Category Archives: Communication Skill

Quotes Pattern – A Jedi Mind Trick of Persuasion

The quotes pattern is a powerful and very useful and sneaky tool from NLP that you can use in many situations to help you covertly gauge the interest level of a client, customer, or potential lover.

If you are a salesperson, and you have a potential customer sitting in front of you, wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to find out exactly what their interest is in the product you are trying to sell? Of course, if you blatantly ask them, like “So, Mr. Customer, are you ready to buy this product yet?” You’ll likely scare them off, never to return.

Similarly, if you are in a bar talking to a potential date, and you ask them “So are you interested in me enough to go out on date?” you’ll likely come across as creepy, or needy. Even if you don’t, and they answer negatively, it can be a serious blow to your ego, not to mention putting all the power in their hands, as they now are absolutely clear of your intentions.

There is a better, sneakier way. It’s called the quotes pattern. What you do is take the question you’d like to ask them, and quote somebody else saying the same thing. Then just sit back and watch their response. If they give you some good buying signals, your good. If they don’t, that just means you need to do a little bit more work in promoting yourself or your product.

Example.

Lets say you are a car salesperson. You have a client sitting in front of you. You’ve been on a test drive, and you’ve managed to get them inside. It’d be great if you could just say, “Ok, now you should buy the car.” And have them passively agree. But you can’t. Here’s what you do. Start talking about a friend or colleague of yours that works at another dealership. His sales method is much more direct, and you give the client an example.

“I have this friend, and he works at a dealership on the other side of town, and he is probably the most aggressive salesperson I know. He’ll look a customer right in the eyes, and tell them that they really should buy this car today. That if they don’t buy this car today, they are going to lose this opportunity, and they might not get it back. And the funny thing is, this guy sells a lot of cars this way. I could never be that direct to a customer.” And then share a laugh about how direct your friend is.

In this story, when you say “buy this car today,” say it directly to the client. Because you are quoting some other person, they won’t react to you as if you’ve said it. But if they are interested in buying the car, you’ll know. You’ll also know if they think the car is a piece of junk, or it’s too expensive by their reaction. If that happens, just continue to demonstrate the value of the car.

You can also use this technique during job interviews, and during seduction attempts. For example, if you are in a bar talking to somebody you might be romantically interested in, tell a story about a friend that is absolutely fearless with the opposite sex. Describe how they will ask a person right after meeting them if they want to go someplace quieter. For example:

After you’ve broken the ice, and started talking about how people meet in bars, try something like this:

“I know this guy (or girl) who has absolutely no fear. He’ll start talking to somebody in a bar, and after only a few minutes, look them in the eye (as you are looking them in the eye) and say I think you are really beautiful/handsome. Lets go someplace where we can be alone. (Pause.) Do you believe that? I could never say something like that.”

Of course, when you say the “you are really beautiful/handsome…” part, say it directly to them without breaking eye contact. Pay close attention how they react. If they smile, or if their pupils dilate, or if they take a deep breath, you’re in. Proceed accordingly.

Have fun with this.

How to Use Language to Persuade Others

I remember when I was a kid, I was in boy scouts. Our troop went to a beach for a weekend campout. The campgrounds were up on a bluff overlooking the beach, with fire rings and places to set up tents.

One thing I remember the most was that there was this new kid. And the poor kid seemed to be desperate to make friends. He would ask one of the other kids to do something, and would always promise things like “I’ll be your best friend,” or “I’ll buy you a soda,” and other stuff. At the time, most of the kids didn’t want anything to do with him, because it seemed creepy to have a kid promising us all kinds of stuff just to hang around him. Looking back, I feel kind of sorry for the kid. It can be tough being a new kid in a group when friendships and relationships have already been formed.

If you can imagine how difficult it can be to make friends as an adult, you can perhaps also sympathize with him. Being an adult, you have more confidence in yourself (hopefully!) so you can relax and be yourself, and be sure that friendships will develop gradually over time, like they should.

But what if you are in a situation, and you need to quicken the process? What if you need to make a good first impression on a boss, or a potential business partner? What then? Does it still work to promise to “be someone’s best friend?” Probably not.

