process of getting money. If this sounds strange, let me ask you a
question. If you could get your dream vacation without needing to pay money
for it, would you take it? Of course you would. Being fixated on money simply
limits your brains ability to perceive any alternative ways to accumulate wealth.
In a similar vein, people fall into the trap of thinking that you need to work hard
to become wealthy.
This is not to downplay the amount of effort required to become wealthy,
because it certainly does require effort, work, and even little bit of luck.
However, the problem with this mindset is that it implies that accumulating
wealth must be hard and you absolutely need to struggle to achieve something.
When you operate from this mindset, you will find yourself working twice as
hard to achieve twice as less. Furthermore, working hard itself is not a guarantee
of anything. You can be working as hard as you want, but if you are making the
wrong choices, the end result is still the same.
 This is why I want to suggest your new mindset for wealth. That wealth is
both infinite and readily available. Just think of it as a stream of water that goes
towards where there is more water. When you start to think of it this way, how
hard can it be to make a slight adjustment in that stream so that some of that
wealth will start to trickle in your direction? You may think this sounds
somewhat preposterous that Im suggesting that you could just pull money from
thin air. This is not the case. Im just suggesting a mindset that gives your mind
permission to perceive all opportunities around you and frees you from poverty
consciousness. There are more opportunities than you have previously thought
of and with this mindset, they will just naturally pop-out. You dont need to
desperately chase them, because you know and feel that you are going to step on
another one soon enough.
Make People Feel Good!

Perhaps one of the strangest paradoxes of western culture is its endless seeking
of personal satisfaction and greater heights of ecstasy. At the same time, people
are made to feel guilty about feeling good. As a result of these contradictory
messages, many people dont allow themselves to feel pleasure if they dont
have an external reason for it. Your mind has an almost infinite ability to feel
pleasure, but when these people try to experience it, they will face their own
internal inhibitions. From a rational standpoint, this is absurd because do you
really need a reason to feel good? How should your ability to feel pleasure be
dependent on what kind of smartphone, car, or house you own? Strict parenting,
sexual abuse, and religious upbringing can also create similar issues.
Regardless of the original cause, a lot of cruelty in this world is the result
of people not feeling good about themselves. Neurosis, drug abuse, and gluttony
are all the results of not feeling good inside, and people in emotional pain also
lash out on others to escape their suffering. Misery loves company and when
there isnt misery around, there is a tendency to create it. We also live in a global
era where a lot of decisions are made without facing the person whom the
decision affects. Except for psychopaths, everyone feels pleasure from empathy
and helping others, but it has also been proven that the mechanism doesnt work
if you dont see the person your decision is affecting. When you teach a person
to feel good internally, they are content with far less, become more helpful, and
focus on their future instead of wallowing in their past.
This is why your job as a master influencer is to make people feel good
about themselves. Instead of putting people down, you need to learn to build
them up. Make people laugh, show them how to fully enjoy their lives, and
empower them with the belief that they can succeed in life. You should leave
people feeling better than you found them. Most people will also reciprocate
somehow, sooner or later. Most of your success will come from referrals by way
of other people you helped. Even in cases you may have thought ended in a total
fiascoas long as people remember you and your performance fondlythey
will refer you. The key lesson here is simple. Instead of thinking of how you
can make people do things for you, think of how you can compel people to
want to give you what you want.

Cultivate a Complex Lifestyle

Have you ever been unemployed for some time? For a lot of people, the first few
months dont feel so bad, but after a while they turn completely passive. It is like
nothing has real meaning anymore, and the days simply pass by. What
happened? Why do people fall into passive routines suddenly and cant seem to
get out of them? The answer is simple.
The more you do something, the better you become at it, and the brain uses
less energy to do so. Unfortunately, as a side-effect of becoming more brain
energy-efficient, you will begin diverting energy away from the adaptive part of
your brain. Before you know it, you are almost completely disconnected from
that part of the brain that allows you to find new solutions and have new
experiences. Learning becomes a chore, change is hard, and even simple things
like feeling pleasure from sex becomes harder.
If an unemployed person doesnt have any kind of engaging routine or
novelty in their life, the brain goes into totally passive mode. They will continue
doing this boring daily life routine, and feel lazy and uncreative. This is true for
almost everyone you meet. Most people are so stuck in their standard routine,
that it can be debated if they are really even alive anymore. They are going
through their daily life without thinking twice about what they are doing or
feeling at the moment. They are sleepwalkers.
But what happens if you put these sleepwalkers into a situation or
environment where they cant rely on their automatic responses? They become
awake again. To get your brain really turned on, you should aim to do at least
one thing differently every day for a month: anything from shaving your beard
with the wrong hand, eating new foods, taking samba classes, working for
charity, going to concerts, and even wearing different clothes will work equally
well. After doing this for a week, you will notice an immediate shift in your
alertness and emotional responsiveness because you are engaging your adaptive
part more strongly. Just continue having new experiences on a daily basis, and
after completing the first month, continue having new experiences at least once
every week.
The reason why I emphasize cultivating a complex lifestyle so much is that
in addition of making you wake up, having new experiences will expand your
comfort zone. For instance, are you equally comfortable wearing a tuxedo as
wearing t-shirt and jeans? Most people arent because it is so far outside their
current comfort zone. When you think about it, it is actually quite ridiculous
becauseobjectively thinkingclothing shouldnt have any effect on how
comfortable you feel in your own skin. Nonetheless, it happens because people
lack real-life experience about how to interact in these situations. Furthermore,
these tools are primarily limited by your own sense of possibility and what you
believe to be possible. To truly grow and evolve as a human being, you need to
actually understand the human experience. Everyone has probably heard of
something akin to monks who have stood on their left foot for the last ten years
or meditated in caves without any kind of human contact. While it certainly
appears impressive, these people have dedicated their whole life to mastering
that single feat. In my personal opinion, chasing miracles like this leads to a dead
end. What you should do instead is to interact with people and have as many
varied experiences as possible. I believe this is the only way you can move
beyond intellectual knowing to truly understanding and perhaps gain some kind
of real enlightenment instead of turning into a circus act.
Keypoints

Influence aims at empowering people to make the best choices with

the limited resources that they have
Only after you have proven your understanding to the other person
are they willing to be led by you
People will give you everything you need to influence them if you
just keep your eyes and ears open
It is very hard to motivate people, but everyone is already motivated
by countless things
A gifted product is mightier than a gifted pen and the more proof you
have, the less persuasion you need to use
Always ask yourself if you are willing to live up to the image you are
giving to the other person and learn to only make promises that you
can keep
Instead of thinking of how you can make people do things for you,
think of how you can compel people to want to give you what you
want.




THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
People dont want to be sold to; however, people buy. Even today, many sales
courses teach you to appeal to a customers rational side by telling facts, listing
benefits, educating them, and pointing out contradictions in their objections.
Which is, all things considered, reasonable-sounding advice. After all, any
intelligent human being should immediately see the benefit of owning the
product when he learns more about it. But thats the problem. We are not self-
respecting, intelligent beings. We are creatures driven by emotions and desires,
no matter what we like to tell ourselves. Humans are not rational decision
makers and it is a mistake to think otherwise.
Hard to believe? Just look around your own house. Can you really explain
logically why you have bought most of those things? As a matter of fact, it is
very hard to find much that we spend money on that makes any logical sense at
all. Very few of our purchases can be explained rationally. Nobody really needs
sugary food, designer clothes, fancy cars, makeup, or expensive phones, but for
some strange reason, all these things are very popular.
Still not convinced? Just grab your remote control and watch late night
infomercials. What do you see? A lady promising miraculous hair growth just by
rubbing coconut oil on your scalp. A gentleman telling you that his patented real
estate formula allows you to buy houses with no money down and make 237,212
dollars per year. A cook selling painted Styrofoam boxes intended to keep your
food warm, for the low price of 69 dollars per box. A televangelist who sells you
crosses that contain authentic shards from Jesus Christs birth cave. And then
there is Bob. Bob has a secret concoction of vitamins that allow any man to grow
his water spout into a fire hose in a matter of a few weeks.
I mean how stupid do they think people are? There is simply no way
someone would ever fall for these things. Except that we do. Again and again
and again. We buy all these things simply because we expect or hope that they
make us feel better. Feel better. Thats the key to influencing others. When you
are influencing others, you are really just providing them with an emotionally
compelling reason to believe you. All those facts, figures, and benefits, on the
other hand, are there just to give them a convenient excuse to crack open their
wallet and give their money to us.
Because influence is ultimately about compelling to peoples emotions, it
is important to understand why we function like this. In this chapter, we will take
a quick look at how your brain operates and how your decision making is
constantly influenced by numerous processes and biases you arent even
consciously aware of. When you understand these underlying principles, it will
help you significantly at influencing others. Furthermore, when you do this kind
of material for a living, you will meet countless people who claim none of these
things are real. I want to clear those arguments off the table right from the
beginning.
Perception

We all perceive and experience physical reality from our own perspective, in our
own way, that is a direct result of our previous experiences. This is not just a
philosophical assertion, but a simple fact about how our brains have been proven
to work.
The part of our brain that is responsible for sensations conserves energy by
interpreting our surroundings. In any given moment, more than 80 percent of
what we perceive as sensations is only an estimation of our surroundings. We do
this kind of ongoing perceptual deletion all the time to conserve energy, and your
brain is just guessing what should be in your perception, based on your previous
experiences. This is how optical illusions work. You see the illusion simply
because your brain is accepting it to be the most likely thing to be in the middle
of the area (Berns, 2010).
Your brain is doing this kind of interpretation all the time, and what people
typically consider as their sensations are only the end result of this interpretation.
Thereby, your senses and perception are two completely different things, and
what you perceive is only the sum of a guessing game and interpretation of your
senses. But it goes even further than that. In 2007, neuroscience proved that
people are unable to pay attention to details for which they dont have any
information. In a landmark study on neuroplasticity, people were trained to
distinguish different types of cars. While taking brain scans, scientists
discovered that the test subjects werent able to distinguish different types of cars
until their brains had built neurons specifically for categorising and perceiving
the necessary information. Our current emotional state, on the other hand, also
influences our perception and where our attention goes (Jiang, et al., 2007;
Phelps, Ling & Carrasco, 2006).
Everything said so far applies to everything in our perception, no matter
how simple or complex. For example, while one person might perceive another
persons response to be lukewarm, another could perceive the response as not
lukewarm but holding a slight interest, based on their previous experiences. A
businessman who has years of experience will perceive opportunities that other
less-experienced people will miss. The brain has been simply trained to
distinguish those details. Obviously, this works the opposite way, too. For
instance, if someone has through his previous experiences interpreted that
representatives of the opposite sex are cold and mean, that is exactly the
prediction that his brain will focus on. The brains natural tendency to predict
behaviour alone can keep you stuck for a very long time, because it can make
you perceive threats everywhere around you even if they dont really exist.
Curiously enough, this has been found to be the biggest difference between
people who consider themselves lucky and those who consider themselves
unlucky. In various experiments done in the field, those people who considered
themselves unlucky systematically missed money on the ground, lottery tickets,
and even hints to solve puzzles (Wiseman, 2004).

Perception and Imagination

Perception is also closely tied to imagination. For instance, have you ever
psyched yourself out from meeting someone? Perhaps you imagined that person
wouldnt be interested in meeting you or would possibly reject you outright.
Soon after that, you froze up physically. In this scenario, what you imagined
might happen is so convincing and believable that it dictated your behaviour.
You just imagined something being true without any kind of tangible or concrete
proof of it being true, and soon your body followed your mind. Why?
It may be hard to believe, but neuroscience has also discovered that both
perception and imagination share the same neural circuits for delivering
information further into the brain. Furthermore, both perception and imagination
also excite neurons for learning in exactly the same way. This means we dont
experience our thoughts only in our mind, but also in our body too. When you
imagined that person rejecting you, your mind and body treated the experience
as if it was actually happening. Of course, you arent imagining something as if
an indistinguishable part of the physical reality, it just feels real. If someone
literally sees a pink elephant dancing in front of them, they are psychotic, not
just imagining (Berns, 2010; Jabbi, Bastiaansen & Keysers, 2008; Oosterhof,
Tipper & Downing, 2012).
Essentially, while you can consciously know that you are just imagining,
what you imagine does influence your own behaviour. In a study made in 2014,
it was found out that when people just visualized being beneath a sunny sky,
their pupils contracted 87 percent as much as they did during actual viewing.
When people were visualizing being in a dark room, their pupils dilated to 56
percent of their size during real perception. Mental rehearsal even influences
automatic processes like pupil dilation, and this connection goes so deep that
even in the absence of any visual stimuli, people can selectively activate specific
low-level sensory neurons through mental imagery. In 2013, it was even finally
proven that just vividly imagining something to be true causes changes in your
perception (Laeng & Sulutvedt, 2014; Winawer & Boroditsky, 2010; Berger &
Ehrsson, 2013).

Perception and Attention

Everything we have experienced and learnt forms a vast network of neural
associations that our brain uses to decide how it will respond to a specific
situation. In practice, when something is in our attention, it will immediately
trigger related associations. This, on the other hand, makes it easier for the brain
to access any other associations related to that filter. Basically, what is presented
first makes us far more likely to respond in a similar manner to the next request.
However, the opposite is also true. When our brain focuses its attention, it will
also inhibit any competing concepts, making it harder to recall or access any
information related to them. The longer attention is sustained on a given concept,
the stronger this effect becomes (Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Reynolds &
Chelazzi, 2004; OCraven, Downing & Kanwisher, 1999).
To understand how powerful effect this has on your decision-making, lets
suppose that someone would come to ask you are you unhappy with your social
life. In this case, you would be 375 percent more likely to declare yourself
unhappy than if someone would come and ask are you happy with your social
life. If someone would ask do you consider yourself to be a helpful person?
you would be more than 250 percent more likely to help someone when asked. If
someone would ask do you consider yourself an adventurous person who likes
to try new things? you would be around 230 percent more likely to give your e-
mail address to a soft drink company. In basic terms, after your mind has been
primed with a specific concept, you are far more likely to behave in a way
dictated by the prime. At the same time, it becomes much harder for you to
process or accept any content that would oppose it (Kunda, Fong, Sanitisio &
Reber, 1993; Bolkan & Anderson, 2009).
What is currently in your attention also becomes a matter of great
importance. Even more so, we assign to it a causality for whatever we are feeling
at the moment. As a simple example, one study found that when observing a
discussion, people always thought the person whose face was most visible to
them was dominating the exchange. This was true regardless of how important
the discussed topic was to observer, how much they were distracted by
experimenters, or how long of a delay there was before judging the discussants.
A similar kind of behaviour has been also found to be true regarding who is
speaking louder in a conversation or wearing attention-grabbing clothing (Taylor
& Fiske, 1978; Robinson & Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1982; Zebrowitz-McArthur &
Ginsberg, 1981).
Everything said so far also extends to any goal-seeking behaviour, from
going jogging to buying a new house. The more motivated we are by the goal,
the more our attention and energy is diverted towards it. Furthermore, when
people are primed to focus on a specific goal, their ability to consider alternative
goals is significantly reduced. The same has also been found to be true when
people are led to focus on a particular way to find a job. Ultimately, what this
means in practice is that when we have truly set our mind on something, we will
start to develop serious tunnel vision. Even more so, this same tunnel vision
makes it harder for us to critically assess any information opposing our goal
(Vogt, Houwer & Crombez, 2011; Shah, Friedman & Kruglanski, 2002;
McCulloch, Arts, Fujita & Bargh, 2008).

Forming New Associations

The easiest way to think about learning new associations is to think of them as
filters of reality that determine where our attention is focused. Each filter has
two separate components: state and frame of reference. State determines what
emotions we experience while the filter is on and what emotions our mind uses
as a basis to predict future. Frame of reference, on the other hand, sets the
meaning and context for the event, which will also generalize future behaviour.
For instance, lets suppose you accidentally stepped onto a snake and the
snake scared the living daylights out of you. Based on this experience, your
mind created a new perceptual filter for snakes. This filter has negative
emotional states associated with it such as fear and anxiety. The brain will take
those emotions and distort them to predict what will happen in the future. In this
scenario, the prediction is that the snake will bite you. The frame of reference
informs that you feel these emotions because a snake scared you in the past. All
this information is then generalized into an automatic pattern of response. Any
time you become aware of a snake in the future, this filter will immediately
activate, causing a phobic reaction.
By creating these kind of automatic patterns of behaviour, the brain is
essentially saving energy and time. It is remarkably lazy and doesnt really want
to think about a given stimuli longer than it has to. By creating a familiar pattern
of response, it can just begin to rely on the automatic responses to navigate
through the world. Of course, the problem here is that we often form these
generalizations based on partial or downright incorrect information. Nonetheless,
any time you are learning anything new, it creates a new filter inside the mind.
Naturally, most filters only have a slight emotional response associated with
them, but it is always there.

Adaptive and Reactive Brain

To (grossly) simplify complex matter, our brains have roughly two different
parts: reactive (which is located in the amygdala) and adaptive (located in the
neo-cortex). Our reactive part of the brain is the far older of these two and is
responsible for the quick reaction to potential threats. Our adaptive part creates
solutions. The problem is that the adaptive part of the brain is very sensitive to
any kind of stress exposure and even mild uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid
and dramatic loss of cognitive abilities. When the reactive part of the brain
perceives and responds to a threat, what often happens is that stress caused by
negative emotional response overwhelms the adaptive part. Instead of working
together to solve a problem, you experience only a pure emotional reaction. At
that stage, any kind of rational analysis of the situation will fail (Arnsten, 2009).
When we are thinking about any kind of decision, we will immediately
trigger any filters associated with that decision. The brain is naturally balancing
between two neurological systems. One measures benefits, one risks, and the
decision is made only after either neurological system gains the upper hand in
the decision-making process. The brain will compare negatives and positives of
the decision and the side with stronger emotional content wins. Even though the
person might rationally know he should go with the decision, he will start to
procrastinate, object, or even downright freeze. The brain is always doing this
kind of measuring, and without it we wouldnt be able to make decisions at all.
For example, there has been several documented cases of patients who have
suffered brain damage on these areas. As a result of that damage, the person
would spend even hours trying to choose a suitable time and date for their next
appointment (Gray, 1994; Fowles, 1988; Damasio, 1994).
To make matters worse, the whole process is self-reinforcing. Any time the
person obeys the emotional response that is perceived to protect them or give
them satisfaction, the brain will release chemicals that strengthen the emotional
association of the filter. This way the brain rewards the person for having
predictable patterns of behaviour, regardless of how good those patterns are.
For instance, while from a purely intellectual standpoint smoking may kill you,
the fact that you continue doing it allows your brain to get more effective at what
it does. This is also why it is so much harder to convince someone who has been
upholding a specific opinion for a long time. Every time the person defends his
position, the emotional connection just becomes stronger! For instance, it has
been found that just presenting evidence against anti-vaccination to people just
made them more entrenched in their position. For this reason, just blatantly
telling people they are wrong rarely works that well, especially during the
Internet era where any opinion will find support somewhere from the net
(Cooper, Heron & Heward, 2007; Miltenberger, 2008; Nyhan, et al., 2014).

Rationalizing Your Behaviour

Everything described so far happens in a matter of a split second, and after our
brain has come to a specific decision yet another part of the brain activates: the
medial frontal cortex. To put it simply, the medial frontal cortexs responsibility
is to reduce cognitive dissonance for the decision. Cognitive dissonance means
any unpleasant feelings that a person experiences when his knowledge, attitudes,
and behaviours dont match. For instance, a person might be trying to stop
drinking, but still goes into a bar to drink. Because there is such a big disconnect
with his attitudes (I want to stop drinking) and behaviour (going to a bar), he
starts to experience unpleasant feelings like guilt about it. The medial frontal
cortex just reduces these feelings and makes the person feel okay about doing
this (Izuma, et al., 2015).
Its role is first and foremost stabilizing, because without it we wouldnt be
consciously able to justify to ourselves our seemingly irrational behaviour.
However, what makes the medial frontal cortex so deceptive is that the
rationalizations it creates arent objectively true and they are often only
marginally related to the triggered emotional reaction. The brain just invents
countless different excuses to justify the persons behaviour.
For instance, lets suppose that a person has learnt to be afraid of seeking a
job. Whenever he just thinks about finding a job, the filter will activate and make
him have a slight emotional response related to that idea. After stopping himself,
the medial frontal cortex will start to create rationalizations about why this
person cant do it. Perhaps there arent any jobs available, perhaps he needs to
finish mowing the lawn before he can go out, or perhaps the weather is too poor
to go out today. If the person still goes out, the emotional response will get
stronger and the medial frontal cortex will continue to spawn new obstacles on
the path. Are these rationalizations objectively true? Not at all. Those obstacles
dont exist anywhere else than inside your head, but even then, they feel so
convincing that we believe them to be absolutely true. In social psychology, this
is known as a narrative bias and we have a natural tendency to ignore
whatever doesnt suit our story (Kahneman, 2011).

Illusion of Free Will

What makes this process of rationalization even more deceiving is that it
typically happens completely outside conscious awareness. In 1983, Dr.
Benjamin Libet and his team asked participants to freely choose when to move
their index fingers and report their conscious decision to do so. As you might
expect, conscious decision preceded the act roughly by 0.25 seconds. However,
readiness potential could be identified in the brain up to a full second before the
actual movement of finger. What this meant in practice was that the brain was
making the decision a long time before conscious involvement (Libet, Gleason,
Wright & Pearl, 1983).
This experiment was and is still considered controversial, because it
implied we are not really in control of our decisions. On the other hand, it can be
also argued that we are in control of our decision, because a chain of events
starts at the very moment we take part in the test. However, to complicate the
matter even more, in 2008 Dr. Chun Siong Soon and his team replicated the test
with modern equipment. They pretty much achieved the same results as Dr.
Libet, but also found out that the predictive action started in the medial frontal
and parietal cortex up to ten seconds before the actual act. This means
consciousness has far more modest involvement in our decision-making than
originally thought. This creates a very strong argument that free will as defined
by the Greeks doesnt exist. Most of the time, we are just reacting to stimuli
outside our conscious awareness while our brain rationalizes our behaviour
(Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010; van de Grind, 2002, Soon, et al., 2008).
Cognitive Biases

In addition to being highly emotional, humans are marred also by countless

cognitive biases. As an example, people are known to be neurologically more
motivated by failure than success. To emphasize this point, lets look at a study
made in 1984. In this study, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky introduced a
hypothetical viral outbreak scenario to a group of medical doctors. The disease
was estimated to kill 600 people, and two different programs had been proposed
for combating the disease. The following consequences were estimated for each
program:

If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If program B is adopted, there is a 30 percent probability that all
600 people will be saved and a 60 percent probability that no people
will be saved.

If stated this way, 72 percent of doctors chose program A over the more
risky program B. But something unexpected happened when the same scenario
was framed differently:

If program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
If program B is adopted, there is a 30 percent probability that
nobody will die and a 60 percent probability that all 600 people will
die.

Now, 78 percent of the doctors chose program B instead of program A.
Just by putting things into a different context and by making the doctors focus on
the losses, the decision-making process shifted completely. This was not a
random statistical fluke, and similar results have been achieved many times in
different contexts. Simply put, if all things are being equal, a person will
always choose to avoid failure and pain instead. Why this is isnt perfectly clear,
but it has been theorized that this is because back in the Stone Age we needed to
use our resources as efficiently as possible. For example, we did our very best to
eat any food we could find, because leaving it behind would be a waste of
resources (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981; Cialdini, 1984; Knowles & Linn, 2004).
In addition to being neurologically more motivated by failure than success,
we have also a natural tendency to believe that the decision that makes us feel
good is the right one. If something makes us feel good, we tend to choose that
alternative. As an example, test subjects were offered a chance to win one dollar
if they randomly drew a red jelly bean from a bowl. People typically preferred to
draw from a bowl with more red beans, but a smaller proportion of them.
Statistically, a chance of 7 in 100 was preferred to 1 in 10 because the larger
bowl looked (and felt) better. This happened even with participants being
consciously aware of the lower chance. In another study, people were more
swayed by the hypothetical case of saving 98 percent of 150 people than being
presented with a scenario where they would save just 150 people. Even though
in the first case less people would have been saved, it felt better because the
scenario had a clear reference point. After all, bigger is better, right? (Kahneman,
2011; Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994; Slovic, et al., 2002)
Even more so, the bigger perceived benefit seems to be, the lower
perceived risk is thought to be. For instance, when people were asked to rate
benefits, risks, and acceptableness of those risks, the higher they rated benefits,
lower they rated risks. In a similar manner, if people were informed about higher
benefits of nuclear reactors, natural gas, and food preservatives, they perceived
lower risks. If presented with higher risks, they perceived lower benefits
(Fischoff, et al. 1978; Finucane, et al., 2000).
Outside Conscious Awareness

For a very long time, the idea that something could influence us outside our
conscious awareness was responded to with great hostility and doubt in
mainstream psychology. However, since the mid-90s there has been a growing
pile of evidence that our behaviour is constantly being primed by the
surrounding environment outside our conscious awareness. For example, we
now know that violent words make us more aggressive, flashing commands for
15 milliseconds can make us drink more, and religious symbols make us act
calmer. How can this be? The explanation can be found from how the brain
learns and categorizes new information.

Categorizing Information
As we learn new information, our brain is also categorizing that information
based on its base features such as motion, colour, and shape. This is why you can
go into these fancy apartments with designer furniture and still identify what you
can sit on. Your brain just wonders for a moment what the heck that should be
and based on its chair-like qualities determines it is a chair. This categorization
process is incredibly complex and to maximize its effectiveness, it nearly always
utilizes already existing categories. For example, lets suppose you want to learn
more about jazz music. As you would continue listening to more of it, your brain
would constantly use nuances you notice to define what is considers as jazz
music. This categorization, on the other hand, would work as a base for
categorizing and identifying different styles of jazz such as bebop, Latin,
orchestral, and so on (Liu & Vaina, 1998; Furmanski & Engel, 2000).
The brain also learns to associate rules of conduct for objects in specific
categories. For instance, after recognizing you as an annoying, pushy salesman,
the brain will just ignore you or shut you down. Instead of memorizing rules for
each category, the brain uses its already existing rules and just adds exceptions to
them. For example, it may look similar to chair, but it is not okay to sit on top of
someones piano. The more you categorize information, the finer this
identification becomes. After some time, the brain learns to focus its attention on
only specific parts of the object, ignoring anything that is not relevant for
identification. This even extends to very complex things like facial features
(Nosofsky, Palmeri & McKinley, 1994; Goldstone, Kersten & Carvalho, 2013;
Goldstone & Steyvers, 2001; Dwyer, Mundy, Vladeanu & Honey, 2009).
The key understanding is that this recognition and matching process is
based on similarity. If something just seems to match an already existing
category, the brain assumes it belongs in that group and operates in a similar
fashion. This change in our attention, on the other hand, makes our brain access
information and behaviours relevant to that categorization and task in hand. This
process can rather deceiving, because it also highlights qualities relevant to
categorization while filtering distractions out. For example, experiments have
shown people perceived objects which were categorized in the red category to
be redder than identically coloured objects belonging to another category. As a
result, you are far more likely to respond to the new object in the way you
typically respond to anything that is perceived to be similar. This process is also
highly dependent on what your attention focused on first, meaning it determines
how you perceive and categorize the given object (Livingston & Andrews, 1995;
Friedman-Hill, Robertson, Desimone & Ungerleider, 2003; Goldstone, 1995;
Sengpiel & Hubener, 1999).
We now know that this kind of attentional selection happens even when we
dont have conscious awareness of the object being selected. However, we dont
yet know how far this process extends. Is this low-level attention limited to base
properties of objects or does it even extend to complex structures that require
more identification? Regardless of this, the research is clear on the fact that
attention and consciousness are two distinct entities that influence each other,
and the first one operates even outside conscious awareness. The priming effects
of this unconscious object selection have also been clearly proven by functional
neuroimagining data (Norman & Heywood & Kentridge, 2013; Marchetti, 2012;
Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007; Brooks, et al. 2012).
Everything said so far is, of course, only a rule of thumb. We can override
this effect simply by paying attention to what we are doing and going against our
first response. Unfortunately, as human beings, we tend to avoid thinking more
than we have to. It is also somewhat challenging to respond to a prime that is
outside our conscious awareness.

Importance of Context
The critics of unconscious priming have claimed that the effect doesnt exist
based on their failure to replicate the results of some of the earlier studies. This
difference can be often attributed to different testing methodology. What had
typically happened is that the administrators of the test had tried to create the
priming effect by building an expectation for it to happen, and the participants
were also aware of some kind of test going on. This difference is important to
understand, because the priming effect only triggers based on the context.
Consciously knowing that experimenters are trying to do something to influence
your behaviour creates a completely different context for the whole experiment.
This is very important to understand because any kind of priming happens only
if it is both applicable and proper for the given context.
Creating a suitable context in itself isnt always easy, because of how the
brain learns new information. The learning and categorization process itself is
largely context-based, meaning that a given behaviour triggers only under
specific circumstances. People also learn different responses to different stimuli.
On top of this all, if there are two learnt concepts fighting for your attention,
they start to inhibit each other. For example, in one experiment, people were
trained to have an emotional response to shown images. If a new image was
shown at the same time as a image with an already learnt response, people were
far less likely to learn the new response. What this means in practice is that not
even under the most ideal circumstances will everyone be swayed by a prime in
the same way (Rescorla 1967, 1968).
Furthermore, the used prime needs to be relevant for the person, meaning
he has both the motivation and intellectual capacity to respond to the given
prime. For example, studies have shown that playing different kinds of music
(e.g., German vs. French) seems to influence a customers buying decision.
However, if the customer doesnt know the difference between German and
French music, it is very unlikely that the country of origin for the music would
influence what product he chooses. It may happen if the customer is
sophisticated enough to know the difference, but you most likely wouldnt get
same the kind of results in your local Wal-Mart. In practice, the more universal
the used prime is, the more likely it is to influence a person (Bijleveld, Custers &
Aarts, 2009; North, Hargreaves & McKendrick, 1997).

Linguistic Triggers
The science is very clear on that even individual words can prime us for specific
behaviour. As a basic example, in a study made in 1983, participants were asked
to arrange thirty sets of scrambled words to form coherent sentences. Half of the
subjects were assigned words that in one way or another implied aggression and
hostility. In a later part of the test, participants were then asked to give twenty
electric shocks to a subject. Those who had been exposed to aggressive words
gave 48 percent stronger electric shocks. In another experiment of a similar type,
half of the participants were exposed to alcohol- and weapon-related primes
subliminally. As an end result, primed participants made faster lexical decisions
about aggression-related words and also showed more aggressive behaviour
towards the experimenter (Carver, Ganellen, Froming & Chambers, 1983; Subra,
et al. 2010).
Fortunately, the same kind of priming has been also found to be true
regarding any kind of positive qualities. Some examples include achievement,
helpfulness, cooperation, loyalty, and being open. Nonetheless, it is important to
notice that verbal priming seems to have greater impact when it is aligned with
satisfying personal values or goals. Something that makes perfect sense based on
how egocentric human attention seems to be. More recent research seems to also
indicate that people focus their attention primarily on things that are relevant to
their own personal goals and self-biases (Bargh, et al. 2001; Macrae & Johnston,
1998; Fishbach, Ratner & Zhang, 2011; Grecco, Robbins, Bartoli & Wolff, 2013;
Weingarten, et al., 2016; Burrus & Mattern, 2010, Humphreys & Sui, 2016).

Subliminals
In 1957, subliminal advertising became the centre of attention due to a publicity
stunt by James Vicary. Mr. Vicary was a market researcher who claimed to have
substantially increased the sales of Coca-Cola and popcorn by subliminally
flashing messages Drink Coca-Cola and Eat popcorn during movies.
Nobody was able to replicate Vicarys findings and it appears the whole story
had just been an elaborate publicity hoax. As a result, the whole idea of
influencing someone outside their conscious awareness by showing pictures or
playing sounds was considered pure fantasy in the scientific community for a
long time. Since the early 2000s, there have been numerous experiments proving
the effectiveness of subliminal messages through both practical experiments and
neuroimagining data (Brooks, et al. 2012).
In one of the first studies made on the topic, participants were given a
standard lexical decision task. Subjects were presented with twenty letter strings,
either random letter strings or simple, short words (i.e., door, bike). However,
prior to the presentation of the words, other, subliminal words were flashed for
15 milliseconds, and immediately covered. In one condition, the word drink
was flashed, in another condition the word cola, and for the control condition,
a random four-letter word was flashed. After finishing the test, subjects were
asked by an assistant who was blind to the condition, would they have either
water or cola, because the next part of the test would be much longer. After
finishing the second phase, it was measured how much people had drank. People
in both drink and cola prime conditions drank roughly two and half times more
than people in the control condition. At the same time, however, the cola
prime did not affect participants choice of beverage at all (Dijksterhuis, et al.
2005).
In another experiment of similar type, participants in the first group were
shown subliminally words that encourage drinking (i.e., thirst, dry, drink), while
the control group had just random letters. Half of the people in both groups were
asked not to drink three hours before the test to guarantee they would be thirsty.
After a series of taste-related tests, people were asked to evaluate two beverages,
and given permission to drink as much as they wanted. Almost everyone in the
first group drank at least twice as much than in the control group, and this was
true even of those people who had been given permission to drink before the test
(Strahan, Spencer & Zanna, 2002).
In a third experiment of a similar kind, the test was altered again by
dividing participants into groups by their self-reported thirstiness. Then,
participants were randomly assigned the control words or brand words Lipton
Ice. As a result, 69 percent of a primed group chose Lipton Ice, unlike the
control group, where only 25 percent chose it (Karremans, Wolfgang & Jasper,
2005).
Based on these findings, we can conclude that it is possible to influence
someone to even choose a specific brand outside their conscious awareness.
Nonetheless, it is important to notice that in all these experiments, limitations
were the same as with any suggestions. Used words influenced a person only if
they were connected to satisfying some kind of personal goals. In these
particular examples, that personal goal was getting rid of thirst. However,
research also shows that people can be subliminally primed for increased
motivation. For example, in one experiment, participants were told they could
win money by successfully squeezing a handgrip. The amount of money the
participant could win wasnt told, but subliminally primed before each round.
With higher stakes, motivation increased. Later experiments found this seems to
happen only when the reward requires considerable mental effort (Pessiglione, et
al 2007; Bijleveld, Custers & Aarts, 2009).
Symbols and Metaphors
This kind of unconscious priming isnt in any way limited to text or showing it
subliminally. It literally extends to anything in your current attention, even to
things that represent different categories only metaphorically. Perhaps one of the
most classic example of this behaviour is the experiment made by John Bargh in
1996. In this test, some of the participants were shown subliminally pictures of
elderly people. As a result, these participants started to walk a little bit slower
and also process information slower. Showing people pictures of achievement,
on the other hand, have shown to prime them to be more productive. When
experimenters placed clouds as a wallpaper for an online store that was selling
sofas, participants focused more on the comfort of sofas than the prices. When
the experimenters placed coins in the background, people focused primarily on
prices, not comfort (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996; Shantz & Latham, 2011;
Mandel & Johnson, 2002).
However, this kind of priming is not limited to even visual components.
For example, participants who were asked to handle dirty money as a part of
experiment were found to be more selfish and prone to cheating than those who
handled physically clean money. This was not just a statistical fluke, because the
effect was measured to be consistent during classic experiments such as the trust
game, the prisoners dilemma, the ultimatum game, and the dictators game
which typically give very predictable results. Even such things as the physical
weight of a reading device and body temperature have been shown to influence
peoples receptiveness to a given message (Yang, et al., 2013; Ackerman, Nocera
& Bargh, 2010; Inagaki & Eisenberger, 2013).
Are We Defenceless?

Ultimately, all the studies shown in this chapter have been driving towards a
specific point: your brain recognizes only form and process, not content. It
perceives everything from the standpoint of predictable patterns, and if
something just seems to match a familiar pattern, it responds to it like one. As an
example, if you tell a story, the brain will immediately assume it is just a story,
meaning there is nothing to resist. If person sees a product with a higher price,
the brain has the natural tendency to assume that the product is better quality. If
you wear a suit, the brain will assume you are some kind of authority. Many
techniques presented in this book work because of this kind of unconscious
priming.
However, what you have learnt in this chapter tends to paint a relatively
grim picture about the human condition. Based on all the research, it would be
easy to conclude that we are sheep in the most literal sense, driven by our own
unconscious associations without us having any real say in the matter. While this
is true to some extent, we can fend off these effects simply by asking the reason
for our current feelings. For example, are you really liking the product or feeling
good because the salesman made you laugh? This has been shown to be quite
effective at correcting most of the biases we might have in our decision-making
so long as we are willing to make the effort to do so (DeSteno, Petty, Wegener &
Rucker, 2000; Healy, Malhotra, & Mo, 2010; Wegener & Petty, 1997).
However, arrogance is a death knell to any attempts to defend yourself
from undesirable influences. To demonstrate this point, Dr. Robert Cialdini
found that his students had actually become more susceptible to manipulative
advertisements as a result of their training. The reason for this was attributed to
the students having become over-confident in their ability to identify
manipulation. This is actually something I noticed all the time when I was
practicing the skills you will learn in this book. The most arrogant people who
attribute falling prey to these techniques to lack of willpower were always the
easiest to influence (Sagarin, Cialdini, Rice & Serna, 2002).
Keypoints

Our decision-making is exclusively based on emotions, and humans

have the natural tendency to believe a decision that makes them feel
good is the right one
You cant perceive things on which you dont have information,
instead, you just pay attention only to things that match your current
biases
What you imagine influences your behaviour, and both perception
and imagination stimulate the brain similarly
When your brain focuses its attention, it will also inhibit any
competing concepts, making it harder to recall or access any
information related to them
The brain recognizes only form and process, not content; if
something seems to match a familiar pattern, the brain will respond
to it like one
Your brain is constantly rationalizing any decisions you made so
that you feel comfortable about them
Our behaviour is constantly being primed by the surrounding
environment outside our conscious awareness
STATE CONTROL
There have been countless definitions of influence over the years, but I
personally believe influence is all about awareness combined with behavioural
flexibility. Awareness means being aware of what is happening in the
interaction. It is not just about paying attention to the other person, but also
being aware of your own and the other persons behaviour. Quite a few people
sabotage their own influence efforts simply by not being aware of what they are
really projecting with their behaviour. Until you have awareness of your own
behaviour, you dont have a chance to adjust according to changing
circumstances.
Behavioural flexibility, on the other hand, means your ability to change
your behaviour. This doesnt mean pretending to be something you arent, but
having the ability to choose what aspects of yourself you bring into an
interaction. When you get good at this, you can adopt different mannerisms,
ways of speech, and perspectives as easily as most people change clothes. Some
people might think this means you are putting on an act and lying to others.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, because many people are in an identity
trap. They assume they need to have a specific role all the time, even under
circumstances where it doesnt work. When you are yourself, you can just decide
and choose what part of yourself you bring into an interaction and quite often
just carefully listening and paying attention is all you need to influence someone.
This is influence at its purest. The more control you have over yourself,
the easier it is to influence others. Its like ballroom dancingsmooth, in
control, leading, and being aware. In this chapter, we will be focusing on how
you can cultivate both awareness and behavioural flexibility through different
exercises. I really recommend you practice these drills for several minutes every
day, because they are the basic foundation from which everything else will
spring.
Self-Control

Before you can begin to influence anyone else, you need to learn to influence
yourself and to manage your own personal state. It is extremely hard to influence
someone else if you dont have the slightest control over your own emotions and
actions. The general problem, however, is that when most people think of self-
control, they immediately begin to think about a person with great willpower and
self-discipline, who can extend their will upon the world. This is a good
description, but it misses many nuances of what makes someone have great self-
control. People often believe great self-control is something that only a few, rare
people can achieve, but in reality everyone is capable of it. The main reason why
more people dont have good self-control is that they have been taught confusing
and contradictory ideas about control and its true meaning.

Letting Go
The common belief in the Western world is that we are in complete control of
our own destiny, that we can control ourselves, our life, our finances, and our
relationships if we happen to know enough. On the surface, this belief appears
highly empowering. After all, if it is true, then everything is achievable as
everything is controllable.
However, in reality this is a dangerously flawed belief because it assumes
that you can be in control of everything. It assumes that by learning enough, we
can have the perfect plan for every situation, and therefore, will never be the
victim of circumstance. But real life doesnt work that way. Life is chaotic;
people are not predictable, and sometimes you might just have rotten luck. If you
hold a belief like this, you undoubtedly will begin to feel frustrated and helpless
when faced with unexpected circumstances. After all, if you truly believe on
some level that you should be in control of everything, everything that happens
to you is your fault. Of course, this is not true.
While you absolutely need to take responsibility for yourself, not
everything can be your responsibility. You can decide how you act, but you cant
take responsibility for other peoples behaviour or feelings. You can encourage
them, but way too often for instance I see people trying to take responsibility for
other peoples happiness. It is certainly a noble goal, but it is impossible to
reach. Even then, believing that it is your responsibility just creates impossible
expectations for yourself that you cant fulfil. When you think like this, you are
going to feel even more helpless and frustrated about the circumstances of your
life.
The idea of self-responsibility can be also greatly abused. I already talked
about the cult of positive thinking earlier on, but it also extends to self-
responsibility and how it is used as a way to put others down. For instance, if
you happen to be depressed, these people just start to claim you attracted it to
your life and you just need to take responsibility for it. Or that it is only a lack of
responsibility that prevents you from overcoming those deeply held traumas you
learnt in Afghanistan. Or that your parents education, economic background,
and living environment dont affect at all your chance of success, only how
much responsibility you take. This is also often used as a form of manipulation,
because it allows person with higher authority to blame you for any attempts to
stand up against their abuse. Alternatively, it can be a form of poorly developed
emotional narcissism where you put others down to feel better about yourself.
But where exactly should the limits for your self-responsibility be? It is
certainly an ethical dilemma, because modern neuroscience has proven how
irrational people really are with their decisions. There is a very strong case for
the theory that free will, as defined by Greeks, doesnt exist and most of the time
we are just on full autopilot. As a matter of fact, many crimes happen because a
person is following an uncontrollable emotional response that someone else
conditioned to him a long time ago. For this reason, I personally define you
having self-responsibility to your own behaviour only to the extent that you have
awareness and understanding of it. It is simply impossible for you to take full
responsibility for specific behaviour if it happens completely out of your
conscious awareness.
Ultimately, instead of thinking you can control everything, you can believe
that you can control yourself while influencing circumstances around you.
Thinking this way will free you from the desperate need of controlling
everything and then becoming stressed when things dont occur as hoped. This is
an important part of gaining real self-control, but there is also another side to it
letting go.
Have you ever seen people on a highway who seem to be holding onto
their steering wheel with a death grip? Are these people really in control? No,
they are not. Actually, they are so afraid of losing control that they cant let go of
their grip even for a second. If you have true control over yourself, you are able
to allow things to happen and be certain that you can pick the pace any time you
want. Quite often, this is actually the best thing you can do, as sometimes things
just work better when you dont interfere with what is happening. Think on that
statement for a moment.
But there is even more to letting go than this. When you learn to let go,
you are also learning how to let go of things that you dont want to consciously
carry any more: grudges, anger, frustration, and other negative feelings. When
you have real control, you can just let go of it all. Naturally, achieving this level
of control can be somewhat challenging and people often manage their inability
to do so in very clever and subtle ways. For instance, when you practice this
material longer, you will discover that some people will do almost anything
asked when you just lead them congruently. Many self-proclaimed experts would
mistake these people to be naturally submissive, but the reality is quite
different. As bizarre as it may seem, people like these are trying to maintain
control of a situation simply by submitting to not controlling it. If they are put in
charge, they often even start to panic, because they feel they are not in control of
the situation anymore. This is a perfect example of control issue managed in
very subtle manner.
In the same way, many interviewed dominants have reported they want
to lead situation because it made them feel safe. If the other person is following
their lead and doing exactly what is being asked, they feel like they are in control
of the situation. Nonetheless, if they lost that very same control, their answer
was typically to push harder and try to impose themselves on the person. Instead
of being dominant, these people pretend to be dominant while in reality they are
just so insecure about themselves that they need be constantly re-assured about
their control and desirability. They push other people around, forcing their ideas
on others, and acting like a total prick in general. People suffering from these
issues are also often completely disconnected from their behaviour, believing
they are in charge of their life. However, if you expose their flaws, they typically
spiral completely out of control.

Controlling Your Own State

This simple technique allows you to have a larger control of your emotional state
and the response you have to other people. First, imagine being in the most
neutral state of emotion you can be. After you have moved into this neutral state
of mind, pick two emotions that are complete opposites, e.g., happiness and
sadness. Now that you are in a neutral state of mind, imagine how happiness
feels. Go as far into the positive emotion as you can. Then, move back to the
neutral state and move as far into the negative state as you are able. After this,
return to the neutral state. Now, pick another pair of emotions and perform the
exercise again.
This exercise has multiple purposes: some obvious, others less so. Perhaps
most obvious is that you are shown that, yes, you do have some control over
your emotional responses, and can consciously decide the state in which you
want to be. After performing the exercise on a daily basis for some time, you
will be able to move quickly and easily between the different emotional states
you have been rehearsing.
For many men it may come as a shock when they realize how small a
range of emotional responsiveness they have. A weak response is primarily a
result of the conditioning many men typically go through their whole childhood,
taught to have a bad temper or hide emotions, and remain stoic. This
conditioning becomes more obvious while performing this exercise, as deeper
levels of emotional range may be harder to reach. It is also far easier to access
mental states in which you have the most experience. For example, most people
have a far easier time expressing frustration than happiness. Men are also
neurologically a little more limited in their emotional responses than women,
even though the difference isnt as significant as we are often led to believe.
By performing this exercise on a daily basis, you will learn to go farther
faster into different emotional states without even putting any real effort into it.
You are also reclaiming your birthright to have as rich and varied an emotional
life as possible. In my personal experience, you should do up to three pairs every
day, and after a month or so, focus only on the emotional states that feel most
challenging for you. When you practice doing so, keep in mind also that this
technique can be used to shift into states that can be hard to explain in words.
For instance, while you might not be able to explain consciously how
intrigued should feel, it is only a label. When you think about being
intrigued, your mind will immediately bring up the state that it associates with
the label.
In addition, you should also practice shifting your state under unexpected
circumstances. For instance, while walking, you could suddenly shift into a
feeling of happiness and notice how your perception of the world changes. In
addition to developing your emotional awareness, you are also training your
ability to return to balance. This is really important, because instead of trying to
keep a powerful state all the time, it is far more important to improve your
ability to return to balance even under the most unexpected circumstances.

Grounding Your Body

As an additional side effect of learning to control your emotional state, you also
learn to better identify the state in which you presently are. As unpleasant as the
truth is, most people arent aware of what they are feeling and are unable to
identify properly their emotional state. Because of this, they cant explain to
themselves what they are feeling at the moment and usually notice being in a bad
state only after they have drifted into it. Many people also over-extend
themselves physically because they dont listen to their body and whatever
warning signals it is giving. As unfortunate as it is, most people literally dont
have any kind of conscious awareness regarding their own state. As your state
control improves, you are able to respond to these signals and catch yourself
before you drift off-balance by experiencing negative emotion. One of the most
important and easiest exercises for this is to learn how to ground your body.
To ground yourself, shift your attention to your feet and feel the surface
you are standing on. Then breathe directly into your belly as you maintain
awareness on your feet. If you have problems doing this, slightly bend your
knees and straighten up. This will help. When you have grounded yourself
successfully, you will immediately become aware of your own internal state. In
addition, your attention will shift from your own thoughts to your own body and
the surrounding environment. You will feel more calm and balanced, and
perceive minor details better.
Awareness

While the ability to let go and assert yourself is important in influencing others,
equally important to influencing others is developing your awareness. As
mentioned earlier on, influence is all about awareness combined with
behavioural flexibility. Awareness means being aware of what is happening in
the interaction. It is not just about learning how to pay attention to the other
person, but also developing your cognitive, social, and emotional awareness.
Until you have that awareness, you dont have a chance to adapt according to
changing circumstances.

Expanding Your Visual Awareness

To increase your awareness, you need to learn to relax your mind, and this
particular mindfulness technique is great for it. Most of your conscious self-talk
is just monkey chatter that doesnt really lead anywhere, but it distracts you from
paying attention to what is going around you. Most people are so absorbed in
their thoughts that a person dancing in front of them in a gorilla suit can go
completely unnoticed. How can you lead your life if you cant even perceive
what is happening around you? Do following:

1. Look to the wall.
2. Adjust your sight roughly 20 degrees upwards.
3. Now, relax your eyes so that you can see both corners of the room.
4. Imagine that you are able to see through the wall.
5. Lower your sight to normal level and maintain the state.

Done correctly, you will immediately notice certain benefits. First, your
field of vision has now expanded by roughly 1015 degrees. This is actually how
people are born but are later trained to focus our attention on a single specific
point, narrowing our visual focus. As a downside, so long as you continuously
relax your eyes in this way, you will have a harder time focusing your attention
to a specific point for exactly the same reason.
While expanded vision is great in itself, this technique will also relax your
mind and make a lot of your self-talk disappear. This result occurs because your
consciousness can only track up to seven pieces of information at a time, eight if
you have practiced more. Relaxing your eyes takes three of those pieces for its
own use. As a result of being more focused on the present, you also relax
physically and differentiate colours better.
You can also use this technique to ground yourself into any positive state
you want. This happens simply by grounding yourself and imagining filling
yourself with a positive state of your choice. So long as you maintain grounding
and the peripheral vision using three-point attention, almost nothing can knock
you from your chosen state. Your conscious mind will be so occupied with the
process that it automatically prevents any other kind of state change. If you have
challenges getting into the desired state using this technique, loosen your
muscles a bit; any kind of tension can prevent you from going into the desired
state because it changes your physiology.

Developing Your Emotional Awareness

Emotional awareness can be best cultivated through grounding. First relax your
body. When your body is relaxed, it is far easier to detect your own state changes
and what the required threshold for state change is. For instance, after frustration
has grown strong enough, it will reach the threshold where it can change into
anger. When you start to practice changing your emotional state from physical
relaxation, you will easily learn to detect these thresholds. Once you become
consciously aware of the threshold, you can decide if you want to move into that
state.
Nonetheless, these kind of exercises have their own biological limitations.
Your body has two different nervous systems: sympathetic and parasympathetic.
The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for different kinds of hide-or-flee
responses and is a higher priority than the parasympathetic system. If you
happen to be in a strongly negative state like anger, it will take some time for the
parasympathetic system to activate and cool you down. In simple terms, it takes
only a few seconds to pump adrenaline into your body, but getting rid of it can
take some time. Specifically for this reason, you should learn to identify your
emotional states better, and catch unwanted emotional changes before they
happen. If you drift into anger, you will be there for at least some time, no matter
what efforts you are going to take to calm that response.
As a good thumb of rule, if you can avoid it, never go into negotiations
stressed; it will be very difficult for you to lead someone if you are struggling to
keep your own balance. For instance, it has been found out that sad people are
willing to part with an item for 33 percent less than those who had a neutral state
of mind. In similar fashion, it has been found that people are if they are tired or
overstressed, they are far less likely to question statements (Lerner, Small &
Loewenstein, 2004; Gilbert, Krull & Malone, 1990; Gilbert, Daniel, Tafarodi &
Malone, 1993).
This is why you see so many people upset because of some random joke
their friend or colleague told. Why? They are in an emotional state where the
most natural response, for them, is to interpret the joke as a personal attack, even
if harm wasnt intended. Therefore, you should always take good care of your
body; get as much sleep as your body and mind require, eat healthy, and drink
lots of water. What you put in your body matters! You should also clean up your
thinking; negative thoughts lower energy, while positive and productive ones
increase energy.

