Category Archives: Hypnosis

Covert Charisma For Influence, Sales, And Seduction

Here’s a neat trick that you can use to covertly create really good feelings in other people. When you can do this covertly, people will feel good without knowing that you are consciously trying to do this. All they will realize is that whenever you are around, they feel really good about themselves. They will start to see you as a really charismatic person. Whenever they hear your voice, or see your face, they will immediately begin to think happy thoughts.

When you aren’t around, and they start to think about you, they will begin to automatically think and feel happy thoughts and feelings. Is this something you think you might have some uses for?

The trick is to make some really positive assumptions about them, and then allow them to prove you correct. There is something strange about this; the mechanism is something deep and subconscious. When you assigning a positive trait to another person, and really assign it in a deep and meaningful way, they have an almost unconscious drive to live up to that label, so long as it is a good and positive one.

Of course, if you do this with manipulative attempt, people will see your fakeness from a mile away. Do this genuinely and people will be their best around you.

For example, if your boss comes in and starts telling you what a great and hard worker you are, on a Friday afternoon, you know something is up. You will naturally feel some resistance, but he’s your boss, so you can’t really tell him how you really feel.

If on the other hand, if you are sitting in a meeting, and they are discussing who to send to meet with a potential client that could mean big money for your company, and after a few moments thought, he looks at you and says”

“You’re the best we’ve got. If anybody can land this contract, you can. If you can’t do it, then it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Then you know she’s being totally honest, and you will feel inspired beyond belief to land that contract, whatever it is.

When you speak to people on a social level, you can still inspire those same good feelings in others. The trick is to assume positive things about them, and then talk to them as if those positive things you assume about them are already obvious to everyone.

Linguistic presuppositions can come in really handy here. Linguistic presuppositions are sentence structures that assume one or more things to be true in order for the sentence to make sense.

If I say that my cat is really smart because she can run to the door two minutes before the mailman comes, that presupposes many things:

I have a cat.
My cat can run.
It’s possible to measure the intelligence of a cat.
My cat is really smart.
My cat can predict when the mailman will come.

Another example based on making people feel good about themselves. Say you are talking to somebody you’ve just met. You’ve talked to them for a few minutes, and learn that they are a kindergarten teacher. If you say:

Wow, kids must really like you. How long have you been able to use your communication skills to inspire people to learn?

What does this presuppose?

They have good communication skills.
They inspire people.
They help people learn.
They have been doing it for a while.

Now, the specific structure of the above example is a question that starts off with “How long…” The important thing to remember is that any answer they give, even if they shrug their shoulders, indicates that they’ve accepted your presuppositions as true. They would have to be extremely suspicious, or have extremely low self-esteem, if they took each element of the sentence and overtly disagreed with it.

When you can take some good assumptions about another person, hide them inside a sentence that only requires a yes, no, or one word answer, you are doing pretty good.

Another sneaky way to do this is to give them a quick, sly compliment, and then follow it up with an easy to answer, and seemingly obvious question.

Example:

Wow, you must be really good with kids. I think that people that are good with kids are the most important people in society. We would be completely lost without them. When did you know that you wanted to be a kindergarten teacher?

The important part is to not allow him or her any time to respond to your compliment, and then ask a question that most people would ask by itself.

The problem many people have with giving compliments is that they have an ulterior motive, and they give the compliment, and then wait for the thank you. This is an indication that on some level, they are really fishing for a “Thank you,” rather than giving an honest compliment.

When you give somebody a compliment like this, without giving them a chance to respond, then quickly focus their attention on some normal, often asked and easy to answer question, the compliment really sinks down deep, and makes them feel really good.

These are just two techniques you can use in your daily conversation that will really boost your charisma, and your ability to make people around you feel really good about themselves. And when you have high charisma, and are surrounded by people that feel good about themselves, you’re doing pretty good.

Tap The Power of Feelings For Incredible Success

If you’ve ever felt a strange sensation, and weren’t exactly sure what it was or where it was coming from, or even if it existed at all outside of your imagination, then this article is for you.

The human mind/body system is a fantastically complex organism that defies and will continue to defy understanding of anything other than it’s basic operation. On the scale of human history, successful surgery, of even the basic kind, is still in its infancy.

Many mistakenly believe that simply because there is not any direct hard evidence of unexplainable phenomenon, then it can’t exist. The easies retreat of people who dare not face the idea of something beyond comprehension is the easy question “Is there any documented proof?”

The human system has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in unending and changing environments. And we have prevailed. We have grown to be the dominant species on the planet. No other animal uses language or tools, or planning or abstract thought like humans do. And that is just scratching the surface.

The thrust of necessity behind the size and intellect of the human brain may never be fully understood. That there even exists a “subconscious” mind is still debated, even today among psychologists. Those that don’t like the idea that part of their brain is operating outside of their conscious awareness will ask for “proof” or “case studies” that show conclusively of it’s existence.

One of the theories behind the development of the subconscious brain is the idea of saving conscious bandwidth. Of course, on a parallel universe, humans may evolve to always be consciously monitoring their heart rate, breathing rate, skin temperature, and keeping all of their memories and imaginations of the possible future in their conscious awareness at all times, but it is not likely.