If you are a salesperson, and you’ve ever tried to sell something to somebody, you now difficult it can be to get past resistance. If you give them a compliment, they can easily see it for what it is if it is not one hundred percent genuine.

So what do you do? One powerful way is to use linguistic presuppositions. Linguistic presuppositions are carefully constructed sentences that presuppose something to be true in order for the sentence to be understood.

An example is the following sentence:

One of the reasons that so many people have bought his product is that it’s lifetime warranty makes it much more valuable than the competition.

Take a look at what is being presupposed in the sentence:

– Many people have bought this product
– This product has a lifetime warranty
– It is much more valuable than the competition
– There are other reasons people have bought it

Even if you blatantly disagree with any of the above statements, you are tacitly accepting the others as truth.

So how do you use this technique to get someone’s good favor? Simple. Use sentences that presuppose good things about the other person. Even if you have never met them before, and don’t know anything about their history, you can still do this. Just think of something that is generally true of everybody.

For example, everybody has made decisions in their lives. Some good, some bad. Everybody has done good things in their life. Everybody has achieved accomplishments in their life.

So you can say,

“Well Mr. Customer, obviously, because you’ve made several good decisions before that have invariably led to substantial accomplishments, you can appreciate the fact that choices always present an opportunity for further achievement.”

That is a simple sentence, which doesn’t really say anything specific, but it presupposes something about the person that they can feel good about.

Another example:

“I’m sure that you’ve avoided temptation in the past due to your willpower and dedication to personal achievement, which is exactly why you are somebody that can really benefit from this product.”

Again, a fairly vague sentence, but it presupposes something good about the person, and uses that presupposition to convince them to consider your product or service.

These are but a few of the many ways that you can use linguistic presuppositions to promote yourself or your product. There are several resources to learn these. They were originally described in the book “The Structure of Magic,” by Bandler and Grinder. You can get it from Amazon.

Although these patterns can take some time to learn, they can be very powerful in promoting yourself, and making others feel really fantastic. You do like to make people feel fantastic, right?

How To Find Your Niche – The Baker’s Success Story

There used to be this guy that worked in a bakery. It was a small shop in a small neighborhood. He had owned the bakery for several years, and had slowly developed a large following in the town, inasmuch as baker can develop a following.  He was he go to guy for all of the birthday parties, wedding celebrations and all other gatherings of friends and family that required any kind of bread product. He was the man.

It wasn’t always that way. When he first moved into town, he didn’t have a nickel to his name. He moved into town back during the transitional time in the local economy, when the city was just starting out. The city had been a small bedroom community for many manufacturing plants in the next town over. Many people that worked in the plants made their home in this small town.

The baker, who back then wasn’t yet a baker, moved to town in hopes of finding a good job in one of the factories. He had just finished six years in the service, and was hoping to apply his skills to one of the many technical based manufacturing plants in the area.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite as well as he’d hoped. Just when he moved into town, the economy suffered a series of serious setbacks. Jobs moving overseas, a significant drop in demand for the manufactured products. Many people lost their jobs, and a lot of secondary businesses that depended on those people simply went out of business. It’s hard to stay in business when nobody can afford to buy your product.

So this ex military man was in a bit of a tough spot. He had saved enough money to get him by for a couple months, but he had really been depending on the source of income from one of the factories. That was his first lesson.

Never depend on a source of income that isn’t yours yet.

So he did a quick inventory of his skills. In the service he had been assigned to the maintenance department on large carriers. He was pretty good at fixing things, small things, big things. Anything mechanical, he could fix it.

That is what led him to his first job fixing the bread machine. He had always loved sourdough bread, and one day he happened into a bread shop to buy a loaf, or half a loaf. The owner was very sad, because his large mixing machine wasn’t working properly. He explained to the ex military man that the part was on order, but wasn’t expected for at least a week. He was beside himself, because without the mixing machine, he would lose what little business he had left. That’s when the ex military man recognized the second lesson.

Always have a back up plan.

Of course, the bread shop owner didn’t have a back up plan, and was exposed to significant risk. The ex-military man, his heart set on eating some sourdough bread, decided to offer his services. He wasn’t doing anything, and maybe the shop owner would give him some free bread. He suggested the trade, and the shop owner quickly agreed.