Overcoming Your Own Projections

Many people struggle with influencing others, because they are excessively self-
conscious about themselves. They think they shouldnt act in a specific way
because it might offend their mother. They assume everyone will respond to
them the same way as their old friend who has known them for twenty years.
Some people even go so far that they dont give themselves a chance to reinvent
themselves because they are so afraid of what would happen if new people
discovered their dark past.
Well, guess what? The good news is that people dont have the ability to
read each others mind. People only know those things about us that you present
to them. If you want people to respond to you in a specific way, just present
different aspects of yourself. If you want to be treated well, treat others well.
Nobody can read your mind, and think how liberating this is! All your past
mistakes, all your social blunders are already forgotten. You are the last person
thinking about them; the rest of the population has moved on. So relax.
When you get over these delusions, you will discover that they are just that
delusions! Most people you meet are good, decent people without an evil bone
in their body. They are literally starving to have some kind of deep, meaningful
connection with other people; but, for some reason, creating that deep
connection is a relatively uncommon occurrence.
Why? Because most of us are so stuck in our own heads. We talk too
much, dont listen enough. We interrupt others. We dont engage the other
person. We project impossible expectations on others. We even arrogantly
assume that we know how the other person will react to us, when in reality, he is
an innocent victim to your own insecurities until proven otherwise. We even go
so far as to assume we know what the other person needs or wants. This is why
you should also become aware of how your current emotional state colours
your own perception. As previously stated, most people arent truly aware of
their feelings in the present, and even less aware as more subtle changes occur.
Your own emotional state can colour your perception so much that you might
miss even the most obvious cues.
To get started, perform the following exercise. First, imagine a person with
whom you are familiar standing in front you. As you continue imagining the
person, notice the emotion that is between you both and imagine you could
physically move it aside. When you do this, you will immediately notice that
your perception of the person changes. Now that you have a clear mind in
relation to that person, it will be easier to answer questions that have been
troubling your mind. For example, is this person a good business partner? Can I
trust this person based on his previous track record? Do I really love this person
or did pleasure cloud my mind?
Continue experimenting with different people and different emotional
states, and after a while put your own personal outcome between you. Notice
how you respond to the person when you perceive him through that position and
think how they would respond. What would this person really think, feel and
see? Finally, move your outcome aside, and ask yourself what you can do to
create an outcome that works for both sides. This will help you create far better
outcomes for yourself, and often may reveal that your outcome wont work at
all.
Even more, this exercise also clearly demonstrates the importance of
keeping your own state of mind clear. When you are in a negative state, you tend
to assume so many negative things about the person with whom you want to
interact. You can carry the perception of the last person you interacted with into
a new situation, making the new person victim to those negative states.
Furthermore, so many people have impossible expectations about social
interactions. Especially in more casual contexts, many people set for themselves
impossible expectations about how they are going to make friends with
everyone, be the centre of attention, and find their life partner. All of this may
happen, but needing for it to happen just reeks of desperation and neediness. It
can even lead you into adopting a mindset that because everything didnt go
perfectly last time, Im not going to go out at all. Learn to look at the world
through eyes of curiosity, because then you can wander out and see what
happens with an open mind and without expectation.
Managing your expectations is an important part in any social interaction
and it is also important that you learn to separate social interactions from
influence. If you have spent any time studying influence, there is a natural
tendency to start to think of every interaction as a form of it. This is reinforced
by influence teachers who typically greatly exaggerate how often and how much
they are using these skills in their daily life interactions. While it is true that on a
certain level every interaction is a form of influence, there is an enormous trap
involved in adopting that mindset. It assumes that you need to persuade and
convince a person to do something even when you two are just having a casual
interaction. In addition to distracting you from creating a genuine connection
with another human being, the other person will instinctively pick up the vibe
that you are trying to make him do something. There is time for both socializing
with and influencing people.
Congruency

An important part of presentation is your own state and how well you are able to
communicate your intent. Our brains are constantly looking for familiar patterns
of behaviour from people around us and it can instinctively pick up when the
other person is acting incongruently. For example, every one of us knows that
person who comes asking us for money. Even though they havent uttered a
word, we already know what this person is going to ask. The person is
transmitting their intent so strongly that we immediately pick it up. However,
this person doesnt just project a need for money, but also that he doesnt really
believe you are going to give that money. As a result of rapport, we naturally feel
this uncertainty and it greatly affects how we respond to a person. Most people
arent aware of how they project their intent, and the problem is amplified by the
fact that the receiver of their projection doesnt have awareness of it either. Way
too many people are completely oblivious to what is happening around them,
and they catch the projection of others without analysing it twice.

Being Powerfully Congruent

But shouldnt this mean humans are perfect lie detectors? Of course not.
Our brains have a natural tendency to pick up only uncertainty. If the person
truly believes in what they are saying, you wont detect any incongruence. More
often than not, people can be honestly misguided about something and talk about
it with the utmost conviction. Some people can be so deluded that they believe in
their own lies while others know how to stay congruent while lying.
Congruency is just our own sense of belief in what we are doing.
This is why it is also possible to become an object of fascination simply by
being powerfully congruent. Most people have a hard time resisting a relaxed
and confident person who expresses their intent congruently with great
conviction. The brain is constantly looking for reliable sources of information.
When you act congruently, you communicate a stable and secure worldview and
you are also becoming different from others around you. To put it simply, you
are not just a boy with a toy, but a man with a plan. People find this highly
attractive because they seek security and stability in their lives. Even if your
asserted worldview is negative or morbid, it can still be perceived to be
something you can rely on. This is how many cult leaders are able to make their
followers adopt strange beliefs. Those with extreme beliefs are often perceived
to be charismatic and even magnetic.
As long as you project yourself as congruent and confident in your ability,
you can often gain acquiescence with a minimal amount of pacing. You should
lead by example, because social psychology has a long time ago proven that as
long as a person expects something to happen, it becomes real for him. If you
manage successfully to create expectation for something to happen, the brain
will, through prediction, make it happen. This means that the probably easiest
way to become an object of fascination is to simply lead by example. No
objection survives the light of powerful demonstration and when you clearly
demonstrate that you practice what you preach, it will disarm any resistance
people might have. When you lead by example, people will follow you and
when people follow you, you have influence.

Congruency as an Indicator of Success

To repeat what was said in the introduction, my overall intention for this
book is to teach you the underlying operators for influence. So long as a person
has an IQ that is above 70, and hasnt lived their whole life isolated from human
civilization, you can count on these operators to be available for your use. When
you understand these time-proven psychological operators, you dont need to
rely on tricks and routines to influence people. Instead, you are just leveraging
what is already deep inside every person.
Naturally, mastering these seven operators is not a guarantee that
everything would be easy or it would be even possible to close every deal. Not at
all. They just stack things further in your favour. There is a human factor in
every interaction and it would be practically impossible to predict every possible
variable of human interaction. Life is chaotic and you should just accept that
people are bound to surprise you in both positive and negative ways.
Even then, it is still important to keep in mind that these operators are
based on a humans natural way of thinking. So long as you are interacting with
a human, you can count on him to have some kind of response to these
operators. The response may be weak or strong, but it is always there. The
response might not be even the desired one, but it will be there. I want to
emphasize this, because more often than not, beginners will say, It didnt
work. It always works! Influence on the operator level is content-free and as
long as you are comfortable with the technique and yourself, the chance of
failure on your part is minimal. It is the human part of the interaction that is
flawed. If something fails, it is because the other person isnt following your
lead, doesnt trust you, or doesnt understand your instructions. It really is that
simple.
I want to really stress this, because ultimately your own sense of
congruency is the best indicator of whether the technique works. This is why as
a beginner, it is important that you learn to detect the difference between your
own signals of congruency and incongruence. As a human being, you have
developed your own internal signals for telling yourself when you are being
congruent in your behaviour and when not. When you learn to identify the
difference between these signals, it becomes easier to perceive where in your life
you are acting in an incongruent manner and what is causing that incongruence
in your life. After you have all that information, it also becomes much easier to
change your own behaviour.

1. Ground yourself.
2. Say three things that you absolutely know are incongruent to your
character.
3. Notice where and how the incongruence begins in your body.
4. Shift your state back to neutral.
5. State yourself three things that you feel congruent about doing.
6. Notice the difference in your body.
7. Return back to a neutral state of mind.
8. State yourself three things that you are absolutely convinced about
being true (e.g., the sun rises every morning).
9. Notice the difference in your body.

After doing this exercise, you should notice very clearly the difference
between being incongruent, being congruent, and being absolutely convinced
about something. Now, it is only a matter of paying to attention to where your
actual weak points exist. When you become more attuned to signals of
congruency, it also makes it easier to feel when someone else is being
incongruent or just flat-out lying. This is because when you have rapport with
someone else, you will instinctively feel whatever state they are in. After
developing your own emotional awareness, you will also learn to notice these
nuances in people who you are interacting with.
Furthermore, when you want to influence people, it is sometimes better to
intentionally stay incongruent for effect. For example, many trainers who teach
this kind of material for a living tend to tilt towards the more dominant side of
the spectrum. Combined with powerful intent, this can quickly overwhelm
people and cause them to become scared of you. In this case, your best bet is to
show some kind of vulnerability to your audience. Shifting your state into
incongruence will help greatly in projecting this.

Focusing on Your Intent

When you are influencing others, you are leading them through different
contexts and emotional states towards your desired outcome. Step by step, you
continue progressing towards your own goal. As simple as this should be, too
many people try to influence others without having a clear idea what they
actually want to achieve. Alternatively, they just make the mistake of trying to
achieve too much at once. You should keep your desired outcomes as present
and immediate as possible, while keeping your intent in the back of your mind.
For example, when meeting with your customer for first time, your outcome
could be, I want to gain rapport. After gaining rapport, I want to gain
acquiescence. After gaining acquiescence, I want to get their values. This
way you focus on what needs to happen at each step instead of clouding your
focus by focusing on the final outcome. Focus only on those things that
absolutely need to happen and be clear with your outcome, as poorly thought-
out outcomes get poor results.
As a beginner, you want to stay as immediate as possible with your intent.
However, another, more advanced approach to intent is to hold a thought you
want a person to have about you. For example, you could want to convey in your
behaviour being a good business opportunity. To do this, you could hold the
thought, This Teppo guy is a really good business opportunity, because he really
knows his stuff. Why? It may seem that we are trying to lodge a specific thought
in their mind, but the explanation is much simpler. When you hold your intent in
the second person (e.g., I want you to think Im good business opportunity),
you are suggesting to yourself that you dont actually have those qualities; you
are just trying to make a person believe it is true, and the person you are
interacting with holds all the power.
By framing your intention from their perspective, you are just telling your
mind that is the outcome you want to have, and that you are, as a matter of fact,
that person who has those capabilities. You are not telling your mind to fake
something till you make it, but telling it to be that person. This way it can freely
exhibit those behaviors, intent, and energy that it believes are most aligned with
the identity you want to represent to the world. When you do this, you will be
surprised how often people will respond to your intent exactly like they would to
a person with that specific role.
Obviously, upholding your intent can be tricky, because humans have a
natural tendency to get distracted by everything around them. Things like
practicing meditation will make it easier to hold onto your message, but many
people make the mistake of trying to maintain it by force. They think about their
intention so hard that it simply starts to distract their attention. Furthermore,
holding thought like this is just so mentally exhausting that you are going to
have a headache after a while. The problem really is that the person is just trying
too much.
Undeniably, the best way to maintain the thought form is to just have an
absolutely passive, receptive state of mind. You dont force thought form inside
your mind, but you dont allow it to disappear either. For me personally, the
easiest way to achieve this kind of passivity is to just allow the message to
gently float in a space between the eyes. Then you just allow it to stay there
while you just passively observe it and do what you are intending to do. Doing
this technique will require a little bit of practice, but it works really well.
Keypoints

Influence at its purest is like ballroom dancingsmooth, in control,

leading, and being aware.
The important part of control is to learn how to let go.
You can change your own emotional state and ground yourself into
any positive state you want by using three-point attention.
It is more important to practice returning to balance than trying to
stay in the same state all the time.
Learn to relax and recognize when you are drifting off into an
unwanted state.
Congruency is your own sense of belief in what you do.
Learn to hold your intent so immediate as possible, stating it in the
first person instead of second person.


APPLICATION: INCREASING YOUR
EXPRESSIVENESS
How you present yourself to others makes a great difference in your ability to
influence others using your body as a channel of intent. This is why body
language and its analysis are so popular these days and it is commonly believed
that it can provide you the edge you need to have to influence others. However,
there are more than a few problems with how body language is typically taught.
Too many trainers make gross generalizations about body language and assume
they are applicable to every person. In reality, you should establish the baseline
in someones body language and pay attention to any deviations from that
baseline. Some trainers focus on a customers micro-expressions to determine if
they are lying. While this can work, it is almost impossible to do when in the
midst of interaction with the other person. It also becomes unnecessary once you
develop your own emotional awareness.
On the other hand, some trainers say that you should adjust your own body
language to match postures that are generally assumed to communicate openness
and confidence. I agree with this to some extent. Always keep body gestures
open to communicate openness and trust, and never make gestures that one can
interpret as uncertainty: dont scratch your neck or ears, dont put your fingers or
arms together, and never allow your arms to go above the neck or below the
waist. Keep movements slow, make soft gestures, and always turn toward the
person with whom you are interacting.
While small adjustments like this are possible, I dont believe larger
adjustments really work in practice. While you can adjust your body language to
some degree, you tend to lose immediate control when you are actually
interacting with people and moving outside your comfort zone. Fortunately,
there is an easier solution. Your body and body language always follows your
emotions; if you feel comfortable and relaxed, your body language follows suit.
This is the reason I highly recommend everyone to practice meditation and work
on their own personal issues.
Controlling Your Intensity

Discussing energy is somewhat challenging, because it is an esoteric topic for

most people. In my experience, it is typically actors, athletes, and artists who
get the subject, while others just scratch their heads. Right from the beginning,
it is important to understand that you can interpret energy in any way you
want. If you are an engineer type, consider it as a metaphor for activity and
effort. If you happen to believe there is more to it than that, that is perfectly fine.
Either way, it doesnt make a difference in applying what you are going to learn
here.

Opposing the Space

For beginners, the most important lesson is that recent studies in neurology have
found that when a person tries to go against a group (three or more people), the
brain automatically releases chemicals that cause a fear response. When the test
subject attempted to choose an answer that didnt match the rest of the group,
their body had a slight fear response. The response was so subtle that the
participants werent consciously aware of it, but it still clearly affected their
decision-making process. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes great
sense, because there was always safety in numbers (Asch, 1955; Cialdini, 1984;
Berns, et al., 2005).
This means you should always adapt to your audience and their energy
level and keep it just a notch higher than your audiences. It is important to
understand that a notch here means a small degree. There are many self-help
gurus that teach their listeners to have this artificial, over-amplified, hyperactive
state, but this usually only makes other people uncomfortable. People prefer to
interact with people who are similar to them, and if your energy level is too
different from your audience, there will be a mismatch. If you cant adapt to the
current environment, just accept it and move on. Otherwise you start to fight
against your own and other peoples biological responses, and you will also most
likely be trampled down by your audiences worldviews. If you try to oppose the
energy of a space or environment, the space and environment will always win.
To practice this particular skill, I recommend you just go out and interact
with people. During the interaction, ask yourself, What is your current energy
level and what is theirs, on scale one to ten? Then, you start to gradually change
your intensity and notice how it changes their response. If it is too much, just
back down. If they are following you, then you can continue to adjust your
energy level higher little by little. This can be very useful when you want to get
your audience to become emotionally involved with the topic.

Respecting Personal Space

As you meet new people, keep in mind a persons personal space. We are
culturally conditioned to respond to people differently based on their physical
distance from us. We have different distances reserved for every social
interaction, family members, and other intimate relationships. Overstepping the
boundaries set for the current interaction can make a person very uncomfortable
and that is what a lot of people do. Therefore, you need to learn to calibrate what
proximity is deemed acceptable in each current interaction. For example, at the
beginning of your interaction with someone, you should actually step back and
maintain a distance with which that person feels most comfortable.
Also be aware of how you lean. When leaning forward, you are
unconsciously communicating interest in the other person. However, leaning in
too early can cause discomfort in others. Allow the other person to set the tone
for the interaction and lean forward only after they have done so; this will
unconsciously change the context of the interaction to one where it is assumed
that you have information worth listening to. When the person learns forward
more, it creates a perception in their mind that what you are saying is valuable.
You can also often make the person qualify himself further by leaning back.
Using Your Voice

You can easily and effortlessly influence a person with any kind of voice and
tonality, so long as you are acting in a congruent manner. However, there are
many good reasons why you should consider developing your voice. A well-
trained voice can in itself be very convincing and make people pay more
attention to you. A well-trained voice also tends to be soothing and resonant,
which can help facilitate influence.

Inflection
Think about the statement this is amazing and try to say it as if it would be
most amazing thing ever. After that, try to do say it as you would be currently
filling out your tax forms. Notice the difference? Based on the emotion used, the
underlying meaning of the message changed and it will also be felt by the other
person. Everyone does this naturally, but only a very few people do it in a
strategic and calculated manner.
To practice controlling the emotion behind your voice, just take different
statements and notice how they change when you change your own state.
Controlling your inflection plays an important part in influence, as it allows you
to control the meaning of the message. The more you can express emotion in
your description, the stronger the other person will experience it. And it is not
just positive states that get transmitted through your inflection. For example, if
you do talk from a standpoint of incongruence and doubt, it will typically trigger
those sensations in the other person. Doubt is actually one of the best states you
can have a person in, because it can transform into pretty much any other state
that you can imagine. Ultimately, you should be more concerned about evoking
feelings than the words you are using. By being emotionally engaging, you
become fascinating. And the more you can simplify your language and
increase the emotional content of your message, the easier it is to influence
others.
Of course, while it is more common that people dont put enough emotion
behind their message, the opposite is also possible. Instead of being emotionless,
you can also be too energetic and thus overwhelming. While many motivational
speakers claim you should be super energetic all the time, all that energy
prevents the listener from developing their own emotional response. If they
arent interested in your message, they will leave. Stay within the normal range
of human experience, adjust your energy level to your listeners level of
excitement, and give them breathing room.

Tonality
No matter where we are born, we have been conditioned to perceive any
statement that ends in a downward inflection as a command. Instinctively, we
tend to find a commanding tone far more credible than a flat tone. Any statement
that ends with an upward inflection, on the other hand, is perceived to be a
question and approachable. When you want people to perceive you as credible,
inflect downward; and inflect up when you want to sound approachable. Another
good way to use these tonalities is to begin with a credible tone, then pause, and
continue with an approachable one. This is bound to get someones full attention.
Inflection and tonality are also conditioning tools. After interacting with
you for a while, people learn to instinctively associate different emotional states
with your expression. As a simple example, if someone becomes relaxed while
you are talking with specific inflection, they will start to become relaxed any
time you use it. The opposite is also true. If someone becomes frustrated while
you are using specific tonality, they start to become slightly irritated any time
they hear it. It is actually quite interesting to realize that many conflicts happen
only because of this. The other party starts to scream at you only because you
used that voice. You know what I mean! That voice! Actually, you probably
dont; but, thats the point. We are doing this all the time, but we dont really pay
attention to it.

Speed
People normally speak at the rate of speed in which they can process
information. If you speak faster than the person listening to you, that person is
going to miss some of the information you are communicating. For this reason,
you should always do your best to match someones rate of speech. If you talk
too fast, slow down. You should also keep your language on the level of your
speaker, because more complex words can overwhelm the listeners short-term
memory. For example, if you are talking with a professor of Oxford, feel free to
use the same big and complex words that he uses. But, on the other hand, if you
are talking with Billy Bob from Kansas, you should keep your language as slow
and simple as possible. However, it can be hard to strike a good balance, because
ideally you still want to keep a relatively fast pace. Why is this?
In various studies it has been found that when a said message was counter-
attitudinal, faster speaking was rated more persuasive. Likable sources have been
found to be more persuasive when the listener couldnt control the speed of
exposure (e.g., the message was conveyed through video). However, when the
message was pro-attitudinal the opposite happened, and slower speech was rated
more persuasive. This is because when people are able to pace, it will lead into
greater emotional involvement with the message. This is because self-pacing
provides them more time to develop imagery and emotional responses related to
the story. Based on these studies, we can conclude persuasive technique is
typically more effective the faster it is executed, but being too fast prevents
emotional involvement with the message (Smith & Shaffer, 1991; Chaiken &
Eagly, 1983; Green & Brock, 2002).

Rhythm
Curiously enough, human beings are currently the only organisms on this planet that can infer a beat from a sound pattern. We can hear
a pulse in a rhythmic pattern while it might not even be explicitly in there, and naturally start to synchronize our bodies with the pulse.
Our breathing changes and as long as the rhythm is slow enough it will cause our body and mind to relax, opening our imagination. In
biomusicology, this is called the entrainment effect. It is the main reason whyoutside of a few unique caseswe humans are the only
organisms on this planet who can dance or collaboratively clap to the beat of music (Will & Berg, 2007; Zakharova & Avdeev, 1982).
A similar effect happens also with any sources of light. For instance, just
watching a campfire makes us synchronize ourselves with its pulse. Religious
and shamanistic practices make good use of this principle, and many traditions
create open states of mind by combining campfire, drumming, and chanting
mantras into a single ritual. But you dont need drums or flames to use this
principle to your advantage. Anything that has a natural rhythm to it creates
entrainment, including your voice. When you can talk in a steady, rhythmic
manner, it will automatically make people more open to your suggestions so
long as they are following you.
Breathing

When you breathe deeply into your belly, you bring more oxygen into your
bloodstream. In addition to relaxing the body and improving energy levels, it
also improves your ability to stay calm, even under great pressure. It is very hard
to have an adrenalin rush while breathing deeply, and breathing deeply
communicates to the body that it is no longer necessary to increase the intensity
of the fight-or-flight response. In addition to causing physical relaxation, a
slower breathing rate also relaxes the mind and puts you in a state of mind where
you can imagine better. Breathing deeply also provides you with a deeper and
more resonant tone of voice (Homma & Masaoka, 2008; Fumoto, et al., 2004).
Retraining how you breath can take quite time, because you have most
likely been breathing improperly for a very long time. While breathing plays an
important part in controlling your own state, you can use your breathing to
connect with others. It has been found that when we are really connected with
another person, we will naturally start to breathe at the same rate. This was
found to be especially true in married couples (Helm, Sbarra & Ferrer, 2012).
What this means in practice is that if you match someone breath for breath,
your breathing rates will synchronize after a while. Matching breathing will
automatically create a greater sense of connection and is nearly impossible to
detect because, in general, nobody pays attention to their breathing rate.
However, its difficult to match someones breathing rate for an extended time
because it will limit your ability to speak. Fortunately, matching breathing rate is
not necessary for longif you gradually change your breathing after you have
gained acquiescence, the other person will continue to follow you.
An easier way to utilize breathing to your advantage is to utilize its natural
tension-and-release cycle. For example, in most modern militaries, people are
first trained to breathe in calmly. After that, they are instructed to take a deep
breath in as they aim and fire when they exhale. This way the brain learns to
associate relaxation with firing, and it is also a reason military, cults, and yoga
classes give you mental tasks after physical exercise. As you cool down, the
brain will automatically drift into a more receptive state of mind and can be
reprogrammed more easily. Of course, this works even in casual conversation.
When a person is breathing deeply, exhaling produces positive sensations of
relief as the body releases its natural tension. Whatever you say during that time
tends to go in powerfully because the brain learns to associate release with the
suggestion being said.
Smiling

When we smile, it tends to cause a positive response in the other person.

However, your smile should be genuine and used sparingly. You should also
keep it only for a few seconds, because it is simply not natural to keep it for
longer. When you try to keep a smile on all the time, it just becomes obvious you
are not being genuine and are just faking it. It should also be noted that women
rated men who werent smiling more attractive than those who were smiling.
Men, on the other hand, rated smiling women more welcoming and attractive.
Both genders also found white teeth more pleasant to look at, so you might
consider whitening your teeth (Grandey, et al., 2005; Tracy & Beall, 2011).
Smiling is also a very efficient tool for conditioning the other person.
Whenever you are smiling, it signals unconsciously that the other person has
done something correctly. Just by flashing a smile at the same time a person does
a requested action, it trains his mind to give more of that behaviour in the future.
A slight frown, on the other hand, signals dissatisfaction. This will be discussed
in more detail in the Acquiescence chapter.
Eye Contact

Eye contact will allow you to dominate a persons field of vision and make them
focus their attention onto you. It will also communicate both honesty and
confidence, and may further imply that something is expected from a person.
Therefore, being able to maintain eye contact is a tremendous benefit while
influencing someone.
However, a common mistake that many people make is not making true
eye contact but looking instead at the persons face. Focus your attention directly
into the eyes and maintain eye contact. When you do this, it is important to be
clear about what you want to communicate with your eye contact. Pure and
direct eye contact communicates dominance and can be a wonderful tool for
setting yourself in a position of higher authority. However, it can be also
perceived as hostile.
There are also times when direct eye contact is not ideal; the less positive
the context of the interaction, the more direct eye contact can make the other
person more uncomfortable and aggressive. Instead of making eye contact when
discussing something volatile, look and gesture to a third point (e.g., slides,
flipcharts, etc.). This puts distance between you and the issue, and prevents the
other person from associating the issue with you. Shifting your gaze to a third
point also gives the other person a chance to focus and think about what you are
suggesting. If you maintain eye contact all the time, you are simply preventing
the person from focusing on thinking about your suggestion. For this reason, I
have found it useful to shift my gaze to a third position for a split-second, then
return to eye contact.
As a more advanced exercise, try to look through someones left eye (right
from your position) with your left eye. Then, match the persons breathing while
continuing to look through their left eye. When done properly, this creates an
immediate sense of bonding and connectedness that can feel very hypnotic.
Why does it work? Studies have found that if people share mutual gazes
for two minutes, they experience a significant increase in their romantic
attraction. Here, we stack certain additional things in your favour. Essentially,
any time we are looking to the right or left for a period of time, one side of the
brain gets more active than the other. Looking through someones left eye
increases activity of the left hemisphere of the brain, while lowering activity of
the right side. While the right side is more emotionally expressive, it also
typically interprets the past and handles stimulus responses like fight-or-flight.
By weakening activity in the right brain side, the person is better able to interact
with you, as they feel less fear, anxiety, and hostility. By looking with your left
eye, the reaction within you is exactly the same. Then, when you match
breathing rates, both participants feel a strong sense of rapport building
associated with the other person. It should be noted that the response is often
(but not always!) reversed for left-handed people. With them, you should focus
on the right eye (Kellerman, Lewis & Laird, 1989; Kinsbourne, 1972).
This technique is very powerful and shouldnt be done with everyone you
meet, because responses gained by it can be very strong. My good friend,
working as a mentalist, often did this technique as part of his act. That was a
mistake, due to the rapport caused by the technique being so strong that some
people became obsessed with him. Doing it too early can also overwhelm the
other person and make them exit from the interaction. When done with someone
who has given permission for it, it is tremendously powerful.
Touch

Your own state is also expressed in your touch. Perhaps the best example of this
is the act of making love. In normal daily interactions, your partners touch can
feel quite ordinary. There may be no particular emotion behind it and perhaps
may even hold the sensuality of a dead fish (figuratively speaking, of course).
However, when in the right mood and having the intent to make sensual and
passionate love, you will feel a strong difference in your partners touch.
While most people dont really pay attention to it, this principle can be
also used to subtly change the context of an interaction. When a person feels the
state transmitted by the touch, it will automatically change the context for the
interaction. Even during a formal introduction, you can change someones
perception simply by changing the emotion behind your handshake. When
dating, even an innocent brush with sensual emotion can make the other person
become more aroused. When you want to communicate understanding, you
simply shift your state to warmth first, then perhaps a pat on the back.
While simple, touching can have tremendous impact on how influential
you are. Social scientists have found that even just touching the upper arm subtly
for a second or two increased the likelihood of getting money while begging by
20 percent. Similar and higher results were achieved in tipping, signing petitions,
drinking more in bars, and so on. We live in a society that very rarely allows any
kind of physical contact and most people secretly crave to have more of it. As a
matter of fact, lack of physical contact or any kind of social exclusion has been
has been proven to activate same neural pathways as physical pain does. What is
even more interesting is that the person doesnt even need to be consciously
aware of touch for the effect to trigger. This is actually something that many
sociopaths are doing to influence people (Guguen, 2007; Crusco & Wetzel,
1984; Guguen, 2002).
When you are absolutely comfortable with controlling your state, you may
start to practice using simple, exploratory touch to influence others. When
practicing, there are several rules to follow. Be quick, nondescript, and focus on
the space between the elbow and the shoulder, which is commonly considered a
safe zone between strangers in Western countries. The best time to touch
someone is during the introductory phase and the touch should be held only up
to two seconds. Do not try to touch someone if you are already in an argument or
if they have closed body language. The actual intent behind the touch should be
friendly and playful. Obviously, this is quite an advanced approach, and it can
easily turn into creepy instead of persuasive. Im not advising you to grope
people, but realize even your touch can be an effective way to influence others.
Keypoints

Slow down your gestures

Keep in mind that if you try to oppose the energy of a space or
environment, the space and environment will always win.
As a rule of thumb, your energy level should be just a notch higher
than your audience's.
Learn to control the expression behind your voice.
No matter where we are born, we have been conditioned to perceive
any statement ending in a downward inflection as a command.
Any statement that ends with an upward inflection, on the other hand,
is perceived to be a question and approachable.
Your touch can be used to communicate different emotional states and
subtly change the context of the interaction.

RAPPORT
Have you ever noticed, when interacting with a close friend, you use the same
words, match each others breath, subtly mirror each others movements, and
feel similar emotions? When you have great rapport with someone, all these
things happen automatically and naturally.
The basic idea behind various rapport-building techniques is to
manufacture this level of rapport quickly and efficiently. After all, people prefer
to work with people who are similar to them. Liking someone is the primary
reason why a person chooses to buy from one salesperson over another. If you
are able to generate rapport quickly with people, this will create a tremendous
advantage over your competitors.
Unfortunately, people typically study rapport-building tools for the
completely wrong reasons. They study them only because they are unable to
gain rapport with most people they meet. The reality of the matter is that so long
as you act like a decent human being and are genuinely interested in the other
person and their needs, you typically have all the rapport you will need. If
thats not the case, it is how you relate to the other person that is causing
problems, not lack of rapport-building tools. I spent five years of my life
observing people like this and while some of those people even had positive
intent, not even once did it pop to their mind that they actually might be acting in
an unlikeable manner. They were always putting people down, belittling them,
and believing it was necessary to manipulate people to get what you want.
Instead of doing careful introspection and developing as human beings, these
people just keep making the same mistakes again and again and avoiding facing
the real problem.
All this being said, rapport-building tools have their time and place. In this
chapter, you will learn certain simple approaches and techniques for gaining
rapport with others. This approach is probably a little different from what you
have learnt previously, because the idea behind these techniques is not to trick
the person into liking you. Instead, you gain rapport by having and
demonstrating genuine social awareness and flexibility regarding other people.
These techniques are also reliant only on your ability to control your state and
they are so subtle that the other person isnt even aware of what is happening.
But before you begin learning these skills, it is important to answer one key
question that eludes many influence experts.
What is Rapport?

Rapport is a feeling of sameness that exists between two people or the desire for
it to exist. On its most basic level, it is about being something that the other
person needs. Building rapport is about creating a trusting and emotional
connection between two people. It is that warm feeling you feel in your body
when you connect with someone, that for most people starts at the spine and then
warmly spreads into the whole body. When this happens, you will also begin to
instinctively start to feel empathy towards the other person. You feel what he is
feeling and on a certain level, become more like him.
Rapport can also exist if there is only the desire for it to exist. Recent
studies have found that those who are more extroverted, friendly, and curious
about others are far more likely start to verbally mimic the others than
introverted people. Other studies, on the other hand, have found that if both
parties just simply pretended to be in love with each other, they actually start to
like each other more. When people had just the intent to affiliate with others,
unconscious mimicry increased. Even just dressing similarly to your audience
has been found to increase likeability and compliance. All this happens because
there is a desire or hope that the other party would be similar to you (Kurzius,
2015; Chartrand, Maddux & Lakin, 2012; Suedfield, Bochner & Matas, 1971).
Without rapport, you wont get what you want from other people, as they
wont allow you to influence them without it. Everything begins with rapport.
However, at the same time, it is also too overvalued. Rapport alone doesnt do
anything, and it is quite common that beginners focus all their attention on
building rapport. Because they feel good building rapport, they think they are
getting somewhere. When the conversation comes to an end, they will then
notice that they didnt actually reach any of their outcomes. They will tell you
they got great rapport, but the ability to influence others is not measured by
rapport, but by actual results.
Make no mistake: rapport is vital for any process of influence that doesnt
rely on violence and threats. However, rapport works only as a springboard from
which everything else will be sprung. It is also worth stressing that a person
doesnt need to trust you fully, only enough to be open to the possibility of
suggestion. This means that you automatically have some kind of rapport with
most people you meet. In these cases, only a minimal amount of rapport-building
is required to build acquiescence.
 The Feeling of Sameness
Rapport is a feeling of sameness between two people, nothing more and
nothing less. It is quite common that many people associate rapport with being
comfortable with someone else. While rapport can feel quite pleasant at times,
having rapport doesnt require that the other person is feeling comfortable at
all. A person can feel very anxious about what you are saying and still have
profound rapport with you. Someone can be shouting at you and still have
excellent rapport with you. Someone can even be preparing to kick your ass in a
martial arts competition and still have excellent rapport with you.
This distinction is important to understand, as so many people avoid
having any kind of confrontation with others. They go along sugar-coating
messages and are careful not to do anything that would make the other person
uncomfortable. This is a mistake. Quite often, you need to talk about the less
pleasant aspects to find out the core of a given issue. Sometimes, a person needs
a rude awakening. Sometimes, you need to give a person something from which
to run away. You cant do any of this if you are unwilling to confront someone
and make them uncomfortable. It should be understood that Im not endorsing
making up problems. There is only so much pressure that one person can take,
and one should avoid creating and incorporating artificial problems. With the
strategies you learn in this book, it is simply not needed.

Getting Lost in Rapport

It is remarkably easy to get lost in rapport. When you have profound, strong
rapport with someone, your feelings, thoughts and experiences begin to mix
together. You arent just like that person; on some level, you feel like you are
literally that person. While this strong sense of connection will make the other
person more helpful, friendly, and receptive, it has many negative side effects.
Research has shown that in-group members have the tendency to project their
own qualities (e.g., honesty) and traits to other group members, have a harder
time identifying how the other people differ from themselves, and experience
difficulty even remembering which traits are theirs and which are of fellow
group members. This blurring of self and the other person seems to be caused by
the fact that both representations are located in the same area of the brain
(DiDonato, Ulrich & Krueger, 2011; Mashek, Aron & Boncimino, 2003; Otten
& Epstude, 2006; Mitchell, Banaji & Macrae, 2005; Volz, Kessler & von
Cramon, 2009).
When it seems you are the best buddies in the worldwhen your rapport
is this deepmaintaining clear focus and succeeding in your outcome with such
a person can be challenging. It also makes you more open to the other persons
suggestions. For example, you ask a person to buy your service, they tell you a
sob story about how they cant afford it, and because you have profound rapport
with this person, you feel his emotions and buy into his story. As an example,
this has been found to be true especially in police interrogations. The more the
interrogator unconsciously mimicked the person being interrogated, the more
susceptible the interrogator became to any kind of deception. When the person
being interrogated, on the other hand, started to increasingly match the
interrogators language, likelihood of confession increased (Stel, Dijik & Olivier,
2009; Richardson, et al., 2014).
In my definition used for rapport, I also emphasized how it can exist if
there is desire for it to exist. Simply put, if both people want to have rapport, it
builds evenly. However, this can be extremely deceiving, because it may be only
you who desires it to exist. If this happens, you will open up to the other persons
suggestion, but you wont have similar influence over him. Of course, if you
presuppose the existence of rapport and trust people blindly, it typically
guarantees at least some level of rapport to exist. The downside is that you are
opening yourself to manipulation at the same time.
Strong rapport can also completely cloud your judgement. For instance,
if the person with whom you are working is angry, you could easily absorb that
state and offer him advice while being angry yourself. If they are afraid of
something, you might begin to panic too. When we have strong rapport with
someone, we have also the natural tendency to project onto the other person
different qualities that we wish he or she would have. You simply start to believe
that they match the idealized version that is inside your mind. This kind of
projection happens all the time during romantic matters, but you might even fall
in love with someone because of their state. Sounds unlikely? It actually happens
more often than you might believe. The only frame of reference that many
people have for very strong rapport is being in a committed relationship. When
you are able to achieve a connection this deep, these people instinctively fall in
love with you and you follow along to maintain the level of rapport. Because of
this effect, more than a few therapists have fallen in love with their clients, with
terrible consequences.
 Rapport Doesnt Equal Familiarity
It is important to note, rapport and familiarity are two different things. Rapport is
a feeling of sameness we have with another person, while familiarity indicates
the length and quality of a relationship. As a relationship develops, you progress
from being a stranger to an acquaintance to a friend until you are perceived to
be a close friend.
Understanding this difference is very important. People make decisions
based on their internal decision-making processes, and familiarity often plays an
important part in that process. You might have great rapport with a person, have
him in an acquiescent state of mind, but he still might reject your offering
because you two have known each other for only a short time.
In a professional context, less familiarity is typically needed because
generally the other person has come to see you to solve their problem. As long as
you are perceived to be the solution to that problem, most people dont care how
long they have known you. You need only to demonstrate understanding of the
person and their problem and reveal your solution. When a person perceives you
are able to offer help, they become very willing to follow your lead even without
deeper familiarity. Based on your professional reputation, the person might have
such an overwhelmingly strong belief in your ability that there is little need to
build any rapport at all. When this happens, you can lead immediately.
In a casual contextlike dating or making new friendshipsfamiliarity
becomes far more important. Under these circumstances, many people arent
very open to influence by another until they have known that person for some
time. This is why you should move away from the mentality that you can or
should always reach your outcome in a single interaction. Building familiarity
requires both patience and long-term thinking.
However, in a professional context you actually want to avoid building too
much familiarity. Why? The problem with having too much familiarity in this
context is that people begin to expect much more from you. If a business
relationship has turned into a friendship, the person may expect favours like
discounts. If a casual business acquaintance begins to perceive you as close
friend, they may tell you things with which you might not be comfortable. You
want to have rapport, but still stay within professional boundaries. While it is
possible to weaken a connection between two people, it can easily result in
burned bridges.
While familiarity is less important in a professional context, there are
people who still need it to satisfy their own internal decision-making process.
You might be perceived as a solution for a given problem, but until their needs
for familiarity have been satisfied, some people arent comfortable moving
forward. Also, keep in mind that there are other people who arent comfortable
having deep connections with anyone at all. When you attempt to move for a
deeper connection, these people just shut down completely. When a person shuts
down like this, it is usually caused by some emotional baggage that prevents
them from being more open: perhaps the person has been hurt in the past,
perhaps they dont feel as if they deserve a deeper connection. No matter what
the reason is, these people will literally shut you out as a response. You may
have done a remarkable job and still not achieve deeper connection. In these
cases, it is not about you but the other person.

Rapport Increases Social Mimicry

When two people have strong rapport with each other, they start to synchronize
with each other. They start to mimic other persons movement, gestures, and
even breathe at the same pace. All this happens without conscious awareness in
an effortless, smooth, and synchronous dance. This is why in typical
communication training, you are told to consciously change your physiology:
mimic someones movements and match pace with their breathing. This is called
mirroring and matching. For quite a long time, these techniques were considered
pseudoscience with no measurable effect. Since the early 2000s, there have been
various studies proving that these techniques actually do have a clear effect on
how people respond to you (van Baaren, Janssen, Chartrand & Dijksterhuis,
2009).
For example, in one experiment, people were asked to react to a series of
advertisements as part of an ongoing marketing study. During the task, the
experimenter mimicked posture for half of the participants. After leaving the
room to retrieve materials for the next part of the study, the experimenter
returned and, upon passing a participant, accidentally dropped six pens that
were on top of several papers. Those who had been mimicked were significantly
more likely to help at picking up the pens. This was found to be true even if the
experimenter himself left the room and his colleague was picking up the pens. In
yet another experiment, mimicked participants gave far bigger donations to
CliniClowns, an organization that visited and entertained hospitalized children
(van Baaren, Holland, Kawakami & van Knippenberg, 2004).
 However, the big problem is that even though effectiveness of social
mimicry has been proven, these techniques are simply not practical for the most
part. They sound good, but their real-life applications are limited. This is simply
because doing physical mirroring requires you to divide your attention between
your own body and the person you are interacting with. This alone limits your
ability to pay attention to the other person. Furthermore, it just happens to be
very hard to control your own physiology with everything going around you.
Finally, studies have found that any kind of social mimicry, regardless of the
amount, causes a person to feel uneasy if it is not considered appropriate in a
given context. Therefore, if the other person catches what you are doing, it will
cause the rapport you have been carefully building to break (Leander, Chartrand
& Bargh, 2012).
The primary reason why Im even talking about these techniques is so that
you could have a physical frame of reference for rapport and understand rapport
can be manufactured. Sure, if you spent a considerable amount of time practicing
mirroring and matching, you might get it to work, but why do that when there
are easier and more effective methods available?
Science of First Impressions

As a good rule of thumb, you have four seconds to make a good first impression
on your audience and start to gain rapport. To do this, the first thing to
understand is that when you meet someone for the first time, a persons brain is
immediately racing to categorize you into a pattern that it is already familiar
with. After the mind has reached a conclusion about a person being a specific
type, the mind goes into autopilot. It perceives the person through a perceptual
position related to that type, and begins to rely on automatic responses when
responding and interacting with that person. It will also try to predict your future
behaviour based on their categorization of you. This is known as the halo-
effect in social psychology; the overall impression of a person influences the
observers feelings and thoughts about that entitys character. This is
problematic, especially because it is self-reinforcing. If we like someone, we are
more likely to perceive more positive qualities in this person regardless of their
validity. The opposite is also true. (Willis & Todorov, 2006; Kahneman, 2011).
For example, lets suppose you are at a job interview. If your interviewer
puts you into a negative category, he will try to predict your future behaviour
from that position, further reinforcing the categorization already happening.
More than a few interviews have gone terribly wrong because a person
accidentally said or did something that moved them into a poor position. This is
also true in sales. Upon hearing you are selling something, most people will
categorize you as a salesperson, because that is what salespeople do based on
their previous knowledge. Upon an aggressive push for your product, you will be
categorized as a pushy or desperate salesperson. As your pitch continues, your
behaviour reinforces the hole into which you have been pegged. After a while,
the person begins to use automatic responses. These responses in turn reinforce
the categorization. Game over.

Being Categorized
While most people arent aware of this categorization process, it happens all the
time. It is a survival mechanism that gives us certainty and saves time. The
problem is that the longer you have been categorized into a specific, familiar
pattern, the harder it will be to change that perception. For example, in one
study, participants formed their opinion on someones trustworthiness only after
100 milliseconds. That opinion rarely changed when new information was
presented. The mind is heavily reliant on automatic responses, and any time a
person is responding to you, it will reinforce the category you are put into.
Furthermore, the brain tries to rationalize all your behaviour to match the filter
into which you have been categorized. Because of this, a person will rarely come
to a sudden epiphany about having categorized you wrongly. It might happen,
but very rarely (Willis & Todorov, 2006; Kahneman, 2011).
Naturally, there is a way to change the category you have been placed into.
You just need to violate its rules so many times that the person is forced to re-
categorize you. However, this is generally a painful process, as people dont like
it when you begin behaving in unexpected ways. It can piss people off, because
they need to get out of their head and actually think about what is going on!
Therefore, it is far better to be categorized into a beneficial category right off the
bat. To avoid being categorized into a negative category, you need firstly to
accept that categorization is happening all the time. Too many people dont want
to accept our tendency to categorize people and fight against it. This is
impossible because our brains are hardwired to do this, and the sooner you
accept it the better.

Pay Attention to How You Show Up

Most people dont even consciously realize what in their behaviour causes the
categorization, but it is vital that you begin paying attention to how you show up
in each interaction. People are constantly seeking validation for their choices
from your actions, and begin to categorize you immediately after spotting two or
three patterns. Figure out what are the most common categories that people in
your profession fall within and what are the behaviours contributing to the
categorization. Also find out what is the most common category that you
personally habitually fall into.
After you have a clear idea of what behaviour causes the categorization,
choose one that works best for you. Think what behaviour you need to exhibit or
suppress in order to fit that position, and what emotional state and position is
needed. Then, exhibit these things in the actual interaction. Now, categorization
will work to your benefit because once you have been categorized positively by
someone, it tends to reinforce itself. Make note that just having a warm and
genuine personality is often enough to be categorized positively, as too many
people pretend to be something that they are not. You also become far more
memorable because you are, from a perceptual standpoint, a unique person.

Creating a New Category

As you gain someones attention, you can also attempt to create a completely
new category all for yourself. The brain is on the constant outlook for novelty
and if something doesnt exactly match already familiar patterns, the brain will
create a new one. In practice, if you start an interaction with something that is
unexpected in a given context, the mind is forced to create a new category
specifically for you. Its not necessary to be clever, funny, or even smart for this
happen. You just need to do something that is not expected in a given context.
Even the most mundane effects and remarks are enough. These actually work
better because they prevent you from being categorized as a clown, creep, or
crazy person.
What are the benefits of doing this? As the category is brand new, the
mind hasnt yet developed familiar patterns of response either. Therefore, there
are also no set rules for what kinds of relationships are possible within it. For
example, lets suppose you are dating and you directly show sexual interest
toward a person. If the person doesnt know anything else about you other than
how you look and carry yourself, their brain will begin to categorize you based
on their personal preferences. If you dont match their type, you are
immediately categorized into a person with whom the person would not consider
having a romantic or sexual relationship (which is silly, because how can one
know what that type of relationship would feel like, having never previously
experienced it?). Of course, it is possible to recover from this, but it can be pretty
hard.
However, if you manage to build a new category for yourself, the persons
mind hasnt yet defined what kind of relationship may be possible within this
new category. In this way you can overcome assumptions based on race, height,
looks, even age. As long as you remain a little different from others, you
entrench yourself deeper into your own category. Obviously, this doesnt give
you freedom to do what the heck you want. Having your own category just
allows you to escape first impressions and general preferences. If you act
stupidly in your own category, these actions start to eliminate you from specific
types of relationships. Not because of your physical appearance, race, height, or
weight, but because of behaviour you have presented to them. Ironically, anyone
who reminds them about you is now going to be automatically disqualified too
because they fell into a category that was built for you.
Building Rapport with State Management

After all this groundwork, we can start to take look at how you can actually build
rapport. In general, the two most effective ways to build rapport are changing
your state and verbally demonstrating understanding. In the chapter on State
Control, you were introduced to how to shift your own state. These strategies
work in the same way. Simply imagine having a specific emotional state and
shift into it.

Maintaining Comfort
In addition to building rapport, you also want to build comfort with a person.
While having rapport doesnt require comfort, there are several reasons why you
would want to shift your own state to be warm and comforting. First of all, it
non-verbally communicates stability and security to your listener. When you feel
comfortable with yourself, a person will instinctively feel that they are safe and
open up to you. Additionally, when people face uncertainty, they will
instinctively look to other people for guidance on how to act. Because you are
calm and relaxed, it communicates that everything is all right and there is no
need for worry. When someone is in a comfortable state of mind, it becomes
much easier to lead them.
Secondly, as rapport develops, the person will instinctively shift toward
your state. Maintaining slight warmth communicates that you two are at least
acquaintances. In my personal experience, for most people, the easiest way to
manipulate their personal warmth is to just imagine you have a window in your
chest that exposes your heart. When you want to increase your personal warmth,
you just imagine the window being more open. This metaphor will help
communicate to your mind what you want to happen. However, if this particular
approach doesnt work for you, you can always just change your state into
something that signifies a deeper connection. For example:

A stranger (detached)
An acquaintance (comfort)
A friend (connection)
A close friend (intimacy)

 States like comfort, connection, and even intimacy work well for
deepening connection so long as you act congruently, and once again, notice the
labelling. Nobody can really explain what comfort, connection or even
intimacy means, but the mind doesnt need an explanation in order to access
the state. When using a descriptive label like this, the mind will immediately
understand what you are aiming at and create the requested emotion. You can
use this strategy even with a minimal amount of rapport so long as the state you
shift into isnt too intense. However, keep in mind that having too much warmth
immediately can backfire because it will indicate friendship even where there is
not one.

Choosing the Right Position for Interaction

The following strategy is credited to Tom Vizzini, who has seen it being taught
by other people countless times without even mentioning him at all. When you
learn to use this effective strategy, you are able to gain rapport with practically
anyone you can meet in the matter of a few seconds.
In every interaction, each of us falls into a specific position of power:
dominant, equal to the person with whom we are interacting, or student. While it
might appear obvious that you would want to hold a dominant position among
the people with whom you are interacting, this is not really the casethe
position that gives the most influence over a person or group is the one you want
to have.
For example, many people arent comfortable holding a subordinate
position. When one of two people shift into a dominant position, the rapport
between them commences to deteriorate because the person holding the
subordinate position feels put down or suppressed. Before there is any confusion
about use of the word dominant, it simply means that you are assigning tasks
and leading other person. It doesnt mean putting the other person down or
anything like that, but taking charge of the situation. Even just suggesting that
you two should go for a drink can be considered a dominant action in the context
of this book. Alternatively, you just stage a different option to choose from. For
instance, while in a restaurant, you could say that you really like this specific
meal and suggest they try it too. By giving a person options, you are leading the
interaction, but disarming his resistance for being led because you are still
offering him freedom of choice. Nonetheless, taking the dominant position is
actually very rarely required if you have done your job well, even though some
people do respond very well to a benevolent dictator.
Far more common is to take an equal position with the people with whom
you are interacting. When you are equal to another, both are able to participate
equally and interactions tend to be more free-flowing. But depending on the
person, this can also lead into a situation where the interaction is just running in
place because nobody is setting a direction. In any case, a position of equality
among others is typically a good starting point for most interactions.
The student position, on the other hand, is often undervalued but is actually
a great position in which to be. The emphasis here is on the word student
because the student position doesnt equal being submissive or needy. It simply
equates to being curious and wanting to learn more about a person. It can be
about showing a little bit of vulnerability. Most people facing a curious student
will give them all the information they could ever want and try to help them
further in order to show what good teachers they are. The person helping you
even typically spells out everything you need to do to influence him and this also
works well in a professional context.
Being a student also allows you to take the position of supportive leader.
When you are a supportive leader, you superficially support the leader and
consult with him, while pretty much calling all the shots. This position is
primarily reserved for overbearing people who need to perceive themselves to be
in control all the time. Perhaps they are accustomed to that role, or perhaps they
are so afraid of losing control that they need to feel they are always in control.
No matter what the reason is, in these situations, being a student can be the best
thing you can be to get that person to do what you want.
Setting a supportive leader position becomes easy when you realize that
people who have the need for absolute control over their current environment are
weak. As long as they just perceive themselves as being in the control, it is
enough.

Changing Your Own Position

Learning how to change your own position of power is one of the most essential
skills you need to master to build rapport rapidly. You need to be able to do this
without uttering a single world to the person with whom you are interacting.
The first step in this process is knowing what your own preferred position
is. People tend to fall instinctively into the position with which they are most
comfortable, and one of the most common mistakes is to shift into a specific
position and then return back to the one you use most. You need to learn to adapt
to the current situation and become consciously aware of what your preferred
position is. Just watch other people and figure out what your position would be
in relation to them.
After you know and understand your preferred position, pay attention to
the other person and their responses. Carefully consider which position would
give you the most influence over them and shift into that position. The easiest
way to do this is to imagine people through different lenses:

Student: child or curious student
Equal: friend or trusted advisor
Dominant: teacher or father

This will unconsciously shift your emotional state and communicate a
different vibe to the person with whom you are interacting. As you do this, pay
attention to any changes in their response. You should notice rather quickly a
difference in response, and if you feel as if rapport is deteriorating, change your
position again until you find the right one. After doing this for a while, you will
also quickly notice how you can adjust your position only slightly to
accommodate the other person. For instance, instead of going fully dominant,
you are just slightly dominant, like a yoga teacher. Instead of being an equal
friend, you are a respectful advisor. Instead of being a student, you are just a
curious colleague. By learning to manipulate your vibe, you can gain rapport,
and sometimes even acquiescence, with pretty much anyone you meet in the
matter of a few seconds.
When experimenting with position of powers, take positions that are the
opposite of what you assume to be the ideal. Doing this will help you quickly
discover how a wrong assumption feels and will help you get better at choosing
the right position.
Tracking Your Progress

With all the tools and strategies learnt in this chapter, rapport building becomes
very easy. However, have you ever gotten into those awkward situations when
you meet a stranger and after just five minutes, the person begins to unravel their
whole life story? As they continue with their story, they begin to ask intimate
and inappropriate questions, inadvertently creeping you out. This happens
because the person either assumed he has more rapport with you than he really
does or the feeling of familiarity is lacking. As it is so easy to get lost in rapport,
you need to learn read others and calibrate to their responses.
Perhaps the biggest reason why people fail at reading people is that they
over-think it. They give meaning to every tiny movement that the other person
makes and try to second-guess the meaning of every change. Look at the obvious
first. When it comes to reading people, the most obvious answer is typically the
right one. Many people also make the mistake in assuming that the other person
should immediately be warm and open to them. If this doesnt happen, they start
to wonder if it is about something they said or did. In reality, if someone is
somewhat timid, distant, or lukewarm when you first meet him, it is very likely
that is how he responds to everyone in the beginning. It is nothing to stress
about.
What you need to do, however, is establish a baseline for the interaction.
Notice how the person is when you first meet him and pay attention to any shifts
from this. Not to individual gestures or movements, but how the whole person
shifts. Is he becoming more relaxed? Does he have more open body language? Is
the person leaning forward? Does he have a genuine smile? Is the person
focusing on you even though they might be also looking around a little bit? Any
one of the shifts indicates an increase in rapport and openness, while opposites
indicate the connection weakening.
On a conversational level, the easiest way to test rapport is to ask questions
that require the other persons involvement beyond automatic responses. So long
as the person answers, you have at least some kind of rapport going on. When
they begin to talk, just keep quiet and listen while paying attention to the actual
quality of their responses. If the person is telling or giving you more than you
ask or is expanding the conversation, things are going very well. Any topic that
creates a positive shift in the other party is potentially a useful direction to go
in.
 One specific area you need to pay attention to is how the person responds
to provided information. When you start to talk about yourself and divulge
personal information, notice how the person responds. If there is a negative shift,
dont push harder. Instead, work back to the last topic with which the person was
comfortable. If you introduce a new topic and the other person immediately
returns back to his own topic, you need to fit your information to their topic.
Otherwise there is bound to be a negative shift. You should always keep in mind
that everyone is comfortable with a certain level of rapport while interacting, and
your job is to find the level that the other person finds currently acceptable, even
if it means following them.
Keypoints

It is remarkably easy to get lost in rapport because as rapport

develops, you begin to slip into the other persons thoughts and
emotions.
Rapport and familiarity arent the same things, and a common
mistake that people make is assuming you have more familiarity with
a person than you really do.
In a business context, you need less familiarity because the customer
has come to you of their own accord for the solution to their problem.
A calming and comforting presence communicates to a person that
they are in good hands.
Your position in an interaction can be dominant, equal, or student.
The biggest reason why people fail at reading people is that they
over-think it.
Pay attention to how a person responds to the provided information.

APPLICATION: MEETING PEOPLE
Now that you have some kind of understanding about rapport, it is time to
discuss meeting people under professional and casual contexts. First we will take
a look at several things you need to take into consideration when you meet
people in a business interaction, then in a more casual context.
Professional Context

We are now going to take a look at several things you need to take into
consideration when you meet people in a professional context. This information
is primarily geared towards consultants who work with private clients, but with
minor adjustments it is applicable to other purposes too.