A much more likely explanation was that only a small bandwidth of mental processing power was given to the conscious mind, and the vast remainder is given over to the unconscious mind. Eating, breathing, fear, love, excitement all of these are the results of massive computations by the unconscious, and delivered to the conscious in the form of feelings.

Sadly, we are taught in the west, especially the males among us, to disregard our feelings and use only our logical, or conscious computing power to make decisions that can affect our livelihoods for a lifetime.

Imagine this scenario. You have a desire to buy a car. You go to a car dealership. The salesperson is setting of alarm bells in your system, danger, danger, danger. But you really want a car, so you ignore them. You allow him to dazzle you with colorful brochures, and statistics about safety and miles per gallon, and how many hundreds of thousands of people have already bought this car. By the time he is done with his sales pitch, you have effectively shut down your initial warning system that has been fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

The result? Maybe you get lucky and the car works out for you. Maybe you don’t, and the car is a lemon that quickly depreciates in value, and you are stuck with it for three or four years. The salesman knew this, and tried his best to cover it up. Had you paid attention to your subconscious processor warning system (AKA your intuition) you could have avoided the whole scenario and gone someplace else.

The more you learn to listen to your feelings, and understand that they are natures best and most effective design that is the result of hundreds of thousand of years of testing and improvement (AKA evolution), the sooner you will able to cut through all the crap that surrounds us in our daily lives, and go straight to the truth. The truth that is there, but elusive if you rely on logic to find it.

This is not metaphysics, or supernatural phenomenon, only misunderstood science. And when you use your feelings and intuition the way nature intended, you will be incredibly surprised how much personal power and choice you will gain in life.

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.

Renew Your Subscription to Fascination

When I was in university, I really loved comic books. I would always be looking out for the next one to come out, and would always keep a couple with me wherever I went. I would always pull them out to read whenever I had a spare moment. I remember I had this one government class, the kind that talks about the different structures of different world governments. As the teacher would drone on and on, I would pull out a comic book and hold behind my textbook so it would appear that I was following along. I think I scraped by with a “C” in that class.

Like when I was a kid, maybe in third or fourth grade, I got my first library card. I grew up in a fairly small town, and we had one central library. We all went down to the library as a class, and signed up for our library card. We had already filled out a practice form at school, and then filled out the real form when we got to the library. After we all got our library cards, before they turned us loose, we got a lecture from the chief librarian. He told us about the dangers that would happen if we didn’t return our library books.

Big ugly, scary guys would come to our house and hunt us down. Armies of horrible trolls would hide under our beds and wait until we pulled out the library book in question. Giant Cyclops’ would swarm down from the heavens to wreak havoc if we kept a book past its due date.

After the lecture, we were turned loose to roam the shelves. I remember the total wonder and fascination I felt when I looked all the books that I could take home and enjoy. I remember thinking that I would never be bored again. Books are funny that way. I guess it’s not the books, but the fantastic journey they take your mind on. Like you can be reading this, and all of a sudden your daily worries and anxieties will completely disappear as you lose yourself in this. You are transported to magical new worlds that can enlighten and inspire and entertain you. And sometimes, if you find something that is really good, you can enjoy this again and again, knowing that you will find a new perspective every time you read this.

A couple of years ago when I was cleaning out an apartment I was moving out, I found an old library book, about Ben Franklin. As best as I could guess, I had checked it out for a history report I had to do. I don’t really remember ever writing the report, and I certainly don’t remember ever checking out that book, but there on the back, clear as day was the old library barcode. I guess I luckily escaped the parachuting cyborgs that apparently didn’t find me.

The coolest thing that’s been happening lately is all the comic books that have been turned into movies. This is a dream come true for somebody that has really enjoyed reading comic books growing up. When the first Spiderman came out, I was happy to see how successful it was, knowing they would likely make a few more. And with the success of that came all kinds of other comic book movies, which is fantastic.

The Power and Danger of Persuasive Language

There’s been a lot written lately about persuasion. When I say lately, I mean the last thirty years or so. Before then, whenever somebody wanted to sell somebody something, they usually came up with some snappy advertising jingle, and put the product, along with the jingle or some slogan in front of as many people as possible, in hopes that they would be convinced to buy this product. Advertising agencies were the ones that generated the jingles and the slogans. Company execs would pay a huge amount of money to these advertising firms in hopes of creating a memorable meme, or what Mark Twain called “Ear Worms.”

That way the product would be magically attached to this earworm and when people decided to buy a product, that would be the first one on their minds.
Because most people have inherent experience being persuaded to do things, clean your room, finish your vegetables, and everything else humans get conned into doing, they felt that learning persuasion, as a science wasn’t something that needed to be done.

Enter NLP.

In the seventies, a group of guys discovered some incredible language patterns that some therapists had learned to use on their clients with almost magical success. They modeled these patterns and found that when string words together in a certain way, they would have a certain effect. If this sounds similar to coming up with a jingle or a slogan, you are absolutely correct. The difference between them and a jingle or a slogan is that these new patterns had more of a scientific basis them. Jingles or slogans were generated largely by how the ad executives felt about them. How they thought they would work based on their feelings.

