Category Archives: Conversation Skills

Bang My Head

How To Leverage Their Ego

In business you’ve got to make some tough choices.

A common metaphor is that you get something done inexpensively, quickly and high quality.

The rub is that you can ONLY pick two.

Meaning if it’s fast and cheap it’s not going to be high quality.

If it’s high quality and cheap it’s going to take a long time.

From inside our heads, we often have to make the same choices.

One thing we humans LOVE to do is be “right.”

That’s even a common expression.

“I know, right?”

But when it comes to persuasion, the need to be right can get in our way.

In fact, the less we need to be right, the more we can get done.

Plenty of famous people have been attributed with this quote:

“Humans can accomplish anything so long as it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”

We KNOW this, but at the same time it’s our Achilles heel.

It’s REALLY DIFFICULT to see somebody else take credit for your idea.

People spend kajillion dollars on lawsuits for this very reason.

But if you CAN turn off your need to “be right,” just for a minute, you can get other people to do pretty much anything.

As an extreme example, if somebody REALLY WANTS to give you a sack of money, is it REALLY that important that they think it was THEIR idea?

If can manage to shut of our own “need to be right” just for a couple seconds, we can leverage the OTHER PERSON’s “need to be right” in our favor.

How?

Most everything we do is influenced by one of the seven laws.

Authority, social proof, scarcity, etc.

At the same time, while we are obediently following those seven laws, (following the crowd, doing or thinking whatever the authority on TV or Facebook tells us), we actually believe it’s OUR idea.

Nobody will explain their behaviors and beliefs as being put in their minds by social proof and authority.

Nobody will say, “I really don’t have any idea why I’m doing what I’m doing, but that guy has on a lab coat, and everybody is doing it, and that’s good enough for me!”

BECAUSE we have this “need to be right” we NEED to believe it’s OUR idea.

Which means if you can shut off your “need to be right” for just a little bit, you can leverage those seven laws like CRAZY.

Because when you combine them with conversational hypnosis, you don’t need anything but your words and the ideas they create.

And then just stand back and watch them “be right,” only they are “being right” in exactly the way you wanted them to.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Risk Reward Of Persuasion

How She Got Money From Her Parents

When I was a kid I loved reading Mad Magazine.

Once they got into trouble because they had a very realistic looking $3 bill.

And supposedly, some kids were using them in change machines.

There was one bit I remember reading as a kid.

It’s pretty popular, I’ve heard it in a lot of places.

It was a letter written from a student at college to her parents.

She went on for a few paragraphs about how her life had completely changed.

She’d dropped out of college.

Gotten a bunch of tattoos and piercings.

(This was back in the day when that was still pretty “out there.”)

She was living with her new boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison.

She was also pregnant.

And she was pretty sure it was his.

But then the letter ended with the following:

“Just kidding. School is fine, my GPA is still 4.0, but I need a couple hundred dollars. Could you send it?”

The idea being that the parents would be so relieved that their little angle wasn’t tatted up and pregnant by an ex-con, that they’d gladly send her the cash.

Whereas, if she started out saying, “Dear dad, can I have some money?” she wouldn’t have gotten the same result.

This clearly shows that when we frame our suggestion or recommendation, we can have a much better chance of getting it accepted.

Instead of just blurting out what we want, if we think a bit, and put it in the proper context, it will be much more likely to be accepted.

What context?

Think in terms of cost and benefits.

Everything we do has costs and benefits.

Everything we think about doing has costs and benefits.

So when we present our ideas to others, they are going to IMMEDIATELY and usually unconsciously think of our ideas terms of costs and benefits.

The idea is to make your suggestion have a much better cost-benefit ratio (many benefits per cost) compared to the alternative.

Just choose something similar to your suggestion, but make sure it is MUCH costlier (in terms of time, money, or inconvenience) and only has a little bit more benefits.

Compared to THAT, your choice will be the most logical.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do this.

And the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

And this law, (Comparison and Contrast) is only ONE of the seven.

Learn Them ALL:

Seven Laws

Super Genius Of All Time

The Sentence Shift That Made Millions

Most people know about the Pareto Principle, or the 80-20 rule.

Eighty percent of the “work” of any system is done by twenty percent of the system.

Twenty percent of your clothes you wear eighty percent of the time.

Publishers make eighty percent of their revenues from twenty percent of their books.

Twenty percent of sales people in any company make eighty percent of the sales.

Most of the time, this just happens naturally.

When you bought one of your twenty percent shirts, you probably felt the same as when you bought one of your eighty percent shirts.

“Hey, this looks cool!”

But one of them ended up in the 20-80, while the other ended in the 80-20.

Same with a lot of sales jobs.

They just hire people, and figure they’ll sort themselves out.

And when it comes to sales, some people are naturally “good” and some people are naturally “not so good.”