Choosing the Right People to Work With

One of the keys to successful business is to choose the right people to work with,
and to do this you need to learn how to qualify your customers. If you havent
done qualifying before, you might feel like you are shooting yourself in the foot
when you reject potential customers; but, you will be surprised to discover how
much it will actually help you. First of all, it sets the right context for the
relationship right from the beginning. When you are interviewing and qualifying
prospects, it sends them a clear message that you are an authority and your time
is valuable. This is even truer if you make the prospect wait. For example:

Please wait for Mr. Holmqvist to become available.

Even a simple statement like this has powerful implications. If you are
waiting for a person to become available, it implies he has something you want.
That he can make you wait implies he is an authority who has the right to do so.
When you operate from this perception, the customer is far more responsive to
your messages.
Qualifying others will also help you to weed out any potential energy and
time sinks right from the beginning. But to be able to qualify someone
successfully, it is important to know what you want. Ask yourself these four
questions:

1. For what urgent problem can you offer solutions?
2. What outcomes can you offer potential customers?
3. With what kind of customers do you work best?
4. What are the biggest turn-offs for you?

Answering these four questions will help you define your own role and
with whom you do your best work. When you are working with people that work
best for you, your business will soar because there are far less customer
relationships that will drag you down. Of course, you might be still in a
situation where you dont yet know what you actually want to have. Even then,
you should have a very good idea of what you dont want to have.

Interviewing the Prospect

As you start to qualify a potential prospect, always ask permission to ask
questions, and keep it short and sweet. Just few quick questions to find out the
following:

1. What would they like to accomplish with your help?
2. What is their current product or service not doing for them?
3. How would having that compare to their current product or service?
4. What is currently their biggest headache?
5. What ultimately is their desired outcome?

Just listen to their answers and do not try to narrate them. The potential
prospect has qualified himself for you when you feel like they are a good match
for you, and that they can afford your services. If the prospect cant match both
criteria, just honestly inform the prospect that you dont feel like you are the
right person for them.
During the interview, you want to stay aware of certain pitfalls like people
who are motivated to fail. These people havent come to see you to get what
they want or be successful, but just to have yet another excuse for their own
failures. You dont want to work with these people under any circumstances. You
also want to verify that it was the customers idea to come to see you. For
example, if you work as a weight loss coach, some of your customers have come
to you because of pressure from a spouse or doctor. No matter what you are
doing, it seems there is no progress. The reason is that motivation to change just
isnt there. Sure, if you happen to be skilled enough with these tools, it is
possible to sell to unmotivated people, but you cant rely only on their personal
motivators to make the sale. If a person doesnt have any genuine motivation,
getting a long-term commitment from them will be difficult. And even if you
were able to force the sale through without motivation from the customer, this
raises ethical concerns about selling people things they dont need or want.
 Instead of wasting precious time, learn to weed out unmotivated people
right from the beginning. The good news is because so many of the techniques
you learn in this book rely on eliciting unconscious responses, you can
determine rather quickly if there is real motivation behind your customers
words. If someone cant find appropriate answers to your questions, it is pretty
clear that there isnt any motivation there or even worse, that person has no idea
what they want.

Manage Expectations by Giving an Overview

In a sales setting, people arrive with preconceived expectations about you and
the product you are selling. Most of the time, these expectations are a direct
result of common myths and second-hand information pertaining to your
profession or product. Depending on your profession and the product in
question, this can be a hindrance. Lets assume that you sell used cars. What are
the common beliefs that people have about used car salesmen? They are not
trustworthy. They are clever. They want to cheat every nickel and dime from
you.
Is this a good starting position for you? Obviously not! If you are working
in a profession where this is a real issue, one of your first tasks is to set the
context and comparison to your own standards, not to the expectation of the
other. This happens by offering an overview before beginning the sales pitch. In
the overview, you are simply telling how you personally do business and giving
the person an experience of what working with you feels like. In addition to
helping build rapport and get the ball rolling, the overview makes the person
compare your behaviour against your words, not the expectations set by others.
There are also two other, less obvious benefits to doing an overview. When you
are doing an overview properly, it sets you in the position of authority, which is a
significant advantage in the influence process. Giving an overview also focuses
your customers attention on what they want.

Empower Your Customers

As you build rapport in a professional context, keep in mind that people dont
enter interactions viewing the other person as a blank slate. People bring all their
emotional baggage, disappointments, and expectations into any interaction they
enter. While in rare instances this can work to your advantage, typically it just
gets in the way. Especially in turbulent times, customers tend to be cynical or
sceptical about promises. Many of them are frustrated, confused, and
disbelieving in others as well as themselves. They believe there arent enough
resources aroundnot enough love, not enough opportunitiesand for someone
to win, someone else has to lose. More than a few of your customers presently
live in a mindset where scarcity and desperation are the word-of-the-day. There
are a thousand different thoughts pressing on their mind and this pressure can
even create outright feeling of helplessness.
Essentially, coupled with scepticism about any proposal, many people are
not even in the right in state of mind to make any kind of decisions. While this is
not your fault, you need to acknowledge the existence of their concerns in order
to best deal with them. Quite often, the only thing you need to address this
problem is to ask a customer about the last time they bought something that
really suited their needs. Talking about success tends to shift the customers state
and create a buying state. For example, lets suppose you are selling a house:

When was the last time you bought a house that really suited your
personal needs?

Just answering this question will help a person move to a more empowered
state of mind about buying a house. Of course, if a person doesnt have any
previous success stories to build upon, you can opt to tell them stories. In these
stories, a character begins from a resource-poor state and at the end achieves a
resource-rich state. As long as the stories are meaningful to the person with
whom you are speaking, that person will identify with those stories and change
their own state. If this fails and they have no experiences from which to build,
you can always elicit feelings of success or desirability.

Do you know what it feels like to be successful / desirable?

When the person thinks upon this question, they will think about a time
when they were successful and their state will automatically change. Now, they
are far more capable of making decisions.

Calling In
Sometimes, you might want to prospect simply by calling into companies. Right
from the beginning, I want to emphasize that I dont really believe in selling
through the phone, only as a way to get appointments. While it is possible to sell
on a phone, it should be your last resort because there is almost always a better
way to get sales. Furthermore, if you are calling in completely cold, the context
is greatly against you. You are technically invading the other persons turf,
trying to sell them stuff that they arent really thinking about at the moment.
Because of this, you want to use everything in your arsenal to reduce the amount
of resistance the potential prospect might have. Even with these strategies, you
often need to call several places before you can get an appointment. When you
first call, immediately ask if the person has time to talk with you.

Hello, my name is Teppo Holmqvist and Im with Real World Influence. I
would like to ask you a few questions. Would you have a minute to spare?

In addition to disarming resistance, this typically makes the person say yes
even if he would be a little busy at the moment. If the person claims to be busy,
you just politely say that you wont bother them any further and ask for when it
would be a good time to call back. Typically, in addition to getting a better time
to call, the person you called often even apologizes to you when you call back,
putting them into a reciprocating mood.
Even more than usual, honesty is your best policy when you want to call
in. For instance, many salespeople simply immediately claim that they know the
listener will like their proposal. Do not do this. What you want to do instead is to
create a context where you are exploring the possibility of this being true. The
best way to do this is to acknowledge the fact that you dont know enough about
prospects business or his life to know if your proposal works for him. Then tell
that you would want to know a little bit about his background. For instance:

Thank you, Mr. Richardson. We have developed a new sales training that
we believe will help customers to save both time and money. However, we
dont know if this training will be beneficial to your company. Would it be
possible for me to come there for a quick review of your current situation?
That way, if we have anything that can improve your bottom line, we can
offer it to you.

When you do this, you are disarming resistance by acknowledging that you
have no idea if your service would work for the company. What happens quite
often is that the potential prospect will arrange the meeting and fill you in on
their current situation immediately. This will help you greatly when you get into
an actual meeting. However, what do you do if you call a person who is already
in a foul state of mind because everyone has been calling him? You just
acknowledge it, apologize, and ask politely if they would have time to answer
few questions. If they dont have time for that, you just leave them alone. For
instance:

This is the third call already? Oh dear, it must have been a busy day and
I apologize for taking your time. I would just ask you a couple of
questions, and if you dont find this interesting, I will end this call
immediately.

In addition to disarming resistance, you are also shifting the context to
cooperation. You are showing the person respect, and acknowledge that both
parties have busy lives to be led. This also works great with secretaries. Many
salespeople dread secretaries, for obvious reasons. One of their most important
jobs is to make sure that every salesman doesnt take precious time from the
boss. The best approach with secretaries is just to be direct. You just
acknowledge their resistance and tell them why you are calling. For instance:

Hi, Im Teppo Holmqvist from Real World Influence. We have some ideas
for increasing the effectiveness of Mr. Johnsons employees. Is this a good
time to talk with him?

If the person you want to reach isnt available, you just enlist the secretary
to help you by asking if he could answer several questions. When you go
through your list, what typically happens is that there is a question that the
secretary feels would be better answered by his boss. At that point, it will
become very easy to get that appointment. If everything else fails, call early in
the morningbecause surprisingly often, the secretary isnt there.

Overcome the Tendency to Linger

When it comes to sales, there is one particular hurdle that most salespeople need
to overcome, and that is the tendency to linger. Neurologically speaking, it has
been found that people tend to remember only the peak and last part of the
experience. Even more so, the last part of an experience tends to colour and
strongly influence your overall memory or sense of it. For example, in a study
made in 2000, subjects were first played 8 seconds of noise at 77 decibels. Then,
the same noise followed for 16 seconds at 66 decibels (still very unpleasant for
the listener). When participants were asked to choose which one they would
choose to listen to again, the longer noise was preferred most of the time. This
preference even persisted after a series of five tests (Kahneman 2011; Schreiber
& Kahneman, 2000).
This means you could be giving the best sales presentation ever, but if the
interaction ends with a negative emotional state, your audience will perceive the
whole event through that state. Most salesmen have been trained to stay around
as long as there is even the slightest chance of getting a sale, but this
unfortunately makes you remembered as a person who lingers. You should learn
to be comfortable about leaving when your job is done. People are busy anyway,
so why waste their precious time more than you have to?
Casual Context

Now it is time to move on to how to meet people in a more casual context. You
will first learn where to meet people, how to get someones attention, and finally
how to build more familiarity when time is limited.

Where Should I Meet People?

When you want to form new relationships, your first step should be finding a
place that is conducive to meeting new people. Any time you engage in an
interaction with a new person, your surroundings play a major part in how open
the person is going to be. For instance, when approaching someone in a busy
club, you may often get ignored because you are assumed to be trying to make a
move on the other person. When approaching someone in the street, you could
be easily assumed as a crazy attention-seeker. But on the other hand, if you meet
a person in a chill coffee house or a relaxed party, they may be far more likely to
have a chat with you.
Most readers are probably going to wonder why Im talking about such
obvious things, but there is a reason for it. For example, many single men have
been taught that they should try to approach women anywhere they go, no matter
what the circumstances are. They then approach every possible prospect in the
clubs and on the streets, slamming their heads against the proverbial brick wall
while wondering why women are so unreceptive. While someone might get a
date after countless attempts, they assume they got the date because of their
aggressive method of approaching everyone who has a pulse. Even a broken
clock is right twice a day and for the most part these people are just
demonstrating a lack of social intelligence.
Naturally, it is possible to get an interaction going in any setting, but you
first need to become comfortable doing so under normal circumstances. Learn
the basic skills for building rapport and practice them. As a beginner, learn to
calibrate and focus your attention first on people who seem to be receptive to
interaction.

Starting the Interaction

The best way to get someones attention is to do something that goes beyond the
normal routine that captures their attention. You could, for instance, offer a
comment that offers insight about that person and also builds upon their value.
This insight doesnt need to be much; it can be anything from an observance
about their clothing to how the person carries themselves. If the insight is felt as
sincere, the person will usually reciprocate. Jokes can work too, but if you do
that you should do your very best to rapidly move away from that position.
Otherwise, there is a very high risk that the person with whom you are
interacting will perceive you as an entertainer and not someone who should be
taken seriously. You can also make observations about the person or surrounding
environment. If the person is busy, tired, etc., just acknowledging that fact
usually elicits a response.
After gaining the persons attention, probably the best topic to talk about is
any kind of commonalities. You are just talking about something that both of you
hold in common: perhaps you are waiting in line, perhaps you are members of
the same organization, perhaps you just noticed that both of you are tired.
Anything related to relaxation, vacations, or personal enjoyment works well, as
does a persons future plans. In the beginning of an interaction, you probably
want to only talk about the persons short-term plans, but long-term plans are a
good way to find out how you can help him. Discussing future plans is also a
remarkably good opportunity for demonstrating your understanding. Finally, you
can also ask advice on something. People love sharing experiences and being put
into the position of helper.
However, how can you get into groups in places like clubs or parties? The
good news, is that while groups may look tightly knit and closed, they very
rarely are. If you see a group in the party, it is very likely these people are
hanging in a group just because they found something in common. Pay attention
to what those commonalities might be, use them to open the group, and focus
your first attention on the person who seems to be most open and talkative.
Slowly get involved with the group at the rate of speed they are comfortable with
and use false time constraint if required.
False time constraint simply means telling the other person you are in a
hurry and cant stay for more than for few seconds, even when you arent. This
will automatically lower a groups resistance, because you are subtly
acknowledging the intrusive nature of your query. What typically happens is that
if someone finds you interesting they will soon just forget your time constraint
for some strange reason. Still, dont try to get everyones attention or talk with
everyone at the same time, because that is not how group interactions work. You
just chat a little bit with one person and when the opportunity arises, chat with
another one. Also learn to be comfortable with ejecting from the group, because
you can nearly always return back to it after chatting with other people in the
party.

Building Familiarity
As mentioned earlier, creating familiarity becomes far more important in a
casual context. There are people willing to have longer interactions even with
total strangers. However, more often it happens that if you approach someone
not specifically expecting it, the interaction tends to exist only as a brief chat: a
few pleasantries exchanged before someone takes their leave. This doesnt leave
much room for actually influencing a person. What you need is more familiarity.
How can familiarity be built? Simply through repetition. As stated so
many times, the brain is a prediction machine that tries to create predictable
patterns of behaviour. This means that familiarity builds automatically and
incrementally with each new interaction with the same person. This is known as
the mere-exposure effect in social psychology and it has also been linked with
how attractive someone is perceived to be. This is the reason why some people
become attracted to their postman and also why is much easier to get an
interaction going with someone who belongs to the same group as you (e.g.,
company, school, hobby, organization) (Guguen, 2009, Zajonc, 1968; Peskin &
Newell, 2004).
If you know a person is a regular at a particular spot you frequent, its easy
to engage them in some casual chitchat, and ask non-invasive questions about
their life. Remember what was said. When you see the person next time, ask
them how they have been doing since your last meeting while injecting some of
the information you learned last time (How was your sons baseball match?).
People are typically flattered when you remember something that is important to
them. After a few interactions like these, your familiarity with this person will
naturally grow. The more you meet, the more likely you will gain a longer
interaction each time. In a casual context, you can often sidestep any need for
familiarity by making a person either curious or fascinated with you. You are
just so overwhelmingly interesting that the person is willing to follow your lead
to find out more about you.
Keypoints

It is important to choose the right people to work with and learn how
to qualify your customers.
Verify that it was the customers idea to come to see you and pay
special attention to people who are motivated to fail.
Keep in mind that people dont enter interactions viewing the other
person as a blank slate.
You want to lead the person away from a resource-poor state by
eliciting previous history of success.
Repetition builds familiarity
While groups may look tightly knit and closed, they very rarely are.
If you see a group in the party, it is very likely these people are
hanging in a group just because they found something in common.

ACQUIESCENCE
Now that you know how to work with rapport, it is time to move on to
acquiescence. Many books written on influence ignore this particular area
completely, but it is an important stepping stone between rapport and leading
others. In this extensive chapter, you will learn what acquiescence is, why it is so
important, and what you need to bear in mind as you try to get it. This is perhaps
the most important chapter in this book and I recommend you to read it through
at least twice before you progress forward.
What is Acquiescence?

In addition to gaining enough rapport to influence someone, you want to get that
person into an acquiescent state of mind. The best way to describe acquiescence
is to call it the human tendency to follow along to get along. It is that experience
you have while following a friends story. You feel relaxed, prompt him to go on,
listen carefully, and genuinely want to hear what happens next. The story itself
absorbs your attention to the degree that you focus on it at the expense of
everything else.
While an acquiescent person hasnt yet agreed to do what you want him to
do, he has given you a non-verbal agreement allowing you to lead the situation.
He has given you his permission to be led in order to see the outcome of your
actions and experience what you are offering. When someone is following you at
this level, he also needs to process all your suggestions thoroughly and create the
thought process you have just described.
Gaining acquiescence is a necessary part of any successful influence
process, but even then many people feel uncomfortable about leading others.
Perhaps the most common reason for incongruence is that you are unconsciously
afraid of offending the other person. If this happens to you, its helpful to keep in
mind that people actually want to be led. During a normal day, the average
person is forced to make countless decisionssome trivial, some majorbut
constantly making decisions is exhausting. The average person is yearning for a
brief relief. The average person would love nothing more than to follow
someone who has their best interests at heart, who could free them for even a
short respite from decision-making. While led by another, a person is
momentarily free of all their daily responsibilities and has given themselves
permission to simply see what happens next.
If you are truly leading a person with their best interest in your heart, about
what could they be offended? Your hang-ups about leading people tell us more
about your own personal character flaws than anything else. You are not truly
worried what they would do, but rather what you might do if someone gives you
their trust. However, if you are having some hesitancy about leading others, ask
yourself are you objecting to what is happening or to how you feel about it?
When you ask yourself this question, more often than not, you will realize that
you are the one holding some objection and not the person with whom you are
interacting.
Becoming the Object of Fascination

While you often need to build for acquiescence, there is a short-cut for gaining it
and that is becoming someones object of fascination. Being an object of
fascination means that you are somehow so overwhelming that the person
simply wants to follow your lead. In a professional context, this typically
happens because the person has high expectations based on your perceived
reputation. For example, medical doctors tend to be perceived as objects of
fascination by their patients. Whatever the doctor says is typically instantly
believed to be true. In addition to gaining instant acquiescence, fascination is an
emotional state that can literally transform into any other state you can imagine:
excitement, happiness, satisfaction, and even pleasure. When you have
fascination, you dont often need to do anything else than suggest a new state
and it will happen.

Perception of Authority
In social psychology, a lot has been written about power of authority and how
people have a natural tendency to defer to authorities. For instance, we tend to
believe what medical doctors say is true, even in areas where they dont really
have any authority at all. Seeing someone wearing a police uniform makes most
people immediately acquiescent, regardless of the situation. Seeing a
chiropractors diploma has been proven to increase the clients compliance
significantly. If you successfully present yourself as an authority, you very likely
turn into an object of fascination and gain instant acquiescence.
However, being an authority is only a matter of perception. If you just
exhibit qualities and behaviours that people typically associate with authority,
their brain will start to respond you as you were one. For instance, if you calmly
walk behind the podium and tap the microphone, observers will start to perceive
you as an authority. If you claim to be from a foreign country, most people will
believe you and assume you are an authority in that specific culture. Even if you
can make a person just imagine that you have the answers they need, they will
perceive you as an authority in their world. It literally doesnt matter if these
things are true or not so long as you carry yourself congruently. Whatever you
can consistently and congruently present to others becomes their reality.
Based on this, it would seem that presenting yourself as an authority is
always beneficial to your influence. However, there are some less-known studies
that demonstrate that being an authority isnt as cut-and-dried as people are often
led to believe. When people are introduced to a topic they have an opinion
about, their mind will race to create arguments to defend their opinion. The
longer a person thinks about these arguments, the more disposed he becomes to
follow them. However, what happens if the person doesnt have an existing
opinion about something? In this case, the person will form his initial opinion
from the presenters behaviour. If there is no significant external pressure to act
or think in a specific way, the person will automatically create an opinion that is
consistent with the behaviour. For instance, if the presenter is excited about the
topic that his audience doesnt have an existing opinion about, the audience will
infer their initial opinion to be positive (Tybout, Sternthal, & Calder, 1978).
Now, here is where it gets really interesting. In various studies, it has been
found that people who didnt have an existing opinion on a topic found a low
credibility source more persuasive than a high credibility source. Why? When
they were listening to a highly credible source, they attributed their compliance
and agreement to the external authority they were listening. Because of this, they
didnt form particularly strong opinions about the topic. They simply werent
forced to think through their argument to support their agreement (Tybout,
Sternthal, & Calder, 1978; Sternthal, Dholakia & Leavitt, 1978).
This is important for two reasons. First of all, being too much of an
authority can backfire royally, because it also limits how much the other person
can participate in the conversation. If the difference is too high, the person is
unable to interact with you. They are then only a student that is required to take
all that you give at face value and they cant build a strong emotional bond to
your message. This is why you should always be paying attention to how
dominant or authoritarian you are in the interaction. It is also probably the
biggest reason why viral marketing in social media is so effective. It is much
easier to create a positive first impression if the person recommending the
product is not perceived to be paid by the author.

Being Recommended
While any signs of authority will typically increase compliance, just tooting your
own horn doesnt really work that well. People simply start to think you are
trying to show off. However, studies have found that if someone else is
introducing or recommending you, you will cut any resistance for being
perceived as an authority. Interestingly enough, this effect applies even if the
person recommending is known to be untrustworthy or could benefit from
cooperation with the person being recommended. For instance, it was found out
that if the secretary told the potential prospect that he was going to be connected
to a specialist with 20 years of experience, the prospects compliance increased
significantly. According to science, it doesnt really seem to matter who is
recommending you, so long as the recommendation feels genuine. This is why I
want to emphasize again the importance of referrals. Even in cases you may
have thought ended in a total fiascoas long as people remember you and your
performance fondlythey will refer you. That reference will increase their
compliance, regardless of who gave it (Pfeffer, Fong & Cialdini, 2006;
Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini, 2008).
This principle can be used practically anywhere. Back in the day, it was
common practice for certain people to go out with their wingman and use him to
praise their fabricated, made-up lifestyle. This was pretty pathetic, but some
people are willing to go to ridiculous degrees to get that recommendation. As an
example, there was this well-known huckster who used his son to recommend
him on all his sales videos. The casual observer couldnt know this, because the
hucksters son didnt share a surname with his father. To defend yourself from
any deception, I highly recommend you find out where that recommendation is
from.
As a side-note, another way to increase your credibility is to talk about
your potential instead of your achievements. For some strange reason, decision-
makers tend to perceive potential as more appealing than actual achievements.
As a simple example, participants in one experiment were asked to evaluate an
applicant who had received 92 points from a leadership test. Curiously enough,
those applicants who didnt have relevant working experience in addition to the
score were assessed to perform better in the future. This prediction remained
even if the timeframe was moved to five years. Why specifically this happens is
unclear, but it most likely has something to do with how the brain handles future
uncertainty (Tormala, Zia & Norton, 2012).

Embodying the Need

As a good rule of thumb, people want more of what they are lacking than what
they already have. This means that one of the most powerful ways to become
someones object of fascination is to simply embody what they want and make
them work towards it. Just ask yourself what is that one belief that person
absolutely needs to have to follow you? When you have found the answer, you
can focus your message directly on creating this belief in the other person. As
basic and simple as this is, the answer will give you tremendous advantage.
After all, if you know what belief must exist for your audience to follow you,
how hard can it be to link that belief into what you do? You just use all your
techniques to presuppose its existence.
Just ask yourself who do you need to currently be for them to follow you?
What aspects of yourself do you need to bring into the interaction? What needs
to happen for them to respond in a certain way? What do they need to expect to
happen? For example, lets suppose you are selling maintenance services for cars
that are primarily competing with quality of service, not price. What is the belief
here? It would be easy to assume that it is the customers need to believe it is
less expensive to maintain a car than buy a new one. Yet, while this is absolutely
true, it doesnt give your customers any reason to buy that maintenance
specifically from you. What would make them believe that you are the best
solution? That they believe you are the most reliable and fastest provider in the
local market.

Glamour and Costuming

We have already discussed first impressions in the Rapport chapter, but you can
also become an object of fascination solely based on your outward appearance. I
call this glamour, because it is based on your perceived status instead of real
status. People will respond to the image you portray and your outward
appearance can really help you get more powerful responses. Especially in a
business setting, you should be exuding business pheromones in every possible
sense. You should dress sharply and a little bit better than your customer, but not
so much that it causes a nonverbal confrontation.
Yes, it is certainly somewhat shallow, but keep in mind that you are just
accommodating to your customers expectations and utilizing them. No matter
what you are doing, dress accordingly, maintain a haircut, and take care of your
hygiene and physical health. It is really a matter of deciding what you want to
attract, and then embodying it. This is because on a deeper level, costumes
arent just pieces of cloth, but (almost) universally accepted symbols. Just
showing any kind of universal symbol to a person tends to elicit relatively
predictable emotional responses. For instance, try to go into a store wearing a
blazer and come back a few hours later without it. You will immediately notice a
major difference in response, even though people around you wont consciously
realize it.
Of course, always keep in mind that there is fine line between looking like
a bad-ass and just a plain ass. Everyone knows someone who overdresses in a
completely tasteless and stupid way, and contrary to what certain people teach,
this typically only helps you to repulse people. It should be also noted this is
actually something that certain aspiring entrepreneurs want. When you start to
learn more about world of scam, your jaw will hit on the floor in total disbelief
about how obvious many of these cons are. Everything from presentation to
promises is so poorly done that nobody should fall for those schemes. But thats
the trick. By doing this, the scammers are weeding off anyone with even a little
bit of common sense left. They dont want you. They want someone so gullible
that even the most blatant inconsistencies dont trigger their alarm bells. It is
really this simple, and this is why it is also a fairly common practice for aspiring
conmen to dress in a completely tasteless and tacky way; golden and purple
jackets, neck-chains, rings, sunshades, you name it. Dressing this way will help a
scammer to repulse anyone who is not easily fooled. At the same time, this will
help at attracting suitable victims, because dressing this way plays on their
fantasies about what rich people are doing with their money.

Being Fascinating
In a more casual context, the easiest way to become an object of fascination is to
simply be fascinating. The other person simply feels compelled to know more
about you, so he is willing to follow you along. This kind of fascination can be
achieved through behaviour, costuming, and suggestion; but, the easiest way to
create it is to simply shift your own state into fascination and be fascinated
about the other person. Because of rapport, you will soon have very strong and
mutual fascination.
This raises the question of what to do when you dont find someone
fascinating at all? In my experience, this typically says more about your own
personal issues than anything else, because when you get genuinely curious
about others, you very rarely run out of topics to talk about. We just get so easily
caught up in our own automatic responses that we often assume there is nothing
to explore with the other person. Learn to talk to others as they would be
another sentient human being, instead of talking to your own mental construct
of them. It has been said Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their
neck saying, Make me feel important. Never forget this message when working
with people. When you learn to give people your full attention and a genuinely
concerned heart, you become charming in almost everyones eyes.
Establishing the Point of Focus

After gaining someones attention, you want to sustain it and keep it as much as
possible the central point of your message. The science is very clear on the fact
that a product or idea can win popularity simply by drawing attention to itself.
This has been found to be especially true when companies have drawn attention
to unique parts of their products. The reason for this that the longer you can hold
someones attention on your leverage, the easier it for them to process any
information related to it. If, on the other hand, you are constantly shifting from
one point to another, you are diluting your leverages impact (Chambers, 2011;
Boland, Brucks & Nielsen, 2012; Yang, Cutright, Chartrand & Fitzsimons,
2014).

Diluting Your Leverage Too Thin

Paradoxically enough, this is also true for any kind of extra benefits or bonuses
that you throw in. In an experiment conducted in 2012, participants were shown
two iPod touch packages that were identical except the second one had an
additional free music download. Curiously enough, participants were willing to
pay less for the second package. This was because their attention was drawn
away from the actual product being offered. Similar results have been found
regarding advertisements. Adverts with quick cuts do increase peoples general
attention, but were found less persuasive if the focus isnt the products crucial
features and claims. Ads that focus on vivifying a central point, on the other
hand, were found to be the most persuasive (Weaver, Garcia & Schwarz, 2012;
Stewart & Furse, 1986; Fennis, Das & Fransen, 2012; Armstrong, 2010;
Guadagno, Rhoads & Sagarin, 2011).
Similar results have been found when rating products. People started to
value companys products more if they rated them in isolation from other
companies products. However, there is a very interesting caveat. In a study
made in 2007, people were given the choice of two different sofas. These non-
brand sofas were pretty much similar, except that the first option had sturdier
cushions. In direct comparison, 58 percent of participants preferred the sofa with
sturdier cushions. When participants were also introduced to three additional
sofas that had sturdy cushions but were otherwise poorer quality, now 77 percent
preferred the same sofa as before. In basic terms, giving participants more
options spread out the attention, but made the sofa with sturdier cushions stand
out more in comparision to its competitor (Dhar & Simonson, 1992; Kardes,
Sanbonmatsu, Cronley & Houghton, 2002; Hamilton, Hong & Chernev, 2007).
Based on this information, you typically want to keep the attention on your
main leverage point as long as possible. Nonetheless, you should still have
multiple points you are willing to negotiate on. For instance, if the company
cant pay the desired salary, perhaps they reduce the amount of working hours or
throw in some extra holidays. There is nearly always something the opposite
party is willing bend on. Being able to negotiate on terms will help you a lot,
because most negotiators arent used to this kind of strategy. Doing so will
typically throw them completely off-balance and make them more open to
suggestion.

Avoiding Analysis Paralysis

Another way to dilute your leverage is to ask the customer make up reasons why
they want to do something. This almost never works, because it overwhelms the
customers brain and prevents them from making any kind of decision at all. To
demonstrate this point, in 1993, Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the
University of Virginia, conducted an interesting experiment. People were split
into two groups and asked to rate five different posters on a scale from 1 to 9.
Posters included a Van Gogh painting, a Monet landscape, and three humorous
cat pictures. The first group was just asked to rate the posters, while the second
group was requested to rationalize their decision. 95 percent of the people who
were asked to only rate the poster picked either Monet or Van Gogh, while the
second group was equally split between cat posters and artistic works. When
later asked to rate how satisfied they were with their decision, 75 percent of the
people who chose the cat poster were dissatisfied, while nobody was dissatisfied
with choosing Monet or Van Gogh (Wilson, et al., 1993).
The key point here is that the more you try to rationalize your decision, the
less emotional momentum you will have for making the decision. This is
because trying to make up all those justifications will overwhelm the brain.
Instead of just making a choice that feels right, you have analysis paralysis
because the brain doesnt have any emotion to follow. In practice, lot of times
salespeople sabotage themselves simply by asking too broad of questions and
swamping their customers with too many details.
Even just asking people to think up reasons why doing something is a
good idea will increase their discontent. This was best demonstrated by a study
made in 1997 where people were asked to list ten reasons to choose BMW over
Mercedes. A second group was asked to name only one. When the first group
was then asked to evaluate their opinions about BMW and Mercedes, they
evaluated BMW more negatively than the group that had been asked to give only
one reason. Why is this? Many people in the first group had found it difficult to
list ten reasons. When they were then asked to evaluate their liking for BMW,
people based their judgments on the easiness of creating those reasons rather
than the reasons they came up with (Wnke, Bohner & Jurkowitsch, 1997).

Remaining Silent
While underappreciated, there is lot to be said about silence. It is often your
greatest weapon, because it allows you to really drive home your point. After
asking a question, you should simply stay silent and allow a person to formulate
their answer. When arguing, this tactic puts enormous pressure on the other
person and more than often simply forces them to give up because you are not
offering them anything they could use to escape from the situation. Staying silent
also works well when you are requesting something. You simply finish your
statement with downward inflection, and then just stay silent.
There is also great wisdom in not talking too much. As explained by the
previous chapters, as you relax your awareness will go up. However, this is not
true only for you but also for the person you are interacting with. The more
comfortable a person becomes, the more their awareness increases. At that
point, they are far more likely to pick up even the slightest changes in your
gestures, inflection, and tonality. If you dont communicate your point clearly,
they may give your well-intended suggestion a completely different meaning
from the one intended. In practice, the more comfortable they become, the more
alert you need to be. And if you dont have that capacity, the wisest thing is often
to remain silent. Of course, the opposite is also true. When someone is
comfortable, it is much easier to intentionally elicit emotional responses from
them using only your tonality.
Nonetheless, the more you try to explain your reasoning, the more likely it
will be that one of the given reasons will be weak. Any chain is only as a strong
as its weakest link, and most people will instinctively attack against that point.
This is why you should only give the least amount of reasons you can get away
with. The same is also true for any kind of mistakes. You should definitely
address your screw up, but after addressing it, dont continue talking about it.
People only learn to associate those mistakes with you and your work.
Importance of Course Correction

When you first start to condition or lead someone, it is important that you do
some kind of course correction regardless of how well the person responds. The
reason for this is simple. Studies have found that people learn better when they
go through error-based rather than error-free training. The reason for this is that
it increases attention to the training and also trains the person to avoid mistakes.
In addition to starting to condition a person to follow your instructions precisely,
correction also enhances your perceived authority. It doesnt matter what you are
correcting so long as you are doing so. In my own personal experience, even
such small things as adjusting a persons position or asking him to move a little
bit aside increase their responsiveness. (Joung, Hesketh & Neal, 2006).

Cycle of Constant Testing

So how do you know when you have acquiescence? The easiest way to screen
for acquiescence is to do something that requires participation from the other
person, and just observe their response. For example, if you extend your hand,
and they reach for it, you have acquiescence. If you stay silent for a moment, and
they begin to talk, you have acquiescence. If they tag along without further
leading, you have acquiescence. If you ask a question and get an immediate
response, you have acquiescence. If they are leaning in to listen to you, you have
acquiescence. If they are matching you, it is a definitive sign of acquiescence.
You should also pay attention to any physical signs: being lost in thought;
slower, more rhythmic breathing; changes in blinking reflex; dilated pupils; and
detached vibe. These are physiological signs of someone focusing his attention
and typically indicate that the person is following what you are saying. These
signs can be very useful in identifying where a person currently is, but if they are
very excited about something, you rarely see these signs.
This is why when you are leading people, you should be constantly testing
for acquiescence and correcting the course. Too many people make the mistaken
assumption that once they gain acquiescence they will have it unequivocally
from that point forward. However, in reality acquiescence is a constantly
fluctuating factor and varies based on a persons current emotional state, mental
clarity, and how much he trusts in you. You know that you have lost
acquiescence when the person stops responding to suggestions, acts them out
half-heartedly, or does something you did not request. Just by paying a little bit
of attention to your customer you can easily spot these changes, and when you
learn to better calibrate, you will also begin to feel instinctively when
acquiescence is lost.
There are several reasons why acquiescence might be lost. The most
common is by moving too quickly. You may be asking someone to take too big a
step, blatantly acting against their benefit, or because the person simply doesnt
understand your instructions. It is also possible that you are leading a person into
a place they dont currently want to go. This typically manifests with issues they
dont feel ready to tackle: a shameful secret or a deeply traumatic memory.
Gently back off, ask what is wrong, and modify your approach accordingly.
Adjust your technique and course correct all the time.

Working with Discomfort

The importance of having a clear outcome and intent cant be stressed enough,
because when an obedient person is willingly waiting for your instructions, it is
vital that you know where you want to lead him. You need to have a specific
outcome in your mind, you need to be able to phrase it so the listener
understands it, and it needs to work for the both of you. If you abuse the trust
that person has given to you, you lose both acquiescence and rapport.
An important part of communicating all this is simply maintaining a calm
and comforting presence. To repeat what was said earlier on, when we feel
uncertain, we have the natural tendency to instinctively seek guidance from our
peer group and leader. When they seem to be comfortable with something, it
unconsciously communicates that everything is okay and allows the person to
open up about less-pleasant topics. Keep in mind that while rapport can feel
quite pleasant at the times, having rapport doesnt require that other person is
feeling comfortable at all. A person can feel very anxious about what you are
saying and still have profound rapport with you. Someone can be shouting at you
and still have excellent rapport with you. Someone can even be preparing to kick
your ass in a martial arts competition and still have excellent rapport with you.
Comfort just allows them to open up about less-pleasant topics.
As you maintain a comforting presence, you also want to acknowledge a
customers discomfort as often and soon as possible. Studies in social
psychology have found that a persons resistance to your message is always
lowered when you acknowledge its existence (Knowles & Linn, 2004).
 As an example:

It seems that you are a little uncomfortable with that. How come? Is it a
little too
private or personal? Or are you just surprised to find someone who
actually cares?
What do you want?

Following acknowledgement, discomfort tends to disappear. Typically, this
helps in building rapport because it shows someone that you really are paying
attention to them. Even while maintaining comfort, some people will still
hesitate to answer in greater detail. Some people simply arent comfortable with
expressing their emotions or arent accustomed to abstract thinking. Quite often,
the only thing you need to overcome that resistance is to stay calm and relaxed
and repeat your last suggestion. As an example, if they dont step forward when
asked, you just repeat your command. If they follow your command this time,
you just continue as if nothing had happened.
You can also encourage a person to answer with positive reinforcers:
nodding for them to go on, and complimenting their responsiveness. This will
help condition them to give further information. Acknowledging discomfort also
allows you to see where the persons current boundaries lie and helps you to
better calibrate in relation to them. Instead of thinking that they are resisting
you or resisting your message, just think that they are temporarily confused.
Increasing Responsiveness

When you have someone in an acquiescent state, you have been given
permission to lead, and he will naturally be more responsive to your content.
However, he is still able to reject your content if he feels uncomfortable about
acting it out. As a part of the decision-making process, the mind will continue
referring to your past actions to determine if it will comply with your current
request. If there isnt enough trust or the state is wrong, your suggestion is
rejected.
The strategies you learn in this part will make it easy to increase a persons
responsiveness, but you need to be careful not to abuse it. After practicing doing
it for a while, you will be able to easily get a person to a point where they
comply to suggestions they would not usually agree to under any normal
circumstances. If the outcome isnt to their liking, they will resent you later.
However, when you lead with something positive and which works mutually,
responsiveness will build much quicker. By consistently showing the mind that
following your lead will only have positive effects, the mind will respond to
your suggestions without hesitation.
This is why as a good rule of thumb, you should always focus on what you
want to have more while ignoring what you dont want. I personally go even so
far that I assume almost slavish obedience to what I am instructing someone to
do. This is not in any shape or form meant to be the mindset for treating other
people in general. It just helps me stay congruent in my role and intention even if
there is a negative response. At this stage, I also tend to presuppose the existence
of rapport, because just makes it easier for the other person to open up. When
leading others, there is no real risk in doing so, except if the other person gets
overwhelmed by whatever emotion they might have. If you arent careful, that
state may start to influence you too.

Leading People in Small Steps

You always want to lead people by making them focus on the next step they
need to take. People have a natural tendency to compare the distance between
their present position and a given request, and the larger the distance is, the less
likely they are to comply. However, countless studies have demonstrated that
this resistance can be side-stepped simply by breaking larger, more intimidating
requests down into smaller steps. The key is to give simple and precise
commands, so that you can constantly lead the individual in small steps toward
your own personal outcome. If a given suggestion is too complex, the person can
reject it. Leading people in small steps will also reduce resistance, because it will
reduce the distance between behaviour and outcome. This is why you should
always lead people in small steps, because it allows them to become
comfortable with your lead (Milgram, 1965; Knowles & Linn, 2004).
Minimizing your request can be also a useful way to gain compliance. To
give an example, when solicitors for the American Cancer Society said that even
a penny would help instead of just asking for a contribution, compliance rose
from 29 to 50 percent. At the same time, average donations were quite similar in
both cases. You simply make your request as small as you can get away with and
use it as a stepping stone for further requests (Cialdini & Schroeder, 1976;
Cialdini, 1984).
As shown by an experiment done by Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C.
Fraser in 1966, this can be very effective. In their experiment, they called
households and asked if they could ask a few non-invasive questions about
household kitchen products. Three days later they called again and asked if the
household was willing to allow a group of five men to come their house and
make an inventory of their kitchen products. From those households that had
complied with the first request, 52.8 percent complied with the second request.
From those households that hadnt taken part in the first request, only 23.2
percent agreed to this request (Freedman & Fraser, 1966).

Reinforcing the Behaviour

Back in business school, one of my teachers had challenges with stuttering.
While it wasnt as serious as it could be, it became ... became ... tiresome when
someone was constantly repeating ... repeating ... words again like this.
Observing his behaviour, I started to notice that his stuttering became worse
every time he was nervous or agitated. Unfortunately, he also had major control
issues and would become frustrated by any perceived challenge of his authority.
Quite often, this made asking even legitimate questions hard, if not impossible.
After observing this for long enough, I decided to do a little experiment.
When asking a question, I first apologized for interrupting his lecture. After
asking my question and receiving an answer, I just thanked him. Just after
several weeks, his stuttering had significantly decreased and he was happier to
answer students questions. What had happened? Just basic operant conditioning.
By acknowledging the intrusive nature of my questions, I also subtly
acknowledged his resistance, thus also lowering his anxiety. I then just simply
rewarded his willingness to answer, conditioning him to feel good about
answering questions.
This little story demonstrates well why to strengthen compliance, you
should be rewarding the persons behaviour by using both positive and negative
reinforcers. Positive reinforcers are anything that encourages doing the specific
behaviour more. When influencing someone, the most common positive
reinforcer is attention. When the person does the right thing, you just reward
them by doing something that indicates attention. You could open your body
language, smile, give a verbal praise, or even give a pat on the backanything
that will signal agreement. When you reward the mind, you get more of the
behaviour that is rewarded (Pryor, 1999).
Negative reinforcers , on the other hand, are something that you can avoid
or halt by changing your behaviour. When influencing someone, you should
preferably only use silence or subtle gestures like frowning as a form of negative
reinforcers. Anything stronger than that is too heavy-handed and possibly
damaging for longer-term use. The idea is not to traumatise people, only to
encourage an avoidance until it becomes constant without further reinforcing
(Pryor, 1999).
The most important rule about reinforcing is to only use it while a
specific behaviour is happening, not after or before it. If you dont do that, the
brain wont learn to associate the behaviour with the reinforcer. This means that
you should never reward or punish someone arbitrarily a long time after
something has happened because you then wont have any control over what the
person learns from your belated action. For the same reason, reinforcing also
needs to end immediately after the person has responded in the right way,
especially if you are using a negative reinforcer.

Varied Reinforcement
Reciprocation is the human norm to give when you receive. This social
mechanic has been proven to exist in every culture and it has been vital for the
survival of our species. The fascinating thing about this behaviour is that people
typically compensate your act with far more than you gave. For instance, if a
waitress gave a group a single mint caramel before the bill, it increased the tips
given by three percent on average. If people were given two mints, her tips grew
fourteen percent on average. If the waitress gave one mint, walked away a little
bit, turned back and then gave a second mint as a gift for good behaviour, her
tips grew 23 percent on average (Strohmetz, Rind, Fisher & Lynn, 2002).
The key to the increase in the third case was that the reward was
unexpected and indicated to be a result of their good behaviour. This means that
the most powerful way to reward someone is to reward them only occasionally,
and on a random and unpredictable basis. The actual reward itself should also be
much larger than what the person is used to. In monkeys, unpredictable
rewards like these caused a significant dopamine spike if compared against
predictable rewards. Using a varied schedule of reinforcement is far more
effective in maintaining already established behaviour, because if you
continue to reinforce the behaviour on a regular basis the brain will rapidly
learn to ignore the reinforcer altogether. (Pryor, 1999; Schultz, 2006).
In a social context, you have several good choices for rewards like this:
discussion, shared experience, and role compensation. From these three, perhaps
the most undervalued is having an intimate and frank discussion about the given
topic. This in itself works as a reward, because many people are rarely able to
discuss anything deep. Either it is not considered polite or the person feels like
he is looked down upon if he exposes himself for what he is. As long as you
dont judge the person, this is a potent reward in itself. Another good reward is
the shared experience. There is a reason why your parents only took you to the
theme park after you had proven yourself to be a good kid. There is a reason
why VIP lounges are so desired. There is a reason why people go to exclusive
restaurants to eat. The third potential reward is role compensation: you give the
person something that helps them perform better at their role or advance their
career. Alternatively, you two can also collaborate on a given task.

Opening Loops
When Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a Viennese
restaurant, she noticed a rather curious detail. It seemed that the over-worked
waitresses remembered only those orders that were in the process of being
served. Immediately after service was complete, the orders simply vanished from
their mind. Interested about the phenomenon, Zeigarnik returned to her
laboratory to test the theory. She gave participants twenty simple tasks to solve.
Allowing for the completion of some tasks, other tasks were interrupted abruptly
midway, and the person was assigned with a new one. Afterwards, Zeigarnik
asked her test subjects to list the tasks they did during the test. People were about
twice as likely to remember the interrupted tasks as those they had successfully
completed. This effect has been replicated again and again under different
circumstances (Zeigarnik, 1927; Kupor, Reich & Shiv, 2015).
Later studies then concluded this happened only when a person perceives
the task or information to be important. Furthermore, any kind of reward
expectancy seems to undermine the effect. For instance, if test subjects had been
promised a monetary reward for taking part in the test, there was a 42 percent
chance they would never return to finish an interrupted task after being paid.
This effect also seems to be stronger in people who are more goal-oriented and
inclined to finish the task (Jhang & Lynch Jr., 2015; McGraw & Fiala, 1982;
Johnson, Mehrabian & Weiner, 1968).
Our mind constantly seeks closure for any information it receives. While
receiving information, a persons responsiveness increases and the mind is more
open to suggestions. After the mind perceives that a process has reached its end,
it assumes closure, feels good about it, and then dismisses the information.
What are then left in our minds to linger are partial and incomplete bodies of
knowledge that are sometimes hard to update, leaving open loops. You can
use this phenomenon to your advantage by purposely opening loops and thereby
increasing a listeners responsiveness.
In practice, creating loops is simple. You simply need to presuppose you
are going to do something during the interaction, but in fact never do it nor even
mention it again. For example, you could tell somebody that during the
presentation you are going to reveal the key to achieving financial freedom. The
listeners mind is now actively waiting and seeking for that important
information; however, its never mentioned again. Alternatively, you could say
that you are going to discuss three different points, and only discuss the first two
of them. Or you could simply tell them that after the presentation they will be
amazed by the secrets you are going to reveal.

There are two things that you need to understand ... wait! There are three
things ... Does it ever happen to you that you start to tell someone there
are two things, and a third thing will immediately pop into your mind? It is
always three things. The first thing you need to understand about this
process is ...

 In this example, one loop was opened by stating that there are three
examples to discuss. In addition, we created another loop by leaving a sentence
incomplete, therefore preventing the thought from being completed. When the
sentence is then finished, the loop is then closed. Loops are a great way to
improve someones responsiveness and keep their attention. They are especially
useful for dealing with a group of experts. So long as you leave at least a few
loops open in a discussion, experts are going to assume you know more about
the topic than they do and will therefore be more inclined to listen. After all the
loops are closed, their minds perceive that they have learned everything there is
to learn about the topic, and they begin to generalize your information out.
However, you should use loops only to increase responsiveness, not as a
teaching tool. A long time ago, one of my own mentors had a tendency to open
countless loops and intentionally leave them open. He believed that by leaving
them open the mind would sooner or later generate an answer that would suit the
listeners need thereby giving closure to the topic and allowing them then to
move on from it. However, without the relief of closure, some people could
spend years thinking about loops left open. This can potentially even damage
someones psyche.
Locking On

In practice, you dont need to have strong rapport to influence someone. So long
as you have the person in an acquiescent state and you are perceived as a
solution to a given problem, you can easily influence them to follow your lead.
However, when you have both strong rapport and acquiescence, the person will
lock onto you. You know someone is successfully locked when they begin to
pace and mimic your movements without any conscious awareness of it, moving
together with you in an effortless, smooth, and synchronous dance.
This is really powerful! When you have locked someone successfully, the
person cant reject your content without rejecting rapport with you. Very few
people are willing to do this without a good reason, because having that rapport
feels so good. But as long as the person maintains that level of rapport, he also
cant disagree with you, raise objections, or even ignore your suggestions. This
means that after you have locked a person, you can easily pressure him to do
almost anything you want. You just move him in small steps towards your
personal outcome.
Locking on in itself isnt dangerous, but you need to be very careful not to
abuse it, because the level of deep rapport is maintained only as long as you are
around the person. If you use this technique to pressure a person to think
something is a good idea, they might even consciously think that way for a
moment. However, that commitment is going to be half-hearted, and the further
away they get from you and the pressure staves off, their commitment will
disappear completely. Sure, you are suggesting new ideas and possibilities inside
a persons mind, but a pressure sales tactic rarely works and will eventually
reverse itself.
The person is also bound to start resenting you later if the outcome of the
interaction was not to his liking. I have seen a lot of people abuse these
techniques only to realize later they have made several new enemies in the
process. Until you have developed enough awareness, it is also a remarkably
easy trap to fall into. Because rapport feels so good, you just think that your
outcome is working for both parties, when you are really just pressuring the
other person. You should also remember that rapport is a two-way street and
therefore its possible that you can lock onto someone and instinctively begin to
follow their pacing rather than the other way around. At any given moment, you
should be asking, Who is leading who? You simply cant lead if you are being
led.

Tension
In 2002, Dr. Dariuz Dolinski and his team conducted a series of experiments on
what effect fear and relief would have on peoples compliance. They
hypothesized that being startled would make people more compliant to further
requests, but a person would regain his faculties if engaged in any kind of
analytical thinking. To test their theory out, a man pretending to be blind grabbed
participants on the shoulder, startling them. Five minutes later, unknowing
participants were approached by a second confederate who asked if the person
could answer a short questionnaire on the living conditions of Polish people. For
the control group, the experiment was otherwise the same, except the man
pretending to blind also asked for the current time. From the control group, only
30 percent of people agreed to fill out the questionnaire, while 53 percent of the
other group did so (Dolinski, Ciszek, Godlewski & Zawadzki, 2002).
Dr. Dolinski and his team attributed the increased compliance to fear
inducing a state of mindlessness. Based on our current understanding of the
human brain, this seems to be a correct assumption. However, based on all the
research available, I personally believe in another major factor in increased
compliance: sensations of release. When we are not thinking critically, our brain
has a tendency to associate what we are feeling with anything that is in our
current perception, even if it is not related to actual stimuli. For example, it is a
well-known fact that people being tortured surprisingly often develop a high
level of rapport withand sometimes even fall in love withtheir interrogators.
When you are expecting severe physical pain or even death, being spared from
that outcome makes you associate the relief that comes from it with the people
you are interacting with (Kathleen, 2006).
While we obviously dont want to scare people, this principle can be
utilized by breaking rapport. Being in rapport feels good, and when you have
someone in an acquiescent state of mind, they will try their best to maintain that
level of connection. Even more so, they will do their very best to get back that
previous level of rapport because of the discomfort losing it causes. For
example, if you intentionally mismatch your posture, the other person will
change their posture to match yours. If you stop talking, he will try to get back in
rapport by talking. If you shift your energy level for a few moments, he will do
his very best to match it. When this happens, the rapport between two people
will deepen because of the tension and release mechanism. This is further
reinforced by repetition, because any time you do something or access a
particular state, the stronger the neurological pathways related to it become. This
is true even if there was only a very short gapeven of two secondsbetween
each individual experience.
This means that by breaking rapport intelligently, it is possible to achieve a
level of rapport in ten minutes that would normally take hours with other more
traditional rapport-building tools. It is one of the simplestbut, in my
experience also one of the most powerfulrapport-building tools in your
arsenal. However, I want to emphasize the word intelligently. When most people
are taught to break rapport, they are told they should insult, belittle, or shut off
the other person. The few people who respond well to this kind of abuse have
low self-esteem and they return back to rapport only because they are seeking
your validation. Quite a few relationships are built around abuse like this and it
is important that you learn to detect when it is happening.