It didn’t take long for the shop owner to realize what a resource the military man was. The shop owner was getting old, and he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He had worked in this same shop for almost twenty years, and all the equipment was very old. If he could convince this ex military man to be his repairman, he could stay in business a few years longer. So they struck a bargain.

The ex military man would help out around the shop, and repair and keep all the equipment running smoothly. The bread shop owner would pay him a modest salary, and give him all the bread he could eat. Both the ex-military man the bread shop owner noticed the third lesson at the same time.

Always be open to new opportunities.

It didn’t take long for the military man to realize he had a love for bread. He began experimenting with different recipes, different cooking methods, and more and more people began coming to the shop to eat the delicious bread made by this ex sailor.

It didn’t take long for the townspeople to forget about his military past and see him only as the baker’s apprentice. The baker himself began to plan his retirement, certain that his apprentice would take over.

And when he did retire, and the bakers apprentice became the baker, it was a smooth a transition as you could imagine.  There was a big celebration, a farewell party of sorts (although the retired baker still lived in the town and was president of the Lions Club), and the apprentice became the baker.

And maybe he realized it, maybe he didn’t, but here’s the fourth lesson:

Sometimes you find your niche in life, but more often than not, your niche will find you.

Beware of GPS Systems That Lead You Astray

Once upon a time, there was this guy. He was a normal, every day guy, and the kind you usually run into in the grocery store, or at the cleaners picking up your shirts. The kind of guy who you see on a regular basis, but if you saw him outside of the usual places, like say if you saw him at the ice skating rink, you wouldn’t likely get anything other than a vague, “that guy looks familiar” feeling.

That was the kind of guy that this guy was. He had a decent job, he made decent money, and he lived in a decent neighborhood, in a decent apartment. He dated some decent girls, and most of his dates went pretty decently, meaning that he never got to second base.

If you are wondering where I’m going with this, that only means that you are starting to find this interesting, and perhaps a little upsetting at the same time, the reasons of which shall likely be explained soon.

So anyways, something very peculiar happened to this guy. He had one of those GPS navigators in his car. It didn’t come factory installed; he had it put in after the fact. Of course, he was smart enough to know that you should never get something like that done at the dealership, because everybody knows they charge way too much for things like that.

Anyways, he really liked the sound of the voice on his GPS. She always sounded so soothing, and so comforting. Warning him of upcoming on ramps and off ramps. He would sometimes drive by himself and pretend that he had a woman with him in the car.

But that’s when the creepy stuff started happening. Pretty soon he noticed that his navigation system was taking him on longer and more roundabout ways to get to where he wanted to go. At first he thought it was just a glitch in the software, but it kept happening with more and more consistency.

Pretty soon, his GPS was leading him way out in the boonies where he’d never been before. Every time he tried switching off his GPS, she would politely ask him not to do it. It was as if she was starting to read his mind.

Pretty soon he just gave up. He listened to her, and went where she told him, without question. And the more he obeyed her, the further and further she took him from his destination. Sometimes he would end up completely lost, and became completely dependent on her to take him back home.

Because he was late several times for work, he quickly lost his job. And with his job gone, he lost his apartment, as he couldn’t afford the rent. All he did was drive around and listen to her sweet, soothing voice take him wherever she thought he should go. And he obeyed unquestioningly.

Pretty soon he was receiving messages from her on how to get loose change, and a few odd dollars here and there so he could pay for gas, and some food. Because he was living in his car, he began to listen to her direction twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Pretty soon he felt completely alone and vulnerable every time he left his car.

People would see him standing on the side of the road, mumbling incoherently as he got out of his car. He would wander off into the city, and come back with enough money to buy another weeks worth of gas and food. Then he would climb back in his car, and she would tell him where to drive, so that they could be alone together.

Everything was fun until he got pulled over. It seemed that either he or she (whatever she was) neglected to renew his registration. Normally, this would have been a regular stop, with a warning from the police officer to renew his registration.

But because he hadn’t shaved or showered in several days, he was more than a little suspicious to the police. When he mumbled completely incomprehensibly to the police, they asked him to step out of his car. When he started asking his car for permission, they knew something was wrong.