But if you start to understand human nature, human thinking, etc., you can EASILY catapult yourself into the top twenty.

Or the top twenty of the top twenty.

Because IN that top twenty, the Pareto Principle still applies.

Mathematically, it means that 4% of any given system is doing more than 60% of the work.

4% is twenty percent of twenty percent. 60% (or 64% to be specific) is eighty percent of eighty.

How do you do that?

Here’s a very famous case.

A company was selling things on TV.

This was way back before the Internet, or even cell phones.

But despite how well the product tested out in pre-release marketing, it was a dud on TV.

So they called in a Fixer.

A lady who was an expert in selling anything to anybody.

She looked at the entire system, the product, the commercial, all the people, even what they were wearing.

And she only made ONE small change.

And the sales went from ZERO to THROUGH THE ROOF.

What was the change?

The final call to action was, “Call now, operators are standing by!”

But what this did was create an image of a bunch of operators sitting around waiting for customers.

Not very enticing!

She (the super genius marketing lady) changed that one sentence to:

“Call now! If operators are busy, please be patient!”

This created a MUCH DIFFERENT image in the TV viewers mind.

It fired both scarcity AND social proof.

Social proof because it implied that tons of people were calling. That’s why the operators would be busy.

But scarcity also because if other people are calling, and you wait too long, by the time you call, they might run out of stuff!

(FOMO, or fear of missing out, is based on scarcity).

One small tweak made the company TONS of money.

How many tweaks can you make?

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Radiate Real Authority

How To Imply Massive Authority

One of the most groundbreaking studies in psychology is the famous Milgram experiment.

It’s been repeated several times, all with the same results.

There was a guy in a white lab coat, posing as a researcher.

There was a guy behind a class window, posing as a test subject.

Then there was the guy or gal who was supposed to give electric shocks to the guy behind the glass.

The supposed study, as told to the poor dude giving the shocks, was that it was some kind of new memory technique.

For every wrong answer, the guy behind the glass got a shock.

But the REAL study was to see HOW HIGH of a shock a person would deliver.

The shocks were actually fake.

And the guy screaming in pain was only pretending.

The results were horrifying.

Most people gave enough shocks to kill somebody, had they been real.

The guy behind the glass even pretended to have a heart attack.

But the test subjects kept shocking away.

All because lab-coat guy said it was OK.

The study was cooked up soon after WWII ended.

Everybody was curious how a country like Germany could go crazy and let a bunch of Nazis kill millions of people.

Turns out that we humans have a bunch of switches in our brains.

And if you know to flip those switches, you can get people to do ANYTHING.

In that particular study, they were leveraging the AUTHORITY switch.

Most people turn off their brains when a scientist in a lab coat tells them it’s OK to shock somebody.

Of course, these switches are neutral.

They are neither bad nor good.

They are like the proverbial driver who can either drive a getaway car or an ambulance.

If you use these switches for good, you can get people to do things that benefit EVERYBODY.

How many of these switches are there?

Seven.

Advertisers have been using them for a long time.

To get us to buy all kinds of stuff.

Many dating techniques are based on them.

But one thing most people DON’T know is how to COMBINE them with the Milton Model.

The patterns of conversational hypnosis.

It cost a lot of money to set up that experiment.

It’s kind of like a con in the movies.

You need a lot of actors (a guy playing a scientist, a guy playing the dude getting shocked, etc.) and you need to create the situation.

But with the Milton Model, you can hypnotically imply ALL of these switches.

Which means just by having a conversation, you can conjure up all kinds of authority.

Or any of the other seven laws.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Resonate With Her

Easy Secrets of Group Resonance

Resonance is a cool concept.

It’s also one of those words that sounds metaphysical, so a lot of people use it without really understanding it.

From a purely scientific standpoint, it refers to the natural frequency of any system.

Like a little kid on a swing.

When he swings his legs at the same “resonance frequency” as the swing, he can swing pretty high.

Singers that can break glass don’t have super powerful voices.

It’s that they can hold the perfect tone, without wavering.

And if that tone is the same vibrational frequency as the glass, then the glass will break.

Same deal when you rub your fingers around the rim of a wine goblet.

When the goblet starts to hum, it’s because the small vibrations of your finger along the top are the same frequency as the wine goblet.

Often times people talk about resonance among people.

Since there are WAY too many variables to even consider, this MUST only be a metaphor.

The resonance you share with your friends when you are all “vibing” is SORT OF like the resonance on a swing set.

But it’s only an approximation.

Thing is though, we understand that as a scientific concept, resonance can be repeated.

Wine glasses, swings, you can “resonate” with them any time you want.

But when we think of “resonating” with people, we assume it’s just one of those rare things.

It either happens or it doesn’t.