Proximity
It should be noted that proximity can be also utilized in a similar way to amplify
emotions and rapport. After gaining enough rapport, you can step within a
persons space that normally is reserved for closer friends. At this stage that
persons perception of us changes from stranger to friend, thereby increasing
their responsiveness. If you, on the other hand, step inside someones intimate
space, it tends to make sexual tension grow if the other person is somehow
attracted to you. When you step out, the tension disappears. You can basically
create tension in order to relive the tension. If after doing this the person moves
towards you, they want to keep level of intimacy they had with you. By
constantly moving in and out from the intimate space, you can also reinforce that
tension.
Obviously, it is also very easy to overstep boundaries and show up as
creepy instead of persuasive. If someone is uncomfortable with your presence or
proximity, invading their personal area will only increase their discomfort
instead of causing them to become aroused. By managing your state, comfort
can be maintained to some extent, but even then the pressure can be too much
for the person to handle. The same is true for any kind of positive sensations like
sexual tension. So pay careful attention to responses and calibrate accordingly.
Keypoints

Acquiescence is the human tendency to follow along in order to get

along
You can gain acquiescence by becoming an object of fascination
An acquiescent person is still able to reject your content if they dont
feel comfortable acting it out
You know you have lost acquiescence when a person doesnt respond
to your suggestions, acts them out half-heartedly, or just does
something you didnt request him to do
You can test for acquiescence by doing something that requires the
persons participation and observing his response
Maintain a comforting presence and acknowledge discomfort and
objections
When the person locks on to you, he cant disagree with you, raise
objections or even ignore your suggestions

APPLICATION: DEMONSTRATING
UNDERSTANDING
In every sales situation, your first goal is to gain acquiescence so that you can
start to lead the interaction. To achieve this outcome, you need to become some
kind authority in the customers mind. Your personal reputation, position of
power, comforting presence, congruency, and even outward appearance all help
to create the perception of authority. While it is possible to be perceived as an
authority based solely on these factors, more than often you need to also
demonstrate your authority verbally. You need to show through your words and
actions that you understand anothers reality and their current challenges. Only
after you have proven it is the other person willing to be led by you. This,
however, is often much trickier than it sounds.
Psychologist Roger Shepard once said that perception is externally
guided hallucination and that is absolutely true. We pay attention only to things
that support our biases, and our brain is reinforcing our biases every time we
follow them. Even though we rarely want to admit it to ourselves, we are highly
emotional, reactionary, and marred by countless different cognitive biases. In the
purest terms, our brain is not designed to see the truth. All our beliefs of
surrounding reality are basically just illusions, half-truths, and delusions that are
rationalised by our brain in a way that frees us from unnecessary guilt, worry,
and uncertainty.
This means that when you are influencing others, you start from matching
the reality that the other person is currently residing in. You are stepping into
that reality, showing understanding of it, and by becoming an authority on it, get
permission to lead the person out from it. In the most literal terms, you are
communicating with their internal reality and trying to make them believe what
you say is real. Through your words, behaviours, and actions, you are reaching
towards them and their reality.
To do this, you need to phrase things in a way that matches their current
reality and means something for them. We like to think of language as universal,
but in the end, it is only an abstraction of how a person thinks internally.
Anything that a person says is an abstraction about how he experiences the
world. To do this, you need to phrase things in a way that matches their current
reality and which means something for them. It is quite ironic that we seemingly
can agree on the meaning of the word until the very moment someone actually
explains what that word means. Unless at least two people can agree on
something, it simply isnt true.
It is important to understand that until you can phrase things in a way that
makes sense for the other person, they wont feel truly understood by you. But at
the same time, demonstrating understanding is only a matter of perception. If
you can make a person imagine that you have the answers they need, they will
perceive you as an authority in their world. If you can imply an existence of
authority within yourself, their mind will start to perceive you as an authority.
The strategies that you learn in this part are meant to create that perception of
agreement, and you should start the interaction by gaining agreement with the
person and progress towards more detailed suggestions only after you have
gained that perception.
Nobody Talks Like That!

In a moment, you are going to learn about certain advanced linguistic strategies
for influencing others. Perhaps one of the biggest objections I have heard about
learning these strategies is that they dont sound natural. However, most people
dont have any kind of awareness of how people talk normally. If you go out and
really listen to how people talk, you will quickly realize how random and chaotic
normal human interactions tend to be. We stumble, jump from topic to topic, use
strange metaphors, and commit word crimes all the time. Still, almost nobody
complains or pays attention to it.
But at the same time, these people do also have a point. There is a fine line
between sounding normal and sounding (too) weird. There are some schools of
thought that focus primarily on language and verbal gymnastics. While there is
not exactly anything wrong with doing that, it is remarkably easy to go
overboard with that material and just sound really strange. This problem is
emphasized by the fact that these schools often provide their students with only
canned sales scripts and patterns without telling you why they are supposed to
work. Because of this, these people often sound stilted and awkward when they
try to influence others. Canned patterns like these arent even necessary, because
when you understand the underlying principles, you can weave powerful
influencing language without the need to memorize anything. The words just
naturally roll from your mouth without the need for verbal gymnastics.
You dont need to be covert either. When learning this type of material for
the first time, many students also think that they need to be as covert as possible
with their language. While subtlety has its own place and time, you first need to
become very comfortable with the fundamentals and understand all the
underlying operators. Without having that understanding, you simply dont have
enough control over the desired outcome. Instead of leading a person powerfully,
you just make his mind wander in completely unpredictable directions. When
you practice the fundamentals, you will also discover that there is absolutely no
need for being covert most of the time. The reality is that even the most overt
techniques in this book are hidden to the untrained eye when executed
properly.
More than often, it is simply easiest to hide your suggestions in plain sight.
Instead of trying to be subtle, you just state your suggestions as a normal part of
the interaction. As long as you act congruently and with intent, most people
literally dont care that you sound a little weird or stumble around. Furthermore,
it is worth repeating that various studies have shown that we have hard time
remembering accurately what was said just ten seconds ago. The reality is
people cant recall how much information they have really provided to you or
what was really being said. Humans have also a natural tendency to focus on
whatever suits their personal interpretation and ignore that which doesnt match
it. Regardless of this, I want to emphasize the importance of softening a little bit
when you use these tools. The problem in general is that when applied properly,
these tools drive the point in so powerfully, that the person may immediately
start to suspect you are manipulating him.
Validating their Reality

In any given interaction, it can be said there are three different realities going at
the very moment: yours, theirs, and the shared reality. In basic terms, you both
are experiencing the reality from your own personal standpoint, but there are
also elements of those realities that both of you share. This is why when you are
building a perception of agreement, you should focus on talking about what you
two consider your shared, consensual reality.
Well, that certainly sounded vague; what the heck is that is supposed to
mean? Just close your eyes and think about being on a beach. What do you see,
hear and feel? What are the common elements that almost everyone agrees exists
on the beach? Some more obvious choices include sand, water, waves, sky, sun,
and wind. But does your beach have a tap-dancing pink hippo? Mine does. If I
try to claim that there is a pink hippo on the beach, you are very likely to
disagree with that image.
As another example, lets think about the most beautiful car money can
buy. As you read that statement, your mind instantly creates meaning and
substance for my empty words. Your mind created a clear idea of what that car
would look like. It feels like a perfect match. But what if I told you that the
most beautiful car money can buy is purple, has green leather seats, and
chromed spoilers that gleam in the sun? Suddenly, you dont feel at all
comfortable with the mental picture Im weaving. You just have an automatic
response in relation to it and most likely just reject the idea I have suggested.
When Im focusing on the shared elements, your mind can fill in the
blanks. This is why when you are building a perception of agreement, you
should focus on these common elements and only after having built a perception
of agreement, start to lead them towards something they value. If the person
doesnt follow you, the new reality you are weaving for him simply doesnt feel
compelling enough.

Stating Observable Facts

If you go into a normal sales training, there is a fair chance that you are going to
be taught something that is called a yes-set. In its crudest form, the salesperson
creating the yes-set asks completely unrelated questions that he believes the
customer is going to answer yes. After doing this for a while, and getting the
customer into an acquiescent state, he just asks for the thing he wants the
customer to agree with.
While it often works, this kind of yes-set is far from ideal. Constantly
asking questions hardly makes for natural conversation and can annoy the
customer, who feels like he has entered an interview. Even when successful, it
makes people resent you, because it becomes fairly obvious that you pressured
them to agree. Nonetheless, salespeople use yes-sets all the time, and wonder
why they dont get repeat customers. Yes-sets like these work because when the
brain agrees with something, it is more likely to agree with the next statement.
What is less commonly known, however, is that you can also create an
unconscious yes-set. The listener doesnt actually need to agree with the stated
things aloud. The statement the person agrees with doesnt need to be a question
either. By giving factual statements in an uninterrupted sequence, the person is
more and more likely to agree with your leading suggestions (Erickson, Rossi &
Rossi, 1976).
To use this effectively, you can verbally pace the listeners reality in
several statements, and then give them a simple lead, something you want them
to agree with. As your listener is already in an unconscious yes-set, they are
predisposed to agree with your lead so long as it is about the same size as the
pace. The amount of pacing is reduced between each cycle until you only need
to lead.

Pace, pace, pace, lead
Pace, pace, lead
Pace, lead
Lead, lead, lead ...

But how you can be sure that you are stating things that your listener
believes to be true? This is not rocket science. While you could refer to some of
the more complex beliefs a person has, you can instead just state things that they
can immediately verify as true according to their sensory perceptions and beliefs.
Lets take the simple example of approaching someone reading a book in the
park.

Excuse me, I saw you sitting there reading that book during this warm
day.

 Doesnt that sound incredibly boring and obvious? Well, yes. This kind of
verbal pacing is all about validating the persons reality. The mind is always on
the lookout for sources of information that verify what it is experiencing, and
when you do verbal pacing, you are stating things that feel absolutely right.
Consciously speaking, the listener may feel that stating such obvious and
mundane things is weird; nonetheless, they will still be strangely compelled to
listen.
In addition to building a perception of agreement, pacing like this also
builds rapport. Because everything you state appears to be correct, the mind
begins to perceive us as a trustworthy source of information. If done
consistently, pacing even encourages the listener not to think, but to wait for
your words to direct them further. Granted, this happens only after a long
conditioning period, but still demonstrates how powerful the simplest things can
be. The really beautiful thing about verbal pacing is that nobody will resist or
resent it later because they are experiencing your statements as their own
thoughts.
Nonetheless, it is worth stressing that your statements need to be verifiably
true. For instance, if I state to someone that they are sitting comfortably in the
chair, is it guaranteed to be verifiably true for them? Not really. If I were to state
that you have come to me for your own reasons, this would work because I have
not specified a specific reason that could be denied. It is also true that they are
sitting in that chair for some reason. Therefore, when you are uncertain of facts,
focus on obvious. Do not assume anything, no matter how obvious something
might seem to you. One way to turn your suggestion into a pace is to use
softeners like may, might, can, could, or perhaps.

I have this impression that you perhaps have some kind of hesitancy
about expressing your needs, am I right?

This statement works as a pace, because you are not claiming that the
person is being hesitant, just suggesting that this is how you perceive the
situation to be. What is there to argue about?
You can also talk about your own reality and personal experience this way
as long as your claim isnt totally outrageous. Nobody is going to argue that you
were having thoughts or what your method of transportation was. It is not just
going to happen. Interestingly enough, if you have acquiescence, the mind has
also a tendency to respond to these suggestions as a command. The brain is
simply on the constant lookout for permission to experience positive sensations
and if given chance to experience them, it tends to take them.
When deciding to lead, it is important to remember to always start from
the small, and constantly progress towards more complex and demanding
suggestions. While you might think that you would need to drag things on and
on using verbal pacing, things actually happen very rapidly in real conversation.
Just to give a simple example:

As you are reading this text, learning new things, and letting your eyes
follow each word, you can realize how natural and easy using verbal
pacing truly is, and as you continue reading, and thinking about it, pacing
makes learning these skills so much easier. There are many ways for this
to happen, and all of them will work wonderfully for you, as you discover
the power of verbal pacing and realize how great it is to learn these
skills.

By the end of the second sentence, I was already leading you all the way
down to Oklahoma, without really saying anything strange or unnatural. Verbal
pacing happens quite naturally after a little practice, and it works easily even on
the phone where you dont really have much information to work with.

Now that you are on the phone, listening to my voice and following
along, Im here to tell you about our new insurance plan that may save
you money. According to our records, you already have insurance from
company X, but this plan will cost a third less annually. We just thought
that this plan may interest your company.

This time, the start was a little rougher, but still a perfectly acceptable way
to start a conversation. Even more, nobody will remember how you started an
interaction a few sentences later. According to our records works as pace,
because what is he going to argue about? That you dont have the records?

Opening a Choice
When you are building a perception of agreement, it is important that you keep
your suggestions as permissive as possible as you lead the person. In 1966,
Doctor Jack Brehm found that when someone is being demanded to do
something, there is a natural tendency to try regaining lost autonomy through
resisting a given command. This type of resistance will increase to the extent the
demand is perceived to be blatant, threatening, unwanted, or arbitrary, while
subtle, collaborative, and justified demands reduce resistance. Another factor
that increases resistance is how important threatened freedom is perceived to be.
At the same time, people automatically started to like prohibited choices more
than a demanded course of action (Brehm, 1966).
Until quite recently, this was considered purely a theoretical classification
for resistance, but more recent studies have found evidence for it to be an
automatic process of the brain. When competing for monetary rewards, verbal
discouragement and risk of minor electric shocks made some participants show
an immediate spike in orbifrontal cortex activity, which is known to facilitate
goal-oriented behaviour. Countless studies have also found out that just re-
affirming peoples chance to choose almost doubled compliance for simple
requests. For example, you could just say something like ... but feel free to do
as you like (Carpenter, 2013; Prevost, Lau & Mobbs, 2015).
Therefore, while directly commanding a person to do something might
even work temporarily, it rarely leads into any kind of long-term commitment.
When you keep your suggestion permissive, you are bypassing most of this
reactance. However, many people confuse permissiveness with giving indirect
and covert suggestions. You can be both direct and permissive, because
permissiveness is above all else about staging opportunities. You are just setting
opportunities and offering the person a choice in the matter. For example, when
my friend is doing stage hypnosis, he sometimes has challenges getting
volunteers. This is why he tells his audience how he appreciates their
willingness, how everything will be fun and exciting, and how others have
enjoyed being in the stage. There is nothing indirect or covert about what is
being said, but it is permissive because he is just staging for people an
opportunity to come up to the stage. This also plays to other psychological
factors, like approval. As paradoxical as it may seem, many people dont allow
themselves to have positive experiences until given permission or approval to do
so from others.
However, how can you open up that choice in your every day speech? By
leaving out how something should happen. When you are being suitably vague,
you are leading a person but not specifying how something is happening. For
example, lets suppose you were directly asking for contact details from a busy
executive:

Whats your phone number? We can continue the discussion later on
when you have more time.

This statement triggers reactance, because it gives a person only one way
to provide their contact details, and that is their phone number. As they feel that
negative tug, their brain compares you against all the previously learnt
conditions for giving details, and if you dont match them, you get a negative
response. It doesnt matter if he had a great time interacting with you, because he
is not really thinking about his answer. You get an automatic response to save
time. Even then, you can circumvent the automatic response by leaving the
means of providing contact details open-ended:

I think this conversation was rather fruitful, but I know you are busy and
both of us have lives to lead. What would be the best way to stay in touch
so we can continue the discussion at a better time?

How a suggestion is formed prevents the person from relying on automatic
responses and it leaves many alternatives on how to stay in contact. Does it
guarantee you will get the contact details? Of course not. But even then, you are
making him actually think about the answer he is giving while bypassing
reactance. This example also works very well in dating or any other context
where you want to get contact details.
What is even more interesting is that being vague doesnt have any kind of
negative impact on how credible or agreeable the statement is perceived to be.
People find the statement to be vague only if they have a prior negative attitude
towards the person talking. In practice, this means that so long as you have
rapport and stay vague enough, there simply cant be disagreement (Williams,
1973; Williams, 1975).
Another example:

For some reason, I have this impression that there has been a shift in
your relationships just recently and it is affecting your life in multiple ways
that might not be that obvious to other people around you. Wouldnt this be
fair to say?

This example is almost obtusely vague, but the listener typically finds it to
be accurate, because it is his own mind that fills in content for it. Furthermore,
people have a natural tendency to focus on whatever suits their personal
interpretation and ignore that which doesnt match. In practice, you can miss
countless times and still be considered accurate if there is at least one thing that
matches your listeners experience. People also have a significantly harder time
recalling vague statements, even if they are perceived to be negative (Williams,
1980).

Echoing Language Back

Based on what you have learnt through this book, it seems that almost
everything we do is largely learnt and patterned responses. This is absolutely
correct and all these patterns also show in our used language. When you are
talking with people, they are literally spelling out their own building blocks for
reality. People are in the most literal terms telling how they want to be treated by
you. As an example, in a study made in 2003, it was found that when waitresses
mimicked their customers by repeating literally their order back, word-by-word,
in exactly the same order, their tips almost doubled. What had happened was the
waitress had echoed customers back their own reality, which instantly increased
the feeling of sameness and made them feel understood. Later studies have
managed to replicate these results and also got similar results in other service-
related interactions (van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert & van Knippenberg, 2003;
Jacob & Guguen, 2013; Kulesza, Dolinski, Huisman, & Majewski, 2014).
In basic terms, if you echo a persons patterns back to them, it indicates
you two being similar. To increase your similarity and attractiveness, you just
need to echo back to them exactly what they are sending to you. You just repeat
to them exactly what they are marking out to you, word for word, in exactly the
same order as they said it. If thats not possible, you just get as close to those
words and phrases in your own speech as possible. For example:

Man: Thats cool, but Im kind of curious, what really shakes you ... I
mean what is your passion in this life?

Woman: I really love helping people. That is why I am a nurse, I guess. It
just gives me this warm feeling when I know I can be useful to society.

Man Ah, I see so you love helping people, because it makes you useful
 to society, right? So is there anything that you would love to do more?

Woman: Absolutely, I would really want to start my own yoga studio.

Man: Start your own yoga studio ... thats interesting ... I definitely see the
appeal ...it allows you to help people ... may I ask do you practice yoga
often?

Woman: I have been practicing yoga for five years now and it allows to me
have this wonderful sense of balance and harmony that I would love to
share with others who have had challenges with stress.

Pretty simple. People are always tonally marking out in conversation what
is really important for them about the topic. As you pay attention, you just need
to echo it back to him. From your standpoint, it may feel weird, but they wont
resist it any way or even notice what you are doing if you stay in a curious and
playful state. Some more recent studies have found that the order in which words
are echoed doesnt actually matter that much, but in my own personal experience
it seems to matter more when you are talking about something abstract that cant
be easily measured (Kulesza, Dolinski, Huisman, & Majewski, 2014).
The interesting thing is that when you echo responses back, the person will
also go deeper into emotional states associated with those words. Because you
happen to be in front of the person, all those responses are associated with you
and the topic being talked about. As a result, that feeling of sameness and
connection will skyrocket even higher. This process is also practically
impossible to resist or notice, because you are echoing back their own thoughts,
emotions, and key building blocks for their reality. In the end, nobody can resist
their own thoughts.
But what should you do if you two dont yet have any kind of agreement
going on? In this case, you just stay suitably vague, giving broad statements that
are very likely to be true in the persons world. If the person still disagrees with
your statement, you just reaffirm what the person said to you using their own
words. For instance:

Salesman: Well, for me it seems that you are a man of great taste who
knows what he really wants.

 Person: Heh, my wife doesnt really think that way.

Salesman: Your wife doesnt really think that way?

Person: Yes, she is always complaining about my tying fat Windsor knots
with my ties.

Salesman: Yes, I can see how that might be an issue for some people.

Person: Yes, it is. But I really like this style myself.

Pretty simple. If your vague statement seems to be correct, allow a
connection to be made or otherwise echo back what that person said to you.
When you re-affirm the other persons statement, they typically respond by
giving you more information and allowing you to stay vague. So long as you are
echoing their own words, people very rarely resist re-affirmations like this.

Utilizing Abstractions
As a part of the conversation, you want to demonstrate understanding of the
persons inner world. What do I mean by this? Lets suppose a person with
whom you are interacting is a successful sculptor. Many people would ask
questions like, How much money do you make? or Where are your works
shown? Such questions not only elicit responses that stay firmly in the realm of
facts and figures but have the potential to activate automatic responses which
dont really engage. But if you ask questions that focus on the thinking process,
a person is then forced to reach beyond their automatic responses and provide
you with more abstract material.

Salesman: So what exactly do you do for a living?

Person: Im a sculptor.

Salesman: Really? You are a sculptor! I have always wondered: does a
sculptor already have an idea of what they are going to create or are you
uncovering it bit by bit as you work with your material?

 Person: Hmm ... for me, it is really about an immediate inspiration and
spontaneous creation. I just look at something and start to imagine what is
behind it.

Salesman: So inspiration and spontaneity seem to be very important for
you. I personally believe that we are at our best when we are creating
something new and exciting. Would it be fair to say this is true for you,
too?

Person: Absolutely! I feel so alive when I can just spontaneously create
new worlds.

In this example we focus the sculptor on the process of creation and
deepened the sense of understanding between us by feeding the personal trigger
words back and adding more to the answers. Of course, you may not always be
correct with your statements, but people still appreciate the intent to understand
them better. In addition to echoing language back, you should also pay attention
to any abstract words the person leans on. These are words and concepts that
hold the greatest significance to the person interacting with you. For example:

Salesman: What is the best thing about having a good massage?

Person: Oooh! It definitely must be that tingling sense of relaxation and
pleasure! I love how all my muscles start to tingle as they relax.

When this customer describes the pleasure experienced, it is referred to
more than once as a tingling sensation. The word tingling probably doesnt
hold much meaning for you, but for the person, it is an abstraction for
pleasurable experiences. This is why the same word returns perhaps even in
contexts where it sounds odd. We call such words trigger words because when a
person hears them, he accesses deeper parts of his mind and feels the emotion
associated with the word. Therefore, you should be paying careful attention to
the words a person uses and search for potential trigger words.

Salesman: Yes, I certainly understand how wonderful that tingling
sensation must feel.

 Person [eyes lighting up]: Sigh ... It truly is something!

In this example, you used a trigger word you just discovered to elicit
whatever feelings that word stirs in the persons mind. You can have tremendous
influence over a person simply by knowing his trigger words, because they allow
you to jump on his hot buttons and elicit emotional responses any time you want.
More importantly to note, trigger words are deeply connected to personal values.
Knowing and using a persons trigger word, you can link the values it represents
to almost anything you suggest. Additionally, using trigger words allows you to
build rapport faster because the person instinctively feels you understand them.
Sometimes, simply feeding trigger words back is the only thing you need to do
to influence someone.
One particularly good way to use trigger words is to use them at the end of
your statement. In addition to triggering an associated emotion in the end, it
forces the listener to associate the emotion with your whole statement. When it
comes to abstract things that cant be easily measured, this allows you to
formulate answer that just feels right for the listener. For instance, lets
suppose that a job interviewer has emphasized cooperation being an important
value for him, but he is uncertain how you can fit into the workplace without
academic credentials.

I think it would be fairly reasonable to say my academic credentials
arent as good as some of your candidates might have, but as you can
clearly see from my past referrals, it has been easy for me to gain other
peoples cooperation.

Certainly, it is an absolutely vague answer, but the last word will trigger
whatever emotional associations the interviewer is associating with satisfying his
value. But how can you spot a good trigger word? Whenever you are talking
about any kind of emotional or abstract topic that cant be easily measured by
facts and figures, people start to use trigger words. They are always abstract in
nature and identify values that arent easily measurable (e.g., pleasure, freedom,
anxiety). The most powerful trigger words for a person are those that he
constantly leans on and returns to, and the more emotional the context, the more
trigger words a person tends to use. This is because the person is describing his
own internal experience, not facts and figures that are typically measured
rationally.
Familiarity and Repetition

In a study made in 1994, eighty subjects were asked to see fifty different full-
page colour magazine adverts and rate them. Then following the ratings, the
subjects were asked to indicate from another set which of the adverts they
recognized as having been in the original set. Those who participated in the
experiment in deliberate study conditions recalled around 60 percent of the
advertisements. Those who participated in the experiment in an incidental group
recalled only 11 percent. However, both parties showed an equal amount of bias
towards the adverts they had been exposed to, compared to the ones they had not
seen before (Perfect & Askew, 1994).
In modern psychology, this phenomenon is known as the illusion-of-truth
effect. People have a natural tendency to believe that whatever immediate
examples they can recall in relation to a current task must be important and
valid. Because of this, people are heavily biased towards more recent
information and also create false memories to support recall of any familiar
sounding statements (Ganzach, 2001; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Roediger &
McDermot, 1995)

Repetition
In practice, if something has been said several times during the interaction, by
the third or fourth time, the other person has a tendency to believe the statement
is true. This has been found to be true even if the person saying them has been
repeatedly lying or if something was just vaguely implied. Even if something
just reminds us about a familiar topic, we have the tendency to perceive it to be
familiar. However, it has been found that people tend to have maximum
confidence in the statement after 3 to 5 repetitions. After that, repetition starts to
lose its power and may even reverse. Furthermore, if the listener was paying
careful attention to what was being said and found an argument to be weak in the
first place, then repetition doesnt have an effect whatsoever (Begg, Anas &
Farinacci, 1992; Roediger & McDermot, 1995; Brinol, DeMarree & Petty,
2008;).
All this being said, it should be easy to see how this principle can be used
for gaining acquiescence. If you repeat a statement several times, even in a short
span, it tends to be accepted as a fact. For instance:

The harsh reality of the marketplace is that costs are going up, up, up
and the government is doing nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing about it
at all.

Intelligent use of repetition will significantly increase the impact of your
message. While it may feel strange repeating the same thing over again and
again, it actually sounds quite natural in conversation. This principle can be also
used for pacing:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it is important for you to realize that what we
you are learning here really works.

In this simple example, we just rapidly pace the person three times by
saying yea. Yeah in itself implies agreement, turning the word into a pace. In
a similar manner, just saying okay now and then can be used to pace people.

From Global to Specific

In 1995, two psychologists from Washington University in St Louis decided to
re-enact an old, forgotten experiment from 1959. In this experiment,
experimenters orally presented a list of 12 words to the students and asked the
students to recall all the items from the list. This was repeated six times. Then,
the students were given a list of words that comprised 12 studied and 30 non-
studied items. Students needed to rate how confident they were that each word
had appeared on one of the previous lists. Curiously enough, certain words were
recalled with the same frequency as said words even though they were never
said. What had happened is that students perceived these words to be familiar
because of their association. They just reminded them so much of the listed
words that it triggered a sense of familiarity.
Now, here is where it gets really interesting. In the next experiment, the
lists had 15 items instead of 12, and the whole process was repeated sixteen
times. Subjects were now first asked to classify each item as something they had
seen before or not. If the subject answered yes, he was then asked if he could
mentally relive the experience of the item being presented, or were they
confident without having a memory for the event. What happened is that people
almost invariably claimed they could mentally relive seeing that word. If
compared to the previous experiment, the recall for associated words had also
jumped from 40 to 72 percent. Participants asserted the associated words to be
familiar and true more often than the actual words that had been listed! The
effect got even stronger with more words being listed (Roediger & McDermot,
1995).
This phenomena is now known as the DeeseRoedigerMcDermott
paradigm and it has some powerful applications for influencing others. What the
paradigm means is that in practice, a previously introduced topic will influence
how familiar statements in the next topic will be perceived to be. If there is a
very strong connection between the topics, the statements in the second topic are
far more likely to be perceived as familiar and true regardless of their validity.
The easiest way to utilize this principle is to just move from global to more
specific:

1. Talk about generalities and what other people tend to think (e.g., The
car is a vital part of modern American culture)
2. Give a specific example (e.g., Bob drives to work in his car every
day, saving a lot of time compared to using public transportation)
3. Move to the personal level (e.g., You also need to have a car).

This is a remarkably good way to assert that what you are telling is true,
and gain acquiescence. People dont typically even resist the first two
statements, because you are not talking about them directly. Just start your
suggestions from a group of a people, and then gradually progress towards more
specific suggestions, until you are directly leading the individual. If you want to
see clearly how this structure is used in practice, just watch some info-
commercials.
Suggesting a Motivation

In 1964, Doctor William McGuire wanted to find a way to increase peoples

resistance to propaganda. His most important discovery was that just teaching
counter-arguments to people didnt increase their resistance. In addition, people
also needed to have motivation to protect themselves from propaganda.
McGuires elegant solution to the matter was simply starting the presentation
with forewarning of propaganda attacks or telling it was an inoculation against
enemy propaganda attacks. In 1986, Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo
observed the same to be true for considering new ideas. People needed to have
motivation to open themselves to new ideas and researching a suggested topic,
and typically the easiest way to do this was to bring the topic to a more personal
level (McGuire, 1964; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
Quite often, the only thing you need to do to bring the topic to a personal
level is to use self-referencing cues such as you. As a basic example, in 1989
doctors Robert Burnkrant and Rao Unnava conducted an experiment where they
compared the impact of highly self-referencing and low self-referencing adverts.
Even with all other things being the same, participants were more swayed by
highly self-referencing advertisements. Similar results have been also achieved
in other experiments of the same kind (Burnkrant & Unnava, 1989; Armstrong,
2010).
However, the most powerful way to bring a topic to a more personal level
is to provide a motivation for your suggestion. To give an example of how this
works, lets consider the old joke about a man who says to his date Want to
come up and see my etchings? Surely, such a lame phrase needs to have
ulterior motivations behind it; but, nonetheless, it gives a woman a reason to go
in. After all, it is not considered proper for a young lady to just to go into a
strangers home. When we suggest a motivation, it removes the persons need to
develop one and also brings the topic to a more personal level. It just needs to be
there to justify the suggested behaviour. If the person doesnt have emotional
resistance to the suggested idea, he has a tendency to accept it without further
analysis.
You might also think that suggested motivation would need to be complex
or rational, but this is not the case. Lets take a look at this classic example:

You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to
 admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. Your sexual
adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and controlled on
the outside, you tend to be too worrisome and insecure inside. At times,
you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or
the done the right thing. You have found it unwise to be too frank in
revealing yourself to others.

Doctor Bertram B. Forer presented this profile to his students in 1949.
When students were asked to rate the accuracy of the profile on a scale from 1 to
5, the profiles accuracy was rated to be 4.26 in average. It is just so vague that it
fits basically everyone you are going to meet (Forer, 1949).
However, in 1982, Dr. Robert Duetsch altered the test by reversing the
description (e.g., You are disciplined and controlled on the inside). What Dr.
Duetsch found was that people found these reversed descriptions equally
acceptable so long as the reading was connected to some kind of individuating
information about the participant (e.g., birthplace, city). This actually matches
precisely other research on motivation. This means that as long as you connect a
vague statement to something that individuates it to a person, no matter how trite
or obvious it may seem, people tend to accept the statement as accurate. This is
something that, for instance, professional cold readers and fortune tellers do all
the time in their work (Dewey & Saville, 1984; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
Another side of the coin is that you should also always provide a person
with a clear motivation and alternative for the old behaviour. Because the brain
is so lazy, if it is not given a compelling alternative for old behaviour, it will just
return to doing what it has been doing most. For instance, lets suppose you are
working with someone who is constantly being frustrated with the real estate
market. You might present your case otherwise perfectly, but until you can
provide the customer an emotionally satisfying alternative for being frustrated,
the brain will return back to its old behaviour. This can be something as simple
as weaving an exciting future for the customer or firing a positive trigger as you
give the suggestion, but it still needs to be done.

Cause-and-Effect Statements
It is a oldie but goodie, but you can easily suggest motivation by using cause-
and-effect words such as as, makes, or because. From your very birth, you
have been conditioned to respond to these words in a very specific way and
assume that there is a logical connection between connected statements,
triggering an assumed response. For example, in the classic experiment made in
1978, experimenters approached a total of 120 adults about making copies. The
experimenter simply asked Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox
machine, because I have to make copies? When a reason was given, people
complied with the request 93 percent of the time versus 60 percent when the
reason was not given. Giving a reason just triggered an automatic response.
What was even more noteworthy is that the actual reason wasnt really that
logical. The experimenter just told the person he needed to do it for some reason
(Langer, Blank & Chanowitz, 1978).
In practice, this effect tends to happen no matter how syntactically
incorrect or illogical your statement is if a person is following you along. Their
mind will literally do whatever is required to rationalize the connection into truth
as long as you are acting in a congruent manner.

I believe in a free market because Im republican.

At first, this may sound perfectly logical, but ... hold on! Are the policies
that you support irrevocably tied to your political affiliation? From a purely
logical standpoint, the statement itself doesnt make sense; nonetheless, if you
structure your statement this way, it sounds like it makes perfect sense.
This is what makes connectors so powerful. When used to connect things,
even the most illogical cause-and-effect statements can sound logical. If
someone is acquiescent, almost any claim tends to be accepted unchallenged.
Naturally, if someone starts to analyze your statements carefully, it is very
possible to spot illogical cause-and-effect statements. But doing so requires
effort, something most people arent willing to do. Furthermore, most of us have
been generally conditioned not to challenge other peoples beliefs, adding more
strength to the power of such connected statements.

As you have clearly started to realize, this kind of language can create
very interesting responses in other people.

In this instance, we used the word as instead of because to create a
cause-and-effect statement. I personally prefer to use the word as, because it
only subtly implies connection, removes conscious analysis, and makes creating
the actual pace easier. For instance:

As you sit on the chair, you can easily start to relax.

Here I used driving suggestions to shape the meaning of the command and
further directed how the person will process it. Now that the command has a
motivation attached to it, it is much more palatable to the mind. But how should
sitting in the chair equal relaxing? If you think about, it doesnt really make
sense. Even then, in casual conversation, suggestions like this are almost
guaranteed to create a response if the listener is an acquiescent state of mind.
This is even more if the cause-and-effect statement follows a disruption of
thought. For example:
Thats right, thats a good point [pause]... because you can still give me a
free upgrade, as I really need to get back home today, right?

In this example, we first broke the state, and then suggested that the other
person can give us a free upgrade because we really need to get back home
today. Because of the interrupt, the suggestion tends to just slip in unchallenged,
especially when stated in a cause and effect format. Disruptions of thought will
be discussed in much greater detail in the Objection Handling chapter.
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea how cause-and-effect
statements work, but another common variation on them is complex equivalence.
You start with something you know the person will agree with to pace his reality,
and then presuppose it is going to cause whatever suggestion you want them to
agree with. When you learn to do this correctly, you will quickly learn that
people will often accept even the most nonsensical and incoherent statements
you could ever dream up as truth.

You are reading this book and it makes you easily become better at
influence.

In this example, we linked reading this book to becoming better at
influence. Does that make any sense whatsoever? Of course not, but once again,
the mind creates the connection. Yet another variation on this is the total belief
equation. It follows the same X-causes-Y structure, except that you are also
giving the connection meaning:

You are easily and effortlessly getting better at influence, because you
 have read
this far, and it means you are starting to understand how useful cause-and-
effect
statements are.

The given meaning makes your claim sounds more reasonable, but it also
makes it much harder to spot the illogical cause-and-effect statement. In this
structure, the meaning doesnt need to be true, only plausible enough to be
accepted. When people go through this structure, they will rationalize it later.

Connectors
We are now going to take a look at the words and and but. These two
connector words operate using very specific logic behind them that can be used
to influence others. Lets take a look first at but.

Thats an excellent plan, but there is only one little problem.

Essentially, the word but cancels everything that comes before it in the
sentence. While a person thinks about the above statement, you are first
presupposing that the plan is excellent, but then immediately cancelling that
statement. So far as your listener perceives, it is not an excellent plan anymore
because of that little problem. That perception can be very hard to stave off even
if the problem is truly minor. In many cases, it is better to link your statements
with and even if it wouldnt be perfect from a linguistic standpoint.

Thats an excellent plan, and there is only one little problem.

This sounds so much better, even if the message is pretty much the same.
To use but to your advantage, you only need to say the negative first, and then
positive.

I understand your concerns about this plan, but we have very good fail-
safe protocols in place.

Essentially, the word but cancels out everything that comes before it in
the sentence. While a person thinks about the above statement, we are first
presupposing they are having concerns, but then immediately cancelling that
thought process. Anything that comes after the word but tends to be accepted
as a fact. The same is also true for the word and.

Yes, but are you aware of the possibility that this problem is really about
how you relate to other people, and even more importantly, about your
indecisiveness to do something about it?

In this example, both the words yes and but pace your listener. Firstly,
we are telling them what the problem is really about and then connecting it to
another claim using the word and. Even if your guess is completely wrong, it
certainly sounds factual and true. Masterful use of but and and together
allows a person to accept junk logic that only sounds perfectly reasonable but in
fact may not be true.
Cold Reading

One of the most powerful ways to become an object of fascination is to do

simple cold reading. Constantly employed by mentalists, it simply means
creating an impression that you have special insight into the other person just by
staying suitably vague. When done properly, what typically happens is that the
person will agree with your observation, because it is their own mind that creates
the meaning for your words. Lets take another look at this classic example:

You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to
admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. Your sexual
adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and controlled on
the outside, you tend to be too worrisome and insecure inside. At times,
you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or
the done the right thing. You have found it unwise to be too frank in
revealing yourself to others.

Doctor Bertram B. Forer presented this profile to his students in 1949.
When students were asked to rate the accuracy of the profile on a scale from 1 to
5, the profiles accuracy was rated to be 4.26 in average. It is just so vague that it
fits basically everyone you are going to meet. These kind of rainbow statements
work because you are offering people two polar opposites that fit to practically
anyone, especially if deliver them with some kind of individuating information.
For example:

From the impression I have gained from your astrological sign, you seem
to have certain challenges with your relationships and it has started to
strain you both mentally and physically. It seems like you are starting to
regret certain choices in your life. Wouldnt that be fair to say?

As long as you connect a vague statement to something that individuates it
to a person, no matter how trite or obvious it may seem, people tend to accept
the statement as accurate. Typically this individuating information is their
birthplace, city, or astrological sign, but anything they have personal investment
in works. For example, you can connect your statement to their clothes or other
material possessions. It is actually ridiculous how well you can make people
believe by connecting your reading into the shoes they are wearing.
But isnt there a risk you get called on your readings? Not really. Cold
reading is strongly rigged in the readers favour, because people have a natural
tendency to be self-serving, meaning that they typically ignore incorrect
statements completely while forgetting all inconvenient inaccuracies.
Furthermore, what you are saying is only your own impression. If disagreement
occurs, it really just means the interpretation is wrong, nothing else. Those who
do cold reading for a living tend to stack the deck even further to their favour by
using some kind of system (e.g., tarot cards, palmistry, I-Ching). Before starting
their reading, they typically tell the participant how the system is known to give
accurate results, but they are just mere interpreters of it. In addition to indicating
humility, if there is a mistake, it is just mistake in the interpretation of the
system. The system also forces involvement from the other party and gives the
reader legitimate reason to ask from their participant what the used prop means
for them.
Ultimately, the only real risks of failure are really related to your own
character flaws. You might focus too much on a specific outcome and insist on a
specific answer even when the other person is clearly thinking otherwise.
Because of cold readings interpretive nature, you need to allow room for the
participant to create his own answers. Another common mistake is to belittle
your participant. Nobody wants to be downplayed and this kind of smugness is
absolutely devastating for cold reading.

Wealth, Health and Relationships

What also works greatly to your advantage is that like great mentalist Kenton
Knepper said, every need the other person has can be vaguely categorized into
wealth, health, or relationships. After all, there can be both outer and inner
health and wealth and you can also have different kinds of relationships with
others and yourself. For example:

From the impression I have gained from you, you seem to have certain
challenges with your relationships and it has started to strain you both
mentally and physically. It seems like you are starting to regret certain
choices in your life. Wouldnt that be fair to say?

In this example, we claim that the person has certain challenges with his
relationships and it has started to strain him both mentally and physically. The
whole statement is so vague that it can be easily applied to any area of the
persons life. Also in this example, we finished the statement by asking if the
statement made sense for the other person. This is really clever, because in
addition to forcing the person to give meaning to your vague statement, it
implies the concern about the persons capability to understand you.
Furthermore, when you do this, people typically assume they made a mistake in
interpreting you instead of you making a mistake.
In addition to wealth, health, and relationships, there are also certain other
things on which you can nearly always rely to exist. You can talk about a
predictable adult crisis (e.g., hitting 30s), being a frustrated talent (e.g., the
person feels he doesnt nurture his talents), and setbacks of a specific choice
(e.g., career choice). This kind of bluffing is especially common with
professionals. They just guess things based on how likely they are to be true. For
instance, if you operate in an area that has an airport, you could say you are
hearing the sounds of an airplane. How likely it is that either the participant or
someone he knows has taken a flight? Very likely. This is also true for the
participants past. For example, how many women born in the late 70s have
idolized Madonna? Quite a few.

Fishing for More Information

If you want to use cold reading for fishing for more information, just ask direct
questions negatively. For instance:

Reader: Youre not dating someone now, are you?

Participant: Afraid so.

Reader: I thought so. Yes, I had the impression that there has been a shift
in your relationship just recently and it is affecting your life in multiple
ways that might not be that obvious to other people around you. Does this
make sense to you?

In this example, no matter which way the person answers, it seems that we
were implying that choice. The trick here is to always assume the positive with
your probing questions even if the person answers negative. After assuming the
positive, we just directly went to providing a reading. This is pretty much a fool-
proof approach, but what should you do if your reading doesnt match the
person? In this case, you just claim that this is how you, as a person, perceived
him as he stepped in. There is practically nothing the other person could call
you on without showing up as crazy. Most people will even find this insight
valuable, because it tells them how others might perceive them.

Providing a Summary
Another useful tool for gaining the perception of agreement is to finish the
interaction by summarizing what you two have agreed upon. After the other
person has agreed on your summary, he will also commit to following it later on.
This process can be admittedly abused greatly, because humans have been
proven to have a hard time remembering accurately what was said just ten
seconds ago. The reality is people cant recall how much information they have
really provided to you or what was really being said. People also recall easiest
the first and last thing they hear. This is because new information is constantly
distorting and pushing information away from short-term memory and only the
things that are repeated tend to be encoded to longer-term memory. Information
said in the beginning tends to be rehearsed and repeated enough to be encoded,
while the last information avoids being distorted (Peterson & Peterson, 1959).
This means that when people hear you telling what really happened in the
discussion, they are more likely to remember your description than anything
else. In practice, this allows you often to tidy up even major blunders and tie up
any potential loose ends. Because humans also have a natural tendency to focus
on whatever suits their personal interpretation, you will be surprised to discover
what kind of leaps of logic people are willing to make to justify your overview.
For instance, when I did cold reading for a living, there were many bizarre
occurrences where the participant recalled me naming her birthplace, when I told
her that I had seen an old house (Stopa, 2011).
Presuppositions: Leading a Person

The strategies that you have learnt in this part are meant to create that perception
of agreement. To repeat what was said in the beginning, you should start the
interaction by gaining agreement with the person and progress towards more
detailed suggestions only after you have gained that perception. However,
many people have the tendency to overdo this part. They continue talking and
talking when a person is already clearly waiting for the speaker to lead them into
a better place. In practice, using these strategies, you often gain acquiescence in
a matter of minutes, sometimes even in the span of several statements.
After gaining acquiescence, there is only leading. You just start to lead a
person with something they value, telling them what is going to happen, while
driving towards your intended outcome. This happens easiest through utilizing
presuppositions. In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics,
presupposition is a term used to describe the implicit assumption of something
being true or real. For instance, Steve bought a car. The statement itself
assumes that both Steve and the car exist, and that Steve bought the car. Can we
really be sure any of those things exist? Of course not, but under normal
circumstances, until there is clear disagreement about the discussed topic, we
have a natural tendency to accept the suggested presuppositions as truth.
With the intelligent use of presuppositions, it becomes very easy to direct
an interaction towards the direction you want. However, it is absolutely vital that
you have acquiescence and present an idea that seems at least somewhat
plausible under the given circumstances. However, it just needs to sound
plausible, not logical. At least in my own personal experience, quite a few
people practicing these skills try to move their customers in too large steps and
break the illusion. Once again, start from small, lead a person in small steps, and
if you lose acquiescence back off and adjust your approach.

Manner Adverbs
During the years, linguistics have spent a considerable amount of time trying to
identify all lexical classes and constructs that trigger presupposition. Perhaps the
most widely agreed-upon trigger is the manner adverb (Abbott, 2000).
For example:

 You can easily and effortlessly make this decision right now.

This statement presupposes that making a decision is both easy and
effortless. The listener doesnt need to necessarily agree with the statement, but
to do otherwise, he would need to analyze the meaning of every word. In
practice, unless the listener has a prior negative attitude towards the person
talking or the given statement, he typically just accepts all presuppositions of
what is being said. Even if he disagrees with a specific presupposition, it forces
him to accept any presuppositions assumed before it. This is even truer when
someone is being acquiescent, because disagreement would mean losing the
current level of rapport.
There isnt much to using manner adverbs, but one thing you need to be on
constant lookout for is mental friction. Mental friction is caused by listing details
after the object you are describing. For instance:

Steve bought a car that is avocado green and had a flat tire.

Reading this statement, your mind begins to create a mental image of a car,
but is then forced to backtrack, think about avocado, paint the car avocado green,
and put a flat tire on it. This kind of constant back-tracking is simply too jarring
and makes it hard for the listener to become truly involved with the description.
To avoid this, you only need to place your descriptive presuppositions before the
object that you want the listener to acknowledge.

Steve bought an avocado green, flat-tired car

Creating the mental imagery now doesnt take any mental effort on the
listeners part, and they can easily follow your description without any kind of
mental interruption. In practice, you should just add positive and beneficial
manner adverbs into everything you say. For instance:

We have done our best to make sure that it is as effortless and automatic
as possible to manage your portfolio.

You can pepper pretty much anything with positive manner adverbs and
even larger numbers feel absolutely natural when used intelligently. Another
useful tool to use with them is the tag question.

You can easily imagine this being true, cant you?

Pretty neat, dont you agree? In a tag question, you just put negation at the
end of the statement. While negation doesnt change the triggered
presuppositions, it disarms a great deal of conscious analysis because so far as
the listeners mind perceives, you are just asking a question. Therefore, it can
process your suggestion without resistance. To understand your tag question, the
person even needs to re-process what was said before it, thus reinforcing the
suggestion. And finally, when the person answers your question, he even self-
affirms what you have said. Some of the most useful manner adverbs include
absolutely, automatically, clearly, easily, effortlessly, naturally, obviously,
readily, simply, and truly.

Factives
Another commonly accepted trigger for presupposition is factives. Factives
simply presuppose that something is being true (Kiparsky & Kiparsky, 1970).
For example:

You can easily start to understand the power of presuppositions

In this example, the word understand is a factive presupposition. If you
can understand something, it must be true. What makes factives so powerful is
that they can be used to dictate something existing. What do I mean by this?
Lets take a look at this classic example:

Are you already aware of which one of your feet is heavier?

Upon hearing this statement, the listeners mind focuses inward and
searches for a sensation of heaviness. Because having awareness of something
requires it to be true, the mind will quite literally create a sense of heaviness in
either foot in order to become aware of it. Once again, a person might disagree
with the statement by analyzing it, but in practice this happens very rarely until
there is a prior negative attitude or disbelief about the physical object existing.
For example, if you claim to have your own helicopter, a person might respond
to it with disbelief.
 However, when speaking about abstract or immaterial things that dont
have any physicality, there is very little that the person can disagree with. After
all, to understand factive presupposition, you need to create thoughts, abstract
values, and sensations presupposed by it. Lets take a look at a classic military
recruitment phase:

Citizen, are you already aware that freedom and democracy is under
attack?

Well, even if the person wasnt aware of it before, now he is. Pretty slick,
dont you agree? While it is an easy principle to understand and apply, factives
are perhaps the most powerful linguistic strategy in your arsenal. With factives,
you can literally tell a person what to pay attention to or feel. Nonetheless,
always keep in mind that the suggested process still needs to make sense in a
given context. Some of the most useful factives include aware, comprehend,
discover, dream, experience, focus, notice, perceive, realize, recognize,
understand, and wonder.

Temporal Clauses
The third commonly accepted trigger for presupposition is temporal clauses.
This means any statement that is assuming some kind of temporal position and
condition for something to happen. If the listener accepts the statement, he also
accepts how and when something is going to happen. For instance, you might
tell me that something had happened in the past (Heinmki, 1974; Beaver &
Condoravdi, 2003).

What was it that you thought to be a problem before?

In this example, we suggested that whatever problem the customer might
have is just a thought and put it into past tense. The implication here is that the
problem was just a thought, nothing else. And if it is just a thought that is in your
past, it really cant control you any more, can it? The word before can be also
used to disarm resistance, because it suggests that we havent yet started to doing
something. For instance, lets suppose you would be doing a sales presentation:

Before we begin, let me tell you a story about this client of mine.

In this example, the word before suggests that the sales presentation
hasnt started yet. Why would the prospect resist listening to you in any way,
because you havent started to sell him anything yet? Of course, you can also tell
me something is happening right now.

As you can clearly begin to see, we have already taken good care of
everything.

When the customer hears this statement, he needs to start to imagine that
we have already taken good care of everything. Obviously, you can also tell me
something is going to happen in the future. For instance:

After we have finished this presentation, you will easily start to have a
clear idea of what you were missing before.

In this example, it is presupposed that after finishing the presentation the
customer will have a clear idea of what he was missing before the presentation.
The mind will do its very best to make the connection, meaning that you are
pretty much dictating how the presentation will turn out while creating the
illusion that the person has a choice in the matter. You can even shift between
different temporal positions:

After we have finished the project you can start to look back at this
moment and realize how most of your concerns were unfounded.

In this example, we move the customer to the future, then look back at the
present and realize how most of his concerns are unfounded. We will discuss
more about this process a little later on. While not technically temporal clauses,
aspectual verbs like stop, start, and now create the same effect. They can be used
to direct what a person should or shouldnt be doing at any given moment. Lets
look at the following example:

Stop having those silly thoughts now and start realizing how this book
can help you become a better influencer.

When stated strongly (but not aggressively), stop literally interrupts any
thought processes the listener might be havingeven if just for the slightest
momentthereby creating a disruption of thought. Start, on the other hand,
makes the person begin to think about whatever has just been suggested. Now
has several uses; it will automatically make the person process everything you
have just said prior to saying now, and in turn re-orient the listener back into
the present moment. Some of the most useful temporal clauses include already,
after, before, begin, during, now, later, sooner, start, stop, and while.
Keypoints

You need to start from creating a perception of agreement and move

onto specifics only after doing so
To create a perception of agreement, validate the persons own reality
Stage opportunities for people and give them choice to bypass
resistance
So long as you have rapport and stay vague enough, there simply
cant be disagreement
When you suggest a motivation, it removes a persons need to
develop one and also brings the topic to a more personal level
When a trigger word is fed back to someone, their state will
automatically be altered to the state they associate with that word
Language can presuppose a condition for something to happen and
manipulate a person's perception of time

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION
Now that you have rapport and the person is in an acquiescent state, it is time to
explore the emotional connection. The goal of this phase is to make the person
connect different emotional states to your desired outcome. For this purpose, we
have two different tools: elicitations, and conditioned responses.
The basic idea behind all elicitations is to ask the type of questions that
force someone to access the deeper parts of their mind. Any time a person
accesses these parts, they experience any emotions related to the answer. When
they experience these emotions, they can be amplified, set on a trigger for later
use, or connected to anything you want. In addition, elicitations can be used to
find out how that person unconsciously makes decisions. You can find out what
values and unconscious beliefs drive the buying decision. After you have found
them, you need to focus your message on them.
With conditioned responses, you can condition a person to have a specific
emotional response to your chosen gesture or other external stimulus. When you
then suggest something to them, you fire the trigger to change their state. Now
they feel the triggered emotion while thinking about your suggestion and feel
compelled to act on it. If your goal is to only influence people, I would dare to
say conditioned responses are the most useful skill for you to learn. This book
covers only the bare basics of it; for advancing your studies, I highly recommend
two people: Tom Vizzini and Kim McFarland of Essential Skills
(http://www.essential-skills.com). I very rarely give endorsements for anyone,
but there are absolutely nobody else in the world who could teach this particular
skillset as well as they do. Some of their advanced strategies allow you to even
reach outcomes that are practically impossible without the tools they teach.
What is Conditioned Response?

For more than a hundred years, it has been known that you can train animals
(including humans) to have a specific emotional response to external stimuli. For
instance, everyone knows Dr. Pavlovs experiments on training dogs to salivate
just by ringing a bell. What is less commonly known is that for quite a bit of
time, Dr. Pavlov was stumped by the fact that the dogs often didnt start to
salivate in front of guests. What had happened was that the guests and the room
were novel stimuli for the dog. Under these changed circumstances, the bell
wouldnt trigger the conditioned response. After becoming habituated to guests
and the room, the bell started to work again (Pavlov, 1927).
In psychology, the orienting response means a reaction that happens when an individual encounters a novel environmental
stimulus. The brain will shift its attention to the stimuli even before identifying it based on the current context and its already familiar
patterns. For instance, in the case of a loud sound, your attention will shift towards that sound, and only after doing so your brain will
try to identify the sound. After the same stimulus has been repeated long enough, the orienting responses will start to decrease in
intensity and eventually cease. Simply put, the person has become habituated to the stimulus and it doesnt draw his attention anymore.
If the brain considers the stimulus significant, on the other hand, it will associate whatever emotional state it is currently experiencing
with that stimulus, as demonstrated by operant conditioning. All this typically happens in less than a second, forming a new emotional
association (Sokolov, 1960; Yantis, 1993; Bradley, 2009; Buggman, Goslin & Duchamp-Viret, 2013).
In conditioned response, we use this principle to our advantage by eliciting
an emotional response from the other person. As we see the person shifting into
that state, we make a simple gesture that draws a little bit of the brains attention.
In simple terms, you, including the gesture, are novel stimuli in relation to the
context and emotional state the person is experiencing. The brain will instantly
associate the emotional state with you and the gesture. Now, the only thing you
need to do is use the same gesture as you give the suggestion to a person. As
they start to think about your suggestion, the gesture will trigger whatever
emotions are associated with it. Even though the person cant consciously
explain it, he just feels an emotional tug regarding the suggestion. This is
because the brain just assumes the triggered emotional response is correct based
on the pattern it has just learnt. Repetition will just continue making the
conditioned response stronger, because you are reinforcing the already familiar
pattern of response.
While you will do fantastically well if you learn only to use suggestion and
elicitations, learning to create conditioned responses will bring those skills to a
whole new level. The really neat thing about conditioned responses is that you
dont even need to have strong, larger-than-life emotions for it to work. As long
as you can make someone feel even a little bit of emotion while giving a
suggestion, the momentum typically carries them in the right direction. Once
again, this is because people tend to think that an idea that makes them feel good
is the right one (Kahneman, 2011).
It is still important to understand simple conditioned responses like these
cant alone make people do something that they have a strong resistance for
(e.g., unreasonably large requests). That being said, this is not as big of a
limitation as you might think, because all the other techniques presented in this
book help to significantly reduce resistance even for larger requests. When used
properly, conditioned responses are a subtle but devastating tool, and they can be
also used to make a person associate a feeling with a person, physical object, or
even an abstract idea.