Naturally, they took him in for questioning, and because of his completely deranged description of how he came to be like he was, they deemed him a menace to himself and to society. They locked him up in the psychiatric ward, where he remains to this very day.

His car, however, is another story. When they interrogated him, he said some interesting things which made the police want to search his car further. When they went out to the impound yard, the car was gone.

And they haven’t found it since.

How Group Roles and Group Diversity Affect Group Longevitity

I was having lunch with a friend recently, a friend that I hadn’t seen in quite a while. It is one of those friendships that you can pick up where you left off, sometimes after a few years even. Other friendships are different.

With those, you need to constantly give them attention or they will die on their own. Of course both kinds are valuable, and both have their own set of benefits. Some are contextual, some are dependent on the time or the situation, and others are dependent on a shared workplace.

I remember once I was waiting in line at a big bookstore to get a copy of a new book signed by a famous author, who was also a TV personality. If you wanted to get your book signed, you had to show up to the bookstore twice. Once in the morning to line up to get a number, and then later that afternoon to line up according to the number you got. They gave out the numbers in order, so you essentially lined up in the same order from the morning.

Which made for an interesting situation. I suddenly made friends with the people standing in line around me. We were there for the same purpose, and because we all left at the same time, and we knew we were all coming back to the same place as the same time, it kind of gave it an “instant friendship” feeling to it. Shared purpose, shared interests, an inherent plan to meet back later at the same place.

It was really strange the way it unfolded. We all said our goodbyes in the morning, and each went off to our jobs. Later that afternoon, we all greeted each other as if were old buddies. There were about six of us. And as we slowly wound our way around the bookstore, we talked about various things that you usually talk about on a first date. Family background, interests, hobbies etc.

And when we got to the front something else interesting happened. They were letting people in by groups, based on their own counting system. Their counting system didn’t consider that people had formed their own “cliques” while waiting in line.

When our turn came, only half of us were called to go in, and the other half had to wait for the next “group.” One of the girls in our “group” gave the bookstore guy a sad look and said “But we’re together,” and motioned to our newly formed group.

He acquiesced, and let us in. We proceeded to shift through the line together, inside the bookstore, closer and closer to the superstar whose autograph we wanted. As our excitement grew, a couple people suggested getting drinks afterwards, or other plans involving restaurants and activities.

But then something totally unexpected happened that really surprised me. As soon as we all got our autographs, the purpose for our group completely and utterly vanished. All the idle chitchat we’d shared lost its importance, as we no longer had a common purpose.

We suddenly found ourselves looking at each other, likely all thinking the same thing. “Wait, who are you people again?” Or something along those lines. We all mumbled a quick and robotic, “uh, see you,” and quickly went our different ways.

I’m pretty sure that I forgot all those people’s names within an hour after leaving, as I’m sure they did mine. And I seriously doubt that if I ever ran into them again, we’d recognize each other.

Now, I’m sure you have friends, good friends, which you met in places while standing in line, or waiting for something. That happens all the time. But when that does happen, it is because you had something in common, and “clicked” personality wise because of reasons other than what you were waiting for.

The “group” I found myself in, we had absolutely nothing in common, at all, except that we were all waiting for an autograph from a famous TV personality/author. As soon as that reason vanished, so did our group.

But it sure was fun while it lasted, and it did pass the time quite quickly while we were waiting, serving a valuable purpose.

I think the only time people get into trouble is when we expect more from a relationship or a friendship that it can provide for us.

Two Tips To Quickly and Easily Eliminate Public Speaking Fear

If you’ve ever had to give a public speech, you know how incredibly nerve wracking it can get. I remember I once had to give a best man speech/toast at my brothers wedding. I kept drinking glass after glass of wine with seemingly no effect.

Even worse is when you get tapped all of a sudden to say a few words when you aren’t expecting it. If you aren’t prepared, standing there with everybody looking at you can be tremendously terrifying.

Luckily, there are two approaches to easily overcome this fear so that next time you give a speech, you’ll not only be confident but also will feel secure knowing that the people hearing your speech will actually benefit from.