But us people, despite our goofy psychological makeup, are still made up of stuff, and although incredibly complicated, that stuff MUST follow the same laws of science that wine goblets and swings have to follow.

Which means if you understand the basic structure of human nature, and human thought, you can RESONATE with a great number of people.

Funny thing is when you are resonating with ONE person, it can be pretty difficult.

But resonating with a BUNCH of people is a lot easier.

See, we humans are PACK ANIMALS.

We naturally feel at home in a group of like minded people.

Which means in a lot of cases, it’s much easier to resonate with a GROUP of people than it is with any individual.

Learn How:

Cult Leader

True Leadership

Radiate What Everybody Craves

Once me and a buddy were feeling rebellious.

This was back in high school.

I was a bit of a non-conformist.

We were sitting in algebra class, talking about how it sucked to have to follow the “rules.”

Of course, at the time, the “rules” were do your homework, get up when the bell rings, and ONLY when the bell rings.

We decided to rebel.

To give the finger to the system.

Our way of doing that was to stand up BEFORE the bell rant.

(I know, crazy!)

We imagined the teacher yelling at us, the other kids gasping in horror.

In our high school brains, that was us making a “statement” against the “system.”

Only it didn’t quite work out that way.

We stood up, and nobody gasped, nobody was outraged, and the cops didn’t show up.

What happened was that everybody else stood up.

They figured since SOMEBODY had stood up, it was time to go.

They didn’t even notice the bell hadn’t rung.

The teacher looked up, a little baffled.

(He usually read the newspaper in the last ten minutes or so of class while we got started on our homework).

He looked at the clock (still a minute to go) and then back at all the other kids.

They seemed to know what was going on (since they were following me and my non-conformist buddy), and even though the clock wasn’t playing along, the teacher (the actual authority of the crowd) just shrugged his shoulders and went back to his paper.

The moral of the story?

We humans are HARD WIRED to follow people.

And if the RECOGNIZED authority (in this case the teacher) doesn’t do his job, they’ll follow whoever TAKES AUTHORITY from him or her.

Now, we weren’t intending to start a revolution or anything.

But this accidental experiment showed a very powerful (and largely unknown or leveraged) facet of human nature.

Humans NEED an authority figure.

We feel LOST without one.

And MOST of our authority figures (the official ones with the titles and uniforms and degrees) really SUCK at it.

Most of them don’t want authority because they actually want to LEAD PEOPLE to better lives.

Most of them are like our algebra teacher.

It’s a job that pays OK, and comes with BUILT IN authority.

The authority comes with the job (or position or degree or certificate).

NOT THE PERSON.

But we humans are hard wired to follow people with REAL AUTHORITY.

Not the authority that comes with a piece of paper or a uniform or a job description.

You may say that people today are STARVED for real authority.

Which means YOU can step up, and fill the gap.

Learn How:

Cult Leader

Magic Woman Trick

The Secret Rules of Life

Imagine playing a game of basketball without knowing the rules.

You had to play before you knew how.

And the only way to learn was to learn by playing.

If you had two teams under these conditions, it might actually be pretty interesting.

Assuming you had refs and scorekeepers who DID know the rules.

Part of your strategy would be to figure out the rules BEFORE the other team did, but to keep them secret as long as possible.

After all, if your team knew the rules and the other team didn’t, you’d have a HUGE advantage.

Now imagine ONLY your team didn’t know the rules.

The other players, the other coaches, all the fans, the scorekeepers, and the refs knew the rules.

But you and your team had your memory wiped or something.

It would be horrible!

For many of us, this is EXACTLY what it feels like during our normal lives.

It’s like everybody else knows the rules, knows all the secrets, but they forgot to tell us.

We’re shuffling along, trying our best, and everybody’s just whizzing by having the time of their lives.

Sometimes it even seems like they purposely tilted the rules in their favor.

And to a certain degree, they have.

Despite our system of “laws,” the golden rule will always apply to some degree.

The golden rule being, “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

But if you can understand how the game is played, it’s not so bad.

Especially if you not only get how the game is played, but how people think.

This would be like knowing the playbook of the other team, AND knowing which plays they were about to play.

Of course, how you USE this information is up to you.

But you better believe that plenty of people who DO know these inside ideas are using them to benefit themselves, at the EXPENSE of others.

You can think of knowing these as a kind of insurance policy.

Just in case.

Learn More:

Cult Leader

Set Them Free

Custom Made Personality

When I was a kid everybody was into skateboarding.

And we all had our own “custom” skateboards.

Certain kinds of wheels, the board itself, the bearings.

There was one surf-skate shop me and my friends would hang out downtown.

When we were both saving up our money to buy our next board.

We’d look over all the choices and put other the ideal board.

Same when we were buying Vans.

You could have them custom make all the colors.