Eliciting Emotions
As you have learned thus far, emotions drive decisions and determine what is
considered acceptable in a given context. Simply put, if someone feels
absolutely fantastic about making a specific decision, influencing him will be so
much easier. As you interact with people, they go into different emotional states
all the time as they think about what you are talking about. When we are
eliciting responses, our goal is to gain responses that we can turn into a
conditioned response. It is worth repeating that the idea behind elicitations is
not to get the strongest possible emotional response from the person. While
many people approach elicitations from the mindset that a stronger response is
better, in practice it is detrimental to your influence efforts.
This is because while it is very easy to get a strong emotional response,
this can make a person feel really uncomfortable. It is simply not normal to
suddenly have a strong emotional response, and having such a response can
scare some people away from the interaction. When someone is outside their
comfort zone of normal daily life experience, they can also act in very
unpredictable ways. Finally, after firing the trigger several times, the person will
also start to realize you are doing something, even though he cant put his finger
on it.
Instead of thinking you need to gain a strong emotional response to
influence someone, you really only need to gain an emotional response that
can be used to direct the person toward your specific outcome. This is why you
typically want to set a trigger at the point where the emotion is starting to
accelerate. When the person feels that the emotion is accelerating and gaining
momentum, it compels him to act on that response. Having an emotional
response that is static rarely makes people do anything, because there is no
momentum behind it. On the other hand, if you set the trigger when the state is
already waning, the brain learns to associate your gesture with an emotional state
that is already deteriorating. This means that when you fire your trigger, instead
of changing the persons mental state, you make his current emotional state
deteriorate. Your trigger now has a completely opposite effect from what you are
aiming for.
For all these reasons, you should set the trigger at a point where the
response is starting to accelerate. It is almost impossible to make the response
stop, but it will peak within the range of the persons normal daily life
experience. You can always accelerate the state later on if you need to, but you
really cant make a trigger made at a peak state less strong without going
through the whole elicitation process. If you miss the suitable point, it is not big
deal, because you can always wait for the response to deteriorate or bump the
response by re-eliciting the emotion.

Shifting Your Own State

Very often, a trigger is defined to be any specific feeling, sound, or image that
causes a person to revivify part of their previous experience. While this
definition is absolutely true, it is also way too loose for our needs, as it means
pretty much any experience a person has in his life is a trigger. Because of this, I
define a trigger as an emotional response that has been elicited and tied to a
specific trigger by design.
In practical terms, a conditioned response has two different parts: the
trigger and the state. The trigger is the stimulus that causes a triggered state to
be revivified. This trigger can be anything from a specific gesture to a sound or
even touch. When people learn about conditioned responses, they are often led to
believe that only the specific gesture they make at the moment of elicitation
turns into the trigger for the state. It is extremely important to understand that
this is not true. Everything that you do during the elicitation turns into trigger
including your own mental state, tonality, and posture. This means that after you
have elicited a mental state successfully, you dont need to do anything except
speak in the same tonality or have the same mental state to trigger the state.
Granted, the response tends to be on the weak side, because your mental state
and tonality are often not the most unique parts of the experience.
This actually works greatly to our advantage, because it means we can also
prime a person with our own emotional state. When you shift your own
emotional state, it will encourage the other person to have the same kind of
response. For instance, if you shift your state to be positive and ask a person to
tell what they do for fun, it will help in drawing a positive state out of them.
Shifting your state also makes using conditioned responses easier, because you
can use the same gesture for multiple triggers. This is because all positive states
you have set on a trigger will be associated with you being in a positive state,
and changing your state will automatically change your posture and general
expression. Negative states, on the other hand, will be associated with you being
in a negative state.
When most people learn these skills for the first time, they also start to
think they actually need to have a clear idea about what they have set the trigger
on. This is not the case. You actually want to keep your state as general as
possible so that the other person can develop their own emotional responses. So
long as the state they shift into seems to be positive, you can just trigger it and
use it to influence them. In normal daily life interactions, almost any kind of
triggered positive state is enough to influence a person. Do you really care if
they feel relaxed, happy, or curious about following your instructions? No. So
long as they are following your suggestions, you are moving into the right
direction. Once again, almost everything can be done with positive states only.
Practical Elicitations

When a person revivifies any previous experience, he also recalls any other
thought processes that he had during that time. If you elicit a personal and
complex issue, you have no idea what thought processes they start to recall. For
example, if you elicited someone to losing his family member, in addition to
having a strong emotional response, you would also elicit all the thought
processes associated with his death. Suddenly a person starts to cry and because
you caused the response to happen, he will associate you with the death of his
family member. This is a bad thing and not even necessary.
Technically speaking, it doesnt really matter how you gained an emotional
response for your trigger, because emotions are context-free. It doesnt matter
that elicited a feeling of relaxation through talking about their vacation, hobbies,
or even things like smoking weed. It is still the same emotional response, and it
can be, through conditioned responses, connected to anything you want. Why
you would you risk having all the negative responses when you can just casually
chit-chat about random things to elicit the states you want? That you elicited
them in casual conversation doesnt make them any less effective for guiding
people, but saves you from a lot of trouble. That being said, it is much easier to
elicit emotional states from a context where it is considered appropriate to ask
about them. As an example, you really dont want to ask someone their marital
status during a business meeting.

1. Eliciting the State

Eliciting the state happens from shifting your own state towards what you want
to elicit. After you have shifted your state, you just ask a question that elicits the
desired emotional response. For example, lets suppose you would ask the
following in casual conversation:

What do you do to relax?

As long as you have rapport with the person, asking a question like this
makes him recall some relaxing experience and have an emotional response
related to that experience. Of course, that response is likely to be relatively
weak, but once again, you dont need particularly strong or powerful responses.
There just needs to be something you can build on. Lets take a look at another
example:

I am kind of curious, what do you do to relax?

In the given example, we once again used a direct question to elicit a
feeling of relaxation, but more introverted people often dont respond that well
to them. With people like this, you can use softer questions to elicit a response.

Have you ever felt like you could just start to relax?

When asked this way, the outcome is still the same. The person starts to
think about something that makes him relax and has the emotional response
related to that experience. Questions like, Have you ever ...?, When you ...?,
If you were to ...?, Whats it like when ...? work best because they sound
non-confrontational while presupposing recalling an earlier experience.

When you want to relax, what do you usually do?

Once again, we elicited a feeling of relaxation. Naturally, there will be
times when you want to be little bit more specific with your elicitations. The best
way to do this is to use an unusual angle. An unusual angle requests the person
to recall an experience that was somehow different from normal. For instance:

That perfect vacation ... where are you?

By specifying that you want to them to think about their perfect vacation,
you are forcing the other person to think about a place that he associates many
positive feelings with. Another example:

Whats it like to go shopping with someone you really know well?

In this example, the unusual angle is to think about going shopping with
someone the person knows really well. This presupposes that the elicited state
will have some kind of trust and openness involved. Obviously, there are
countless ways to gain a similar response.

 Have you ever felt that you could rely on one person more than any
other?

This time, we are asking the person to think about a person whom they
could trust more than any other. The result is still the sameeliciting a state that
involves a higher level of trust and openness.

2. Accelerating the State

Sometimes, you will have a state that can be set on a trigger just by asking
simple questions like the ones posed just previously. However, most of the time
the state can be so weak that it doesnt lead anywhere nor is it worth using for
conditioning. In such situations, you can bump up a state by elaborating
further on a topic and asking new questions. Lets assume that the person surfs
because they find it exciting. In this case, you could accelerate the state by
saying something like:

Thats so interesting. I didnt realize surfing could be that exciting.

When a person hears a statement like this, their mind is forced to process
the last few sentences again in order to understand you. This automatically
causes their state to accelerate and allows setting the trigger in a better position.
You can also just ask them to describe the experience more.

Can you tell me more about that golf trip you had?

Once again, the response begins to accelerate. Yet another way to re-elicit
the same state would be:

I have been wondering why people like golfing ... why do you like it?

This approach tends to be little more disarming, because you are softening
it up and also indicating curiosity. Another way to bump the response is to
validate what is observed. For example, if you see someone responding strongly
to flowers, you could say the following:

So, you like flowers?

This question asks the mind to access immediately the state they just had.
This also means that quite often the best thing you can actually do is to just listen
to people and observe them. People go into different states all the time while
telling stories and if you miss the trigger point, you just re-elicit the state. You
just sit there relaxed, allowing them to do all the hard work for you while you
are setting your triggers.
If you are in a more casual conversation and you see the person shifting
into a state, you can also just feed back what they just said to re-elicit the state.
While approaches like this work very well, perhaps the best way to accelerate
any state is to isolate it; focus the person on a specific part of an experience.

Whats your favourite restaurant? What is the best about it?

In this example, we first had a slight pause and then isolated the person to
think about the best thing about that restaurant. At this point, you can also steer
the discussion in another direction, now that the context has shifted:

I see, but have you ever gone to a restaurant that was horrible?

Now that you two are already talking about restaurants, it is easy to elicit
an emotional state for a negative experience. You can even pinpoint this to any
part of the experience you want to set on a trigger.

Salesman: Have you ever felt like buying something because it truly
captured your imagination?

Customer: Yes I have. My friend and I went shopping and I just saw this
wonderful red dress.

Salesman: Red dress ... what exactly about it captured your
imagination?

Now, youve isolated an experience directly to its most exciting part.
While accelerating the response, it is important to understand that the emotion
will accelerate directly from the point where it had deteriorated thus far, meaning
you can accidentally build a peak state and go far above it just by doing re-
elicitation.

3. Affirm the State

When eliciting an emotional state, most people will immediately shift into the
state you elicited. However, some people wont do this. In these cases, you dont
need to do anything more than ask the person how the experience felt. This will
automatically make them affirm existence of the state and go into it again. The
mind needs to do this in order for the feeling to be explained. For example:

How did that make you feel?

A question like this forces a person to associate with their experience and
immediately feel emotions related to the experience. Another example:

When I go fishing, I find it so relaxing. You know that feeling, right?

When the person then answers, it makes him agree and affirm existence of
the state, thus associating him with it. Other phrases like How does it feel?,
And that gives you what?, That leads to?, How do you know?, What do
you do?, What is that like for you? are all good questions for suggesting
association.
Choosing Your Trigger

First and foremost, a good conditioned response has a clear, simple, easily
identifiable trigger that doesnt get confused with anything else. Let me repeat
this. A trigger needs to be discreet, clear, and not confused with anything else.
One of the biggest reasons people fail at creating conditioning responses is lack
of consistency. Either they forget their own triggers, or havent planned in
advance which gesture will trigger what emotion. A little planning beforehand
will save you a lot of trouble later on.
However, people often greatly complicate choosing the trigger. They think
they need to have dozens of different gestures for conditioned responses, but in
reality, you only need two different gestures. One for positive states and one for
negative states. Once again, this is because your own state is part of the trigger.
When you shift your state, it will push them into the right state while the gesture
reminds them about that state. This is why you can use the same gesture again
and again.
For example, you could decide that every time you slightly pop your left
hand, it works as a trigger for any positive states you have triggered. Now you
dont need to do anything else than switch your own personal state, talk about
the state you want them to experience, and fire the trigger. Even when they are
set in the same gesture, different states dont get muddled up. Your own personal
state is always part of the trigger and helps the persons mind distinguish
between triggered states. You dont need to memorize dozens of different
gestures, just choose two or three that work for you. And even that is not
actually necessary, because almost everything can be done with positive states
only. If you want to keep things even simpler, just choose a single gesture to
use.
The best way to choose the actual gesture is to think about the different
gestures that you do naturally all the time anyways. For example, what do you
do while you are in a relaxed state? Do you nod in a specific way? How do your
hands move? Do you put your hands into your pockets? Do you cross your legs?
Do you lean backwards? If you dont have a friend with whom you could do
this, you can always use a mirror instead. Just by thinking and experimenting a
little bit, you can easily find good gestures to use.
The reason why you should choose a gesture that is within your normal
body language is that it also prevents you showing up in an incongruent manner
while firing the trigger. If you start to use gestures that dont feel like they would
happen in your normal interaction, it can make the other person wonder what the
heck you are doing. This, in turn, pollutes your trigger with emotional states you
didnt intend the person to experience. Your gesture can be very, very subtle, but
it is important that it will pop up somehow and it is a little bit outside someones
narrow focus. These kinds of gestures naturally trigger an orienting response.
Forming the Trigger

In this simple three-step model, you will learn how to set a trigger on emotional
responses reliably for later use. While eliciting states is typically the way to go,
you should also watch out for windows of opportunity. People go into useful
states all the time even without elicitations, and nothing prevents you from
setting a trigger on them. Just pay attention to any opportunities.

Setting the Trigger

After the desired state has been elicited, setting the actual trigger is a relatively
easy process. When a person begins to process your questions, you should see
immediate physiological changes in their facial expression, posture, and eye
movements. Some people process information strongly internally, meaning that
there arent many external cues about their state changes. Nonetheless, while
these changes may be subtle, something will always change in a persons posture
and expression when he shifts from one state to another. If nothing seems to
happen, just accelerate the response by doing a re-elicitation.
If you have great rapport and have calibrated to the other person properly,
you will also feel their change because, as stated so many times before, rapport
is a two-way street. Everything that they experience, you will feel at least to
some extent. This is where expanded awareness and your ability to pay attention
to others play a big role. Furthermore, by eliciting the state many times without
the goal of setting a trigger, you can easily learn the right place for conditioning.
Remember to be patient, as some people take a longer time to process questions.
When noticing their state changing, simply make a clear gesture to set the
trigger. Thats it. You now have a working trigger.

Using the Trigger

Now, you probably cant imagine that this can be this easy, but it is. It takes less
than 500 milliseconds for the brain to construct a trigger. Now its time to test it.
Fire the trigger while giving a suggestion and notice any changes in the persons
physiology or state. The triggered response will be a little weaker than when
you elicited the state, but it is still strong enough to lead a person. Remember
also that it takes a little bit of time for the person to shift into the state you are
triggering.
Just keep in mind that you should always guide the person to take a
specific action while firing your trigger. As a simple example, you could talk
about how excited he can be about making this decision, and fire the trigger that
causes excitement. Always keep your outcome in mind while firing the trigger,
and dont fire trigger in the context where you cant lead the person anywhere
(e.g., greet the person and fire the trigger). When this happens, the trigger gets
associated with anything that is in the persons current view.
The most common mistake that people make using their triggers is to fire
them without shifting their state first. For example, if you fire the trigger while
being anxious, and it was originally set in a positive state, then these two states
muddle together. Soon you wont have the slightest idea what state you are
evoking with your trigger. Keep in mind that while you need to go into the state
to use the trigger, you dont need to stay in that state for a very long time. Just go
into the state a little bit while firing the trigger to have it work.

Setting Triggers to Objects and People

So far, we have been mostly talking about how you can set triggers into gestures,
but nothing prevents you from connecting specific mental states to objects as
well. To do this, you elicit the emotion you want the person to experience, and
subtly point at the object you want the emotion to be associated with. The mind
will understand the meaning even when a person doesnt pay attention to the
gesture. Every time you fire the trigger again, you can make the gesture more
and more subtle, until you can just simply nudge in a specific direction. And this
is what many sales courses primarily teach. First you elicit wanton desire in a
person and then literally point at the product you want them to buy. This
absolutely works, but there are often easier ways to do things.
When you set a trigger to an object, it is only set to that specific object. If
you trigger the feeling of happiness into the front door of an apartment, it wont
be generalized to all doors, only those that have very similar qualities (e.g.,
similarly engraved door handle, same wood finish, etc.). Even then, if not
constantly reinforced, time will spoil the trigger. It is also worth understanding
that you shouldnt try to set emotions onto things that already have strong
emotional contexts like bibles, wedding rings, or family photos. If you try to do
that, your trigger will be simply overwhelmed by previous associations.
Obviously, while it is a touchy subject, you can also easily trigger states to other
people and yourself in the same way as you would trigger objects.
To do this, you just need to subtly point towards yourself or the other
person as you elicit the state. When you do this, it will create a new perceptual
filter that the person perceives the person through. For example, one of the
worlds richest motivational speakers simply thumps his own chest while
shouting phrases like mother and Jesus to connect different emotional states
to himself. Unethical? Yes, but also highly effective. Some people connect
negative emotions on their competitors to make them look bad. Questionable?
Perhaps, but also very effective.
While you might already have brilliant ideas about using these strategies to
your own benefit, I want to strongly advise against conditioning anything that
causes dependency on yourself. While it might feel like a wonderful idea to
trigger feelings of deep trust and adoration to yourself, you dont have any
control over how the person perceives you anymore. Even if you have a poor
day, and just want to be left alone to collect your thoughts, the person is
harassing you because he experiences those feelings immediately whenever he
interacts with you. I have heard and seen so many horror stories about people
who have connected states to themselves that I really advise you not to do it.
Keypoints

The idea behind elicitations is not to get the strongest possible

emotional response from the person
You want to stay within the persons normal range of emotions so
that he doesnt feel uncomfortable or start to act in unpredictable
ways
Change your own state to match what you are eliciting
Conditioned response is a skill to make a person associate an
emotional state with a specific gesture or other stimulus
Shift your state into what you want to trigger, then elicit an
emotion, and as the emotion accelerates, make a clear and simple
gesture to set a trigger on it
You shouldnt just fire a trigger, but use it as a way to reinforce a
suggestion
You can also set triggers to items and people
APPLICATION: GATHERING INFORMATION
While most people think influence is all about words and specific techniques,
most of your time is really spent gathering information. In this chapter, you will
learn specific techniques for effective information-gathering and managing
interviews. In addition, you will also learn how to elicit a customers buying
processes and find out how he typically makes decisions. People have a natural
tendency to fall into routines and just use automatic responses for making
decisions. This means that, surprisingly often, the only thing you need to do to
influence someone is to find out how they make their decisions and do exactly
like they say. You can also easily set triggers on emotions related to decision-
making processes.
Eliciting a Customers Buying Processes

We are now taking a closer look at how you can find your customers buying
processes. As you read on, keep in mind that the point is not really to memorize
these questions. Instead, I want you to realize that whatever the customer is
saying will tell you how he thinks internally and it should be utilized by you.
After you have familiarized yourself with your customers buying processes, you
can use them easily to influence him.

Decision Making
Most of the necessary information about a customers buying processes can be
elicited just by asking simple questions. For instance:

Youve been in this type of situation before ... how do you make a
decision?

When the customer answers, he will reveal how he makes decisions and
what he needs to be able to make decisions. When you know these details, you
can focus all your attention on providing them. Equally useful is to know how
the client knows he has made the right decision.

How can you be sure you have made the right decision?

Answering this question will reveal if the customer is more externally or
internally validated. Those who are more externally validated need more support
and feedback, and how you present yourself in the interaction also plays a great
role in their decision-making process. If you show up congruent and confident
about something being right, it positively influences their decision-making.
However, if they are easily hurt by criticism and have a high level of external
validity, it can also be a sign of low self-esteem. Internally validated customers,
on the other hand, trust their own feelings and inner voice, and their decision is
influenced more by how they feel about something than what others think. To
deal with these people, you need to have strong rapport, and create powerful
mental imagery inside them to compel them to act. The good news is that if a
person is internally oriented, once you have them in the right state, theyre
typically ready to go.
Finally, you might want to find out whether the person is reactive or
proactive in his decision-making. A reactive person wants to see how others
react to their given offer and want time for decision-making, while a proactive
person just takes charge and wants to get things done immediately. For example:

1: Do you see yourself as more of a proactive kind of person?
2: Do you typically act quickly after sizing things up, or after carefully
analyzing the given information and thinking it through?

A question like this will give you a clear idea about their preference. Many
people dont really dont have a preference, but those people who are reactive
tend to typically want to take time for thinking and they tend to ask opinions
from other people. These people can often be the toughest types of people to
handle, because they can start to ponder for a long time, and they often dont
even reach any conclusion at all. The best way to deal with this type of person is
to simply acknowledge their need to think it through, and just directly ask what
information they typically need to ask from others. This makes decision-making
easier for them.

Definition
We have already been talking about finding out what the customer really wants,
but we often want to discover what it means in concrete terms. Lets take a look
at several different ways of getting that definition:

1: Suppose it were true what you really want, how would you know you
have it?
2: What do you need to experience to let you know when you have
achieved X?
3: Lets suppose you could have X - what you would be doing?
4: That perfect vacationwhere are you?

There are countless different ways to ask about it, but when a customer
thinks about the answer, it will tell you what he needs to experience to know he
has something. For instance, a customer buying a house could answer that he
needs to see himself and his wife inside the house. A customer buying a speaker
could tell you he needs to hear pristine sound. A customer buying a car could
answer that he needs to take a few spins around the block. No matter how silly it
is, you should do exactly what the customer is requesting. It is also useful to
know how often the customer needs to experience something to know he has it.

How often do you need to experience this in order to be convinced?

When the customer then gives his answer, it will tell you how many times
or how consistently he needs to do something to be convinced about having
something. If they list the number of times, it just means they need to experience
it a certain number of times in order for them to be truly convinced. For
example, a person could tell you that he needs to see something two times. If the
person says he needs to do something only once, decision-making is automatic
in the sense that if he has experienced the convincer once, it is enough. Period of
time just means that the person needs to experience something for a specific
length of time. For example, the person could tell that he needs to use the
product successfully for a week. Consistency just means that a person needs to
be convinced multiple times every time you do something together.
Motivational Strategies

In a study made in 1998, doctor James Shah and his team gave test subjects an
anagram task to complete. They found out the test subjects performance
increased when the motivational message was aligned with how the person
typically motivates himself. Those who motivated themselves by moving
towards something responded better to messages about gaining points, while
those people who motivated themselves by avoidance responded better to
messages about avoiding losing points (Shah, Higgins & Friedman, 1998).
Therefore, all human motivations can be roughly divided into two
categories: motivations that drive someone towards a desirable goal, and
motivations that move someone away from an outcome he wants to avoid. This
distinction is very important to understand, because those who are running away
from something dont want to achieve, but avoid something. People like these
dont respond well to suggestions about going towards a specific outcome,
because they are more afraid of what they will lose by making a specific
decision.

Towards
Towards strategies are very easy to understand. Something causes such a strong
emotional response in you that you are willing to take action to get it. These
desires can be anything from wanting to have a slimmer body to something as
simple as having fun. It is all about the pleasure and satisfaction something can
give to us. When we are motivated by moving towards something, we also focus
our attention on multiple benefits of making that decision (Liberman, Molden,
Idson & Higgins, 2001).
The problem with toward strategies is that while they are compelling, they
become more and more compelling the closer you get to reaching them. For this
reason, it can sometimes be very challenging to get a person to take action. The
good news is that after you have made a person act and get some results, the
good feeling will just suck him in and drive him naturally towards the desired
outcome.

Away
Away strategies are based on you running away from something. While away
strategies are good to get people moving, they have two major limitations. First
of all, they depend on taking something away, or making a person feel
unpleasant feelings. While negative and painful emotions are a very powerful
way to influence someone, they can condition him to avoid certain behaviours
all together. For instance, it has been theorized that eating disorders like anorexia
are simply caused by a person having negative associations to eating. Secondly,
away strategies do not compel people to continue with a given action. The
greater the distance between the source of discomfort and the person, the less
likely the person is to continue doing something. By their very nature, away
strategies are excellent at hurling people into action, but they dont encourage
continuous behaviour.
You can easily determine if a person is away-oriented from how he
describes his experience. When a person is getting away from something, he
typically uses words like avoid, evade, and escape. Also pay attention to how the
customer justifies his argument. Studies have found that when a person is
running away from something, he will typically focus on only a single cause for
his behaviour and use it to justify his avoidance. When you learn to pay attention
to this detail, you will notice how often people are actually arguing from a
position of fear. You most likely wont see any physical signs of it, because the
medial frontal cortex is reducing their cognitive dissonance. They think they are
having a reasonable argument, when in reality they are just reacting. In this case,
you need to find a way to get them into a state where they can once again think
creatively (Liberman, Molden, Idson & Higgins, 2001).

Driving Emotion
In addition to identifying a customers motivational strategy, it is important you
learn to differentiate between the motive that makes a customer desire and the
one that impels him to take action. What do I mean by this? Lets suppose for an
example that your goal is to buy a new sports car. You start to imagine how it
feels to have that car, how people respond to you differently, and how happy you
feel. Just based on this visualization, you may conclude that it is that feeling of
happiness that motivates you to work towards the car.
But is it really? People often confuse the feeling of reaching the goal with
the feeling that would actually make them work towards the goal. That feeling of
happiness was just the result of having that car, not the emotion which motivated
you to move towards the goal in the first place. Quite often, it can be something
even so petty as wanting to show off to your neighbour or wanting to avoid
being mocked by him. In a similar fashion, lets suppose for a moment that you
are selling vacations with a limited-time discount. In this simple example, while
the customer might desire a vacation because of the assumed experience, it is the
limited window of opportunity that often compels him to act. If you dont act
now, you lose your chance. In this example, the customer is more motivated by
the loss of opportunity than the actual benefit of having a discount. Just by
paying a little bit of attention to your customer, you typically can determine what
emotion would actually motivate them.
This being said, many sales courses advise you to use artificial scarcity
tactics and make people run away from something. However, I strongly advise
against this. When you amplify someones pain, they often associate it with you
and your services. While you might get the sale, the customer wont return back
because he associates that pain with you. When people are running away from
something, they are also unpredictable and there are also many ethical issues
with intentionally making people feel bad only because you want to sell them
something. If you really need to get the person to get away from something, his
own motivations are enough, and they are far more meaningful for them than
anything you can invent anyway.
Logical Levels

In 1972, anthropologist Gregory Bateson introduced his idea of logical

categories of level and communication. Based on these ideas, it can be theorized
that someones mind can be roughly divided into three levels. In this model, each
level in the hierarchy is progressively more psychologically encompassing and
important. The higher levels of hierarchy always organize and control
information on lower levels, and any changes in them will always create changes
on lower levels. Changes in the lower level could but would not necessarily
cause change to higher levels. For instance, changes in someones sense of self
will always cause change in their personal beliefs, but the opposite is not always
true (Bateson, 1972).
1. Sense of self: Deeply ingrained beliefs that we believe to be an
immutable part of ourselves and define our purpose
2. Beliefs: Our personal beliefs and values derived from them
3. Behaviours: Behaviours, capabilities, and awareness of
surrounding environment

When you ask people to explain why something is important for them, you
typically first get an answer that is related to the behaviour level. Instead of
telling what they want to satisfy with their purchase, they will tell you the
behaviour that they believe will lead into satisfying the value. For instance, for
one customer the most important value about the car could be safety. When you
first ask him to tell you what he wants, he starts to say things like it needs to
handle well. The problem with this is that unless the customer is very detailed
and concrete about their answer, you really cant be sure about what to give him.
In this particular case, the customer has an idea about what value they want to
satisfy, but he doesnt know what would actually satisfy that desire.
Furthermore, using values makes it easier to keep track of things. While
you could just echo a customers answers back to him, in many cases the
customer lists so many details that it becomes hard to keep track of all of them.
When you have the customers value, you dont need to do this to the same
degree, because the value itself is an abstraction of all those details. It just
encompasses all of them. Some trainers claim that eliciting values is too time-
consuming and tedious, but it really helps when you are selling complex
products where benefits are hard to grasp and marginalize much later.
Values and Emotions
Value is what you want to satisfy most in context of the current relationship.
Lets think about that statement for a moment. One of the most common
mistakes salespeople make is that they focus on the performance of their
product. They try to woo their customers with technical details and tell all
possible features and benefits, hoping that something sticks. But it is not these
features or benefits that drive a customers decision. It is what emotional need
the product can satisfy for him.
What do I mean by this? Lets suppose that you have a customer who
comes to your store and wants to buy a fast sports car. It would be easy to
assume that the person buys this kind of luxury car only to show off. Well, that
could be true. Perhaps the customer just wants the car to be a status symbol, and
to see the jealous faces of his neighbours when he parks his car in the driveway.
But perhaps he actually wants to feel the danger and excitement of speeding up
from one to one hundred in three seconds. Perhaps he saw that thrilling chase
movie as a kid, and after that point, always wanted to have that kind of car.
Perhaps the car itself is a symbol of freedom and independence for him.
All these are different kinds of values, and having any one of them would
highly influence what your customer actually wants to buy. As you read through
that list, you probably noticed that nearly all of the listed values were abstract
values. Status. Envy. Danger. Excitement. Freedom. Independence. All these are
abstract values, and while value is important to the customer, it is also important
to understand it is only a label for the experience. For example, if you went out
on the street and asked twenty people to explain what freedom means, you
would get as many different answers as there are people. When people think and
talk about freedom, they will experience completely different emotions in
relation to that word. This is why successful politicians are constantly talking
about abstract values like freedom, and trying to somehow link the experience
their audience is having to their own message.
I want to emphasize this, because many salespeople make the major
mistake in assuming they know what their customers value means for them.
Because value is only a label for the experience, you simply cant know what the
customer values about something without asking. When a person names his
value, you can direct it; otherwise you are just guessing aimlessly, and arrogantly
assuming that you know someones values and needs. And while your guess
might even be even right, you should still always let the customer tell it to you
personally. In addition to building trust, the customer feels that you are not
pushing or pressuring him for an answer.

Leveraging Value
Even better is that after you have the value, you can trigger any positive
emotions associated with the value just by saying its trigger word. Now you just
need to presuppose that something you have will satisfy that value. You can link
their values to anything you want, leverage their definition, or even change the
definition. At that point, there is very little a person can do to resist because to
resist their own values would mean resisting their personal hopes and dreams.
Even if they dont have a concrete idea about what could satisfy their value, they
will start to associate it with anything you connect it to. You dont even need to
focus on anything other than satisfying the highest value, because satisfying a
persons highest value will always control the other values.
This is why eliciting and linking values is both one of the simplest and
most powerful strategies you can use and works equally well in therapy, sales,
and dating. Of course, it is important to understand when to use it. If the
customer has a very concrete and detailed idea about what he wants to buy, then
value elicitation isnt really necessary. You just need to provide him with the
product that matches his specifications, perhaps connect some positive state to it,
and you have made the deal. With customers that are absolutely ready to go,
value elicitation can even backfire, because the customer feels like you are
wasting his time. But if you are selling something that cant be clearly defined
(e.g., insurance, travel packages, gym memberships, etc.), then it will improve
your effectiveness greatly.

Changing the Definition of Value

While it is very hard to change a persons value directly in conversation, nothing
prevents you from eliciting its definition and manipulating it. Manipulating the
definition will influence how the other person experiences their value. In
practice, you can add more details and create emotional connections to it.
Adding more details is a matter of adding more to the definition by
offering suggestions. If the person says their definition is having more time
with my grandchildren, you could suggest how having that spare time allows
him to have more time for his hobbies too. Suddenly, satisfying the value seems
even more important to the other person. You can also use this strategy to deal
with problematic or unrealistic definitions. For example, if your injured
customers only definition of success is to be able to run ten kilometres, it
doesnt really leave much to work with. You cant immediately satisfy it either.
In these cases, you can add more definition to overcome impossible
expectations. You can also plug extra details into the definition. For instance, if
the other person talks about their dream house, you can easily plug in additional
details about that house and its location.
We can also create new emotional connections. For instance, a person
searching for a new personal trainer could define success as avoid being
injured. In this situation, you could link their definition to working with a truly
capable professional who knows how to work with recovering athletes. Now that
person will associate satisfying their value fully to working with you. This is a
very powerful way to direct the persons value and nothing prevents you from
connecting the definition to something that is unique to you or something only
you can provide in the marketplace.
You can also link states in this way. If someone believes that reaching the
goal will make them more successful, you could suggest that the quicker the goal
is reached, the more pleasure they will feel. You could also add that a person
becomes more interesting and attractive as a side-effect to fulfilling their value
fully. All these reasonable suggestions make the value even more desirable, and
getting that value satisfied is linked to working with you.

Eliciting Personal Values and Motivators

Discovering someones personal values is a relatively straightforward process.

You need to just ask the person what the most important or best part about
something is. If you are talking about something that cant be physically defined,
asking this type of question will immediately uncover the driving value.

Salesman: What do you like best about waterskiing?

Person: Its that sense of rush you get. Its like this legal high.

In this example, the person immediately revealed the value that he is trying
to fulfil with water-skiing. We dont yet know what that sense of rush
specifically means for him, but as long as we are talking about waterskiing, we
can trigger all the positive sensations associated with that word simply by saying
it. However, there are times when you want to find values for things that are
tangible and physical. When you ask what is most important about an object,
you typically get answers that are related to the first level (i.e., behaviours). For
example, the customer might speak only of the products specifications or of
what it needs to be capable.

Salesman: Hello, what brings you here today?

Customer: Oh, Im trying to save enough money so that I can retire early
and now Im just exploring all the alternatives.

Salesman: Save enough money so that you can retire early. I understand
that need well because nobody wants to spend more time in the daily grind
than they have to. That being said, what is really most important to you
about retiring early?

Customer: Hmm ... Definitely freedom to spend my remaining time as I
want.

First, the customer described to us their behaviour derived from his
personal values: save enough money to retire early. However, this answer
doesnt tell us what unconscious need they are trying to satisfy with this
behaviour. But when you ask the same question about these details, it forces the
person to move to a second level. In this case, their value for making this
decision is freedom: saving enough money in order to achieve freedom.

Focusing on the Value

In the previous example, we echo the customers word back to him and had a
little bit of small talk. The reason why you want to state their words back exactly
like the customer said them is the abstraction. The deeper you progress in logical
levels, the more emotional and abstract your customers answers will become.
They will mostly consist of trigger words that have great meaning for him. When
you state their answer back, they feel like you are communicating to them just in
a way they need and that you understand them. This will start to build immense
rapport, and the customer will also experience emotions related to those words.
Even if the answer is not very detailed, still state it back as it was said. While
their answer can be too vague for your liking, it is more than enough for them.
Because it is, after all, their words.
You know that you have found a value when a person shifts their
physiology, emphasizes a word more strongly, and there is a clear shift in state.
He will also often try to steer the discussion back to it again and again if you try
to change the topic. Sometimes things dont go as smoothly as in the example.
The person might list several different values or values that cant be mutually
satisfied. For instance, a person might want to have a more fulfilling job with
more working hours, yet also have more time with their children. In both of
these cases, you only need to ask a person to sort them and the person lists
several different values. In this case, you can just ask him to sort them by
importance.
Just by listening carefully, you can also easily determine if the highest
value is something they are moving away from or going towards. It is absolutely
vital that you align your sales message with their strategy, because otherwise
your customer starts to feel you dont understand them or something is missing.
Especially beginners often dont pay enough attention to this, because it seems
so insignificant a detail on paper. In reality, focusing on a customers
motivational strategy is absolutely critical for value elicitation to work.

Motivator
While just talking about satisfying a value again and again will typically close
the deal, you also want to find out what motivates a person to act out and what
basic need he is trying to fulfil with it. To do this, simply ask what satisfying the
value allows them to do. Lets continue with the example.

Salesman: Thats terrific! Thats absolutely terrific! Keep that picture in
mind because we can easily achieve that for you. But what does having
that freedom allow you to do?

Customer: To have an absolute sense of relief that I can now spend my
final days without stress or worry.

By the time we have reached this point, you have practically deconstructed
the persons current needs. Instead of guessing, we now know what motivator
motivates this person on an unconscious level. In this case, it is avoiding stress
during his final days. Another way to ask for motivation is to simply ask what
does having the value give to the customer or where having it will lead him. It is
really that simple, and if you want to add even more strength to this process, you
can also ask the customer to define the value, using strategies mentioned earlier.
Keypoints

You can elicit a customers buying process to find out how he

typically makes decisions.
After you know them, you just need to step into his already familiar
buying processes and give him what he wants.
Buying processes and their emotional states can be set on a trigger.
Eliciting values allows you to discover what unconscious beliefs and
values actually drive a persons decisions.
You only need to focus your attention on the highest value, because it
will control the rest of the decision-making.
When you successfully elicit a value, you can link them directly to
anything you want by using suggestions.
You can always add more details to the values definition and
convince or create new emotional connections to them.

FRAMING
Framing is a skill of contextualizing the current interaction and putting an idea
or belief into a different perspective so that the persons perception, and
therefore, response to it changes. All interactions have an underlying context that
determines what is acceptable under current circumstances, and as you progress
towards your desired outcome, you need to create a frame where your proposal
is considered acceptable. In this chapter, you will learn how to subtly change the
explicit meaning of the interaction just by saying a few words. You will also
learn how to change the meaning of an emotion, and how to change the context
through different emotional states. Mastering this material can take some time,
but after you have done so you are able to in many cases change the meaning of
an interaction into anything you want in a matter of a few seconds.
Importance of Context

Imagine a stranger comes to you and asks you to give them your credit card.
Would you give it to him? Of course not. But what if the stranger was holding a
gun? Under these circumstances, the suggestion would obviously have far more
persuasive power. While this example is a greatly exaggerated one, it still
demonstrates something important. What you think is beneficial varies greatly
by context and anything is acceptable in the right context. In order for your
listener to process your suggestions, you need to have good rapport, but you
need to also need to have the right context. Only suggestions that make sense in
a given context will be accepted.
For instance, while chatting with someone about their vacation,
suggestions related to that topic slip in more easily. You can easily suggest
relaxation and other positive feelings associated with that vacation, but anything
that doesnt fit into the context will most likely be ignored. If you are
aggressively pushing for a sale, most of your suggestions will be ignored,
because from the listeners standpoint the context is being harassed by a pushy
salesman. On the other hand, if it was perceived that you are teaching the person
something of value, they would be far more open to your sales message. If
talking about relationships, you could slip in suggestions about connection,
comfort, and rapport, perhaps even attraction. On the other hand, any purely
sexual suggestions would most likely be ignored.
The emotional state also plays an important part in this. While an
emotional state doesnt directly determine context, it makes changing the context
far easier. If someone is especially enthusiastic about meeting you, you can far
easier manipulate the context with that person. However, if someone is feeling
begrudgingly about interacting with you, their feeling will limit your ability to
change the context. If someone is already sexually aroused, it wont require
much to change the context into a highly sexual one.
Influencing someone is equally about having the right context as it is about
saying the right things. You should constantly ask yourself in what context
would it be natural for a person to respond the way you want them to respond.
Think about that statement for a moment. Instead of trying to influence someone
from a context where they might raise objections, lead them into a context where
it will be natural for that person to do what you want. It is truly that simple.
Social Identities

As human beings, we navigate through a busy day via adapting different social
identities and roles. For example, when at our workplace, we adopt the identity
of an employee. At home, we adopt the identity of a lazy couch potato. When
trying to persuade someone, we adopt the identity of a persuader. Each one of
these identities has its own learned behaviour, and the identities themselves tend
to activate as a reaction to the surrounding environment, not as something that
you are consciously paying attention to. Nonetheless, your shifted attention will
start to inhibit any behaviour that is not related to that role. As a simple example,
when members of a university fraternity were primed to be in their Greek
identity, they showed a clear inhibition towards any Student identity-related
vocabulary (Hugenberg. & Bodenhausen, 2003).
This kind of shift of social identities is understandable, because it allows
us to navigate through the world more effectively. This can be both beneficial
and detrimental at the same time. When you go to work, you will instinctively
shift into the identity of employee and have access to all the behaviours that
work well in that context. This saves both time and energy, and allows you to
instantly access right behaviours. But on the other hand, you might adopt the
role of cry-baby as a reaction to sudden stress because it worked so well when
you were four years old. Not a very good idea.
However, your current social identity doesnt define only your behaviour,
but also your current capabilities. As a basic example, there is a growing pile of
evidence that when female students were told that women students perform
worse in math tests, their test scores lowered. When athletes were reminded of
the fact they are stupid athletes, their scores lowered. The same was found to
be true with African-Americans when positioned in a role of a stereotypical
black person. This kind of negative priming could be mostly mitigated by
positive encouragement, self-affirmation, and showing students positive role
models to strive for (Rydell, McConnell, Beilock, 2009; Yopyk & Precentice,
2005; Nguyen & Ryan, 2008; Taylor & Walton, 2011).
What is even more fascinating is that this kind of priming is in no way
limited to social roles or stereotypes. Various studies have found the same kind
of priming happens when people are positioned based on their culture, projected
traits, perceived self-identity, self-responsibilities, and even personal goals. This
is why learning to prime people into specific identities and roles is one of the
most powerful things you can do. If you can position yourself as an authority,
asset, or prize, you have a significant upper-hand in an interaction (Weber &
Morris, 2010; Halvorson & Higgins, 2013; Brown & McConnell, 2009; Pham &
Avnet, 2004; Van Yperen & Leander, 2014).

Your Role: The Inner Frame

In the State Control chapter, we discussed congruency and exhibiting behaviour
congruently. The importance of congruency cant be emphasized enough,
because regardless of what you are doing, you are also bringing yourself into
every interaction. In every interaction, a person gives meaning for the interaction
based on the behaviour they are exhibiting. This doesnt only determine their
response, but also the underlying context for the interaction.
For example, lets consider such a common experience as dating. If the
opposite sex considers you to be a prize, they (typically) want to win you over.
Through the behaviour you have expressed, they have positioned themselves
into the role of seducer. However, the general problem is that while many men
can temporarily establish a solid frame, they cant hold it for a long time. Either
the woman manages to bait them out of it, or they let go of it because they
become too excited about what is happening. For example, when men notice a
woman becoming attracted, they typically start to chase her, making the context
for interaction once again shift into her being the prize.
But heres the interesting thing: if you exhibit a specific frame, only one of
two things can happen. Either the person will buy into your frame and change
their own social identity, or leave. Thats it. Even if they try to bait you out from
your frame, they have already bought into its existence. This has two interesting
implications. First is that if you can congruently hold a specific frame, it
becomes reality regardless of how valid it is on an objective level. Secondly, if
you go into an argument with someone, it means their claims have merit,
meaning that you have bought into the frame they are presenting. For this
reason, frame control often boils down to ignoring the other peoples arguments
and doubling down on your own claims. Sooner or later, people will just go with
the given frame, because you havent given them any evidence to believe
otherwise. Of course, you need to be very careful how you present your frame,
because exaggeration in itself can lead a frame to change. Furthermore, people
still always have a choice to leave the interaction if they dont believe in you.
This is why in every interaction, we ideally want to establish three
different frames: authority, solution, and teacher. We have already spent
considerable time discussing how you can position yourself as an authority and
solution for someones problem, but why exactly would we want establish a
frame of teacher?
Learning is a very powerful frame, because it assumes that the person has
given you permission to teach them something new. In addition to giving you
permission to lead them, the person following you tends to take information in
less critically, because after all, he is learning something new. It is also a hard
frame for a person to resist, because disagreeing would imply he is not interested
in learning, something that only stupid people believe in.

Their Role and Higher Ideals

In any given interaction, people are positioning themselves into different social
identities based on the behaviour you are exhibiting and the words you are using.
When you have given a person a specific role, they typically do their very best to
uphold that role if it is considered positive. As a classic example, when
collecting money for charity, you could first ask a person is he doing well. After
affirming this, he is far more likely to give money, because after all, he has
committed to being a person who is doing well. In addition to being primed for
the behaviour, he wants to prove what you have said and puts himself into the
implied role. Throughout this book, you have also seen other examples of people
being put into different roles like being helpful, open, and adventurous.
This kind of priming has been found to be even stronger if the assigned
role matches the persons self-perceived identity, purpose, and responsibilities.
As an example, in a study made in 2004, when test subjects were primed by
appealing to their sense of duty, they were more swayed by actual content of the
advertisement than its emotional undercurrent. When primed the other way
around, the opposite happened. In a similar study of same type, when fundraisers
were shown how their work impacted other peoples daily lives, their
productivity almost tripled. Finally, it has been found that verbal priming seems
to have a greater impact when it is aligned with satisfying personal values or
goals (Pham & Avnet, 2004; Grant, 2012; Weingarten, et al., 2016).
This is why any kind of vivid imagery that has strong emotional content,
provides desirable motivation, and taps into peoples own ideals is incredibly
powerful. As a real life example, it is not a coincidence that when Donald J.
Trump was running in the U.S. primaries, his slogan was to Make America
Great Again. Many of his followers identified so strongly with the slogan,
because it played on their self-perceived identity as Americans. When you vote
for Trump, you have been positioned in the role of making American great
again. This woven imagery didnt just appeal to their sense of identity, but also
gave them a sense of higher purpose. At least in my own experience, when
people feel they are working for a higher purpose, there is very little you can do
to sway them off.

Peer Group and Social Consensus

As proven countless times by social psychology, we have a natural tendency to
socially conform to groups. For example, if three people are looking up on a
busy street, within ten minutes, everyone is looking up. If three people choose
the wrong answer on purpose, a fourth one will typically conform to the group
and select the same answer. In the case of an emergency, if three people panic,
the rest of the group tends to panic too. This pattern has been proven to exist in
all cultures, and the threshold for it has been commonly determined to be three
people. If three people behave in the same way, the rest of the group tends to
have an automatic response and follow along. However, larger groups of people
didnt affect the conformity at all. Nonetheless, this is only an automatic
response, and it can be staved off by becoming consciously aware of it. For
example, if one person starts to help someone having heart attack, the people
around will typically also start to help. The problem is that if there is no one
responding differently, everyone just continues with their automatic responses
(Asch, 1955; Cialdini, 1984).
However, this behaviour also extends to how we interpret a given
situation. Laugh tracks work even if we know people laughing on those tracks
have been dead for forty years. Seeded collection boxes cause increased
donations. Popularity is typically perceived to be a sign of value, even though in
blind tests people preferred completely different products. People have a natural
tendency to conform to groups and what is deemed popular, even though in
privacy they might think otherwise.
People even conform to popularity even if it is simply implied. To give an
absolutely hilarious example of this, Petrified National Forest Park used two
signs to measure theft of petrified wood on various trails. The first sign had the
text Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing
the natural state of the Petrified Forest and a picture of group of people picking
up wood. The second sign, on the other hand, had the text Please dont remove
the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the
Petrified Forest and a picture of a lone person picking up wood with a red X
superimposed on it. On trails where there was no sign, 2.92 percent of
strategically placed wood pieces were stolen. When the first sign was used, 7.92
percent of wood pieces were stolen. On the trails where the lone person sign was
used, on the other hand, theft was reduced to 1.67 percent (Cialdini, 2003).
In another study, it was found if you tell hotel guests to reuse their towels
based on environmental concerns, on average 35 percent of guests comply. If
you told them that 75 percent of people in their room had reused towels, more
than 45 percent complied with the request. In yet another experiment made in
1982, a group of college freshmen who were experiencing difficulties were
shown videos of seniors who said they did better after the first year. The end
result was that only 5 percent of the experimental group dropped out versus 25
percent of the control group (Goldstein, Cialdini & Griskevicius, 2008; Wilson
& Linville, 1982).
Dynamics like these can often make your live much harder, but they can
also be leveraged to position a person into a specific social identity. You just
simply tell what others have done is same situation. As a basic example,
Britains Her Majestys Revenue & Customs (HSBR) has always had challenges
with people who havent paid their taxes in time. HSBR had tried to appeal to
peoples sense of duty, informed about late fees, and even threatened with legal
action. In 2009, they decided to add a single sentence to their letters that told
how many other people had paid their taxes on time. The results were amazing!
In a single year, clearance rates jumped from 57 percent to 86 percent (Martin,
2012).
If, on the other hand, you want to lead people to avoid a specific
behaviour, it happens easiest through attributing that behaviour to an undesirable
group of people. For instance, when college students found out that the charity
wristband they were using was also adapted by students of a geeky dormitory,
there was a 32 percent decrease in use of those wristbands within a week. In the
control group which hadnt seen the geeky dormitory, the drop was only 6
percent. This kind of behaviour also seems to be strongest when the behaviour in
question is openly public for others. When undergraduate participants were told
that graduate students were the biggest consumers of junk food in the campus,
the undergraduates were far less likely to choose junk food. When graduate
students were told the same about undergraduates, they also started to avoid junk
food. Both parties just didnt want to become associated with each other (Berger
& Heath, 2008).
However, the most powerful way to utilize this principle is to draw
attention to how their behaviour differs positively from accepted social norms.
The reason for this is that while people tend to conform to social norms, they
also want to perceive themselves as unique human beings. This is why people
are typically more attentive to the costs and benefits of deviating from norms
than conforming to them.
As a simple example, Dr. Hart Blanton and his team framed taking flu
shots from two different standpoints: positive characteristics of taking the shot
and negative effects of not doing so. If a participant believed most students were
getting flu shots, he was swayed more by the message that drew attention to the
negative effects of not doing so. The opposite happened if the participant didnt
believe most students took the flu shot. In this case, they were persuaded more
by the message that drew attention to the positive characteristics of taking the
shot. In another experiment, Dr. Blanton and his team applied the same principle
to condom use. The end result was pretty much the same. If the participant
believed most people used condoms, he was persuaded more by drawing
attention to the negative effects of not doing so (Blanton, Stuart & van den
Eijnden, 2001; Blanton, et all. 2001).
Implication

As said in the last part, to process a statement you need to accept all
presuppositions that come with it. What most people dont realize is that this
extends to even what is not directly being said. When a person accepts a word,
he will also accept all underlying presuppositions that come with it. For instance,
when students were asked to evaluate the truthfulness of sixteen tape-recorded
commercials, subjects often evaluated implied claims as being directly asserted.
In another study, when people were asked to recall all inserted product
placements and their slogans in a story, people frequently falsely recognized
implied claims as asserted but seldom in reverse. In yet another study, subjects
believed that brands that had been just implied to be better were superior to
competitors (Searleman & Carter, 1988; Harris, Trusty, Bechtold & Wasinger,
1989, Snyder, 1989).
In all these studies, nothing was being directly said, but people just
accepted the implied claim as asserted. Therefore, if you just imply the existence
of something, it tends to cut through any conscious analysis. This way,
implications can be used to change the context of the interaction, redefine
relationships, and even refocus resistance.

Changing the Context

The easiest way to change the context of an interaction is implication. For
example:

I want to thank you for allowing me to share my experiences with you
today.

What are the implications in this statement? Quite a few! First, the audience is
allowing me to do something. As they have given me permission to lead, there is
nothing they will resist. Second, sharing suggests that we are doing this together.
Furthermore, sharing indicates a worthwhile activity, one in which the audience
is going to learn something of value. Third, I also need to be some kind of
authority figure in order to teach them something of value. And even more, an
experience implies it is something that will help you to grow, adding to its value.
The listener needs to agree with all these presuppositions if they are going to
accept the statement and shift their own perception on the context. Instead of a
sales presentation, you now have a teaching situation.
The most important thing to keep in mind about changing context is that if
someone goes along with you for even a moment, the context automatically
changes. Very few people are conscious enough to realize when the context for
the interaction has changed, because the whole process is completely outside
conscious awareness. Talking of sneakiness, one particularly good way to deliver
implications is to talk about your personal experience. For instance:

While I was getting here, my team contacted me and informed me that
they already have everything in place for going ahead with this deal.

In addition to just pacing the listener, you are also implying that everything
is already in place for the deal to go forward. Furthermore, it implies
competency. Talking about your own personal experience can be used to pace,
presuppose, and imply something at the same time. You can also top-load
frames using implications. As a silly example, lets suppose you want to go have
a few drinks with your boys and your wife is objecting to that. In this case, you
could say the following:

Look honey, Im going just go to have few drinks with the boys and then
return
back home. Do you trust me?

The trick in this example is that we are changing the underlying meaning
of our suggestion. The underlying implication is that wifes concerns arent
about what we are doing, but about trust. If they answer yes to our question,
they are also indirectly agreeing with everything else that was said.

Redefining Relationship
We discussed the importance of first impressions in the Rapport chapter, but you
also want to set the right context for the interaction right from the beginning.
Implications help greatly with this, because in addition to changing the
underlying context, they can also be used to redefine the current relationship and
roles. For example:

 Please wait for Mr. Holmqvist to become available.

Even a simple statement like this has powerful implications. If you are
waiting for a person to become available, it implies he has something you want.
That he can make you wait implies he is an authority who has the right to do so.
When someone has put himself into this position, influencing him is much
easier. But how about this:

Real World Influence, Teppo speaking, may I help you, please?

I learnt this particular phase from advertising guru Russell Yarnell and it is
really good. When you answer the phone like this, the implication is that the
caller is actually seeking help from you. When someone is in this position, they
have the unconscious need to reciprocate that help by providing you with their
contact details. Of course, you can also do this in a more subtle manner:

If I were to see this from your side of the desk, what would I see?

It may sound like a weird question to ask, but when the person answers,
their response implies that you are on the same side of the desk, solving
problems together, and working on the same side. In a more casual context, you
often have challenges with people opening up to you. Even this can be often
overcome with simple implication:

I have no tendency to judge people...

It is certainly direct, but the underlying implication is that they can open
up to you because you dont judge them. This is also undeniably one of the most
disarming things you can do in dating together with implying discretion.

I dont kiss and tell...

If the other person believes you dont judge them and are discreet, it
allows them to open up sexually. You can even subtly challenge people by using
implications:

Say, let me show you something interesting about how your mind works.

In this example, we are telling them that we want to show him something
interesting about how his mind works. It implies that you are sharing the activity
of learning together. You are being the teacher while the other person is the
student. For most people, a statement like this is hard to resist, because
disagreeing with it would imply he is not interested in learning, something that
only stupid people believe in. This works especially well with people who
have control issues, because it gives them the illusion of control. You can even
use this approach to put the customer himself in the position of expert. For
instance:

Look, I know you have been in this business long enough to know that
only an idiot wouldnt see the benefit of having this book.

This statement works on multiple levels. First of all, you are implying that
the person has the expertise of understanding of what is being offered. Secondly,
you are challenging his intelligence. Thirdly, you are not flattering the person.
You have now raised the person into the position of expert and also challenged
him to prove that. At that point, many people will just go along with you,
because disagreement would imply both not being true.

Exclusion and Inclusion

Finally, implications can be used to refocus resistance by excluding or including
a specific condition. As an example:

I understand you. Outside this room you have had challenges discussing
such private matters.