I remember reading an interview with actor George Clooney several years ago. He was recalling his early days as an anchor, having to go to audition after audition. He said that he finally discovered the secret of confidence. He found that confidence was the most important thing when giving an audition. More important than acting skills, and more important than remembering the lines.

The same is true in public speaking. Something happens to people when they see a person giving a speech who is extremely confident. It’s like their logic circuit shut off completely, and they take whatever the person says as true and sound, despite how crazy it may sound.

Its no wonder politicians have been able to lead people with such crazy ideas for so long. When they stand up and speak as though they believe in what they are saying, everybody else believes them as well.

So that is the first secret. Confidence. The best way is to simply “fake it till you make it.” You’ll be surprised how faking just the first few seconds of your speech will give you an incredible boost of real confidence. Once you set the tone, you’ll notice the audience looking at you with much less scrutiny, and much more openness and acceptance.

Which leads us to the second secret. The liberal use of pauses during your speech. Especially when used near or at the very beginning of your speech, pauses can have a profound effect on your air of authority. When you pause in the middle of a sentence, where people least expect it, it creates tension and a strong desire to find out what your important message is. Experts call this “building response potential.”

For example, instead of saying this:

“Today I want to talk to you about the importance of dental hygiene.”
(pause)
“Dental hygiene is important because without dental hygiene, your teeth will rot.”
(pause)
“And if your teeth rot you can’t eat candy.”

Try this:

“Today”
(pause)
“I want to talk to you about…”
(pause)
“Dental…”
(pause)
“Hygiene. Dental hygiene is important because…”
(pause)
“Without dental hygiene…”
(pause)
“Your teeth will rot. And if your teeth rot, you can’t…”

You get the idea. The first pause may be terrifying, as you’ll be standing there with everybody staring at you, and the silence can be extremely intimidating.

But you’ll soon notice that the interest you generate with your silence will literally destroy any thoughts of criticism in your audience’s mind. And quickly give you authority and confidence.

The best way to practice this would be to go and join a local toastmasters group. They are filled with kind people who are learning to give public speeches just like you, and are very supportive and helpful.

Of course, these techniques are also very powerful in one on one conversations or conversations in small groups. When you do this people will quickly be hanging on your every word.

How to Develop Stunning Conversational Skills and Skyrocket Your Popularity

If you’ve ever found yourself in a conversation, and felt that uncomfortable silence, you know that coming up with something interesting to say on the spur of the moment can be very difficult. When you combine two people feeling that same lack of conversational insight at the same time, and you have the recipe for conversation ending disaster.

One widely held misconception about holding interesting conversations is that you have to be interesting. While it helps if your job is a juggling trapeze artist who performs regularly for the Queen of England, it’s really not necessary to be anybody other than yourself. After you finish reading this short article, you’ll have the tools necessary to easily become the best conversationalist in the room.

The simple secret is that you don’t have to be interesting, rather you have to be interested. Interested in what the other person is saying, why they are saying it, how they came to their conclusions. It’s no big mystery that most people like to talk about themselves. That is the biggest stumbling block to conversation success.

Most people are so interested in speaking about themselves; they rarely give the other person a chance to speak. When you have two people competing for the limelight in a conversation, it can get pretty boring, pretty quickly.

The trick is to ask open-ended questions about what the other person is saying. An open-ended question is simply a question that doesn’t have a short one-word answer. When you begin to dig beneath the surface of what the other person is trying to say, you show that you are really interested in them, which will almost automatically make them interested in you. We generally like people that like us, and think that we are interesting.

Once you start digging beneath he surface of their conversation, start to look for similarities. Similarities in experiences, in values, in beliefs. Once you find a similarity, briefly tell a story or personal anecdote illustrating the similarity. This is much better than simply saying “me too!” That can come off as being insincere, as if you are some kind of salesperson trying to sell something.

Once you discover a similarity, and tell a brief story or anecdote, guide the conversation back to what they were talking about, so they don’t think you are stealing the conversation. This takes some practice, because it’s pretty easy to lose your place once you start talking about yourself.