They had this big book of fabric you could look through and pick all the different swatches for the different parts of your shoes.

Being able to put together a custom set of ANYTHING is pretty cool.

Sometimes we take it for granted, like ordering a meal at a restaurant.

Because it’s “normal” we don’t get excited about being able to choose between fries and a baked potato.

But other areas, we don’t even consider that we have choice.

If you look closely, however, you’ll see that we ALWAYS have choice.

Or almost always.

You can’t really choose to be taller.

But you can choose pretty much everything else about who “you” are.

Most people don’t think of things like social skills, communication skills or charisma as something we can “custom order.”

We tend to think of it like height or how much hair we have.

But if you look just below the surface, there is much more choice than most people realize.

It’s not quite the same from picking swatches out of a book and waiting for your custom made personality to come in the mail.

But you CAN build it however you like.

All you need is a model.

Somebody to copy.

After all, modeling (or copying) is how you learned a LOT of things.

Walking, talking, etc.

And if you’re going to model some folks to custom build a better personality (or better social skills or persuasion skills or leadership skills or WHATEVER skills) you may as well choose the most outrageous.

You can always “dial back” the parts that are too much.

And fine tune the PERFECT set of skills.

Learn How:

Cult Leader

Conquer The Wasteland Of Their Mind

Ditch The Purple Neon Jacket

Little kids are perfect learners.

So perfect in fact that they learn EVERYTHING.

Not just the good stuff.

If you’ve got kids, you know how hard it is to keep them from learning the stuff you DON’T want them to learn.

Stuff that you or your friends (or maybe their older sisters or brothers) do in “secret.”

“I don’t want him to pick up any bad habits” is a common worry among parents.

Being a kid is different than being an adult.

If you are a kid, you can pretty much try ANYTHING, without getting into too much trouble.

Personally, I carried that idea as far as I could.

When I was in high school, my “go to” line when I got into trouble was:

“I thought it was OK?”

But as we move into adulthood, we need to CHOOSE our actions with more foresight.

At least that’s the theory.

We can’t just act and hope for the best.

The sad thing is because we’ve all gone through the mind numbing educational system, we’ve forgotten how we learn naturally.

Which is to model.

Copy the behaviors we want to learn.

However, we DO do this without realizing it.

We STILL pick up behaviors from others, without really knowing.

And every time you learn something from a YouTube instructional video, you’re essentially modeling the person on YouTube.

(At least if you’re following along and not just watching.)

But most people VASTLY underutilize this natural learning skill.

Especially in social situations.

A simple way to model somebody in social situations is to find somebody that does something YOU want to be able to do.

And as you watch them, mentally imagine it’s YOU doing that thing.

You can also model historical figures.

That’s the cool thing about modeling.

Since we’re doing it thoughtfully, as adults, and not mindlessly and automatically, like kids, we can pick and choose the traits we want to copy.

Kind of like if you’d model somebody who has really POWERFUL social skills, but really HORRIBLE taste in clothing.

If he’s wearing a purple jacket with a flashing neon sign on the back, you DON’T have to copy that part.

Only the part you want.

And when it comes to copying certain social behaviors, there is a class of people that are FAR ABOVE everybody else.

If you can do what THEY DO, and apply it to “regular” life, you can CLEAN UP.

Learn More:

Cult Leader

Find Magic Everywhere

Build Relationships From Scratch

We are instinctively programmed to recognize a good leader.

And we are similarly turned off by false “eaders.”

A leader, of course, is somebody who LEADS.

Somebody who goes first.

Somebody we WANT to follow.

On the other hand, false leaders have figured out a way to FORCE us to follow them.

Throughout human history, there has been a mix of both.

This comes across conversationally as well.

Some people make us feel comfortable, open, safe.

Others either force us on the spot, or force us to listen to them blather on and on.

If you can make people feel comfortable, relaxed and open, they’ll tell you anything.

What they want, how they want it, and what they want to do with it.

This, of course, gives you a lot of leverage.

If you can creatively figure out a way to show them they can get what they want by helping you get what you want, you can create some pretty good relationships.

And if there’s one skill that will help in nearly every area of life, it’s the ability to create relationships.

Most people kind of drift around, HOPING relationships will just “happen.”

And by pure probability, you will get a few relationships that just kind of organically pop up.

But if you can consciously build the skill of creating relationships, you’ll have an advantage over nearly everybody else.

How, exactly, do you create relationships?

It’s much easier than folks realize.

Create rapport, and ask the right questions.

Hold back on the judgment, and learn to appreciate other people’s ideas.

If you can do this, people will LOVE you.

Whether you’re building romantic relationships, friendships or potential business partnerships, the strategy is the same.

Ask the right questions in the right order, and let them be the star.

Learn How:

Secret Agent Persuasion