What this statement implies is that right herein this roomyou can
share your private information with me. You are also refocusing their resistance
(discussing private matters) to it happening only outside the room. You are
basically acknowledging the persons concern or reluctance, but placing it into a
different context where it wont cause any resistance. The example used is
actually pretty bad, because after processing, what typically happens is that the
person doesnt stop talking no matter what. They will tell you everything, even
those things that you really dont want to hear. Another example:

After you have signed this contract, you will feel so much better knowing
everything is taken care of.

The trick in this example is that we are associating positive sensations with
signing the contract. The underlying implication is that if you dont sign the
contract, you dont get to feel those positive sensations. How bad do you think
the customer will feel if he doesnt follow your instructions? You can also
refocus resistance by using inclusion. As an example, lets suppose someone
doesnt want to share his secrets with you. You could say the following:

Yes, I definitely get what you mean. Secrets are secrets and you should
share them with only the people you really like and trust.

In this example, we implied that the person should share his secrets only
with people he really likes and trusts. If you match these criteria in his mind, you
are now included in the list of people with whom he can share his secrets.

Association
Implications can also happen through association. For example, as part of
the interaction, you may find yourself in situations where you need or want to
convey status to the other party. This is easiest achieved through storytelling, but
the general problem with exhibiting status verbally is that tooting your own horn
doesnt really work that well. It will only make you be perceived as a try hard
who is showing off. However, there is a very simple solution for this. You just
need to tell stories where your own personal status exists only as a background
detail, not the centre of the story. When the person listens to you, he will infer
from these details that you have status without you directly boasting about it. For
instance, when you tell what your friends did, you are attributed with all the
trappings of status by association.
However, it is important to understand this extends to everything you say.
As an example, if you say with great conviction that you believe in a specific
Higher Ideal or Great Person, it implies you are believing in those same
qualities. As you continue describing in length how this Great Person thinks,
believes, and acts, you are also subtly implying you have the same qualities and
virtues that he does, even if you havent demonstrated them in practice. This is
the reason why so many self-help gurus and motivational speakers spend so
much time creating the facade of a larger-than-life person that everyone should
be striving for. Of course, there are also other ways to imply status such as just to
surround yourself with trappings of wealth. For instance, quite few conmen and
women release photos of themselves standing next to a Lamborghini or Ferrari.
If you dont know any better, your brain will automatically start to assume that
person owns the car, even though it is most likely someone elses. This extends
to everything from expensive beach houses to beautiful vistas and standing next
to a celebrity.

Words to Use
When you are influencing others, you should always imply in your language
cooperation, agreement, or the chance to learn. These three themes will
commonly position you as a trusted authority. No longer are you convincing
someone, but rather teaching, sharing, and leading them toward something of
value. When you have been given such a position, influencing others becomes
much easier. Some useful implications for this purpose include:

Admit: If you admit something being true for you, you commit
yourself to believing so in the future.
Allow: If you are allowing something to happen, what is there to
resist?
Explore: You can be either exploring your own sensations or
thoughts, or allowing someone to lead you to explore new
possibilities.
Find: Implies that you are finding your own reasons for
something to be true.
Invite: When you invite yourself to do something, it is your own
choice to do so.
Let: Implies that you are allowing another person or yourself to
do something (e.g., letting go).
Pretend: Implies that this is only make-believe and therefore
there isnt anything to resist.
Promise: That you could promise something to me, there must be
some kind of trust established.
Share: For you to share something, you need to know or have
something I dont. It must be valuable too, if it is worth sharing.
Suppose: Allows a person to imagine something being true, even
if it is not currently true.
Show: If you are showing me something, it must be something I
havent known before.
Tag: Tagging along implies that you are following someone else,
generally someone of authority.
We: Implies we are doing something together.
Establishing a Training Space

You can also become an object of fascination by establishing a training space.

Training space simply means any place designated for the purpose of teaching
and learning. The leader of the space has been given consent to influence people
who have agreed on the existence of the space. When this happens, you become
instantly an authority figure and object of fascination for your audience. As an
example, when holding a seminar, the room where the seminar is held becomes a
training space. Everyone has come to the room with intention to learn and they
have given their consent to be taught by you. At that point, you can just start to
lead people. While you dont need a training space to influence others, having
one will make your life so much easier. While we used the seminar room as an
example, there are naturally also other kinds of training spaces: the bosss office,
church, a meditation retreat, military boot camp, and even an interrogation room.
Some training spaces are explicitly agreed upon, while others are just a
result of a set of conventions. It doesnt matter where or how the training space
is established, so long as there is a clear contract about its existence between the
parties. This contract defines roles for both parties and the agreement on what
should be disclosed. For instance, an interrogation contract can be something as
simple as respond to me, and I dont hurt you. So long as both parties are
holding to their own sides of the contract, the person can open up because he
knows what he can do to make you happy (or content at least).
The contract also defines the desired responses and creates expectation for
them to happen. For example, if you start to tell a random story in a seminar,
everyone in the audience will assume it will actually mean something because of
the set expectation. In a stand-up comedy show, people laugh more easily
because it is what you are expected to do in a stand-up show. In faith healing
gatherings, people fall onto the ground and speak in ancient tongues only
because it assumed to be the correct response.
The problems arise when the contract is not clearly defined and agreed
upon. For instance, in various religious sects, lower members of the organization
are pretty much expected to do anything because there are no clear rules for
conduct. Lack of a clearly defined contract can also create an ambiguous context
where the other party isnt sure about the desired responses. For example, it is
fairly common that a patient starts to develop romantic thoughts about his
therapist because the contract hasnt been defined well enough.
Exciting Groups
From the standpoint of influence, group dynamics can greatly affect one persons
ability to make decisions. The flip-side is that working with groups is often
actually easier, because you can always take part in someone elses excitation.
For instance, anyone who has been to a rock concert, rave party, or religious
gathering knows how easy it is to become highly aroused and just go with the
flow. The feeling of similarity between the members of the audience just pulls
everyone in. Group dynamics just add into this and this is why it is actually
easier to excite large groups of people than individuals. After you win several
people to your side, their excitement often just pulls everyone else in.
Of course, the opposite is also true. If you make a negative impression on a
few people, their lukewarm response will pull others in. For instance, when my
friend is doing stage hypnosis, he might get into a situation where he has only
one or two people on the stage who are truly responsive. In these situations, he
does his best to dominate their attention and view so that they dont get sucked
in by the other peoples unresponsiveness. In a similar way, if he notices that
there are only a few unresponsive people, he tries to focus their attention on all
the others. When they observe others being responsive they typically go along
after a while.
Testing large groups is also actually quite easy. After starting to weave
vivid imagery, you can just give innocent and indirect suggestions to elicit
responses. For instance, you could ask your audience if anyone else thinks it is a
little warm in the room and pay attention to their responses. Those who are
already acquiescent typically shift their state and might even show other physical
symptoms related to your suggestion. This actually works quite well with
storytelling too and just by observing who has the strongest response to your
story, you can easily deduce who is already acquiescent.

Bypassing Analysis
With implications and training space, it is possible to create an atmosphere
where the listener doesnt analyze what you are saying. To do this, you only
need to suggest in one way or another that you dont demand them to believe
what you are saying. The trick here is the underlying implication. If there is
nothing to believe, then there is also no reason to doubt what you are saying
either! For example:

My intention is also to bring the best out from you and this is why I want
you to promise me something. Im not asking you to believe anything that
Im saying. Im not even asking you to agree with me. Im merely asking
you to go through this book at a leisurely pace, and if you see something
that fits and works for you, just take it and use it.

I actually used this phrase in the introduction of this book. What are the
implications here? For someone to promise you something there must be some
kind of trust. Promise also implies a commitment to keep promises. That
promise is connected to taking what you find useful in this book and using it. I
think it is a fairly reasonable request, even though it is implanted in a fairly
sneaky way. Nonetheless, when framed this way, what happens is that most
people will just follow along and stop resisting your message. Of course, if you
say something that is blatantly against their worldview, then they will snap out
from this state. Another good way for establishing a state like this is to ask the
person to just pretend something is true. For instance:

I understand your concerns perfectly, but lets just pretend for a moment I
would be a highly respected professional. How would you describe your
current challenge?

In this particular example, we first acknowledge the persons concerns.
Then we suggest to him to just pretend that we are that highly respected
professional he wants to work with. Pretend is such a powerful word, because
it playfully implies a harmless thought experiment. Therefore, there is nothing to
resist while you imagine something to be true. Another variation on this is to use
the word suppose. Another example:

Lets suppose I would have a magic wand that could give you what you
want. What would you want?

Once again, we are disarming resistance by suggesting a harmless thought
experiment and allowing them to imagine and explore all possibilities. The word
suppose is more serious in nature than pretend, meaning it often works better
in any kind of business context.
Suggesting Amnesia
You can also use exclusion to control what the customer pays or doesnt pay
attention to. For example, in many sales presentations, the prospect may be
acquiescent, but constantly thinking that the price is too much. This prevents him
from even really listening to what you have to offer. In these situations, you can
draw attention away from the price by suggesting temporal amnesia for it.

Lets forget the price for a moment, and talk about the wonderful benefits
this plan
will give you. Now, let me ask you this

First we suggest he can just forget the price for a moment, and then we
redirect his focus by asking a question. This is a really efficient way to control
what the customer focuses his attention on, but it doesnt create long-term
amnesia. The customer will remember the price if asked, but as long as you
dont mention it, his mind is now too occupied with the rest of your presentation
to even think about it.

Thats absolutely great! Just remember that wonderful picture till the end
of the presentation so we can discuss how we can help you to achieve it.

In this example, we do the opposite of amnesia. We suggest that the
customer should remember the wonderful image he has made for himself until
the end of the presentation. This way you can also control what positive things
the customer remembers and focuses his attention on.
Expressing Interest

Showing your interest is tricky business. People want to be appreciated for their
unique qualities, but at the same time they are wary about compliments, because
they know how many people use them only for manipulation. Even then, many
want to feel special and feel at least someone notices their unique qualities and
talents. So how can you compliment someone so that they think you want to
make them like you? Heres how.

Compliments
When you want to compliment, you need to be genuine with your compliment
and preferably make it about something the person has put effort towards. As an
example, give a woman a compliment about how she has accessorized herself.
The second rule is to simply focus on what is absent from the person. For
instance, if the person seems to be very well-groomed, you could point out that
they seem to be less untidy than most people. This typically generates a far more
powerful response than just stating directly what you are observing. The third
rule is to hide the compliment inside a larger statement like it would be
seemingly just a throwaway comment. For instance:

Yes, I find it so fascinating how badly some people dress at parties, while
some people like you are putting far more effort into their appearance than
most. When I was in New York, there was even this one person who was a
literal fashion disaster. He had this pink sweater tucked into grey khaki
trousers with tennis shoes to match. Have you ever seen someone dress so
badly that you just wanted to laugh?

The statement is full of fluff, but it implies that the person is tidier than
most people are. Almost everyone will believe this to be true, even though it
cant be statistically correct. When presented indirectly like this, the participant
will still catch it, but doesnt think you did say it just to please him. If there is
nothing particular you could compliment the person about, you can simply
project on him common qualities that people typically want to perceive
themselves having (e.g., being honest, hard-working, intuitive).
Flirting
Flirting is defined as a social activity of implying sexual interest in the person of
an opposite sex. While easy to understand, very few people (especially men)
actually can do it well. For example, lets suppose that you tell an attractive
woman that she is beautiful. While the woman absolutely wants to know she is
having a sexual effect on you, there is nothing in your compliment that would
indicate it is earned through her own behaviour or how sexy she is as an
individual. Why this is so important? Without that level of individualization, she
will respond to your compliment with her public persona, thus triggering all the
fears and inhibitions that come with that social identity. To avoid this happening,
we just need to give her sexualized compliments that imply her specifically
having a sexual effect on us. For example:

Oh sorry, could you repeat that ... because I got distracted by your smile
... very nice ... ok, go on with what you were saying.

For sexualized implication like this to work, it needs to meet two
conditions. First of all, it needs to communicate that she caused a sexual effect
on you. Secondly, and more importantly, the compliment needs to say that she
specifically, not all women caused that effect on you. You can even actually be
quite direct about stating these two conditions, because if she accepts both
presuppositions, she also accepts the implication of you being a man who is not
judging her inherent sexiness or how she expresses it. Another example:

When I first met you I thought you were sexy, but you are actually even
sexier than I thought

So what are we doing here? We are acknowledging that she is sexy, but
also telling her that she specifically has done something to cause us to become
sexually attracted. This also makes her feel sexy, something that is unfortunately
often woefully neglected in long-term relationships. Women start to feel unsexy,
because they dont receive enough positive affirmation that they are having a
sexual effect on their man. As a matter of fact, when women buy all those sexy
clothes, fragrances, etc. to help an ailing relationship, they are doing it because it
makes them feel sexy, not because they want to arouse you. Nonetheless, her
feeling sexy is a necessary condition for anything sexual to happen.
Teasing
Teasing is one of the fundamental tools for creating sexual tension, but also
something that seems to be pretty hard to get right for many men. The
underlying goal of teasing is to communicate you arent putting her on pedestal
in a playful, tongue-in-cheek manner. The reason why teasing is so good for this
purpose is because when you accept any statement, you also accept all the
underlying implications that come with it. When delivered in a playful,
exaggerated manner, the teases surface meaning is you just fooling around.
This prevents any kind of negative reception from triggering, while all the
underlying implications still trigger.
Now, if it is really this straightforward, why do men have so many
problems with teasing? Because they are being creepy. They just start to tease
someone even before there is any kind of mutual attraction going on and they
deliver teases in the most un-playful, creepy way possible. At that point, the
womans mind is just trying to figure out where you are burying all the bodies.
Therefore, a good tease is exaggerated and delivered in a tongue-in-cheek
manner, like you were teasing your little sister. Anything that implies she is silly,
weird, creepy, or unable to handle your pace works especially well for this
purpose. Women dont want to be seen any of these, which just adds to the
power of the tease.
Nominalization

In linguistics, nominalization simply means taking an adjective, verb, or adverb

and using it as a noun, typically via the addition of derivational affixes. For
instance, decide versus decision, refuse versus refusal, friendly versus
friendliness, and variety versus variance. When a process is turned into a
nominalization, the underlying implication is that it immutable and permanent.
For instance, if the person says he has made a decision, it implies that he has
finished deciding and that his conclusion is final (Alexiadou, 2010).
It should be fairly easy to see how nominalizations can be applied to your
advantage. If you turn a process into a nominalization, it implies the process has
ended. To do this, you just need to suggest a nominalization:

So do we agree that you have made your decision?

In this example, we just ask if the person made the decision. When the
person affirms the suggestion about the nominalization, he also accepts the
underlying presupposition that it is his final decision. However, a nominalization
can be also applied to another nominalization to create double nominalization.
Now the nominalization has static qualities of both nominalizations.

What it was that you thought to be the problem before?

In this example, we connected thought to problem and put it into past
tense. The implication here is that the problem was just a thought, nothing else.
And if it is just a thought that is in your past, it really cant control you anymore,
can it? If you want to be really sneaky with nominalizations, you can even use
them to presuppose something happens in the future. For instance:

What are you going to be doing since you have changed your mind on
this issue and made the decision to work with us?

In this example, the implication is that you have already changed your
mind and decided to work with us. The word since in this case doesnt just
presuppose the past, but creates a cause and effect statement that connects the
past (cause: you have changed your mind) with the future behaviour (effect:
decision to work with us). The structure forces you to imagine the future
scenario where both parts have became true and even turns the whole process
into a nominalization.
Changing the Meaning of an Emotion

As a part of our ability to do deductive thinking, we can also reflect thoughts and
emotions back to our emotions and thoughts. This dissociates us from the actual
experience we are having, and you only experience emotion about having the
emotion.
For example, you can feel bored, and frustrated about feeling bored. You
can feel physically tired about exercise, but feel proud about feeling this tired.
You can feel angry, and feel tired about being angry. You can feel warm inside,
and think that you have fallen in love. In all our examples, a person is
experiencing emotion, and reflecting back on it, giving an interpretation to our
experience. Thoughts can be also reflected upon, and this way people can
rationalize actions, be absolutely convinced about their beliefs, and even have
beliefs about having certain beliefs even if they really dont have them.
In psychology, these reflective emotions and thoughts are called secondary
emotions, while the emotion which they are reflecting upon is called the primary
emotion. The primary emotion is anything that happens in response to the
external reality around us. For example, if you fall off your bike, and feel sharp
pain on your knee, it is the primary emotion. That you feel bad about having this
pain, on the other hand, is a secondary emotion about pain. At the same time,
you can feel stupid for making such a mistake, and frustrated about feeling
stupid. This way, we have more nuanced responses to the surrounding
environment. Furthermore, primary emotions are also often very subtle in nature,
meaning that people draw their whole attention on secondary emotions.
While the whole idea of primary and secondary emotions may seem
theoretical, perhaps even philosophical in nature, it is supported by
neuroscience. Scientists have spent a considerable amount of time trying to
categorize the amount of primary and secondary emotions people can have, and
those patients with very specific types of damage in the frontal lobe cant
experience secondary emotions like embarrassment, guilt, or despair at all.
These people have primary feelings like everyone else, but have no reaction to
refer to and to interpret as an emotion (Damasio, Tranel & Damasio, 1991).
While this kind of reflexive consciousness makes us human, it can also
keep us stuck for a very long time. You can have multiple secondary emotions,
creating thoughts about having thoughts, and very soon you dont have the
slightest idea of what your actual experience is. All your attention is occupied
with secondary emotions you have created for yourself.
Lets expand on our previous examples. You can feel bored, frustrated
about feeling bored, and angry about feeling frustrated. You can feel physically
tired about exercise, but feel proud about feeling this tired, and this pride makes
you feel pleasure. You can feel angry, feel tired about being angry, and helpless
about feeling tired. You can feel warm inside, think that you have fallen in love,
and feel afraid of being in love. Secondary emotions just stack above each other
until we have no idea about what we are actually experiencing. This stacking
also creates a new meaning and context for the state. Any time a person is giving
meaning to their personal experience, they are dissociating themselves from it
and creating a secondary emotion above it.
It is possible to change the meaning of a primary emotion by doing
cognitive reappraisal. You simply identify the primary emotion and give it a new
meaning. This has been found to be very effective in a therapeutic setting, but
nothing prevents you from doing the same in a less-formalized setting. Simply
put, you just suggest a new secondary emotion upon a primary emotion in order
to change its meaning (Gross, 1998).
As an example, if someone feels anxious, you can simply suggest a
secondary emotion above it and suggest that it means excitement. Then, what
was initially thought to be anxiety is now interpreted as excitement. If your
listener is lukewarm to your representation, you can add a new secondary
emotion that they are just unsure due to not having all the details. If they are
indecisive about going with that offer, you can introduce the desire to just get
things done.

When you look at that anxiety, you might realize it is really only
uncertainty because you dont know all the details yet. Allow us to show
you how our product can help you solve your challenges.

In this example, you built on the listeners anxiety by adding excitement
into it. Naturally, the person needs to accept your explanation, but because you
two are talking about such abstract things, the explanation just needs to sound
plausible. It is really this simple, and any suggestion that somehow indicates a
new meaning for an emotional state works well for this purpose. This is actually
a good way to deal with resistance and objections, because many objections are
really about how the person feels at the moment.
Keypoints

Suggestions are context-specific, and context determines what is

acceptable and what is not
Any kind of vivid imagery that has a strong emotional content,
plausible motivation, and taps into peoples own ideals is incredibly
powerful
If the listener accepts the implication, they need to accept all the
underlying presuppositions that come with it
If someone goes along with it for even a few moments, the context
changes automatically
Use implications to redefine relationships and side-step resistance
If there is nothing to believe, then there is also no reason to doubt
what you are saying either
You can change the meaning of an emotional state simply by
suggesting a new one above it

APPLICATION: OBJECTION HANDLING
To make things simple, objections are a result of someones personal worldview
and when someone is raising an objection to you, they are essentially telling how
they perceive the world. They are simply automatic responses that the person has
learnt to use as a response against specific ideas. Understanding this simple fact
is important, because directly challenging peoples beliefs rarely works.
Any time a person is objecting against something, it is ultimately a
negative emotional response. To repeat what was said in the Emotional Brain
chapter, negative emotional responses like this overwhelm the brains ability to
make rational decisions in the matter of several seconds, leading to a pure
emotional reaction. Even more so, the person himself still thinks he is being
rational, because the brain creates a stream of rationalizations to justify the
response. These rationalizations reinforce the underlying behaviour, making him
more inclined to act the same way in the future. But surely you can overwhelm
the person by just showing the facts, cant you? Nope. As explained in the
Acquiescence chapter, the more a customer needs to justify and rationalize his
decision, the less emotional momentum he has for making a decision. Trying to
justify a decision to yourself even makes you more dissatisfied with it (Wilson,
et al., 1993; Wnke, Bohner & Jurkowitsch, 1997).
On top of all this, when the brain runs out of rationalizations and gets
overwhelmed, the person doesnt give up. Instead, he either becomes aggressive
or tries to flee the situation. This is the main reason why most debates have
degenerated into irrational shouting matches in the modern era. Due to
increasingly effective media manipulation, people have became so emotionally
invested in their favorite pet causes that it doesnt take much to overwhelm the
brain. At the same time, the only way that most people know how to change
someones opinion is based on attacking their ideas, shaming them, or trying to
overwhelm them with facts. None of these things work that well. In this chapter,
we are taking a look at what really works for changing peoples opinion (Haidt,
2001).
What Are Objections Really About?

When it comes to objections, the first thing you need to understand is that
typically people want to genuinely believe you. You may have come to a point in
an interaction where you just continue talking and talking, and you know things
arent going anywhere. As you continue to talk, you may notice that the person
you are interacting with hasnt left yet. At that point, you should asking yourself
why this is. More than often, the answer is simply that people want to believe in
you. People want to believe that you actually can deliver what you are
promising. They are just waiting for you to provide the proof to back up your
claims. People also often ask for proof to validate their own belief in your
ability to help them, not to challenge you.
Therefore, you should never be afraid of objections or try to avoid them. A
lot of salespeople dread objections and try to avoid them at all costs, but when a
customer gives you an objection, he is actually also telling you his current
worldview and showing you his own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. With some
effort, both can be utilized to your advantage, and they also indicate that some
level of trust has been established. After all, for a person to tell you his
vulnerabilities, he needs to trust you. In the same vein, the three most commonly
raised objections in sales are I need to think about it, I dont have time, and
I cant afford it. Under most circumstances, all three of these objections are
just excuses for the customer not trusting you enough. They happen because you
havent built enough rapport, youre trying to sell them something they dont
need, or you havent demonstrated clearly enough how you can satisfy their
needs with your service.
Dealing with objections should be just another way for you to distinguish
yourself from your competitors as a salesman who really pays attention to his
customers. For this reason, you should also never slag your competition or bring
them up in conversation. In addition to being distasteful and making you look
like a high schooler, it will refocus the customer on the negative aspects of your
industry while looking directly at you. This is not a very good position to be in.
If your customer does bring up the competition, feel more than free to address it
in a tasteful and proper manner.

Becoming Aware of Used Language

When dealing with objections, it is important to keep in mind that while we like
to think language as universal, in the end, it is only an abstraction of how a
person thinks internally. Anything that a person says is an abstraction about how
he experiences the world. This is why when you are listening to a person, you
should always ask yourself what needs to be true for a person to say what he
does.
To emphasize this point, back in the day I had one student who wasnt
willing to give a testimonial for learning influence from me. His rationale was
that the world at large shouldnt know about him studying this kind of material.
Well, what does that presuppose? First of all, it implies that you are afraid of
how other people will respond. What kind of person is afraid of that? Someone
who believes they are manipulating people to do something they would not want
to do. What kind of person does this? A person who is either deeply insecure or
doesnt believe he has someone elses best interest in their heart. In this case, the
first option appeared to be true.
Later on this same person tried to impress and upstage me in several ways,
most silliest being comparing how many Facebook friends we had. In his reality,
this was meant to impress and demonstrate his superiority over me. But does it
really do that or does it just tell me you are being so insecure that you need to
rely on virtual friends to gain my approval? You decide, but keep in mind that in
the end, nothing that a person says happens in isolation. Whatever a person is
saying is always representative of his internal reality.
Which actually leads us nicely into our next point. People typically mean
what they say, but they dont understand what they are saying. What do I mean
by this? Ultimately, whenever we believe something to be true, we act on it as if
it were true. Because of the medial frontal cortex and its ability to reduce
cognitive dissonance, people are often very disconnected from their real
behaviour. They literally dont know what they believe in. They may consciously
think they know, but when an actual situation occurs, they act in a completely
different manner. To return back to the previous example, the person thought he
was operating from a place of power, but in reality everything he was doing was
to placate his own insecurity that he wasnt even really consciously aware of. To
put it in simple terms, people may say this and that, but their actions and
responses tell a completely different story. While what person says can give you
lot of information, in the end you should judge people by how they act, not by
how they speak.
Pre-Empting Objections
You shouldnt ever try to pre-empt objections. This just makes the person think
about the objection and make it real. When someone verbalizes an objection, the
situation worsens because in that moment they have committed to a specific
negative stance. After that, it will be very difficult for you to recover and
otherwise convince them what they are missing. This also means that the easiest
time to disarm objection is to address them right away, even before the person
has the opportunity to verbalize them. How is that possible? To disarm
objections before they are stated, you need to pay very close attention to the
other person and anticipate their mood. If they begin to sound or look sceptical,
address this immediately. For instance, you could ask:

I noticed you seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what I just said.
Would you mind sharing what is on your mind?

The wonderful thing about precluding objections is that, once addressed,
they often dissolve no matter their validity. However, keep in mind that as they
start to explain their reasoning, you need to validate their concerns as valid, but
not the objection itself. The reason for doing it this way is that otherwise you are
just reinforcing their objection through repetition. Understanding this principle
will save a lot of time and headache. Too many people are just so afraid of
addressing objections, even if they clearly see the person doesnt like their
message. You should honour the persons resistance and see it as a potential
opportunity to positively influence them.

Finding the Reason for the Objection

Before you can challenge an objection, you need to have the full objection. What
I mean is that when people object to you, they quite often leave out the actual
reason for their objecting. To elicit the missing part of the objection, you dont
need to do anything but to ask for it.

Person: I dont like this car.

Salesman: And this is because ...?

 Person: It is so red!

In this simple example, we just asked the person to tell us the missing part
of the objection. Now that you have both sides of the objection, you can
challenge and change it. There are literally dozens of different ways to elicit the
missing part, but I personally prefer using And this is because ... ? It simply
doesnt leave the person any wiggle room or other way to misinterpret the
question. Why questions can easily be misinterpreted and tend to direct
conversation in completely wrong directions.
Unfreezing Decision

But what you should do if the customer claims he has already made a decision?
As explained in the last chapter, a statement like this doesnt leave you much to
work with, because the nominalization implies the sales process has ended.
Fortunately, nominalizations like these can be challenged simply by asking how
the person came to the specific conclusion. For instance:

Person: I have made my decision and its final.

Salesman: What were the most important factors you considered while
you were deciding?

When the customer explains how he arrived at the decision, he needs to
also break it down. The underlying context changes having made a decision back
into deciding. Now, you are once again able to influence the decision-making
process. However, asking a question like this can put a lot of pressure on the
person, and the customer may simply be unwilling to explain his decision. If not
asked tactfully, it can make you also appear obnoxious or rather dense. While
this strategy works quite often, avoid getting into situations where its use is
needed. It is always easier to do everything correctly from the beginning than try
to convince someone at the end of the interaction.
Working with Resistance

When you are handling objections, you should first decrease the customers
resistance before you do anything else. As mentioned in the Emotional Brain
chapter, the brain is naturally balancing between two neurological systems. One
measures benefits, one risks, and the decision is made only after either
neurological system gains the upper hand in the decision-making process. Most
persuasion techniques try to tip the scale simply by increasing the desire
towards the goal (e.g., giving extra discounts). While techniques like these
work, they arent always that cost-efficient. For this reason, there has been
increased focus in social psychology to find different ways to reduce peoples
resistance, instead of increasing their desire (Knowles & Linn, 2004).

Acknowledging Resistance
The simplest way to reduce resistance is to simply acknowledge its existence. In
general, studies in social psychology have found that a persons resistance to
your message is always lowered when you acknowledge its existence. For
instance, when people were asked to mail a single letter, 71 percent of people
complied with the request. However, when the researchers first acknowledged
that the person might not like doing so, compliance rose to a full 100 percent
(Knowles, Nolan & Rider, 2007).
Obviously, this was only a very simple request, but even in more complex
requests, compliance nearly always rose by at least 30 percent. To use this
principle, you just need to acknowledge resistance before your message. For
instance:

Look, I know you are busy, but do you have a second to spare?

When you acknowledge the existence of resistance, it will immediately
lower it down and you will get a chance to connect with the person. In many
cases, that window of opportunity will be small, but it is still doable.
Acknowledging resistance has also been proven to lead into attitudinal changes
when it is used as a part of a larger campaign intended to change attitudes. As a
matter of fact, when encouraging students to recycle soda cans, messages that
first acknowledged resistance to recycle and then said it was important were
found to be far more effective than trying to appeal to the easiness or practicality
of recycling cans (Werner, Stoll & Birch, 2002).
Another practical way to disarm resistance is to just acknowledge the other
partys side. If you can accurately describe it, it is proven to increase compliance
even more than just acknowledging the resistance. However, the same studies
have found out that if you try to use these strategies to lower resistance with a
person who actually doesnt have any, you will end up creating resistance. This
is simply because the person starts to think about what you said and it starts to
affect their behaviour (Knowles & Linn, 2004).

Redirecting Resistance
In addition of acknowledging resistance, it can be also re-directed. Probably the
easiest way to do this is just channel the persons resistance against a common
enemy. For instance, lets suppose the customer is frustrated about paying so
many taxes.

I can see you are frustrated about your hard-earned money disappearing,
and Im not happy about this situation either, because the IRS is making
both of our lives so much harder.

In this example, the resistance is re-directed towards the common enemy
that is the IRS. In addition to helping you to build rapport, you are now even
perceived as a trusted authority that has a strategy for foiling the plans of a
common enemy. Obviously, this strategy should be used only when it is
appropriate. If the frustration is really about you or your company, then trying to
re-direct it against a third party can potentially make you look really bad.
It is also important that you learn to identity the difference between
outcome-based and method-based resistance. In outcome-based resistance the
person resists the suggested outcome, while in method-based resistance the
person resists the method for doing so. For example, not wanting to buy
insurance is outcome-based resistance. Not wanting to make a quick decision
about buying insurance is method-based resistance. You can redirect this
resistance simply by setting an alternative outcome or method. As an example,
lets suppose someone is resisting quickly reading a report for the next meeting.
You could say the following:

 I want you to read this report slowly and carefully for the next meeting
and think about what is being said.

The trick here is that you are not asking them to read a paper in a way that
they are resisting (read quickly). Instead, you are asking them to do it in a way
that doesnt cause resistance, but still leads to the same outcome (report being
read) (Knowles & Linn, 2004).

Distracting Resistance
The mind, by nature, is multitasking and relative. Everything that we have ever
learned is stored within, and it constantly refers to that information during
decision-making processes. After the mind has had several experiences related to
any topic, it generalizes them into automatic patterns of behaviour that we
follow. When interacting with people, you constantly face situations where the
other person returns to their automatic responses. Instead of even considering
your message, they resist it with the same automatic response they have given to
everyone else prior. When this happens, instead of thinking of how you can
make someone do something, you should be asking yourself how you can
make him stop doing something. Think about that statement.
Undeniably the best tool for overcoming negative automatic responses is a
disruption of thought. In a disruption of thought, you are doing something that
the persons mind isnt accustomed to within a given context. The mind will
freeze for a few moments and allow you to take the lead. For example, when
experimenters asked for some change in a panhandling experiment, they got
donations 44 percent of time. By asking for 37 cents, response increased to 75
percent. Wait a minute? How many people are going to ask specifically for 37
cents? Thats the point. Because the request was unexpected, it interrupted
whatever automatic responses a potential donor might have against panhandling.
If left unattended, the person will soon react to the situation once again with an
automatic response (Santos, Leve & Pratkanis, 1994).
Even more important is that when you interrupt a persons state
successfully, practically anything you say or do will slip directly inside the mind
and allow you to take the lead. Perhaps the funniest example of how effective
this is was when experimenters were selling door-to-door note cards for a local
charity. The pitch was ended simply by saying the following:

 We are selling this pack of eight note cards for 300 pennies ... It is a
bargain. Would you buy some?

The unusual statement broke the prospects state, allowing a leading
suggestion to slip in (it is a bargain). When compared against just saying the
cards would cost three dollars, response jumped from 35 percent to 65 percent.
This wasnt a statistical fluke, because the same results were achieved in three
separate experiments and the experimenters even tried shuffling suggestions
around. The only cases where the response increased were when the leading
suggestions were given after the interrupt. Any other way, the response stayed
around 35 percent. Disruptions like these work even when watching recorded
media (Davis & Knowles, 1999; Petty, Wells & Brock, 1976).
While disruptions of thought are arguably one of the most powerful tools
of influence, they can also work greatly against you. Undeniably, the worst
possible disruption is the ringing of a phone because you arent able to control
that and most people have been conditioned to respond to it immediately. When
the person is in a good state, great lengths should be taken not to break their state
with something stupid: avoid needless arguments, stupid jokes, sarcasm and
anything else that could break the state you have created. It is also absolutely
vital that you maintain a comforting and calm presence while using disruptions.
Whenever you take away the familiar, it is you who defines the new normal for
that person. If in that moment, you hold any kind of stress or anxiety about
leading the person, you will imprint him with those states. He might start to feel
anxious, or even downright panic in certain cases.

Using Pauses

One of the simplest disruptions of thought is to simply say firmly stop to

interrupt a listeners thought process. However, practically anything works as a
disruption of thought as long as the person isnt accustomed to it. Sudden
interruptions, physiological changes, compliments, and insults can all create
disruptions of thought. Even a dramatic pause or a long silence works as a
disruption.

Thats right, thats a good point [pause] ...

In this example, just having a longer pause will cause a disruption of
thought. The listener will begin to wonder what the good point is and interrupt
their own thought. This can be used in almost any context to interrupt a
resistance pattern and suggest a desired behaviour. Another example:
Thats right, thats a good point [pause]... because you can still give me a
free upgrade, as I really need to get back home today, right?

In this example, we first broke the state, and then suggested that the other
person can give us a free upgrade because we really need to get back home
today. Because of the interrupt, the suggestion tends to just slip in unchallenged,
especially when stated in cause-and-effect format (which will be discussed in the
next chapter).

Asking Questions

But even the simplest questions can force others beyond their ordinary
experience, if presented in the right kind of tonality. For instance:

Who are you? No, thats not what I meant ... Who are you?

When asked with little more serious and questioning tone than normal, the
results are quite interesting. When asked the first time, a person might opt to
give an automatic response. But when asked again, the questioning tone creates a
disruption of thought in most people, because answering it forces them to go
outside their comfort zone. This kind of questioning can be very powerful, but
the inherent risk is that this kind of self-exploration can make a person really,
really uncomfortable. Even just asking what a person wants tends to create a
disruption of thought.

You want something? What do you want? No, thats not it ... What do you
really want?

At first, people often give a ready-made conclusion instead of what they
truly need. But when asked again, a person will go outside their normal
boundaries and truly think on what they really want. Asking about someones
desired outcome also tends to create the same effect. For example:

What is your desired outcome?

Asking people what they really desire tends to create a disruption and re-
orient their mind towards the goal.

Taboo Breaking

Quite often, the best way to cause a disruption of thought is to go against social
norms and break some kind of taboo. For instance, in the corporate culture, there
is a tendency to distract people with less-important details and to be dishonest
about a current situation. The leadership is accustomed to brown-nosing and yes-
men. People also know that many salesmen sugarcoat their products, if not
blatantly lie about them. When you are absolutely honest about the situation, it
tends to break this hidden taboo. Even using words that are considered
shocking in a given context create disruption of thought. For example:

If thats the case, you can just go into the hallway and start to burn one
hundred dollar bills, because that is what you are practically currently
doing.

When the subject thinks about burning money, it will interrupt their state
and allow the motivation to slip in without resistance. Most people in the
corporate world also hold money in high regard and just indicating otherwise
tends to cause a disruption of thought. Another example:

Money? So, this is all about money?

When indicating with tonality that money isnt that important to you, it
tends to cause an instant disruption in most people. It also creates embarrassment
in the other party, a very good state for you to begin from because it can be
easily transformed into almost any other state. Because of this, it is also
absolutely vital that you maintain a comforting and calm presence while using
disruptions. Whenever you take away the familiar, it is you who defines the new
normal for that person. If in that moment you hold any kind of stress or anxiety
about leading the person, you will imprint him with those states. He might start
to feel anxious, or even downright panic in certain cases.

Shifting Perspective
Another way to cause disruption is to just suggest to a person to shift his
perspective outside his self-defined boundaries. If someone is being acquiescent,
this has the tendency to cause immediate disruption of thought and give you the
lead immediately. For example:

You can easily start to imagine how applying these skills will enable you
to go far beyond what you expected to be possible.

When your mind processes the statement, the underlying implication is
that you are shifting your perspective to a place that is outside their normal
boundaries. Now you just need to start to lead a person towards new
experiences. This can also be a very good way to deal with objections. You just
suggest to the customer to look at a given issue outside their own self-defined
box. Then you redefine it. Another example:

We both know this is not really about money, because when you start to
look beyond the price tag, you know you want to have that respect that
comes with this car.

When done successfully, a shift like this creates a disruption of thought
and allows the person to re-define their problem from the place where it
doesnt exist. Spatial statements like this are practically impossible to resist in
normal interactions because the listeners mind will begin to process the
suggestion faster than they can become aware of it consciously. Some of the
most useful words for this purpose include among, apart from, beside, beyond,
separate, through, and without.

Leveraging Resistance
One of the most common myths about persuasive language is the use of
negation. People tell you that when you add negation in front of any statement, it
forces the mind to think about that statement. For example, dont think about the
elephant. Yes, this certainly works, but guess what else causes a person to think
about the elephant? Just saying elephant. Therefore, negations dont make any
difference whatsoever in whether a person thinks about a given suggestion or
not. However, they deny a person from having a choice in the matter.
In the beginning of this book, we discussed doctor Jack Brehm and his
work on resistance. Dr. Brehm discovered that when someone is being
demanded to do something, there is a natural tendency to try regaining lost
autonomy through resisting a given command. The more important the denied
choice was perceived, the stronger the reactance was. At the same time, people
automatically started to like prohibited choices more than a demanded course of
action. Until quite recently, this was considered a purely theoretical classification
for resistance, but more recent studies have found evidence for it to be an
automatic process of the brain. When competing for monetary rewards, verbal
discouragement and risk of minor electric shocks made some participants show
an immediate spike in orbifrontal cortex activity, which is known to facilitate
goal-oriented behaviour. (Brehm, 1966; Prevost, Lau & Mobbs, 2015).
In practice, intelligent use of negations allows you to leverage resistance
and make a person actually like the denied choices more. Of course, the keyword
here is intelligent. When most people learn about negations, they just spam them
all the time thinking they are being so clever. This has no effect whatsoever,
because the person needs to actually value denied choice in the first place for
reactance to trigger. For example, if the customer isnt interested in the product
in the first place, negation doesnt have any effect whatsoever. Regardless,
negations can significantly increase the effect of your message when used
intelligently. For instance:

It is not important for you to get really excited about learning this
material because Im not sure if you are truly interested in becoming a
highly influential human being.

In this case, we outright told our audience not to get excited about learning the
material by feigning ignorance. Feigning ignorance is powerful because it
doesnt really give a person anything he could argue with. By their very nature,
negations are also very good for telling people what is necessary or what they
should need, know, want, or have. Lets suppose you want to suggest to the
person which product to buy.

Look, I wouldnt ever tell you to choose this product.

In this simple example, we created a non-confrontational context for choosing a
product. When used properly, feigning ignorance can also be used to lead a
person rapidly through a chain of states. For example, you could first tell him
that something isnt necessary, then that something isnt needed, and finally that
he doesnt need to have it. For instance:

I dont know if you can see value in this and it is not necessary to feel
excited about this possibility and even if you would, you wouldnt need to
make this decision right now.

When used in the right context, it will be very hard for the person to resist
suggestions like this. As you might guess, subtlety is the key here, because if
you constantly tell people that you dont want to do or think about something, it
will make them very suspicious of your real intentions.
Challenging Objections

Contrary to what most sales courses teach, objection handling is not about
arguing with or outsmarting your customer or about convincing a person to
change their mind. Instead, challenging objections is all about stopping a
persons current train of thought and shifting their perspective to their own
given objection. When you successfully do this, a person is forced to think about
your proposal objectively instead of relying on his automatic responses. He
might still disagree with you, but at least he is genuinely thinking about your
offering. At this point, if your reasoning seems emotionally compelling enough,
it will typically break down the objection. From a practical standpoint, there are
essentially five different directions you can go with challenging objections. After
the description, you will be shown how each strategy can be used to dissolve the
following objections:

1. We tried that before and it didnt work.
2. I would prefer to work with a larger and/or more experienced
company.
3. I can sell my house on my own and save money.

1. Future consequences: Perhaps the most common way to challenge
an objection is to shift someones attention to the future
consequences. You either point out the objections (negative) short-
term consequences, or speak about an objections short-term
consequences that lead to additional long-term consequences. If you
focus on short-term consequences, focus on the hassles of not
making a specific choice. If you are talking about long-term, the
most effective way is to emphasize responsibility and how the
decision will impact the future self. The scientific reason why these
approach works so well will be discussed in the Hallucination,
Playing with Time section.

a. That you dont try new things puts a dead halt to any kind of
innovation, and it is only a matter of time before you totally
lose your competitive edge.
b. That you are unwilling to work with small companies is
 unfortunate, because experience isnt measured in company
size. There are many companies in your marketplace who are
interested in the level of experience and specialization we can
provide. Before you notice, it is very likely that we will be
working against you instead of working with you and that is
unfortunate.
c. Selling your own house might save money, but you are going
to soon realize that selling a house on your own isnt that easy
in this economic climate. After your house has been staying
empty for three, four, perhaps even six months, you will
quickly realize why you should have worked with a
professional in the first place.

2. Reasoning: In this strategy, you draw a persons attention to a
counter example that goes directly against the rule defined by the
objection, or give the person a plausible, alternative explanation for
why they are objecting. Of course, you dont always know the
purpose of their behaviour, but as long as your explanation sounds
plausible, it is enough. A third way to utilize this strategy is to tell a
person that whatever outcome they are stating is not the real issue,
but something else instead (e.g., you are not really concerned about
X, but Y). For example:

a. You say you arent interested in our product, because it is the
easiest way to avoid being disappointed when a product
doesnt match its promises. Let me show you what allows you
to test our product so that you will be absolutely sure it will
work for you before you make the final decision.
b. Many of our customers wanted to work with a larger
company until they realized that they were only yet another
number on the balance sheet for the company. We can provide
you the kind of personalized service you can only dream of
with larger companies.
c. It is not guaranteed that selling your house on your own will
save you money, because it is very likely you wont make as
much money as a professional realtor can.

 3. Ask for more detail: You can ask the person to provide more details
on how the person knows something to be true, forcing them to
provide you more information to work with. When challenged this
way, the person will often also describe their own emotional state.
When this happens, you can change its meaning using strategies
described in the last chapter.

a. What exactly didnt work last time and were there any
aspects that actually worked really well?
b. How do you know that a company is experienced? What
makes you feel that you cant achieve greater success with a
smaller company?
c. What exactly makes you feel you can save money by selling
your own house?"

4. Social Consensus: In this strategy, you shift the customers
attention to what others are doing. When you shift the perspective
to a more personal level, you should emphasize how the change will
make them stand out positively from current social norms. By
drawing attention to what others are doing, on the other hand, you
gain compliance by appealing to the popularity of a given
behaviour. Furthermore, you are making the person consciously
aware that not everyone else shares the same worldview. This is
really powerful, because people often assume that everyone else has
the same worldview as they do. When they take ownership for their
own objection, they cant impose it on others anymore. This can be
executed quickly simply by asking, According to whom?

a. Thats an interesting way to say it. Most people want to hear
and explore first how a service can solve their problems
before declaring that it doesnt work for them.
b. Large companies may sometimes have experienced staff, but
equally common are the horror stories where you were put to
work by some inexperienced intern.
c. You may be able to save money by doing everything on your
own, but all around your neighbourhood is the evidence that
this isnt as easy as it sounds.

5. Apply objection back to self: Finally, you can draw attention to how
the objection itself is the reason why they are having the objection
in the first place. This strategy can be a little tricky to learn, but
when learned, it will make the other persons head spin and cause
an immediate disruption of thought. It is highly recommended that
you soften or pace before using this strategy.

a. So if something didnt work perfectly the first time, is that a
reason to give up? How has that been working for you?
b. That attitude is deceiving, because every successful and
experienced company must have started from somewhere, and
we are bringing all our experience and knowledge to help you
get what you want.
c. Saving money isnt and shouldnt always be a factor in
making decisions. There are no guarantees in the first place
that you can save any money, and are those few dollars worth
all the time you are going to save by working with a
professional?

In conversation, you typically use two or three of these strategies in
succession to unhinge a given objection. The first strategy simply interrupts the
persons train of thought and the ones following shift perspective on the
objection. For instance, you could begin by applying the objection to the self
and then talk about the future consequences. Even then, the only way to know
what strategies you should use to handle a specific objection is to practice and
experiment with different approaches.
As you practice, it is very important that you pay attention to how the
other person responds. When used correctly, people will often go totally blank,
because they are not accustomed to their objections being challenged this way.
Using these strategies allows you to also quickly call a horse a horse. If the
person is dancing around the topic after you have challenged his objection, you
pretty much know that he is simply wasting your time. After some practice, you
will also find it very easy to put almost any objection into a new context, but it is
important that you remember to keep in mind that some objections are truly
valid. If a person truly doesnt have a need for your product or have enough
money for it, you should respect this. And sometimes people really need to think
before they make a decision. It is not wise or appropriate to challenge all
objections, and pushing against every objection can be also considered
(rightfully) a sign of weakness. You dont need to win every sale.
Using Conditioned Responses

You can also challenge objections simply by using conditioned responses. You
just interrupt their train of thought and fire the suitable trigger as you shift the
customers perception on the objection. This typically breaks almost any
objection immediately so long as the trigger is strong enough. For instance, lets
suppose the person objects about a cars price.

Customer: You really cant expect me to pay this much money for car!

Salesperson: Thats right, thats a good point ... [pause]

Customer: Umm ... [sudden pause breaks persons state]

Salesperson: ... but you need to realize that safety does cost money. Does
that money really mean so much when you drive back home in this car ...
[fire a trigger with the feeling of safety] ... knowing that your family will
be safe?

This typically breaks almost any objection immediately and it is actually
often the best way to deal with one. We first acknowledge resistance to lower it,
then do a disruption and then fire the trigger to change the emotional state.
Instead of arguing, we are only changing the brains direction and we dont need
to intellectualize anything. Even then, this rarely works if the objection is very
deeply held. To overcome those objections, you would need to have a very
strong trigger that is close to a peak, something you dont normally do.
Keypoints

Objections are simply automatic responses that the person has learnt
to use as a response against specific ideas
You should never be afraid of objections; try to avoid them or pre-
empt their existence
Find the reason for the objection first
Disruptions stop a persons train of thought momentarily by doing
something that the person isnt accustomed to in a given context
Objection handling is not about arguing or outsmarting your customer
Challenging objections is all about stopping the persons current train
of thought and shifting their perspective on their own given objection
You can also use conditioned responses for challenging objections

HALLUCINATION
In this chapter, we are taking a closer look at how you can make a person
hallucinate new possibilities by creating vivid imagery that feels absolutely real
for the person, even though it really happens only inside his mind. Before there
is any confusion about the usage of the word hallucination, I want to stress that I
use the word in its loosest scientific definition: a perception in the absence of an
external stimulus.
Emotional State and Ownership

In the Emotional Brain chapter, we discussed how our perception is in constant

shift. Any time our emotional state changes, our perception and attention also
shift. We start to perceive different things, focus on different things, and even
give those things different meaning. Everything happening in the interaction is
rationalized from a standpoint of the current context and emotional state.
Positive states make you rationalize why something is possible while negative
states make you rationalize why you are avoiding something. Even more so, you
try to predict the future through your current emotional state. I suspect every one
of us can probably relate with situations where we were expecting something
bad to happen and when we finally got there, nothing happened!
In similar fashion, if the perceived context is to be you intruding on
someones privacy, all your behaviour, no matter how well-meaning or genuine,
will be interpreted from that standpoint. The other person is literally
hallucinating a different meaning for your well-meaning words than you
intended. And think about love. When we have fallen in love, we cant think
straight and we start to project our hopes and dreams on the other person. At this
point, they are simply perfect regardless of what they do.
Ultimately, what this means is that any kind of state change is
hallucination in itself that increases in intensity the longer attention towards it
is sustained. Because the brain will inhibit any competing concepts, a person
may quickly even reach a point where he cant think critically at all. I personally
suspect that based on all the scientific evidence available, this is really the only
thing that happens during hypnosis, and everything else is a combination of an
agreed frame, the expectation effect, and conditioning. Nonetheless, from our
standpoint, it is not really a matter of quantity, but quality of those states. Are
these emotional states that your customer shifts into something that will enable
them to go in the right direction or something that just keeps them stuck? Even
more importantly, do they even have motivation to go towards better states?
Quite often the answer is negative, but we can overcome these obstacles to a
great degree by shifting a person into another emotional state.

Building an Expectation
As explained earlier on, social psychology has a long time ago proven that
expectations influence our perception and if you manage successfully to create
expectation for something to happen, it becomes real. Expectations created by
perception, on the other hand, create sensations. As an example, physical pain is
one of the rare emotions that is not created exclusively by your brain. However,
it is still influenced by your expectations. Mere expectation of pain has been
proven to activate both pain-related regions and expectation-related brain
circuits. When expected pain is then manipulated, expectations of decreased pain
significantly decrease the intensity of both the subjective experience of the pain
and activity in pain-related brain regions (Koyama, et al., 2005).
In similar fashion, it has been found that our perception is heavily
influenced by the current context. As an example, in an experiment conducted in
2012, test subjects were introduced to moderate physical pain in two different
contexts. In the first, subjects were given a moderate amount of pain without
other alternatives. In the second context, subjects were given a moderate amount
of pain, but it was contrasted against a risk of intense pain. Quite unexpectedly,
in the second context test subjects rated moderate pain to be pleasant, despite it
being reported as painful as in the control context. This difference was then also
verified by physiological and functional neuroimagining data (Oliva & Torralba,
2007; Leknes,. et al., 2012).
All this means that as long as a person expects something to happen, it
becomes real for him. When you get really deep into it, you realize that most of
our job as an influencer is about creating expectation for something to happen.
When you have successfully created strong expectation for something to happen,
the whole thing is in the bag so long as you dont do anything stupid to screw up.
This is why when leading people, Im constantly telling them what we are going
to do next and what is going to happen as a result of it. For example, before
starting the presentation, you can suggest that time will just fly by because you
have so many exciting things to show. You can tell that signing the contract will
make them feel proud of the decision. After making the sale, you could describe
to the customer how much better he will feel when he returns back home. By
constantly telling what is going to happen, you are making it real.

Ownership
While every interaction is influenced by an underlying emotional state, it is also
subtly influenced by the person willing to take ownership of that emotion. While
we create our own sensations, it is fairly common that we are attributing them to
an external source like someone we are interacting with. The problem is that if
the person doesnt particularly like the emotion, he will typically attribute it to
you manipulating him. At that point, your ability to influence him will be greatly
diminished. This is why we have been emphasizing the importance of subtle
states so much through this whole book. While it is remarkably easy to create
strong sensations with the tools you have learnt, they will typically just backfire.
People in general arent that comfortable with strong, powerful sensations
and if their state changes suddenly, a person might become overwhelmed by it.
For many people, this is a downright scary experience and at that point the most
natural response is to simply try to escape from the situation. This typically
happens by baiting you to do something. For example, while dating, a woman
might suddenly start to act irrationally to bait you to do something that gives
her an excuse to leave the interaction. The man, on the other hand, typically baits
by becoming emotionally withdrawn and cold.
In both of these cases, this behaviour is really about the persons inability
to accept his own feelings. If this happens in your interactions, you just need to
stay calm and not react to it at all. You just maintain comfort while not providing
them any rational reason to get away from the situation. What happens is that
sooner or later (typically sooner) they lose the fight against themselves, accept
the ownership, and just go with the flow. If they succeed in baiting you to do
something, they will rationalize later that it was because you were manipulating
them or you had a weak frame.