But just like anything, the more you practice the better you will get, so don’t give up if you forget this at first. When you can engage somebody in a conversation, become interested in them and their stories, show (don’t tell) how you are similar in experience or beliefs with them, all while keeping the conversation focused on them, you will fast become a very popular person.

Extra bonus points if you can do this on a first date. That will create that feeling of “clicking” with someone, which is a great foundation for a good relationship.

Of course, if you are listening to them drone on and on, and you really can’t find anything they are saying interesting, and you can’t find any similar experiences, it’s best to cut your losses and find somebody else to talk to. Remember, not everybody was meant to be friend with everybody else.

When you use this strategy with people on a regular basis, you’ll develop deep, lasting friendships with people that you find interesting, and share many things in common with.

Now get off the Internet and go out and talk to somebody!

Public Speaking for Sales, Persuasion, and Popularity

If you’ve ever had to give a speech, you know how nerve wracking it can be. What to say, how long to give it, how to begin. Should you memorize your whole speech or use note cards? What should the topic of your speech be? Informative, funny, persuasive?

If you are in sales and you have to give presentations on a regular basis, you know how tough some audiences can be. The kind of audience you give a sales presentation to is a completely different animal that your friendly neighborhood toastmasters group.

One is completely accepting and supportive, the other sits there with their arms crossed wondering what you have of value to offer them.

One way that you can deliver a powerful presentation to either group is to harness and leverage their criteria. Eliciting criteria is fairly straightforward in an individual setting. You merely need to ask the other person what they are interested in, and explore that through some probing questions.

With a large audience, however, this can be a bit more difficult. With the two different groups mentioned above, you’ll need to develop two different strategies, both involve a bit of creative thinking

With a group of toastmasters or a class at school, everybody has the same criteria: To improve their speaking. Simply by taking turns speaking you are all fulfilling each other’s criteria. This is relatively simply. If you want to supercharge your popularity at your next toastmasters group, give a speech on how to give better speeches. It’s a pretty safe bet that is what’s on everybody’s mind, so it would be much better received and appreciated than a speech on why you visit the dentist regularly.

For a sales speech, you can get a leg up by imagining what is important to your audience based on your product. Old school sales techniques dictate that you rattle off a series of features and benefits, followed by “what this means to you is…” Unfortunately that is a bit presumptuous, and can be a little off putting.

A simple way around this is to speak of your potential clients criteria in vague terms. Make statements that sound specific to your audience, but are relatively true for any given business. What do most businesses want to do?

Increase revenue.
Decrease overhead.
Increase productivity.
Increase efficiency.
Increase public image.

These are just a few, but most companies would agree to those in principle. The trick is to carefully explain why your product will do all those things for your prospective client. A great way to do this is to give examples of how you helped to do this with others.

Another very powerful way to do this is to elicit deeper level criteria. Again, this is much more difficult in a group setting, so it takes time to develop this skill. But once you learn how to do this on a regular basis, you will have astronomical closing percentages.

The way to do this is to structure your speech so that the audience is thinking of their deeper level criteria while you are speaking. One way to do this is to future pace, or getting them to imagine them in the future working with you. For example:

“Now I’m not exactly sure how you measure your efficiency, but with our services, we will work with your company, just like we have with many others, to ensure that those increases in efficiency that are specific to you. When you begin to think of the ways you’ll realize that you have an increase in efficiency, you can be confident that we have done those exact things with other companies.”

The trick is to be vague enough, and refer to the past when you’ve helped other companies do what your prospects want to do. When are vague enough, and confident enough, your clients will begin filling in the blanks on their own. Which will result in more sales for you.

How To Ace a Job Interview Even if There is Tough Competition

If you’ve ever had a job interview, you know now incredibly nerve wracking it can be. Suddenly you are sitting there, feeling completely under the microscope, as the interviewer looks over your resume with a passive look on his or her face. You have no idea what he or she is thinking, but you can’t help but wonder.

The good news is that interviewing is a skill, and like any other skill you can improve with practice. Of course, some people are fortunate enough not to have to go on many interviews, but many others have to go through several to land an even mediocre job.

So what is the secret? A mixture of self-confidence and criteria.