The Last-Minute Resistance

It is also possible that the emotion overwhelms the person so badly that he or she
cant think clearly. When this happens, the person will just go along with you for
the time being. It is remarkably easy to sell people who are in a vulnerable state
like this, but having long-term commitment is much harder. Immediately after
the state clears up, the person starts to wonder what the heck happened and
demands a refund. Many sales courses call this buyers remorse or last-
minute resistance, but neither of these things really exist. Any kind of resistance
or remorse happens only if the circumstances didnt feel right.
Of course, this has never bothered conmen and women of the world. Most
confidence games rely on using powerful emotionstypically guilt, shame, or
personal painto sell the product. In their sales pitch, they typically amplify
these feelings to the point where they overwhelm the victim so that he just needs
to get away from them. The product itself is then presented as an escape
plan from the situation. You say you are uncertain? Just imagine what your
dead mother would think. Wouldnt you agree that she would want you to be
happy and financially independent? Yes, I thought so. You may be poor now, but
if you buy my real estate course, you will be swimming in riches in no time. Just
give us your credit card details and we are ready to go. Blatant shysterism like
this is then often amplified with false scarcity and other pressure tactics.
This formula should be familiar to anyone who has been in any way
involved with self-help organizations, MLMs, motivational speakers, or other
scams of a similar type. After the victim starts to cool down, he or she often
regrets the purchase for obvious reasons. What the victim doesnt know is that
conmen typically make it as hard as possible to get a refund by attempting to
demoralize anyone trying to do so. Often, the victim has also been put on forced
continuity and his contact details have also been sold to various boiler rooms
around the country.
Naturally, some people wont go down quietly and actually dare to demand
their money back. For this purpose, most scams also employ so-called coolers
who hold victims so long that they start to cool down and give up on demanding
their money back. In modern scams, the cooler often also plays the double role
of mentor; he pretends to be some kind of mentor or coach for the services the
victim has bought. In reality, the cooler rarely knows anything about the topic he
is mentoring the victim about, instead relying on well-crafted sales scripts to
keep the cycle of self-blame going on as long as possible. Now the victim is not
just cooled down, but turned into an opportunity to make extra money (Goffman,
1952).
Weaving Vivid Imagery

When someone is in an acquiescent state of mind, that person needs to process

whatever you are suggesting thoroughly, including any vivid imagery you are
describing in your story. When you make a person focus on your description and
the internal experience, they gradually become more and more immersed by it.
After a certain point, they will start to feel that the internal experience feels more
believable than what is currently happening in the surrounding physical reality.
To do this, you only need to involve all three main senses as much as
possible in the description. What does that person see? What do they hear? What
do they feel? The more you can involve different senses within the description,
the more real it becomes. Just keep your descriptors before the object you want
to a person to acknowledge, to avoid mental friction:

Have you ever been to the movies? You pack into the same room with 200
strangers with whom you wouldnt normally associate, bumping your way
to your seat. You can hear people chattering and smell popcorn while
wondering what the heck is that thing you just got stuck on your feet. But
then something happens. As you sit comfortably in your seat, the whole
room suddenly goes silent as the lights go down. You watch the
shimmering screen and within a matter of minutes, it is like everything else
has disappeared. You are just so immersed by your experience that it
doesnt matter.

In this lengthy description, you basically rotate between all the three main
senses while describing a fairly mundane experience. Even still, it naturally
captured your imagination. While just rotating between the three main senses
can create extremely vivid imagery, to really knock the other person out you
should also describe physical sensations.

Just few days ago, I was jogging in the national park. It was so exciting
to see the wilderness expanding all around me, hear the birds singing and
feel the sun on my sweaty skin. Nothing can beat that feeling of heart
pounding after a long jog.

The importance of adding bodily sensations to your descriptions cant be
stressed enough, because when you do so, you are bringing the persons internal
experience to the physical realm. It convinces the mind that the experience is
real. When you can get someone to have a physical response to your
descriptions, they become so much more powerful. The opposite is also true. If
you integrate a persons physical responses into the story you are telling, it will
have greater impact. If you can blur the line between imagined and real, what
you are describing becomes so much more powerful. The mind can literally
create anything you can describe and if you can bring something to life, it
becomes real for the mind.
Instead of trying to convince the person, you are creating mental imagery
that compels them to act. So far as that person is concerned, those images are
their own thoughts. While anyone can oppose a direct command, nobody can
resist their own thoughts and feelings. Why? When you vividly imagine
something, the mind just assumes that it has already happened. If the experience
felt good and led to a positive outcome, why would the mind resist experiencing
it again? Like one of my teachers loved to say, It is kinky only for the first
time. If I can make you imagine something, I win.

Shared Experience
One of the biggest challenges while weaving vivid imagery is to not clash
with the listeners own perception of reality. Even minor differences can turn
mentally jarring in the long run, and if the difference is too vast, woven reality
breaks completely apart. But how can you know what you should focus on?
After all, you may have been invited inside their reality but you are still not
sharing it. To repeat what was said earlier on, all you need to do is to focus on
what we consider our shared, consensual reality. As an example, close your
eyes and think about being in a library. What do you see, hear and feel? What are
the common elements that almost everyone agrees to exist in the library? Some
more obvious choices include people, books, desks, shelves and light. This is
why when you are describing new experiences for someone, you should focus on
these common elements and allow them to fill in the rest.
In the beginning, you may find thinking this way challenging, but there is
a very simple way to improve it. You just need to cultivate your awareness of
reality layers. These are:

1. Your own perception of physical reality that is influenced by our
 own feelings and thoughts.
2. The other persons perception of physical reality that is created by
his own feelings and thoughts.
3. The shared reality that is formed by things that both parties agree
upon and accept to be true.
4. Physical, objective reality.

To develop your awareness of these layers, just put aside a few moments
every day and reflect on the high point of the day. As you think about it, just ask
yourself what was going on in each one of these layers. How were you feeling
and how did it influence your behaviour? What was the other person feeling and
how did it influence the interaction? What was the reality you two were sharing
and agreeing upon? What parts of the reality were you disagreeing on? How was
the physical, objective reality? After spending few moments reflecting on that
specific event, do the same process for the low point of the day. Doing this
simple exercise on a daily basis will significantly help you to perceive the
existence of these layers.
When you learn to think this way, it becomes remarkably easy to weave
vivid imagery. However, to increase your effectiveness further, you should learn
to describe events and places using unspecified process words. The unifying
theme for these words is that they are abstractions for imagining and dreaming
new possibilities. They cover all three main senses (visual, auditory, and
kinesthetic), opening a persons choice for how he wants to experience your
description. In addition, they also suggest focusing inward to make sense of what
you say. Some examples of unspecified process words include aware, anticipate,
awaken, discover, dream, experience, introspect, notice, perceive, ponder, within,
and wonder.

Minimizing Resistance
When it comes to weaving vivid imagery, there are certain things that can be
done to minimize the amount of resistance. First is to start from describing an
experience that is firmly within the persons current realm of possibility. When
the person is then fully immersed in the experience, you start to gradually
introduce new elements to it which are outside those limits. Some people are just
so trapped in their sense of possibility that anything outside is disregarded as a
fantasy. By introducing elements gradually, it becomes easier for him to accept
them. Even better is if you can start from a place where he has the most success
in his life. Quite often we have self-made limitations based on the place we are
currently in. After you have successfully imagined doing something in several
familiar and safe places, it becomes much easier to do it anywhere.
The second thing is to make a person imagine being in another culture.
The reason why this is so effective for disarming resistance is that it bypasses a
large amount of the persons cultural conditioning. After all, from the brains
perspective, the person is literally being in that culture he imagines. We rely on
our cultural conditioning to define our reality and when we cant rely on it, we
are extremely responsive to new influences. This is why people often have such
major changes in their attitudes and behaviours during and after travelling.
Whatever social conditioning they had is not holding them back anymore. Of
course, you dont need to travel to exotic lands to use this principle. To utilize
this principle, just tell stories about exotic and distant places where you have
been, even if it is just a vacation. As a side note, even imagining taking part in
unusual and extraordinary events (e.g., masquerade, nudist camp, meditation
retreat) tends to create a similar effect.

Utilizing Novelty
When you are weaving any kind of vivid imagery, novelty is often your best
friend. The first reason is that people often have a much easier time imagining
experiences they havent had before. Why? While it is easier to imagine
experiences with which you already have familiarity, you also have pre-
conceptions of how those experiences should feel. When you ask someone to
imagine something new and novel, these self-imposed expectations will vanish.
This is why it is easier to make most people imagine that their arm is getting 30
pounds heavier than that they can feel good for no reason at all.
Of course, if someone absolutely doesnt have any kind of frame of
reference for the experience, just describing it wont work. As an example, I
know more than a few therapists who have shot themselves in the foot by trying
to train a subject to express emotions they havent experienced because of a past
trauma or lack of experience. As there isnt any kind of reference point that the
client can use, you need to elicit a series of emotional experiences that are
similar to the desired outcome. This can be achieved by using metaphors and
telling stories, but doing so is very challenging to even the most accomplished
therapist.
 Novelty also works to your advantage, because you can disarm a great
deal of resistance simply by re-packing or re-wording your message. When you
are using some kind of private vocabulary, it will automatically disarm resistance
towards the message. The mind simply doesnt have any specific associations for
the made-up words. Therefore, there is no existing opinion about them or even
what would be considered proper behaviour in relation to the formed association
either. Because they are an open concept, you can also easily link any values or
emotions into the word. From Google to Scientology to iPod, business is full of
successful examples of creating new vocabulary to use. In similar fashion, you
can create strong associations simply by using words that are rarely used in a
given context. As a real-life example, part of Donald Trumps strategy in the
U.S. primaries was using novel concepts to undermine his competition. Low-
energy Bush, Lyin Ted, and Robot Rubio are all perfect examples of
powerful associations created by using words that are rarely used in political
debates. What also helped in all these cases was that they had a strong visual
component that was hard to stave off.
Playing with the Time

In 1978, Dr. John Carroll concluded a study where he asked participants to

imagine which one of the candidates would be elected in the 1978 presidential
election. Later on, those who had imagined Carter winning judged that Carter
was more likely to win, while those who had imagined Ford winning claimed
that Ford was more likely to win. Just by imagining a specific candidate to win
made people believe more in it. What is really interesting, however, is that how
predictions like these dont only alter someones judgement, but also actual
behaviour too (Carroll, 1978).
To demonstrate this being the case, in 1980, Dr. Jim Sherman concluded a
study where students were asked to devote an afternoon to help a charity during
the current semester. From those who were asked directly, only two percent
complied with the request. The control group, on the other hand, was asked what
they would do if someone would ask them to help a charity in the future. From
this group, 40 percent predicted that they would help. Far more importantly, this
error of prediction was mostly self-erasing. When the control group was asked
later to help a charity, 95 percent of the group complied. In similar fashion, when
participants were asked to imagine and explain their future success in an
upcoming anagram task, those who had imagined success would perform
significantly better in the actual test than those who didnt predict anything. In
yet another study, participants were asked to imagine enjoying the benefits of
cable television service. Those who had been imagining these benefits were
much more likely to sign up for a cable service than those who hadnt imagined
using it (Sherman, 1980; Sherman, et al., 1981; Gregory, Cialdini & Carpenter,
1982).

Building an Expectation
In practice, when a person imagines something happening in their future, it starts
to build an expectation for it to happen. This is important to understand, because
most of the time people first imagine repeatedly doing something in the future
and only after creating themselves a pattern of behaviour, go for it. By weaving
positive outcomes and repeating your message, you can literally train a person
on how to act in the future.

 As you start to imagine living in this wonderful house two years from
here on, you can realize how good it feels to be in a safe and comfortable
home, far away from the dangers of the big city. What you considered
before to be an unreachable dream is possible now.

In this example, we used simple age progression to make the customer
imagine a positive future ahead. When they go through the process, it builds an
expectation for a positive future. The word now then re-orients the person
back to the present. You can also link this expectation to something that is
verifiably true and expected in the persons reality. For instance:

As you return back home and open the front door, you are going to
instantly feel a sense of relief, because you know you have made the right
decision and your home is absolutely safe now.

We suggested that when our customer returns home and opens the front
door, they can begin to feel a sense of relief, recalling that they have made the
right decision. When casually dropped in conversation, the person will even
rehearse this inside their minds until they open their front door. In this way, the
suggestion has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which absolutely convinces
them that they have made the right decision.
In my own experience, you should weave at least three different
experiences for the customer. This will help their mind to generalize the
described behaviour as automatic in the future. This works well in influence too,
especially when tied to satisfying someones personal values.

Lets go into the future and think what financial freedom means for you.
Are you more satisfied? Do you feel happy? Do you feel more secure
knowing that your children will get the best possible education? Just keep
that clear picture in your mind because we can make all that happen.

In this example, we first use a simple age progression to lead a person to
an unspecified point in the future where they have achieved financial freedom
and ask them to continue imagining that future. Then we simply continue on
with our presentation. This is powerful because as they continue imagining that
future, whatever mental imagery we weave during our presentation becomes part
of their experience. Even more so, the mind will also resist less imagining the
experience.

Temporal Distance
From studies introduced in the last part, it should be fairly clear to see that just
imagining doing something in the future affects your behaviour. Even more so, it
can make people comply with requests that they wouldnt agree to under the
current circumstances. But why is this? In 1993, doctor Thomas Gilovich made a
series of experiments that clearly demonstrated how peoples confidence
decreased dramatically the closer the moment of truth came. For example,
students were far more confident in their ability to succeed in midterm exams
when it was asked on the first day of class than when asked on the day of the
exams. Gilovich theorized that this is because people felt more accountable for
their own predictions when they tried to predict event happening in the near
future, thus inhibiting less plausible predictions (Gilovich, Kerr & Medvec,
1993).
When you vividly imagine scenarios happening in the far future, they still
influence your behaviour, while temporal distance reduces resistance caused by
improbability. This means you can disarm a great deal of resistance simply by
moving a choice into the future. For instance, if you tell a person you can send
them a sales brochure only a month later, the likeliness of them taking that
brochure will significantly increase.
This theory has been supported by the fact that people seem to focus on
different things based on the timeframe. In 1998, doctors Nira Liberman and
Yaacov Trope presented their theory for temporal construal. According to their
findings, when we imagine something happening in the near future, our brain
will instinctively focus on the feasibility of a given action, how we can do
something, and how likely we are to succeed than what it will provide us. When
we imagine something happening in the far future, on the other hand, we put
more emphasis on the desirability of a given action than the probability of it
happening. For instance, students were more likely to choose a difficult but
interesting course if the temporal distance was long, but an easy and boring one
if the temporal distance was short. This theory has been supported by the fact
that imagining future experiences that are more relevant to your interests
stimulates the brain more than plausible but unrelated events (Liberman &
Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2000; Arnaud, et al., 2010).
Sidestepping Resistance
More recent experiments have also shown validity of these theories in practice.
As an example, it has been found that changing temporal focus to the distant
future makes it easier to gain commitment for donations, public policy, personal
self-development, and increasing your retirement savings. Basically, things that
everyone knows they should do, but dont do. Distant temporal focus has been
found to increase commitment even more if it combined with personal
responsibility-based appeal and/or imagining how the decision will impact the
future self. Reminding people about their future and future self seems to also
increase commitment for the behaviour (Rogers & Bazerman, 2008; Bryan &
Hershfield, 2012; Hershfield, et al. 2011; Bartels & Urminsky, 2011).
What this all means in practice is that if you are requesting to do
something in the near future, you should focus your message on the easiness and
feasibility of a given action. When the focus is on the distant future, you should
focus on promoting the desirability of a given action and other abstract features
that cant be easily measured. My own way to utilize these two modes is to first
weave a long-term future experience that feels emotionally compelling and
encourages them to move. After that I weave another experience that focuses on
the first practical step that a customer needs to take. The longer-term experience
removes resistance while short-term experience will provide them a way to start.
For instance:

I understand your concerns well, but months after we have gotten
through this project and everything is in place exactly like you want them
to be, you can easily start to look back at this moment, and realize how
good a choice you have made ... Now ... it makes sense to go forward,
doesnt it?

In this example, we made the customer think several months forward into
the future and imagine how, during that time, we have successfully finished the
project exactly like he wants it to be done. Then, we make him imagine looking
back on the present and realize how good of a decision he has made in
retrospect. Finally, we return the person back to the present day position using
the pivot word now while further suggesting that they can move forward with
their decision. The reason why this process works so well is that it first shifts the
persons attention to a distant future, sidestepping resistance and creating an
emotionally compelling experience. Then when we asked him to look back at
this moment, he needed to imagine making a decision to go for it.
You can also use this same process to make a person think about doing
something multiple times. For example, many people feel that they need to meet
you several times before they can make a decision.

I understand your concerns well, and it is better that during the
upcoming months, we meet several times to make sure that you have all the
necessary information. After these meetings in which we will have ironed
out all the further details, you can easily have all the information that you
didnt have before this day in order to move on with this project. Having
done all that ... now ... do you feel we can do business?

In this example, we first moved the customer several months into the
future and made them imagine how during that time, we will have met several
times in order to make sure they receive all the information needed. Then, we
suggested that after those meetings, they will then have all the information that
they didnt have before allowing them to move further along with the project.
Finally, we returned back to the present and affirmed the whole experience with
our customer. Notice that we didnt specify the amount of meetings in concrete
numbers. This way, the mind is allowed to create meaning for the message, and
create an amount that sounds right. Really, what does several times mean? I
dont know, but it probably means imagining at least a few meetings.
Keypoints

Any kind of state change is hallucination in itself

Every interaction is influenced by is the person willing to take
ownership of their emotional state
Put descriptors before the thing you want the person to think about to
avoid mental friction
You can excite the mind by weaving vivid imagery and making a
person associate with the experience
Vivid imagery cuts through any resistance because, from the minds
standpoint, the described experience has already happened
When we imagine something happening in the far future, we put more
emphasis on the desirability of a given action than the probability of it
happening
Always remember to create a positive future for a person to follow

APPLICATION: STORYTELLING
It has been said that nothing beats a good story, and that is absolutely true when
it comes to influencing others. No matter where we were born, we have been
trained to respond to stories in a very specific way, beginning with the fairy tales
of our youth. When we follow a story, we will generally become acquiescent and
allow ourselves to absorb the experience. This happens because, as far as the
listeners mind perceives, the story is not about them; therefore, there is nothing
to defend, allowing them to just follow along. Still, the mind follows the story
closely. If it can relate to the story and its characters, the mind will begin to
identify with the storys underlying message. This is true even if the story isnt
directly applicable to the current situation. In this chapter, we are going to
examine how you can weave stories that capture peoples attention, arouse their
minds, and how you can covertly slip suggestions in.
Limitations of Storytelling

Before we begin to study this material in earnest, it is important to understand

the limitations of storytelling. While stories can be an extremely powerful way
to influence people, their effectiveness correlates directly with the listeners
current mental capabilities. Perhaps your listener isnt accustomed to this type of
creative thinking. Perhaps they have been punished for doing so during their
childhood. Perhaps, they are simply as dumb as a rock. No matter what the
reason is, all these things need to be taken into consideration while telling
stories.
Of course, the story you tell needs to be relevant for your audience. Way
too often, I see people tell stories only because they want to tell them. They
dont have any kind consideration of whether others find his story interesting at
all. And believe me, they often dont. This is why you should always ask
yourself if your story provides any value for your audience. Is the story funny,
interesting, fascinating, or educational? The more you integrate these elements in
your story, the better the response is. You should also keep in mind your
audiences values. For example, if you are speaking to a group of devout
Christians, you should probably emphasize subtly how God allowed to you do
something. By the same token, leave out details that could possibly offend them.
Another common mistake is telling a story that is directly analogous to the
customers current challenges. While it makes it easy to spot parallels between
the story and the given problem and make the connection, herein also lies the
danger. Because direct analogies are so easy to understand, many people will
consciously shrug them off because the solution seems too obvious. Other
people will feel terribly patronized and assume their intelligence is being
insulted. This is why the best stories are metaphorical and a tad bit outside the
persons conscious awareness. With those stories, someone cant really detect if
the metaphor is meant to be about them and their current challenges. As a result,
instead of feeling patronized, they feel as if they are using their own creativity
and intuition to make the connection and solve their own issue.
Power of Proverbs

Many people make the mistake of assuming that the story needs to be long to
influence someones behaviour. However, you can achieve similar (and in many
cases better) results simply by using short proverbs. You just use them to lead
people through different emotional states towards your desired outcome. For
instance:

It is important that we wrestle this problem down before it becomes too
serious.

When a person thinks about that proverb, its vivid imagery will make them
more ready to tackle the problem you two have been talking about. This is true
even if what you said isnt literally applicable to their current situation. You can
also use proverbs to bring up delicate topics that your customers arent
comfortable talking about.

Lets suppose I would find myself in a nasty legal dispute that threatened
to leave me penniless. What would I do?

By introducing the topic this way, the listener feels far more comfortable
about answering, because you arent referring directly to him. If the customer
doesnt respond positively to your question, you can always point out that you
were only talking about yourself, not him. This kind of indirect question be also
used as a rhetorical point to form a bridge into the next point. Using this
approach, you can also easily connect positive emotional associations to your
brand name and even bring up your competition in a friendly way:

If you could take a crummy bus or a limousine to your destination
without any extra cost, which one would you select?

The best way to do a comparison is to compare your company against any
products or symbols that the public audience is already familiar with. For
example, the word Rolls Royce will automatically create imagery of luxury
and quality, and you could just say your product is the Rolls Royce of your
industry. This works so well, because people learn to associate those positive
feelings with your product. As the worlds best copywriter Gary Bencivenga
said, this is like alchemy. You are just fusing two different things together at the
hip and instantly transferring the qualities of one into the other. There is no
critical analysis, no resistance, because all you are really doing is comparing
thing A to thing B in an effective manner.
For the best proverbs, you should simply look at any sources that we all
know by heart; fairy tales, movies, sports, the Bible, and so on. I know that many
courses advise avoiding clichs, but this is a mistake because everyone already
believes in them! They can even be used to reinforce your leading suggestions so
long as your listener believes them to be true. For example:

You need to work hard to get rich, so it is better to start work right now.

In this example, we used a commonly accept proverb as a pace and
connected it to a lead. This is pretty powerful, because when a person accepts
the proverb, he needs to also accept your leading suggestion. To make the
suggestion stick even better, you can put it between two proverbs. When a
suggestion is placed in the middle of so many proverbs, it tends to be accepted as
true too.

As the sun rises every morning, you need more financial security in your
life, because nothing can survive without sunlight.

Here, a suggestion is sandwiched between two proverbs. To make sense of
the sentence, a person needs to accept your suggestion as a fact too. Of course, if
he really starts to think about the statement, he can stave it off, but in general
people dont really want to think more than they have to.
There is very little that can go wrong with using proverbs, but one thing
you should watch out for is drowning your metaphors. Simply put, if there are
two directly competing images in your proverb, they drown each other out. For
instance, lets think about the silver lining at the end of the tunnel. This
example doesnt really work out that well, because your mind is jumping
between images of silver lining and dark tunnel. Nonetheless, using two images
can work if they complement each other (OConner, 2011).
For instance:

Making this decision right now will quickly lead you into an oasis of
 financial ecstasy, while indecision will just lead you deeper into the desert
of financial ruin.

In this example, we linked decisiveness into reaching an oasis of financial
ecstasy while indecisiveness was linked into going deeper into the desert. Both
images simply blend smoothly into the same picture. This format has been used
successfully by organized religions for millennia to reinforce specific values in
their followers.
What Kind of Stories Should You Tell?

Many people turn storytelling into a bigger deal than it really is. In the end,
storytelling is about only three things: building commonalities, creating an
expectation, and moving a person from a resource-poor to a resource-rich
state. Thats it! You can use stories to indirectly demonstrate common and
desirable values that build a feeling of sameness between you and your audience.
You can also use a story to make people expect something to happen. As
explained earlier on, whatever people expect to happen becomes true for them.
When a person is raising objections or is in a resource-poor state, you tell stories
where the main character starts from a resource poor-state and that culminates
with the character achieving a resourceful state. Just focus on what you want to
have more of and tell stories that lead a person into that state.
The only thing that can really go wrong is that you try too much. Your
story doesnt need to be spectacular, only interesting enough to grasp the
listeners attention. Naturally, many beginners still prefer to have some kind of
well-defined structure for their stories. For this reason, we are now going to take
a look at three simple formulas for creating your stories.

The Borden Formula

Richard C. Borden was the Administrative Chairman of the Department of
Public Speaking at New York University. A remarkable man, he was considered
one of the nations best speakers and during his lifetime he wrote several books
on selling and public speaking. In his book, Public Speaking As Listeners Like
It! Borden introduced the world to his famous four-step formula for delivering
speeches. Its structure is deceivingly simple and it works equally well for
storytelling. You just imagine your audience shouting the following phrases as
you give your speech:

1. Ho hum!: Your audience is completely disinterested and you need
to grab their attention.
2. Why bring that up!: The audience demands you to expand on your
opener and explain why you brought it up.
3. For instance?: Now the audience demands examples of the point
you are trying to make.
 4. So what?: Finally, the audience asks what should be done about
this.

Confused? Lets take a look at a speech by copywriter Bruce Barton that
Borden quoted in his book. In this speech, Barton was trying to convince his
audience to use their spare time better (Borden, 1936).
Direct quote:

Last month a man in Chicago refused a million dollars for an invention
he had evolved in his spare time. You are interested in this because it
confronts you with the possibilities of your spare time. Did you ever stop to
think that most of the worlds great men have achieved their true life work,
not in the course of their needful occupations, butin their spare time?

A tired-out rail-splitter crouched over his tattered books by candlelight or
by fire-glow, at the days end; preparing for his future, instead of snoring
or skylarking like his co-laborers. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to
later immortalityin his spare time.

An underpaid and overworked telegraph clerk stole hours from sleep or
from play, at night, trying to crystallize into realities certain fantastic
dreams in which he had faith. Today the whole world is benefiting by what
Edison didin his spare time.

A down-at-heel instructor in an obscure college varied the drudgery he
hated by spending his evenings and holidays in tinkering with a queer
device of his, at which his fellow teachers laughed. But he invented the
telephone in his spare time.

Gentlemen, you, too, have spare time. The man who says: I would do such
and such a great thing, if only I had time! would do nothing if he had all
the time on the calendar. There is always timespare timeat the disposal
of every human who has the energy to use it. Use it!

As can be clearly seen, Bartons speech clearly matched the formula laid
out by Borden. First, Barton broke the ho-hum barrier with his attention-
grabbing introduction, then he explained why his audience should be interested
in this. Then he gave several persuasive examples to support his case and
finished by telling what should be done about it. This formula is deceptively
simply, but it works equally for storytelling.

Hoffer Formula: True Believer

The Hoffer formula is based on the works of Eric Hoffer, the philosopher who
described painfully accurately the psychology of mass movements in his 1951
book True Believer. In the book, Hoffer describes how mass movements
happen when large numbers of people start to feel their lives are worthless and
wasted. From these peoples standpoint, the past was glorious, and the present is
irrevocably broken. Feeling powerless, they gang up together to work towards a
loosely defined utopia that is waiting for them. Everything revolves around this
dream and a strong leader who is going to lead his herd towards that brilliant
future. While there is nothing inherently bad with mass movements, Hoffer
pointed out that all mass movements tend to attract people with a similar
psychological profile. Hoffer even argued that for the true believer, substance
of any particular group is less important than being part of an energized
movement. I highly recommend you read the book for a full analysis, but this
format works as a good foundation for any kind of populist story or speech
(Hoffer, 2010).

1. Issue: Draw the audiences attention to a present-day issue
2. Contrast: Contrast the present against the past and how things were
better before
3. Future: Shift the audiences attention to the future and start to paint
an image of it where the problem has been solved
4. Obstacle: Bring your audiences attention to an easily understandable
obstacle that is assumed to be preventing the future from becoming
true
5. Demand: Cry for action!

This structure is used all the time in politics and it is good for electrifying
a disfranchised group of people. Essentially, it is dumbing down the problem
into something tangible and easy to understand for the masses. The inherent
danger in using this formula is that it encourages a simplistic, even black-and-
white, type of thinking. Obviously, even more than usual, delivery is the key
here. Your message needs to be delivered with an absolute sense of congruency,
painting a clear, vivid picture of the problem and the future you want to
establish. You need to be very familiar with the hot topics of your audience and
they need to be frustrated with the given issue.

Campbell Formula: Heros Journey

This particular format was first popularized by Dr. Joseph Campbell, who
studied myths and noticed how certain types of stories appeared in all cultures.
Based on these findings, he formulated the concept of monomyth, or the heros
journey. It follows the classic structure of a hero who goes on an adventure,
overcomes crisis, and then comes home changed or transformed (Campbell,
2008).
Direct quote from Campbells book The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive
victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with
the
power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

While even the name creates vivid imagery of an epic story where you
fight against dragons and save the princess, the heros journey has a remarkably
flexible formula. It has been adapted for countless different contexts ranging
from Hollywood blockbusters to political speeches to even selling toasters.
There is practically no context where it couldnt be used and it is also so flexible
that it can be told at any length you want. If you are in a hurry, you can
summarize it in four minutes. If you have more time, you can spend even ten
minutes on telling the story so long as it keeps the listeners attention.
However, at the same time, the heros journey is somewhat overrated. Too
many storytelling courses I have seen have revolved solely around teaching this
particular formula. As a result, many of these students turn into one-trick ponies
who can deliver only one type of story. They turn their past into epic heros
journeys that are meant to amaze their listener. They study ancient myths and
Jungian symbolism to maximize the effectiveness of their stories. They spend
weeks, even months, to polish a single story. All this is fine, but it is easy to get
distracted by doing so.
 You should allow yourself a certain level of spontaneity in your
storytelling. If you are trying to strictly follow the written script, it is very easy
to show up incongruent, especially if the story is completely made-up. The best
stories come from real-life experience anyways, and it is often far more efficient
to just kill a poor story than try to polish it. Good stories just happen naturally if
you are living an abundant and varied life. Nonetheless, the heros journey is a
very effective formula if used properly, especially for introducing yourself. It
contains five steps:

1. Defining moment: This is the turning point that leads the hero on
his current path. It is defined by some kind of emotional turmoil
that can be even very mundane in nature. For example, a dentist
could tell he had poor dentists as a child, so he decided to become
dentist himself to help others avoid similar pain. This is the hook of
your story, which captures your audiences imagination.
2. Crossing threshold. In this part of the story, the hero is leaving his
old world behind to learn from the masters and pass different tests.
Instead of slaying dragons or jousting, anything that requires
serious effort fits here nicely (e.g., earning a degree, succeeding in a
physical task, etc.).
3. Passing the ultimate threshold. In this part of the story, the heros
faith and new ideas are being challenged and new allies are found.
The enemy could be anything from having arguments with your
parents, to competitors painting a negative picture of you, or you
taking part in a competition, etc. This is the part where people
typically start to get really involved with your story.
4. Death and resurrection. In this part of the story, the hero realized
he is doing the right thing. It could be about helping a specific
customer, achieving something in your personal life, etc. At this
stage, the hero leaves his old beliefs behind and is reborn into his
new role.
5. Sharing the truth. In this final part, it is revealed what the hero is
doing right now and what his message is to the world. The message
could be something as simple as how having a perfect mattress will
improve your personal health, or even something as epic as you
dedicating your life to curing cancer. Whatever the truth is, it will
imply a lot about the heros values and morals.
Bridging to the Story

Stories are also wonderful vehicles for delivering suggestions. The interesting
thing about stories is that so long as it simply looks like you are telling a story,
people will respond to your process as if it were a story. Even if you are just
talking about personal experiences, the mind will presume a story. Some good
starting phrases include:

Once upon a time
I met this person
I think
I find it so interesting
Another thing I find fascinating ...

Phrases like I find it so interesting ... or Another thing I find
fascinating... are also great because they also imply a connection between two
things even when there isnt.

Yes, it is surprising how few people know about this and what I also find
interesting is how you can connect so quickly with absolutely random
people who dont feel like your type at all. I met this old geezer in The
Venetian and when we started to talk, everything just clicked right away.
Has it ever happened to you that when you start to talk with someone, you
immediately feel like you have known this person for a very long time? It is
like you just see this person in front of you and feel that deep connection
developing between you two. Has this ever happened to you? I think it is
amazing when it happens.

Well, wasnt that an abrupt change in topic? We began talking about how
many people dont know about something, and then steered the conversation
(and context) toward meeting new people. Even though the change is abrupt, the
mind just tags along with your suggestions without really concerning itself too
much. In this way, talking about personal experiences can be used to shift the
context to anything you want. Understanding this principle will also take a lot of
pressure off your shoulders because it also means that your stories dont need to
be elaborate.
Ambiguous Suggestions

While short proverbs can be a powerful way to influence people, longer stories
allow you to slip in suggestions without resistance. In addition to making people
suspend their criticism, stories create ambiguous context for all given
suggestions.
According to current linguistic theories, when the brain first hears an
ambiguous statement, it does what is called A frequency-coded multiple access
model. In this model, the brain will retrieve multiple meanings as part of
recognizing the word. As it does so, it will also elicit all the processes, emotional
states, and mental imagery associated with these different meanings. Then the
brain will search for the most frequently used meaning in relation to the current
context (e.g., BANK --> MONEY instead of BANK --> RIVER). After doing all
this, attentional processing then allocates resources to the dominant meaning,
resulting in inhibition of responses to the less likely meanings. All this happens
in around 500-750 milliseconds. If there is very strong contextual evidence for a
specific meaning (i.e.; through context or repetition), then the brain will go into
linear mode, where it just picks up the meaning that is the most frequent in a
given context (Burgess & Simpson, 1988).

Pivot Words
But what does this mean in practice? To put it simply, you will consciously
perceive only the meaning that makes the most sense in a given context, but your
brain will process all potential meanings for a suggestion without any kind of
conscious analysis or resistance. For example:

I believe you can easily find your own reasons why this is a good idea ...
now ... let me ask you something ...

By inserting a slight pause after the word now, you focus the mind on
that word as it hangs momentarily. As we continue to the next sentence, the mind
will interpret the word now as being a part of both sentences. As far as the
mind is concerned, we are suggesting both that the listener can easily find
reasons for why this is a good idea now and that we want to now ask a question.
The second statement redirects the listeners attention away from the first
suggestion. To do this, we dont even need to emphasize the pivot word, but just
have slight pause before it.
Another, and much more powerful application of pivot words are so-called
hidden directives. As mentioned in the Increasing Your Expressiveness
chapter, no matter where we are born, we have been conditioned to perceive any
statement that ends in a downward inflection as a command. Instinctively, we
tend to find a commanding tone far more credible than a flat tone. Any statement
that ends with an upward inflection, on the other hand, is perceived to be a
question and approachable. When you want people to perceive you as credible
inflect downward, and inflect up when you want to sound approachable.
However, these two approaches can be also combined to bypass conscious
analysis. For example:

Could you ... help me now?

The question used in the example is a conversational postulate. The
response to this could easily be a simple yes or no, but in practice, people
tend to offer longer responses. The questioning tone (could you) at the start will
distract the mind allowing in an actual command (help me now) to slip in
without analysis. The brain just cant be sure of the intended meaning. For
instance:

I understand your hesitancy. Many people dont want to ... make a
decision ... without doing some research. You want to ... make a decision
... only when you ... feel certain ... that you truly ... get what you want ...
and that you ... make a good decision ... instead of wasting your money. It
is not necessary to ... make a decision now ... You can always ... do it
sooner... or later when you ... feel more certain ... about making this
decision.

In this example, we appear to acknowledge a customers concerns about a
purchase. However, we are also sending an underlying message guiding the
listener toward a certainty about making an immediate decision. While they are
often thought as hidden there is actually nothing covert about these directives.
The primary reason why people respond to them is their ambiguousness. This
effect can also be easily staved off if you are trained in spotting them.
In my experience, to maximize the effectiveness of hidden directives, they
should never be longer than four words. With longer commands, the brain just
concludes that you have started a new sentence. The command should also
always be in the form of present-tense verbs, designating a specific kind of
action. Furthermore, a person needs to be in the right emotional state to feel
comfortable acting upon them. This is why I personally use hidden directives
only to suggest to someone to feel something, instead of doing. Without having
the right emotional state, it doesnt really matter how many commands you
throw at people; and when people are in the right emotional state, you dont need
to hide your commands.
Also keep in mind that you need only to have a slight pause before the
command and have a very slight downward inflection. The pause can be very
short as long as it is in there. The general tone of your commands should be one
of a firm authority figure. You should have a clear and resolute intent behind
your message, but without any hint of aggression.

Missing Referential Index

While pivot words are really powerful, arguably the most powerful type of
ambiguity is to leave open to whom or about what we are speaking. For instance:

I can really empathize with your concerns. So many products are made in
China these days and break so easily. You need to have ... that product ...
[point] that gives you this good feeling of durability ... This product ...
[point] also needs to be made in America, right?

What is this product in this case? Is it the product that the customer is
thinking of or the one you are subtly pointing at? Because the mind cant be
sure, it concludes both as being true and associates those positive feelings with
the product you pointed at. As you might guess, this also works well with
people. For instance:

I certainly understand what you mean. Friends are really important and
as you see ... this person ... in front of you, you start to feel happy, am I
right?
This person? Who is this person in this example? Is this person you as
the speaker, talking and standing in front of the listener, or some other person
known to the listener as a friend? Because the mind is unable to conclude a
definitive meaning, it concludes and accepts both as being true. The mind of the
listener begins to think about the speaker and about the friend, elicits those
emotions evoked by their friend, and reflects those emotions and associations
onto you as the speaker. The mind now perceives you as an equal friend. This is
powerful! The third example:

Do you know somebody you absolutely trust? Like ... when you ... hear
that persons voice ... in your head ... right now ... you just act on it
without any questioning, right?

Once again, who is that person? Is it you or some other person your
listener absolutely trusts? Because the mind cant be sure, it concludes both as
being true and connects absolute trust to your voice. Right now just adds extra
power to the suggestion by implying that the person is hearing that voice right
now inside their mind, while simultaneously hearing your voice. This strategy
can be used with any important and meaningful voice the person can imagine,
even if that voice belongs to a fictional person or entity. Alternatively, you can
disvalue something by connecting it to a voice the person doesnt trust.
With a little bit of ambiguity, you can easily evoke any emotional state and
link it to yourself or your product, borrow someones personal associations, and
hide direct commands in plain sight. All this is practically invisible, because the
whole process happens outside conscious awareness. However, keep in mind that
your suggestion needs to be supported by the current context. Otherwise, the
brain doesnt access the desired response while searching for the right meaning.
As an example, if you want to elicit trust, you need to do it in a context where
your suggestion could mean it. This particular technique also works better if you
use a commanding tone to emphasize your suggestion.

Quoting
Even shifts from the third to second person work well. The mind simply cant be
sure whether you are talking about the story or referring directly to the listener.
For instance:

I really like being on the beach because you can so easily start to relax
while you hear all the natural sounds.

 You? Are you talking about your own personal experience or giving a
suggestion to the listener? Switching to a third person perspective creates an
ambiguous context where you can be talking about both ourselves and the person
listening to us. When this happens, the suggestion doesnt trigger reactance.
Even quoting someone else works in a similar way. When you quote
someone else, people dont associate what you are saying as your own words.
Even still, any suggestions you give while quoting will slip in without conscious
analysis.

After Bob had finished signing the contract, he looked me directly in the
eyes and said, Im so grateful you trust my ability to help you. You wont
regret this decision. When we work together you can be absolutely sure
that everything will match your needs. He had such enthusiasm for the
job, and it did work really well in the end.

The command hidden inside the quotes is really direct, but it will still sink
in powerfully. Talking with someone else other than the person you want to
directly influence (but standing within the same group sphere), creates an effect
similar to a quotation. This is because as far as the mind is concerned, the
message isnt really meant for the person listening. However, at the same time,
studies have found this doesnt have an effect if the person has a prior negative
attitude against the message (Walster & Festinger, 1962; Brock & Becker, 1965).
But when used properly, this principle has some interesting applications.
For instance, I remember well when I was observing one of the worlds best
stage hypnotists on the stage. Through his show, he seemingly was talking to his
volunteers, when he was actually priming his audience. One example:

As you look at me, you can just imagine that you are taking part in this
years best comedy show, laughing and enjoy your time!

Wait a minute. Who is looking at who? The hypnotist was giving this
suggestion to his volunteers, but because of its ambiguous nature, it is also
applicable to the whole audience watching. This kind of priming actually has
many applications, when you realize that the expanded awareness techniques
allows you to observe the person without them realizing you are doing it. You
can even quote a person quoting someone else. For instance:

 My brothers friend Richard told him a story about a time he was
travelling in Africa ...

Now, isnt that a slightly confusing mess? Yes, absolutely, and thats the
point. If a person is in an acquiescent state of mind, this will remove any
resistance for your suggestion, because the mind cant be sure anymore who is
talking to who. This principle can even be used to create an illusion of
agreement while you slip the suggestion in. For instance:

I agree with you one hundred percent, but my brothers niece said to me
once that it is so important that you listen to this kind of person who
clearly has your best interest in their heart.

This kind of structure removes even more resistance, because you as a
person seem to be agreeing with the listener.
Applying Humour

As you have learnt so far, the brain always needs to finish a process it has been
given. Before a person can consciously reject a suggestion, the brain still needs
to process it. Why is this important to understand? It means that if you redirect
your listeners attention somewhere else, the brain will process your suggestion
without any kind of conscious interference or critique. The most typical way to
do this are to distract the mind, ask questions related to another topic, or to point
out something in the current environment.
Another good way to bypass conscious analysis is to use humour. When
you are laughing, you really cant analyse given suggestions or concentrate on
what is being said. This distraction alone allows you to slip in suggestions, but
what is even better, people also learn to associate those positive feelings with
your suggestion. A sudden joke can also work as a disruption so long as it is
executed properly. This way humour can even be used to disarm negative states
of mind. Being playful in itself also unconsciously signals congruency and
confidence in your skill, two things that help you set yourself as an authority.
Applying humour to your work may seem intimidating, but certain things
work greatly to your favour. While you may lack comedic chops or have a
curious sense of humour, even a crude or dark humour works well if you happen
to have rapport with your audience. Furthermore, laughter is dangerously
contagious. If you can make a few people in the group laugh, the feeling of
similarity between the members of the audience just pulls everyone in. The
timing is best learnt by observing stand-up comedians and watching what they
do. As a side note, when peoples beliefs are challenged, they often start to
nervously laugh. In my experience, this is a sign of them running out of rational
explanations for their own behaviour. At that point, people are typically very
open for suggestion even though you still need to work with resistance.
Nested Story Loops

In the Acquiescence chapter, we talked about opening loops to increase the

listeners responsiveness. In nested story looping, we use the same effect to our
advantage by telling stories that break off into another story just before the
conclusion. When you then reach the climax in the second story, break again and
tell another story. By the time you have reached the third story, the brain is so
occupied with all the information that the person cant really analyze what is
being suggested. Often this even leads to partial amnesia of the experience,
because short-term memory is so overwhelmed. For instance:

As we waited in the lobby, my friend started to watch Dick Tracy on TV.
Which actually reminds me ... does anyone remember that watch that Dick
was carrying? In one of the series it could just stop time for several
seconds. Wouldnt that be great? You could just stop the time for few
seconds and search for next thing to say. Unfortunately real world doesnt
work that way, and that is why state control is so important...

When suggestions have been given, the stories are finished in reverse order (i.e.,
third first, first last). Lets continue:

I got that deal only because I was able to pay attention and keep my
state clean. You just need to pay attention to that person who is in front of
you. But where were we? Oh yes, talking about my friend. So there we
were, just waiting for a decision to be made...

In practice, nested loops are very easy to create. When reaching the climax
of a story, create a smooth transition into the new story. Just watch for responses
in the audience and make the switch accordingly (if you want to see how this is
done really well, watch stand-up comedians). While stories are typically bridged
with smooth transitions, you can also do a hard switch, by simply beginning
another story without any kind of transition. This tends to create a stronger
response than a smooth transition (by creating a disruption of thought), but it can
make you lose acquiescence because the switch is so abrupt. The more rapport
you have with the person, the less likely it is that you lose acquiescence when
making a hard switch.
 At this point, some readers are probably wondering why exactly you
would want to use nested loops. Nested loops arent typically used in casual
conversation, because they tend to require some preparation to be done well.
However, they are great for any situation where you want to teach group of
people (e.g., a sales presentation), because they can be used to sequence people
through any chain of experiences you want. For example, for a frugal person
your first story could be about learning to spend when it is beneficial; the second
story, how your services will help them save money in the long run; and your
third story, about how hesitating can be costly. In this example, we first shifted a
listener through two emotional experiences, then in a third story encouraged him
to take an action. Because the brain is so occupied with all the information, the
third story typically has a powerful impact.
Theoretically, you can have dozens upon dozens of loops open
simultaneously, but in practice most people limit the amount of loops from three
to seven, five being the most common. The main benefit of having more loops
open is that it allows the sequence to be split into smaller parts. With someone
truly skilled with nested loops, it is possible to have as many as twelve open at
the same time, but this kind of mental juggling requires so much fore-planning
that it is not viable for most situations. But what happens if the loops are closed
in the wrong order? Nothing. The point of nested loops is leading a listener
through a chain of experiences while bypassing conscious analysis. If a nested
loop is ended abruptly, the worst thing that can happen is that the listener can
become very disoriented.

Keypoints

The effectiveness of a story correlates directly with the listeners

current mental capabilities
The story itself needs to be meaningful for your audience
You can use stories to indirectly demonstrate common and desirable
values that build a feeling of sameness between you and your
audience
In the end, storytelling is about only three things: building
commonalities, building an expectation, and moving a person from a
resource-poor to a resource-rich state
Even if you are just talking about personal experiences, the mind will
presume a story
Stories are also wonderful vehicles for delivering suggestions
Ambiguous suggestions create confusion about meaning, and when
the mind cant resolve the meaning, the mind will process and
conclude that every given alternative is possible



SELF-AFFIRMATION
After you have empowered the person and created a positive outcome, it is time
to end the interaction by making him committed to follow your suggestions in
the future. The big mistake that many salesmen make while working with a
person is to create desire, but then not tell the person how to act in the future.
When this happens, the customer is likely to lose their positive momentum and
return to an undesired behaviour within a few days after the interaction.
Fortunately, it is easy to make someone commit to his decision because of the
consistency principle.
Consistency Principle

Countless studies in social psychology have shown that after committing

verbally to doing something, a person is very likely to continue doing so even if
it would be considered foolhardy. Because human culture values consistency and
the ability to make decisions so much, it puts enormous pressure on a person
who has made a verbal commitment to someone. If you arent consistent in your
behaviour, you are perceived in the least as untrustworthy, and in the worst
cases, insane. If you are able to get a signed agreement, this bind is even
stronger.
Perhaps the most fascinating example of this behaviour can be found from
Dr. Robert Cialdinis book Influence. Back in the Korean War, the Chinese
were able to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war simply by asking, Is there
anything you would change about the U.S.A.? Because soldiers felt that they
werent pressured to say anything negative, they typically gave statements like,
I think buses should stay more on schedule. But the Chinese were clever and
asked soldiers to sign their statements and affirm them in front of other soldiers.
After this, the Chinese publicly blasted through loudspeakers that the latest
American defector had declared that busses arent always on time in the
U.S.A. Because soldiers hadnt been pressured to make a treasonous
statement, they felt committed to follow their statements and no longer thought
of themselves as prisoners but rather as willing defectors. As a result, no U.S.
soldier ever escaped from the Chinese prison camps during the war because
there was always a defector who revealed the plan. Many soldiers who
returned back home after the war had at least minor pro-Chinese sentiments and
a few even wished to remain in China (Cialdini, 1984).

Endowed Progress Effect

Closely related to the consistency principle is the so-called endowed progress

effect. First discovered by Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze in 2006, it simply
means people become more committed to a given behaviour if they have been
given a head start in the process. As an example, three hundred customers of a
local car wash were handed loyalty cards. They were told that every time they
would wash their cars, the card would be stamped. Half of the customers
received a card that required eight stamps to receive a free car wash. The other
group received a card with ten stamps, but two stamps were already affixed to
the card. Whereas only 19 percent of people in the first group made enough
visits to fill up their card, 34 percent of the second group did the same. Even
more so, the second group took 2.9 fewer days to complete their cards and time
between their visits reduced about half a day with each car wash that was
purchased (Nunes & Dreze, 2006).
In practice, if you can present a process as something that has already
started, it will significantly increase a persons motivation to finish it. For
example, you could tell a customer that he is already well along at choosing a
new car to buy. While working on a project, you could emphasize to your team
members that you have done the groundwork and the project is already well
underway. Or you could start a specific project, give its manager a reward, and
tell them they will receive a similar reward every two weeks if they manage to
stay on the schedule you are going to present. Receiving the first reward in
advance will just tell their mind that the process has already started. It is not that
different from opening loops, but it is important to keep in mind that the person
needs to value the given behaviour to commit into it.
Self-Affirmation

The consistency principle also works in less-extreme contexts. If you can make a
person affirm a decision in an acquiescent state of mind, they are committed to
follow it after the interaction is over. To give a simple example of how this
works, lets assume you are selling a house. You have led your customer to
imagine how wonderful it will be to live in the house, and associated positive
states into the house. As you are leaving the house, you ask:

It looks like you really liked this house, am I right?

When your customer answers your question positively, they are then
committed to follow that train of thought later on and defend it. Affirmation also
opens the person for counter-attitudinal information. It has been found that
people who have self-affirmed evaluate attitude-disconfirming evidence more
favourably and are less biased in evaluating the source of information (Cohen,
Aronson & Steele, 2000).
Of course, the response needs to be genuine. Various studies have found
that being forced to affirm doesnt change behaviour. Furthermore, the
affirmation needs to have a positive emotional momentum behind it. When you
affirm something, you immediately activate any emotional states related to the
thoughts it is representing. If these states are negative, you just feel bad instead
of empowered. In various studies, it was even found that saying affirmations in
front of the mirror would actually make a person feel worse about their
limitations through the constant repetition and compounding of the negative
emotional state. Therefore, for self-affirmation to work, there needs to be a
positive emotion associated behind the thought. From a practical standpoint,
almost everything you have learnt in this book from weaving vivid imagery to
firing a suitable trigger at the right moment achieves this. It also has been found
that affirmations have far more significant impact on a persons behaviour if they
are connected to personal values. For example, Im non-smoker now that I can
be healthy. In this particular example, the behaviour of being a non-smoker was
connected to the value of being healthy (Steele, 1988; Blanton, Cooper, Skurnik
& Aronson, 1997; Falk, et al., 2015).
In practice, when influencing someone, have the person self-affirm the
decision you have planted in their mind. This will make them committed to
following their decision afterwards and also removes any resistance from
decision-making. Nobody likes being pressured to make a choice and it is a
mistake to try to make a decision for someone else. While this should be
obvious, the reason why Im bringing this up is because there are many books
out there that claim self-affirmation alone can make people do something. This is
why you see so many lousy salesmen trying to get you to re-affirm everything.
Offering a Loaded Choice

The term double bind was first used by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson
back in the mid-1950s. It is used to describe a situation in which limited
understanding, context, and/or external pressure forces a person to accept a
paradoxical situation. For instance, a father could tell his daughter that she
shouldnt talk when talked to. Later on, the father then tells her that she should
answer when asked something. Now, the mind has learnt that no matter what it
does, it will always disappoint the father. Understandably, double binds like
these can make a person develop serious mental issues. Fortunately, negative
double binds like these rely heavily on a high level of authority and that the
victim has developed dependency on the author, meaning it is very hard to create
a lock like this (Bateson, Jackson, Haley & Weakland, 1956).
However, double bind has also became a term for a linguistic strategy
where you create the illusion of choice by suggesting two different choices that
lead to the same outcome. If someone is in an acquiescent state of mind, he has a
tendency to not analyse the given choices. Self-affirmation and the consistency
principle makes him then committed to follow his choice. The easiest way to
create a double bind like this is to use words like or which normally indicate
opposing choices. For instance:

Do you want to sign the deal now, or after reviewing all the conditions?

In this example, no matter which option the person chooses, both lead
toward the same result: signing the deal. Of course, if a person really thinks
about the choice before giving an answer, he can easily spot what you are up to.
This just rarely happens if someone is being acquiescent and you can make the
illusion of choice much stronger by connecting the choice to a simple cause-and-
effect statement. For example:

Do you want to go through the signing of the papers right now or after a
coffee break because you sure look like you need cup of coffee?

Now, the loaded choice is even harder to perceive. If you want to
encourage someone even further, you can bind the given choices with their
personal commitments or values. An example:

We both know you are a reasonable person, so we can start the work
right away or after reviewing the plan because you have already stated
that you want to get this over with as soon as possible.

This example suggests that compliance with the bind makes you a
reasonable person (something most people want to see themselves as).
Furthermore, we emphasize the fact that this person had made an earlier
commitment to get the project done as soon as possible. Double binds can be
also used to create win-win scenarios, where you can claim credit for success no
matter what happens. As an example:

As you start to breathe in deeply into your belly, you might start to relax
immediately, but for some people it can take a few moments.

I used this phrase quite often while teaching meditation to improve my
perceived authority. Breathing deeply into the belly forces your body to relax
regardless of what happens. It just takes a little bit longer for some people. By
covering both alternatives, it seems I was right no matter what happened. This
approach can also be used to deal with resistance, because covering all angles
will spread a persons defences thin pretty much same way as giving multiple
tasks would do.
While all four examples use the word or to link choices, other similar
words work equally well. On paper, double binds can appear tricky to learn and
they certainly require some practice. Instead of trying to make the process too
complex, simply think of two different ways to state the same outcome and then
link them together.
Asking for Favours

As mentioned in the Acquiescence chapter, people have a natural tendency to

reciprocate your help sooner or later. Even then, there are some people out there
who require verbal commitment for them to reciprocate you. While straight up
telling people directly that they owe you one works, it can also backfire royally
especially if it seemed you were helping out of pure kindness. Perhaps the
easiest way to sidestep this issue is to make people indirectly affirm their
willingness to help you. For instance:

No need to thank me. If I would be in the same kind of spot, you would do
same for me, right?