You need to be confident enough to give an honest assessment of your skills and how you can help the company’s bottom line. You do yourself no service whatsoever by being shy or reserved. If you have skills you need to make sure the interviewer knows about them, and believes you. If you don’t have skills, don’t say you do, otherwise you might find yourself in a difficult situation.

I was once in an interview for a technical position that was over my head. The interviewer asked me a question that required a specific knowledge of statistics to answer correctly. He asked the question, and without hesitation, I confidently said “fifteen.”

He paused, looked at me and asked: “Is that based on your knowledge and experience, or did you just make that up?”

Busted.

You’d be surprised how many people go into an interview with a “please hire me I’ll do anything for you” mentality. Employers don’t like this. They are in business to make money, and they need skills, not somebody looking for an opportunity.

That is where criteria come in. This is an almost magical technique that you can apply in areas much wider than job seeking. And the less technical the position, and the more “people skill” oriented it is, the easier you can leverage criteria, even if you don’t have any particular experience in the field.

Here’s how it works. Once you establish some rapport in the interview, and you get past the “tell me about yourself” part. You’ll likely come to a part where the interviewer asks if you have any questions. Most people ask things like “when are the holidays,” or “what are the health benefits,” or “do you have dental,” or other things.

What most people don’t realize is that this part of the interview is a near perfect opportunity to leverage the employers criteria to almost guarantee you the position.

When it’s your turn to ask questions, as the employer to describe exactly what they are looking for in an employee. Make sure to really listen, and pay attention to words and phrases that he or she puts extra emphasis on. Especially vague phrases like “people skills,” or “dedication,” or “focused on the final product.”

Then simply ask follow up questions about those particular words or phrases that they “lean on,” so to speak. The more they talk about their ideal employ, with you sitting there in front of them, they will start to subconsciously imagine you as the ideal employee. Especially when almost every other prospective employee is asking what’s in it for them.

The longer you can draw out that part of the conversation, the better. And any time you feel an opportunity to work in a person story or anecdote about yourself, try and use some of those phrases mentioned above. It will go along way to putting you at the to of the list.

Express Yourself and Increase Self Confidence and Self Esteem

The other day I had the opportunity to visit an author in a local bookstore. He wasn’t that famous of an author, which was good for me, and the rest of the people that went to see him, but probably not particularly good for him. Nevertheless, he was really outgoing and friendly, and took the time to sign everybody’s books, and answer any and all questions that people had, in a lot of detail.

I asked him what made him decide to write a book on his chosen subject. It’s is not really a particularly popular subject, I would classify it as a kind of self-help or self-development. He seemed really enthusiastic about answering, and lot of other people became interested as well.

He said it all started with a teacher he had in Junior High School. This teacher was kind of different from the rest, sort of like a rebel. He didn’t last very long, because he was always getting into disagreements with the administration on the proper teaching methods. It seems that is the case more often than not. You’ll get a really good teacher, like this one, and he’ll really have an impact on you, but because these methods are not “proper” or “accepted,” the administration doesn’t really like them very much, so they fire him.

I remember a teacher like that I had in elementary school. He was really interested in each student, and made sure that each individual student was taken care of, as far as being able to not only understand the stuff we were supposed to be learning, but be able to understand everyday stuff as well. One of things he had us do was a lot of oral reports, or show and tell, or mini-plays. Anything to get us talking in front of class. I guess he figured that being able to express yourself in front of a group was a skill they didn’t teach much in public schools.

But unfortunately, despite how much the kids liked him and how much our self-esteem was raised through experience, he didn’t stick to the “proper” curriculum, and was let go only after one year.

That was what this author’s teacher taught him as well. He said that everybody has something important that they need to share with other people, no matter how unimportant you think it is. And when you find that, and figure out a way to share that with others in a congruent way, not only will you benefit many other people, but also you can really increase your self-confidence to the point where you can discover all other kinds of cool stuff.

And this guy kept answering questions and talking to people well after the bookstore closed. The manager of the bookstore was nice enough to let us hang around. And he even gave everybody his own personal email in case we had other questions that came up.

I think I was really lucky to meet this person. When you find somebody like this, you can really feel good knowing that this is an example of all the good things that can happen when you open up yourself to others.