When the person affirms positively, he is verbally committed to help you
even without consciously realizing it. That being said, the receiver of favour
tends to put less value on it the more time has passed, while the opposite is true
for a person who performed it. What has been found to be effective in these
cases is to make the receiver recall the time he received the favour. These
strategies borderline on pure manipulation and I strongly advise against abusing
them. Nonetheless, they can really be useful when you need to work with self-
centered people who dont typically help anyone (Flynn, 2003).
Keypoints

We value consistency over anything else

If you can make a person affirm a decision in an acquiescent state of
mind, they are committed to follow it after the interaction is over
When the person then affirms the existence of something, it becomes
real for him
When influencing someone, have the person self-affirm the decision
you have planted in their mind
Nobody likes being pressured to make a choice and it is a mistake to
try to make a decision for someone else
When you want to close the sale, make the customer first reaffirm the
suggestion you have planted into his mind
After you have got a commitment to help, it will typically stick

APPLICATION: CLOSING
With the techniques you have learnt in this book, closing is typically the easiest
thing to do. If you have elicited someones values before, you just simply
continue talking about the value, its definition, and how you can fulfil the
underlying basic motivator. You tell them how things will be better in the future
and make a person self-affirm the idea you have suggested to them. As you do
all this, the customer will automatically begin to associate satisfying value with
your offering.
Even then, the biggest mistake that many salespeople make about closing
is to thinking it is the last part of the sales process. This is problematic for two
reasons. First is that if you make closing the last step in the sales process, you
are putting enormous pressure on yourself. When you think about closing the
deal, there is a certain sense of finality to the whole interaction and you might
even start to panic. You simply think if I dont close now, the whole sale is lost.
Your customers also think this way. If they just say no when you start to close, it
affirms the context that the sales interaction is over. Closing should be just one
part of the sales interaction, not the end of it.
But what you should you do if you and your company cant satisfy the
customers needs? Just admit it. There is absolutely nothing wrong in telling
your customer that your services cant answer his needs. Instead of wasting your
time and energy, and trying to manipulate your customer by promising
something you cant deliver, just admit that you are not the right person for the
job. This is the honourable and right thing to do, and even though the customer
didnt get what he needed, he will remember you fondly and tell his colleagues
about you.
It is also important to keep in mind that peoples long-term desires rarely
go away. After you have converted someone to be a customer in your market, he
will most likely be a prospect in that market for the rest of his life. If someone,
for example, is passionate about fishing, he is most likely going to continue
doing that for a very long time. Perhaps he hasnt bought any new products, but
it is only because he hasnt a found solution that would satisfy his current needs
completely. When a person finally gets the inspiration to buy again, you will
most likely be his first stop, because he remembers you so fondly. Humans are
creatures of habit, and if you can activate a person to buy again, he is very likely
to go into a buying frenzy that in many cases can last years.
Indirect Closing

However, one of the most common mistakes salespeople make is to directly ask
their customer if they are ready to buy. The problem with this approach is that if
the response is no, it automatically sets the context that they arent interested
in buying and the current interaction has ended. One of the most elegant ways to
avoid this behaviour is to indirectly ask what is needed to close the deal.

Is there anything else you need to know in order to go ahead?

If more information is needed, focus on giving that information.
Otherwise, simply go ahead and close the deal. If the customer is a little unsure
about how he can make a decision, just elicit states of successful decision-
making.

When was the last time you were faced with this decision ... [slight
pause] or this type of decision? Youve been in this type of situation before
... how do you make a decision?

When a person thinks about making a decision successfully, it will
automatically change their state. Even more importantly, whatever he answers
will tell you how he makes decisions. When you know how he makes decisions,
you can adjust your approach accordingly.
Changing the Frame of Reference

Every decision is influenced by the conditions to which it is compared. In

practice, you want to influence the comparison as favourably towards your
proposition as possible. This is easiest achieved through contrasting, anchoring,
and matching.

Contrasting
To ensure that your customers are able to make the final decision, its preferable
to limit the amount of potential offerings to just three: one high-end choice, one
medium or standard (the one most likely to sell) and one lower-end choice. The
ideal set number of choices is three due to what is known as the contrast
principle in social influence. Simply put, when you experience similar items in
succession, your perception of one is influenced by the other. The classic way to
use this in sales is to first make a large request that you know will be rejected,
then the request you want to be accepted, but it can be also used for other
purposes like positioning (Cialdini, 1984).
For instance, when Williams Sonoma added a new high-end bread maker
to their line of products, sales of their previous high-end choice nearly doubled.
However, at the same time, having too many options can overwhelm customers.
For instance, when Proctor & Gamble reduced the number of versions of Head
& Shoulders shampoo from twenty-six to fifteen, it sales increased by 10
percent. In addition to helping retailers to stock all products and direct marketing
better, it helped uncertain customers at choosing a suitable product. It has also
been found that the more options people have, the less likely they are to enroll in
various fund choices. For every ten additional funds that a company offered, the
participation rate dropped by almost 2 percent. When employees were given two
choices, 75 percent participated; but when there were fifty-nine choices, only 60
percent participated (Simonson, 1993; Osnos, 1997; Iyengar, Jiang & Huberman,
2003).
In our closing strategy, the high-end choice makes your standard product
look less expensive. The lower-end choice makes your standard product appear
to hold more quality. If your customer cant afford either the high-end or the
standard, they are still very likely to buy the lower-end choice. If you want to
recommend a specific product, get the customer first into a positive state of
mind, then interrupt their thought process and recommend the product.

I really want you succeed ... Have you thought about this product?

In this example, we are eliciting the feeling of success before
recommending any specific product. When the customer is then making their
decision, remain silent. If you have successfully linked positive states to your
products, at least one of the options will be chosen. As a side note, you should
consider always connecting pride to making a successful purchase. If you
succeed in that, it is guaranteed that the customer will tell everyone about his
purchase and refer people to you.

Anchoring
Anchoring is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to use
an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgements. This bias doesnt
include only presented facts, but also numeric information. For instance, telling
people that the item used to sell for one dollar, but now costs only 75 cents gets a
better response than just telling people the product costs 75 cents. This is
because the reference point from which the comparison is made has changed.
However, what is less commonly known is that you can change the
reference point even by quoting numbers that are unrelated to the price. For
instance, in auctions, people who had been asked to hold larger numbers in their
mind gave bigger offers. Just claiming that there are two hundred uses for an
eight-dollar item makes people more likely to buy it (Mussweiler, 2000, 2002).
This effect applies even if it seems to be clear that there is a mistake. In his
book Predictably Irrational, Dr. Dan Ariely described an experiment where he
presented one hundred MIT students with three different options for subscribing
to the Economist:

A. 59 dollars, subscription only for the limited amount of articles on
the news site
B. 125 dollars, subscription only for the online news site
C. 125 dollars, subscription for both newspaper and the online news
site

What happened is that 84 percent of the students chose option C and 16
percent picked option A. Nobody picked B. When the middle option was
removed, 68 percent of students chose option A while only 32 percent picked
option B. Even though nobody would choose option B in first test, it definitely
distorted their decision-making. It has been found that those who have
experience in a given field seem to be more resistant to an anchoring effect, but
it still affects their behaviour (Ariely, 2008).
And like the case is with so many techniques presented in this book,
numbers prime people even outside their conscious awareness. Various
experiments have shown people favour an athlete with a higher number on his
jersey, are willing to spend more money on a restaurant named Studio 97 than
Studio 17, and performed better in cognitive study when the experiment was
labelled to be twenty-seven instead of nine (Critcher & Gilovich, 2007; Switzer
& Sniezek, 1991).

Matching
When asked to compare a set of items, we can either use elimination or
matching for comparison. In elimination, your mind compares the two items
and begins a process to determine how these two items dont match up, thereby
eliminating choices. People tend primarily to use elimination, and a big mistake
made by many salesmen is to accidentally suggest to their clients to make a
comparison by elimination. For example, lets suppose you have shown your
customer several cars and returning back to office, you ask the following:

So after our little tour, did any of the cars suit your needs?

When the customer processes this question, their mind will automatically
begin to compare the cars using elimination. Each car is compared against the
customers idea of their ideal car and choices will be eliminated if each choice
doesnt match their values perfectly. This is devastating because people usually
have a somewhat idealized image about what car they should own. But how
about this?

From the cars I have shown today, which one matches your needs the
best?

When phrased this way, the customer compares the choices and is
compelled to make a match (rather than eliminate) with their idea of the ideal
car. In this manner, they are far more likely to find one that matches their needs.
Any words that indicate finding matches cause matching (e.g., fit, match), while
words that indicate finding what is missing cause elimination (e.g., compare,
difference). Another example:

Which one of these solutions works the best for you?

Even just suggesting the right kind of comparison will help you greatly at
closing, but you can also combine the matching processes for setting direction.
First, suggest elimination against things you dont want the customer to go with.
Then, make him do a matching process for things you want him to choose from.
It should also be noted that elimination and matching also works really well for
pointing out what is missing from a current relationship:

What is the difference between what you currently believe you can get
and what would truly satisfy you?

This is quite a sneaky question. As unfortunate as it is, most people are
consciously detached from their needs, because their social conditioning tells
them they should want something else. Even then, when you suggest a
comparison like this, it will automatically make the person compare these needs
against the people he is interacting with.
Keypoints

Closing should be just another part of the sales interaction, not the
end of it
When you are ready to close the deal, ask if there is anything else the
customer needs to know before he can move forward.
If the customer is a little unsure about how he can make a decision,
just elicit states of successful decision-making
People can make comparisons either by elimination or matching
Elimination and matching work especially well with conditioned
responses
Give customer three choices: one high-end choice, one medium (the
one you are most likely to sell), and one low-end choice
Consider connecting pride to making a successful purchase
FINAL THOUGHTS
By the time you have reached this point, it should be fairly evident that this
books scope is somewhat larger than you might have originally thought. The
original title was Practical Influence: A Masters Class in Influence, because that
is what it really is. I intentionally wanted to avoid hyping its contents, because in
my experience this tends to attract the wrong kinds of people; the same kind of
people who caused my utter disillusion with the self-help industry and partially
made me agree with writing this book.
Back in the day, I was a serious self-help buff; but, as the time passed by, I
became more and more disillusioned with everything. No matter where I went, I
realized that almost nobody around me was really going anywhere with their
life. No matter what they were learning, no matter what they had been doing, no
matter with whom they had been working, their life continued to be pedestrian.
They were still 50 pounds overweight, with no dream job, ideal relationship, or
millions in sight. As a matter of fact, a lot of these people were just getting
weirder and creepier with all the material they had digested. So many of these
people were totally lost. They were marching from seminar to seminar, and no
matter what they were told, no matter what they were shown, they continued
searching for a magic pill, something outside them that could change their lives.
A guru, if you please.
Gurus ... oh, yes ... what troubled me even more was the constant
emergence of the unhealthy student-teacher relationships. No matter what I was
studying, everything nearly always revolved around a strong teacher who had,
accidentally or not, developed a cult of personality around him. Quite often,
followers thought of this person as a guru or an enlightened being. Some of these
gurus were plain charlatans overcharging for weak or inefficient technique.
Some of them were quirky, but well-meaning people. Some were self-important
and pompous jackasses. Some didnt have the slightest clue about what they
were teaching. Others were wolves hiding in sheeps clothing.
It didnt help that many of these people had become completely oblivious
to their own flaws. Any critique was shot down and turned against the student
asking the questions. Serious mistakes were often hidden behind positive
thinking and many gurus blatantly abused their power and position. From
organizing large-scale frauducts, to bribing politicians, to running fake diploma
mills, to plain sexual abuse, things got really dark and all these things are really
just tip of the iceberg. Even scarier was that nobody around me even questioned
this kind of behaviour, and more than often I was just told I was being too
critical. After all, the end supposedly justifies the means and these people were
providing good technique.
When you are operating in this kind of environment, it is easy to become
so jaded and cynical that you cant function anymore in the real world. My
personal hope is that this book makes you think and realize you dont need to
worship these gurus. Even though I say it myself, this book contains pretty much
everything you could really want to know about influencing people. As a matter
of fact, you have learnt far more than you really need. As stated at the very
beginning of this book, influence is far less and more than many people
understand. It is more about having awareness and flexibility than specific
technique. When I teach this material to groups, my biggest challenge is to make
them realize that you dont need that much to influence others. You dont really
need much if you know which buttons to press.
Some people reading this material will also believe that Im opening the
doors wide for all kinds of manipulation. This is certainly true; but, in the end,
manipulation is not really about lying to others. It is about lying to yourself. It is
caused by a deep insecurity about your own desires and feeling that others will
oppose what you are doing. No matter what these people learn or do, their life
will always be on some level miserable, because they feel it simply isnt good
enough. I have seen this again and again. Even when they really had it all, they
felt that they needed to manipulate others; but, in the end, it always blew up in
their faces. What I have shared in this book doesnt allow you to control
anyones mind, and it is downright delusional to believe otherwise.
Those who have at least some kind of balance in their life, on the other
hand, dont really abuse these skills. All the techniques described in this book
require rapport to work, and when you learn to have a genuine, strong
connection with others, you are far less likely to abuse the trust they have given
to you. You will also realize that you actually need far less to be influential than
you ever thought before. It just typically takes a lot of studying to realize this. I
wish you success with these strategies and I hope to see you again someday.


Teppo Holmqvist


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbott, B. 2000. Presuppositions as nonassertions. Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 32, Issue 10, pp. 1419-1437.
Ackerman, J. M., Nocera, C. C. & Bargh, J. A. 2010. Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and
Decisions. Science, Volume 328, pp. 171215.
Alexiadou, A. 2010. Nominalizations: A Probe into the Architecture of Grammar Part I: The Nominalization Puzzle.
Language and Linguistics Compass, Volume 4, Issue 7, pp. 496-511
Alice M. Tybout, et al. 1978. A Two-Stage Theory of Information Processing in Persuasion: an Integrative View of Cognitive
Response and Self-Perception Theory. Advances in Consumer Research Volume 5, pp. 721-723.
Ariely, D. 2008. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Harper Perennial. New York.
Armstrong, J. S. 2010. Persuasive Advertising. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Arnaud DArgembeau, et al. 2010. The Neural Basis of Personal Goal Processing When Envisioning Future Events. Journal
of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 22, No. 8, pp. 1701-1713
Arnsten, A. F. T. 2009. Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews
Neuroscience, Volume 10, pp. 410-422.
Asch, S.E. 1955. Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193, pp. 35-38
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M. & Burrows, L. 1996. Automaticity of social behavior: direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-
activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 71, pp. 230-44
Bargh, J. A., et al. 2001. The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, Volume 81, pp. 1014-1027
Bartels, D. M., & Urminsky, O. 2011. On inter-temporal selfishness: How the perceived instability of identity underlies
impatient consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 38, Issue 1, pp. 182198
Bateson, G. 1972. The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication. in The Steps to An Ecology of Mind.
University of Chicago Press edition 2000, pp. 279-308
Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J. 1956. Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1, pp.
251-264
Beaver, D. & Condoravdi, C. 2003. A uniform analysis of before and after. in Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic
Theory XIII, Cornell, Ithaca: CLC Publications, pp. 37-54.
Begg, I., Anas, A. & Farinacci, S. 1992. Dissociation of Processes in Belief: Source Recollection, Statement Familiarity, and
the Illusion of Truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 121, pp. 446-458
Berger, C. & Ehrsson, H. 2013. Mental Imagery Changes Multisensory Perception. Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 14,
pp. 1367-1372
Berger, J., & Heath, C. 2008. Who drives divergence? Identity signaling, outgroup dissimilarity, and the abandonment of
cultural tastes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 95, Issue 3, 593.
Berns, G. 2010. Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently. Harvard Business Review Press. New York.
Berns, G. et al. 2005. Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation. Journal of
Biological Psychiatry, Volume 58, Issue 3, pp. 245-53.
Bijleveld E., Custers, R. & Aarts, H. 2009. The unconscious eye opener: Pupil dilation reveals strategic recruitment of
mental resources upon subliminal reward cues. Psychological Science, Volume 20, Issue 11, pp. 1313-5
Blanton, H., Cooper, J., Skurnik, I., & Aronson, J. 1997. When bad things happen to good feedback: Exacerbating the need
for self-justification with self-affirmations. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 23, Issue 7, pp. 684-692.
Blanton, H., et al. 2001. Accentuate the negative: Social images in the prediction and promotion of condom use. Journal of
Applied Social Psychology, Volume 31, Issue 2, pp. 274295
Blanton, H., Stuart, A. E., & van den Eijnden, R. J. J. M. 2001. An introduction to deviance-regulation theory: The effect of
behavioral norms on message framing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 27, Issue 7, pp. 848858
Boland, W. A., Brucks, M. & Nielsen, J. H. 2012. The Attribute Carryover Effect: What the Runner-Up Option Tells Us
about Consumer Choice Processes. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 38, pp. 87285.
Bolkan, S. S. & Anderson, P. A. 2009. Image Induction and Social Influence: Explication and Initial Tests. Basic and
Applied Social Psychology, Volume 31, pp. 31724.
Borden, R. 1935. Public Speaking As Listeners Like It! Harper. New York.
Bradley, M. M. 2009. Natural Selective Attention: Orienting and Emotion. Psychophysiology, Volume 46, pp. 111.
Brehm, J. W. 1966. A theory of psychological reactance. New York: Academic Press.
Brinol, P., DeMarree, K. G. & Petty, R. E. 2008. Processes by which Confidence (vs. Doubt) Influence the Self. In R. Arkin,
K. Oleson, & P. Carroll (Eds), The uncertain self: A handbook of perspectives from social and personality psychology. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum
Brock, T.C. & Becker, L.A. 1965. Ineffectiveness of overheard counterpropaganda. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, Volume 2, pp. 654-660.
Brooks, S.J., et al. 2012. Exposure to subliminal arousing stimuli induces robust activation in the amygdala, hippocampus,
anterior cingulate, insular cortex and primary visual cortex: a systematic meta-analysis of fMRI studies. Neuroimage, Volume 2, pp.
2962-73
Brown, C. M. & McConnell, A. R. 2009. When Chronic Isnt Chronic: The Moderating Role of Active Self-Aspects.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 35, pp. 315.
Bryan, C. J., & Hershfield, H. E. 2012. You owe it to yourself: Boosting retirement saving with a responsibility-based
appeal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 141, Issue 3, pp. 429.
Bugmann, G., Goslin, J. & Duchamp-Viret, P. 2013. The speed of learning instructed stimulus-response association rules in
human: experimental data and model. Brain Research, 1536, pp. 2-15
Burgess, C. & Simpson, G. B. 1988. Neuropsychology of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: The Contribution of Divided Visual
Field Studies. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution, Morgan Kaufmann Inc, pp. 411-431
Burnkrant, R. E., and H. R. Unnava. 1989. Self-Referencing: A Strategy for Increasing Processing of Message Content.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 15, pp. 62838.
Burrus, J. & Mattern, K. D. 2010. Equity, Egoism and Egocentrism: The Formation of Distributive Justice Judgments. Basic
and Applied Social Psychology, Volume 32, pp. 15564.
Campbell, J. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Third Edition. New World Library. Novato, California.
Carpenter, C.J. 2013. A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of the But You Are Free Compliance-Gaining Technique.
Communication Studies, Volume 64, Issue 1, pp. 6-17
Carroll, J. S. 1978. The effect of imagining an event on expectations for the event: An interpretation in terms of the
availability heuristic. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, pp. 88-96.
Carver, C. S., Ganellen, R.J, Froming, W. J. & Chambers, W. 1983. Modeling: An Analysis in Terms of Category
Accessibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 19, pp. 40321.
Chaiken, S. & Eagly, A. H. 1983. Communication modality as a determinant of persuasion: The role of communicator
salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 45, Issue 2, pp. 241-256.
Chambers, J. R. 2011. Why the Parts Are Better (or Worse) Than the Whole: The Unique-Attributes Hypothesis.
Psychological Science, Volume 21, pp. 68275.
Chartrand, T. L., Maddux, W.W. & Lakin, J. 2012. Beyond the Perception-Behavior Link: The Ubiquitous Utility and
Motivational Moderators of Nonconscious Mimicry. In The New Unconscious, Oxford University Press, New York.
Cialdini, R. B., & Schroeder, D. 1976. Increasing compliance by legitimizing paltry contributions: When even a penny helps.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, pp. 599-604
Cialdini, R.B. 2003. Crafting Normative Messages to Protect the Environment. Current Directions in Psychological Science,
Volume 12, Number 4, pp. 105-109
Cialdini, R.B. 1984. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition. Harper Business. New York.
Cohen, G. L., Aronson, J., & Steele, C. M. 2000. When beliefs yield to evidence: Reducing biased evaluation by affirming
the self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, pp. 1151-1164
Cooper, J., Heron, T., & Heward, W. 2007. Applied Behaviour Analysis. New Jersey: Pearson Education.
Critcher, C. R. & Gilovich, T. 2007. Incidental Environmental Anchors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Volume 21,
pp. 24151.
Crusco, A. H. & Wetzel, C. G. 1984. The Midas Touch: The Effects of Interpersonal Touch on Restaurant Tipping.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 10, Issue 4, pp. 512-517.
Damasio, A.R. 1994. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Penguin Publishing Group. New York.
Damasio, A.R., Tranel, D. & Damasio, H. 1991. Somatic markers and the guidance of behaviour: theory and preliminary
testing. In: Levin, H.S., Eisenberg,H.M. & Benton, A.L. Eds.), Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction. Oxford University Press, New
York, pp. 217-229.
Davis, B. P., & Knowles, E. S. 1999. A disrupt-then-reframe technique of social influence. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 76, pp. 192-199.
Denes-Raj, V., & Epstein, S. 1994. Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: When people behave against their
better judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 66, pp. 819-829.
Desimone, R., & Duncan, J. 1995. Neural Mechanisms of Selective Visual Attention. Annual Review of Neuroscience.
Volume 18, pp. 193222.
DeSteno, D., Petty, R. E., Wegener, D. T. & Rucker, D. D. 2000. Beyond Valence in the Perception of Likelihood: The Role
of Emotion Specificity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 78, pp. 397416.
Dewey, H & Saville, S.K. 1984. Red Hot Cold Reading: The Professional Pseudo Psychic. In Visible Print. New York.
Dhar, R. & Simonson, I. 1992. The Effect of the Focus of Comparison on Consumer Preferences. Journal of Marketing
Research, Volume 29, pp. 43040.
DiDonato, T. E., Ulrich, J. & Krueger, J. I. 2011. Social Perception as Induction and Inference: An Integrative Model of
Intergroup Differentiation, Ingroup Favoritism, and Differential Accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 100,
pp. 6683.
Dijksterhuis, A. & Aarts, H. 2010. Goals, Attention and (Un)Consciousness, Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 61, pp.
467-490
Dijksterhuis, A.P. et al. 2005. The Power of the Subliminal: On Subliminal Persuasion and Other Potential Applications. In
The new unconscious: Oxford series in social cognition and social neuroscience, pp. 77-106
Dolinski, D., Ciszek, M., Godlewski, K. & Zawadzki, M. 2002. Fear-then-relief, mindlessness, and cognitive deficits.
European Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 32, pp. 435-447.
Dwyer, D. M., Mundy, M. E., Vladeanu, M., & Honey, R. C. 2009. Perceptual learning and acquired face familiarity:
Evidence from inversion, use of internal features, and generalization between viewpoints. Visual Cognition, Volume 17, pp. 334355.
Ehrlichman, H. & Micic, D. 2012. Why Do People Move Their Eyes When They Think? Current Directions in Psychological
Science, Volume 21, Issue 2, pp. 96-100
 Erickson, M. H., Rossi, E.L. & Rossi, S.I. 1976. Hypnotic Realities: The Induction of Clinical Hypnosis and Forms of
Indirect Suggestion. Irvington Publishers. New York.
Falk, E. B. et al. 2015. Self-affirmation alters the brains response to health messages and subsequent behavior change.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 112, Number 7
Fennis, B. M. Das, E. & Fransen, M. L. 2012. Print Advertising: Vivid Content. Journal of Business Research, Volume 65,
pp. 86164.
Finucane, M. L., et al. 2000. The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making,
Volume 13, pp. 1-17.
Fischoff, B. et al. 1978. How safe is safe enough? A psychometric study of attitudes towards technological risks and benefits.
Policy Sciences, Volume 9, pp. 127-152
Fishbach, A., Ratner, R. K. & Zhang, Y. 2011. Inherently Loyal or Easily Bored? Nonconscious Activation of Consistency
Versus Variety-Seeking Behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 21, pp. 3848.
Flynn, F. J. 2003. What have you done for me lately? Temporal adjustments to favor evaluations. Organizational Behavior
and Human Decision Processes, Volume 91, pp. 38-50.
Forer, B.R. 1949. The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology, Volume 44, pp. 118-123
Fowles, D. C. 1988. Psychophysiology and psychopathology: A motivational approach. Psychophysiology, 25, pp. 373391
Freedman, J.L. & Fraser, S.C. 1966. Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, Volume 4, Issue 2, pp. 195-202.
Friedman-Hill, S. R., Robertson, L. C., Desimone, R., & Ungerleider, L. G. 2003. Posterior parietal cortex and the filtering
of distractors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 100, pp. 4263-4268
Fumoto, M., et al. 2004. Appearance of high-frequency alpha band with disappearance of low-frequency alpha band in EEG
is produced during voluntary abdominal breathing in an eyes-closed condition. Neuroscience Research, Volume 50, Issue 3, pp. 307-
317
Furmanski, C. S. & Engel, S. A. 2000. Perceptual learning in object recognition: object specificity and size invariance.
Vision Research, Volume 40, Issue 5, pp. 473-84.
Ganzach, Y. 2001. Judging risk and return of financial assets. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,
Volume 83, pp. 353-370.
Gilbert, D. T., Krull, D. S., & Malone, P. S. 1990. Unbelieving the un-believable: Some problems in the rejection of false
information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 59, pp. 601613.
Gilbert, D.T., Daniel, T., Tafarodi R. W. & Malone P. S. 1993. You cant not believe everything you read. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 65, pp. 221-233.
Gilovich, T., Kerr, M. & Medvec V. H. 1993. Effect of temporal perspective on subjective confidence. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 64, pp. 552-580.
Goffman, E. 1952. On Cooling the Mark Out. Psychiatry, Volume 15, Issue 4.
Goldstein, N. J. , Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. 2008. A room with a viewpoint: using social norms to motivate
conservation in hotels. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 13, Issue 2, pp. 214-20
Goldstein, N. J., Martin S. J. & Cialdini, R.B. 2008. Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Simon and
Schuster. New York.
Goldstone, R. L. & Steyvers, M. 2001 The Sensitization and Differentiation of Dimensions During Category Learning.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 130, Issue 1, pp. 116-139
Goldstone, R. L. 1995. Effects of Categorization on Color Perception. Effects of categorization on color perception.
Psychological Science, Volume 6, pp. 298304
Goldstone, R. L., Kersten, A., & Carvalho, P.F. 2013. Concepts and Categorization. In Weiner, I.B, Healey, A.J., & Proctor,
R.W. (Eds.) Handbook of Psychology, Volume 4, Experimental Psychology, 2nd Edition (pp. 607-630). New York, NY: Wiley.
Grandey, A. A., et al. 2005. Is service with a smile enough? Authenticity of positive displays during service encounters.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 96, Issue 1, pp. 3855
Grant, A. M. 2008. The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary
conditions. The Journal of Applied Psychology, Volume 93, Issue 1, pp. 108124.
Gray, J. A. 1994. Framework for a taxonomy of psychiatric disorder. In S. H. M. van Goozen, N. E. van de Poll, & J.
Sergeant (Eds.), Emotions: Essays on emotion theory (pp. 2959). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Grecco, E., Robbins, S. J. & Bartoli, E. & Wolff, E. F. 2013. Use of Nonconscious Priming to Promote Self-Disclosure.
Clinical Psychological Science, Volume 1, pp. 31115.
Green, M. C. & Brock, T. C. 2002. In the minds eye: Imagery and transportation into narrative worlds. In M. C. Green, J. J.
Strange, & T. C. Brock (Eds.) Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.,
pp. 315-341.
Gregory, W. L., Cialdini, R. B., & Carpenter, K. M. 1982. Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and
compliance: Does imagining make it so?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 43, pp. 89-99.
Gross, J.J. 1998. Antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation: divergent consequences for experience, expression,
and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 74, pp. 224-237
Guadagno, R. E., Rhoads, K. V. & Sagarin, B. J. 2011. Figural Vividness and Persuasion: Capturing the Elusive Vividness
Effect. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 37, pp. 62638.
Guguen, N. 2002. Touch, awareness of touch, and compliance with a request. Perceptual and Motor Skills, Volume 95, pp.
355-60.
 Guguen, N. 2007. The effect of a mans touch on womans compliance to a request in a courtship context. Social Influence,
2, pp. 81-97.
Guguen, N. 2009. Mimicry and seduction: An evaluation in a courtship context. Social Influence, Volume 4, Issue 4, pp.
249255.
Haidt, J . 2001. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological
Review, Volume 108, pp. 814-834
Halvorson, H. G. & Higgins, E. T. 2013. Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence. New
York: Hudson Street Press
Hamilton, R. & Hong, J. & Chernev, A. 2007. Perceptual Focus Effects in Choice. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume
34, pp. 18799.
Harris, R. J., Trusty M. L., Bechtold, J. I. & Wasinger, L. 1989. Memory for implied versus directly stated advertising
claims. Psychology and Marketing Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 87-96
Healy, A. J, Malhotra, N. & Mo, C. H. 2010. Irrelevant Events Affect Voters Evaluations of Government Performance.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 107, pp. 128049.
Heinmki, O. 1974. Semantics of English Temporal Connectives. Ph.D. thesis, University of Indiana at Bloomington
Helm, J. L., Sbarra D. & Ferrer, E. 2012. Assessing cross-partner associations in physiological responses via coupled
oscillator models. Emotion, Volume 12, Issue 4, pp. 748-62
Hershfield, H. E., et al. 2011. Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self. Journal of
Marketing Research, Volume 48 (SPL), S23-S37.
Hoffer, E. 2010. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. New
York.
Homma, I. & Masaoka, Y. 2008. Breathing rhythms and emotions. Experimental Physiology, Volume 93, Issue 91, pp. 1011-
21
Hugenberg, K. & Bodenhausen, G. V. 2004. Category Membership Moderates the Inhibition of Social Identities. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 40, pp. 23338.
Humphreys, G. W. & Sui, J. 2016. Attentional control and the self: The Self-Attention Network (SAN). Cognitive
Neuroscience, Volume 7, pp. 517.
Inagaki, T. K. & Eisenberger, N. I. 2013. Shared Neural Mechanisms Underlying Social Warmth and Physical Warmth.
Psychological Science, Volume 24, pp. 227280.
Iyengar, S.S., Jiang, W. & Huberman, G. 2003. How Much Choice is Too Much?: Contributions to 401(k) Retirement Plans.
In Pension Design and Structure: New Lessons from Behavioral Finance. Ed. O. S. Mitchell and S. P. Utkus. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Izuma, K. et al. 2015. A Causal Role for Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex in Choice-Induced Preference Change. Journal of
Neuroscience, Volume 35, Issue 8, pp. 3598-3606.
Jabbi, M., Bastiaansen, J. & Keysers, C. 2008. A Common Anterior Insula Representation of Disgust Observation,
Experience and Imagination Shows Divergent Functional Connectivity Pathways. PLoS ONE 3, no. 8
Jacob, C., Guguen, N. 2013. The effect of employees verbal mimicry on tipping. International Journal of Hospitality
Management, Volume 35, pp. 109111
Jhang, J. H. & Lynch Jr, J. G. 2015. Pardon the Interuption: Goal Proximity, Perceived Spare Time, and Impatience. Journal
of Consumer Research, Volume 41, pp. 126783.
Jiang, X., et al. 2007. Categorization Training results in shape- and category-selective human neural plasticity. Neuron,
Volume 53, Issue 6, pp. 891-903.
Johnson, P. B. & Mehrabian, A. & Weiner, B. 1968. Achievement Motivation and the Recall of Incompleted and Completed
Exam Questions. Journal of Educational Psychology, Volume 59, pp. 18185.
Joung, W., Hesketh, B. & Neal, A. 2006. Using War Stories to Train for Adaptive Performance: Is it Better to Learn from
Error or Success? Applied Psychology, Volume 55, Issue 2, pp. 282302
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York.
Kardes, F. R. & Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Cronley, M. L. & Houghton, D. C. 2002. Consideration Set Overvaluation: When
Impossibly Favorable Ratings of a Set of Brands Are Observed. Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 12, pp. 35361.
Karremans, J.C., Wolfgang, S. & Jasper, C. 2005. Beyond Vicarys fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand
choice, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 42, Issue 6, pp. 792-798
Kathleen, T. 2006. Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control. Oxford University Press. New York.
Kellerman, J., Lewis, J. & Laird, J. D. 1989. Looking and loving: The effects of mutual gaze on feelings of romantic love.
Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 23, pp. 145-161
Kinsbourne, M. 1972. Eye and head turning indicates cerebral lateralization. Science, 176, pp. 539-541
Kiparsky, P. and Kiparsky, C. 1970. Fact. in Bierwisch, M. and Heidolph, K. eds.), Progress in Linguistics, The Hague:
Mouton, pp. 143-173.
Knowles, E.S, Nolan, J. & Riner, D. 2007. Resisting persuasion. In R. Baumeister, & K. Vohs (Eds.), Encyclopedia of social
psychology, 752-754,Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Knowles, E.S. & Linn, J.A. 2004. Resistance and Persuasion. Psychology Press. Mahwah, New Jersey
Koch C. & Tsuchiya N. 2007. Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
Volume 11, Issue 1, p. 1622
Koyama, T. et al. 2005. The subjective experience of pain: Where expectations become reality. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 102 no. 36, pp. 1295012955
 Kulesza, W., Dolinski, D., Huisman, A., & Majewski, R. 2014. The Echo Effect: The power of verbal mimicry to influence
prosocial behavior. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Volume 33, Issue 2, pp. 182-201
Kunda, Z., Fong, G.T., Sanitisio, R. & Reber, E. 1993. Directional Questions Direct Self-Conceptions. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 29, pp. 6386.
Kupor, D., Reich, T. & Shiv, B. 2015. Cant Finish What You Started? The Effect of Climactic Interruption on Behavior.
Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 25, pp. 11319.
Kurzius, E. 2015. The extraverted chameleon. Personalitys effects on mimicry of verbal behavior. Journal of Individual
Differences, Volume 36, Issue 2, pp. 80-86.
Laeng, B. & Sulutvedt, U., 2013. The Eye Pupil Adjusts to Imaginary Light. Psychological Science, Volume 25, Number 1,
pp. 188-197.
Langer, E. J., Blank, A. & Chanowitz, B. 1978. The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of placebic
information in interpersonal interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 36, Issue 6, pp. 635-642
Leander, N. P., Chartrand, T. L. & Bargh, J. A. 2012. You give me the chills: embodied reactions to inappropriate amounts of
behavioral mimicry. Psychological Science, Volume 23, Issue 7 pp. 772-779.
Lee, F., Peterson, C. & Tiedens, L. Z. 2004. Mea Culpa: Predicting Stock Prices From Organizational Attributions.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 30, pp. 1636-1649
Leknes, S. et al. 2012. The importance of context: when relative relief renders pain pleasant. Pain, Volume 154, Issue 3, pp.
402-410
Lerner, J. S., Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. 2004. Heart strings and purse strings: Carry-over effects of emotion on
economic transactions. Psychological Science, Volume 15, pp. 337-341
Liberman, N. & Trope, Y. 1998. The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions: A
test of temporal construal theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 75, pp. 5-18.
Liberman, N., Molden, D. C., Idson, L. C. & Higgins, E. 2001. Promotion and prevention focus on alternative hypotheses:
Implications for attributional functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 80, pp. 5-18.
Libet B., Gleason C. A., Wright E. W., Pearl D. K. 1983. Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral
activity (readiness-potential): the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, Volume 106, pp. 62342
Liu, Z. & Vaina, L. M. 1998. Simultaneous learning of motion discrimination in two directions. Brain Research: Cognitive
Brain Research, Volume 6, issue 4, pp. 347-34
Livingston, K. R. & Andrews J. K. 1995. On the interaction of prior knowledge and stimulus structure in category learning.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, Volume 48, pp. 208-236
Macrae, C. N. & Johnston, L. 1998. Help, I Need Somebody: Automatic Action and Inaction. Social Cognition, Volume 16,
pp. 40017.
Mandel, N. & Johnson, E. J. 2002. When Web Pages Influence Choice: Effects of Visual Primes on Experts and Novices.
Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 29, pp. 23545.
Marchetti, G. 2012. Against the View That Consciousness and Attention Are Fully Dissociable. Frontiers in Psychology 3:
36.
Martin, S. J. 2012. 98% of HBR readers love this article. Harvard Business Review, October 2012 Issue.
Mashek, D. J., Aron, A. & Boncimino, M. 2003. Confusions of Self with Close Others. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, Volume 29, pp. 38292.
McCulloch, K. C., Arts H., Fujita, K. & Bargh, J. A. 2008. Inhibition in Goal Systems: A Retrieval-Induced Forgetting
Account. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 44, pp. 85765.
McGraw, K. O. & Fiala, J. 1982. Undermining the Zeigarnik effect: Another hidden cost of reward. Journal of Personality,
Volume 50, Issue 1, pp. 5866
McGuire, W.J. 1964. Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology, Volume 1, 191-229. New York: Academic Press.
Milgram, S. 1965. Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Human Relations, Volume 18, pp. 57-76.
Miltenberger, R. 2008. Behaviour Modification. Belmont, CA. Wadsworth Publishing.
Mitchell, J. P., Banaji, M. & Macrae, C. N. 2005. The Link Between Social Cognition and Self-Referential Thought. Journal
of Cognitive Neuroscience, Volume 17, pp. 130615.
Muraven, M., Tice, D. M. & Baumeister, R. F. 1998. Self-control as limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, pp. 774-789.
Mussweiler, T. 2000. Overcoming the inevitable neuroassociation effect: Considering the opposite compensates for selective
accessibility. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 26, pp. 1142-1150
Mussweiler, T. 2002. The malleability of neuroassociation effects. Experimental Psychology, 49, 67-72.1
Nguyen, H. D. & Ryan, A. M. 2008. Does Stereotype Threat Affect Test Performance of Minorities and Women? A Meta-
Analysis of Experimental Evidence. Journal of Applied Psychology, Volume 93, pp. 131434.
Norman, L. J. & Heywood, C. A. & Kentridge, R. W. 2013. Object-Based Attention without Awareness. Psychological
Science, Volume 24, pp. 83643.
North, A. C. & Hargreaves, D. J. & McKendrick, J. 1997. In-Store Music Affects Product Choice. Nature 390 (November
13), pp. 132.
Nosofsky, R. M., Palmeri, T. J. & McKinley, S. C. 1994. Rule-Plus-Expection Model of Classification Learning.
Psychological Review, Volume 101, Issue 1, pp. 53-79
Nunes, J. C. and Dreze, X. (2006). The endowed progress effect: how artificial advancement increases effort. Journal of
Consumer Research. 32, 504-512.
 Nyhan, B., Reifler, J., Richey, S. & Freed, G. 2014. Effective Messages in Vaccine Promotion: A Randomized Trial.
Pediatrics, Volume 133, Issue 4, pp. 835-842.
OConner, P. T. 2010. Woe is I: The Grammarphobes Guide to Better English in Plain English, 3rd Edition 3rd Revised &
enlarged Edition. River Head Books. New York.
OCraven, K. M., Downing, P.E. & Kanwisher, N. 1999. fMRI Evidence for Objects as the Units of Attentional Selection.
Nature, Volume 401, pp. 58487
Oliva, A. & Torralba, A. 2007. The role of context in object recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 11, Number
12, pp. 520-527
Oosterhof, N. N. & Tipper, S. P. & Downing, P.E. 2012. Visuo-Motor Imagery of Specific Manual Actions: A Multi-Variate
Pattern Analysis fMRI Study. Neuroimage, Volume 63, pp. 26271.
Osnos, E. 1997, September 27. Too many choices? Firms cut back on new products. Philadelphia Inquirer, D1, D7
Otten, S., & Epstude, K. 2006. Overlapping Mental Representations of Self, Ingroup, and Outgroup: Unraveling Self-
Stereotyping and Self-Anchoring. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 32, pp. 95769.
Pascual-Leone, A. 1996. Reorganization of cortical motor outputs in the acquisition of new motor skills. In Recent
Advances in Clinical Neurophysiology, ed. J. Kinura, H. Shibasaki, pp. 3048. Amsterdam: Elsevier Sci.
Pavlov, I. P. 1927. Conditioned reflexes. Translated by G. V. Anrep. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Perfect, T. J. & Askew, C. 1994. Print adverts: Not remembered but memorable. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Volume 8,
pp. 693-703
Peskin, M. & Newell, F. N. 2004. Familiarity breeds attraction: effects of exposure on the attractiveness of typical and
distinctive faces. Perception. Volume 33, Issue 2, pp. 147-157
Pessiglione, M., et al. 2007. How the brain translates money into force: a neuroimaging study of subliminal motivation.
Science, Volume 316, pp. 9046
Peterson, L.R., & Peterson, M.J. 1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, Volume 58, pp. 193-198
Petty, R. E., Wells, G. L. & Brock T. C. 1976. Distraction can enhance or reduce yielding to propaganda: Thought disruption
versus effort justification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 34, pp. 874-884
Petty, R.E., & Cacioppo, J.T. 1986. The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, Volume 19, pp. 123-205
Pfeffer, J., Fong, C. T. & Cialdini, R.B. 2006. Overcoming the Self-promotion Dilemma: Interpersonal Attraction and Extra
Help as a Consequence of Who Sings Ones Praises. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 32, Issue 10, pp. 362-74
Pham, M. T. & Avnet, T. 2004. Ideals and Oughts and the Reliance of Affect Versus Substance in Persuasion. Journal of
Consumer Research, Volume 30, Issue 4, pp. 503-517
Phelps, E. A., Ling, S. & Carrasco, M. 2006. Emotion Facilitates Perception and Potentiates the Perceptual Benefits of
Attention. Psychological Science, Volume 17, Issue 4, pp. 292299.
Prevost, C., Lau, H. & Mobbs, D. 2015. Reactance to Deterrence: How Discouragement Impels Success. Front. Hum.
Neurosci. Conference Abstract: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII).
Pryor, K. 1999. Dont Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training Revised Edition. Bantam. New York
Rescorla, R. A. 1967. Pavlovian conditioning and its proper control procedures. Psychological Review, Volume 74, pp. 71-
80.
Rescorla, R. A. 1968. Probability of shock in the presence and absence of CS in fear conditioning. Journal of Comparative
and Physiological Psychology, Volume 66, Issue 1, pp. 1-5.
Reynolds, J. H. & Chelazzi, L. 2004. Attentional Modulation of Visual Processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience, pp.
61147.
Richardson, B., et al. 2014. Language style matching and confessions in police interrogations. Law and Human Behavior,
Volume 38, pp. 357-366.
Robinson, J. & Zebrowitz-McArthur, L. 1982. Impact of Salient Vocal Qualities on Causal Attribution for a Speakers
Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 43, pp. 23647.
Roediger, H.L. & McDermott, K. B. 1995. Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Volume 24, pp. 803-814
Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. 2008. Future lock-in: Future implementation increases selection of "should" choices.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 106, Issue 1, pp. 120.
Rydell, R. J., McConnell, A. R. & Beilock, S. L. 2009. Multiple Social Identities and Stereotype Threat: Imbalance,
Accessibility, and Working Memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 96, pp. 94966.
Sagarin, B. J. & Cialdini, R. B. & Rice, W. E. & Serna, S. B. 2002. Dispelling the illusion of invulnerability: The
motivations and mechanisms of resistance to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 83, pp. 526541.
Santos, M. D., Leve, C. & Pratkanis, A. R. 1994. Hey Buddy, Can You Spare Seventeen Cents? Mindful Persuasion and the
Pique Technique. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 24, pp. 755-764
Sengpiel, F. & Hubener, M. 1999. Visual attention: spotlight on the primary visual cortex. Current Biology. Volume 9, Issue
9, pp. 318321
Schreiber C.A. & Kahneman, D. 2000. Determinants of the remembered utility of aversive sounds. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, Volume 129, Issue 1, pp. 27-42
Schultz, W. 2006. Behavioral Theories and the Neurophysiology of Reward. Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 57, pp.
87-115
Searleman, A. & Carter, H. 1988. The effectiveness of different types of pragmatic implications found in commercials to
mislead subjects. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp. 265-272.
Shah, J. Y., Friedman R. & Kruglanski, A. W. 2002. Forgetting All Else: On the Antecedents and Consequences of Goal
Shielding., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 83, pp. 126180.
Shah, J., Higgins, T. & Friedman, R. S. 1998. Performance incentives and means: How regulatory focus influences goal
attainment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 74, pp. 285-293.
Shantz, A. & Latham, G. 2011. Effect of Primed Goals on Employee Performance: Implications for Human Resource
Management. Human Resource Management, Volume 50, pp. 28999.
Sherman, S. J. 1980. On the self-erasing nature of errors of prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Volume 39, pp. 211-221.
Sherman, S. J., et al. 1981. The effects of explaining hypothetical future events: From possibility to probability to actuality
and beyond. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 17, pp. 142-158.
Simonson, I. 1993. Get closer to your customers by understanding how they make their choices. California Management
Review, Volume 35, pp. 68-84
Slovic, P., et al. 2002. Rational Actors or Rational Fools: Implications of the Affect Heuristic for Behavioral Economics.
Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 31, pp. 329342.
Smith, S. M. & Shaffer, D. R. 1991. Celerity and Cajolery: Rapid Speech May Promote or Inhibit Persuasion through its
Impact on Message Elaboration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 17, pp. 663-669
Snyder, R. 1989. Misleading Characteristics of Implied-Superiority Claims. Journal of Advertising, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp.
54-61
Sokolov, E.N. 1960. Neuronal models and the orienting reflex, in The Central Nervous System and Behavior. Mary A.B.
Brazier, ed. NY: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, pp. 187-276
Steele, C. M. 1988. The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. Advances in experimental social
psychology.Volume 21. Social psychological studies of the self: Perspectives and programs, pp. 261-302
Stel, M., Dijk, E. V. & Olivier, E. 2009. You Want to Know the Truth? Then Dont Mimic! Psychological Science, Volume
20, Issue 6, pp. 693-699
Sternthal, B., Dholakia, R.R. & Leavitt, C. 1978. The Persuasive Effect of Source Credibility: Tests of Cognitive Response.
Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 4, pp. 252-260.
Stewart, D. W. & Furse, D. H. 1986. Effective Television Advertising: A Study of 1000 Commercials. Lexington, MA:
Lexington Books.
Stopa, F. 2011. The Human Skills: Elicitation & Interviewing (Second Edition). CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform. New York.
Strahan, E.J., Spencer, S.J. & Zanna, M.P. 2002. Subliminal priming and persuasion: Striking while the iron is hot. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 38, pp. 556-568
Strohmetz, D. B., Rind, B., Fisher, R. & Lynn, M. 2002. Sweetening the Till: The Use of Candy to Increase Restaurant
Tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 32, pp. 300-309.
Subra, B., et al. 2010. Automatic Effects of Alcohol and Aggressive Cues on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviors.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 36, pp. 105257.
Suedfield, P., Bochner, S. & Matas, C. 1971. Petitioners attire and petition signing by peace demonstrators: A field
experiment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 1, Issue 3, pp. 278-283
Switzer, F. S. & Sniezek, J. A. 1991. Judgment Processes in Motion: Anchoring and Adjustment Effects on Judgment and
Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 49, pp. 20829.
Taylor, S. E. & Fiske, S. T. 1978. Salience, Attention, and Attributions: Top of the Head Phenomena. In Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology. Vol. 11. Edited by L. Berkowitz New York: Academic Press, pp. 24988.
Taylor, V. J. & Walton, G. M. 2011. Stereotype Threat Undermines Academic Learning. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, Volume 37, pp. 105567.
Tormala, Z. L., Jia, J. S., & Norton, M. I. 2012. The preference for potential. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
Volume 103, Issue 4, pp. 567583.
Tracy, J. L. & Beall, A. T. 2011. Happy guys finish last: the impact of emotion expressions on sexual attraction. Emotion,
Volume 11, pp. 1379-87
Trifts, V. & Hubl, G. 2003. Information availability and consumer preference: Can online retailers benefit from providing
access to competitor price information? Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 13, pp. 149-159
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. 2000. Temporal construal and time-dependent changes in preference. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 79, pp. 876-889
Tversky, A. & Kahneman D. 1981. The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, Volume 211, Issue
4481, pp. 453-458
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. 1973. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology,
Volume 5, Issue 1, pp. 207-233
Tybout A.M., Sternthal, B. & Calder, B.J. 1978. A Two-Stage Theory of Information Processing in Persuasion: an Integrative
View of Cognitive Response and Self-Perception Theory. Advances in Consumer Research Volume 5, pp. 721-723.
Walster, E. & Festinger, L. 1962. The effectiveness of overheard persuasive communi-cations. Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology 65, pp. 395-402.
van Baaren, R.B., Holland R.W., Kawakami, K. & van Knippenberg A. 2004. Mimicry and Prosocial Behavior.
Psychological Science, Volume 15, pp. 71-74
van Baaren, R.B., Janssen, L., Chartrand, T. L. & Dijksterhuis, A. P. 2009. Where is the love? The social aspects of mimicry.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Volume 364, Issue 1528, pp. 2381-2389
van Baaren, R.B., Holland R.W., Steenaert, B. & van Knippenberg A. 2003. Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences
of imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 39, Issue 4, pp. 393-398
van de Grind, W. 2002. Physical, neural, and mental timing. Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 11, pp. 241264
Van Yperen, N. C. & Leander, N. P. 2014. The Overpowering Effect of Social Comparison Information: On the
Misalignment Between Mastery-Based Goals and Self-Evaluation Criteria. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 40, pp.
67688.
Weaver, K., Garcia, S. M., & Schwarz, N. 2012. The presenters paradox. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 39, Issue
3, pp. 445460.
Webb, T. L. & Sheeran, P. 2003. Can implementation intentions help to overcome ego-depletion? Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 39, pp. 279-286.
Weber, E. U. & Morris, M. W. 2010. Culture and Judgment and Decision Making: The Constructivist Turn. Perspectives on
Psychological Science, Volume 5, pp. 41019.
Wegener, D. T. & Petty, R. E. 1997. The Flexible Correction Model: The Role of Nave Theories of Bias in Bias Correction.
In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 29. Edited by M. P. Zanna. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 141208.
Weingarten, E., et al. 2016. From Primed Concepts to Action: A Meta-Analysis of the Behavioral Effects of Incidentally
Presented Words. Psychological Bulletin, Volume 142, pp. 47297.
Werner C.M., Stoll, R., & Birch, P. 2002. Clinical Validation and cognitive Elaboration: Signs that encourage sustained
recycling. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24, pp. 185-203.
Will, U. & Berg, E. 2007. Brainwave synchronization and entrainment to periodic stimuli. Neuroscience Letters, Volume
424, pp. 55-60
Williams, K. D., Bourgeois, M. J. & Croyle, R.T. 1993. The Effects of Stealing Thunder in Criminal and Civil Trials. Law
and Human Behavior, Volume 17, Number 6, pp. 597-609
Williams, M. Lee. 1973. The Effects of Equivocation and Negations on Message Perception and Source Credibility. Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association (59th, New York City, November 8-11, 1973).
Williams, M. Lee. 1975. Equivocation: Character insurance. Human Communication Research Volume 1, Issue 3, pp. 265-
270.
Williams, M. Lee. 1980. The effect of deliberate vagueness on receiver recall and agreement. Central States Speech Journal,
31, pp. 30-41.
Willis, J. & Todorov, A. 2006. First impressions: making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological
Science, Volume 17, pp. 592-8
Wilson, T. & Linville, P. 1982. Improving academic performance of college freshmen: Attribution theory revisited. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 42, pp. 367-376
Wilson, T.D., et al. 1993. Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, Volume 19, pp. 331-339
Winawer, J., Huk, A. & Boroditsky, L. 2010. A motion aftereffect from visual imagery of motion. Cognition, Volume 114,
pp. 276-284.
Wiseman, R. 2004. The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles. Arrow Books Ltd. London.
Vogt, J., De Houwer, J. & Crombez, G. 2011. Multiple Goal Management Starts with Attention: Goal Prioritizing Affects the
Allocation of Spatial Attention to Goal-Relevant Events. Experimental Psychology, Volume 58, pp. 5561.
Volz, K. G., Kessler, T. & von Cramon, D. Y. 2009. In-Group as Part of the Self: In-Group Favoritism Is Mediated by Medial
Prefrontal Cortex Activation. Social Neuroscience, Volume 4, pp. 24460.
Wnke, M., Bohner, G. & Jurkowitsch, A. 1997. There Are Many Reasons to Drive a BMW: Does Imagined Ease of
Argument Generation Influence Attitudes? Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 24, pp. 170-177
Yang, L. W., Cutright, K. M. & Chartrand, T. L. & Fitzsimons, G. Z. 2014. Distinctively Different: Exposure to Multiple
Brands in Low-Elaboration Settings. Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 40, pp. 97392.
Yang, Q., et al. 2013. Diverging Effects of Clean versus Dirty Money on Attitudes, Values, and Interpersonal Behavior.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 104, pp. 47389.
Yantis, S. 1993. Stimulus-Driven Attentional Capture. Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 2, pp. 15661.
Yopyk, D. J. A. & Prentice, D. A. 2005. Am I an Athlete or a Student? Identity Salience and Stereotype Threat in Student-
Athletes. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Volume 27, Issue 4, pp. 32936.
Zajonc, R. B. 1968. Attitudinal Effect of Mere Exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 9, Part 2, pp.
1-27.
Zakharova N. N. & Avdeev V. M. 1982. Functional changes in the central nervous system during music perception (study of
positive emotions). Zhurnal vysshei nervnoi deiatelnosti imeni IP Pavlova, Volume 32, No. 5, pp. 915-924
Zebrowitz-McArthur, L. & Ginsberg, E. 1981. Causal Attribution to Salient Stimuli: An Investigation of Visual Fixation
Mediators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 7, pp. 54753.
Zeigarnik, B. 1927. Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung 9, pp. 1-85.