These new patterns had a certain degree of structure and repeatability. Meaning that a message structured the same way would generate the same effect in various individuals on consistent basis.

With jingles, they sort of “hoped” that they would work and just threw them out there. Many times when they didn’t work, they would blame the market, or the economy, or the product. They never really sat back and said “Jeeze, this jingle really sucked ass.”

Language patterns on the other hand, had a consistent effect, regardless of the market, or the product or the economy.

But with this new language technology, another problem exists. Before, people had to really focus on creating a good product that many people would get real value from. With these new patterns, it became possible to create the illusion of short-term value that would slowly fade over time, leaving a bad taste in the consumer’s mouth. It became easier for people to focus less on the steak, and more on the sizzle.

The thing the many of these persuasive language-using salesmen don’t understand is that when they say, “sell the sizzle, not the steak,” the underlying presupposition is that the steak is a quality steak, not some old leathery piece of meat that has been in the freezer for six months.

With this new language technology, it has been possible to sell the sizzle, when the steak is really not worth your chewing effort.

If you can combine a decent product that will provide long term value for your customers, with some of these persuasive language patterns, your success is virtually guaranteed. Not only will people be convinced to buy your product over all of your competitors, but also their appreciation of your product will generate sales and referrals and additional income for you.

That is what they mean when they say “Win-Win.”

The Right Mix Will Get You Noticed

The other day I was sitting in my favorite restaurant. It is a Thai restaurant, one of the better ones in the area. I like Thai food very much, so I’ve eaten at most of the ones that I know about. And this particular one is really good. Because they are so good, they are usually very crowded around lunchtime. They are also very smart, because they are only open from 11 AM until 2 PM, to maximize their profit, and minimize their expenditure. And because I like to go when it’s not crowded, I have to show up at just the right time to maximize my own enjoyment. And to be honest, one of the sources of my enjoyment is that the waitresses there are very cute, and very fun to talk to. If I go there when they are busy, then obviously I don’t have much of an opportunity to speak with them. I also usually bring a financial newspaper with me, so I can read about the latest news.

Once I was talking to a local rice farmer. Around where I live there are plenty of rice farms, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now. I don’t know if you are a big eater of rice or not, but here in Asia it has been a large part of their diet for thousands of years, so they have the art of growing it down to an exact science. This farmer was telling me about how you need to plant the seeds at exactly the right time. If you plant them too late, the ground has already saturated all of the nutrients, and if you plant them too early, their roots will take before the rains come and that will affect their development. It’s important for the rice seedlings to enter into the ground at exactly the right time.

Cooking rice is a completely different matter. If you’ve ever used a rice cooker, you know how easy it is. It’s like that commercial for that world famous kitchen appliance where you just “set it, and forget it!” In order to cook the perfect batch of rice, all you really need to concern yourself with is the ratio of rice to water. Then just pour them both in, click the button down, and you’re good to go. And the best part is, when the rice is done cooking, the rice cooker will shut itself off immediately, and will keep it warm for several hours, sometimes even overnight if you have one those fancy cookers.

Eating rice, on the other hand, all bets are off. Some people eat it plain, some put really spicy red sauce in it, some people put meat next to it, and then scoop up a piece of meat and handful of rice, others will mix everything together. Still others will throw the rice into big wok with other vegetables and some shrimp and make fried rice. There is really no end in sight to the different ways you can eat rice.

But the times when I’ve gone to the restaurant too early, it has been busy, and the waitresses were very hurried, and not only did they not have time to chat, I felt if I sat there reading the paper like I normally do, people who were waiting might get impatient. And times when I mistakenly showed up a little late, I didn’t have time to lounge and relax. Timing is very important.

I remember once in high school chemistry class I got into trouble because I mixed two chemicals in the wrong proportion. It was supposed to be exactly three and half to one, but I read the instructions wrong and mixed them at two and half to one. Of course my experiment didn’t turn out very well, and the teacher got angry with me for not listening. It wasn’t as bad as the time I mixed two chemicals that I wasn’t supposed to mix, causing a terrible stench that evacuated the lab. I was allowed to come back in after that.

Now when you start to talk about playing golf, that is different topic altogether. Then you need to factor in wind speed, temperature, club face angle, and how good your short game is. But that will likely be covered in another post. In the meantime, be careful how you mix things together, either with time or with elements of nature. They can come out pretty good if you pay attention to what has been going on here.

Comforting Thoughs Lead to Increasing Ideas

This morning I was doing my usual exercises. I do some setups, a bridge, some Hindu squats, and I have a large elastic band that I use for some upper body work. It saves a lot of time this way; as I don’t have to go to the gym, and it saves quit a lot of money, because the only cost was for the elastic band contraption (which I bought from lifelineusa.com by the way), which was about fifty dollars. While I was doing my exercises I noticed something strange about my apartment. Because it’s recently become hot, I started sleeping in another room, because I only have an air conditioner in one room, so I sleep in that. And I usually do my exercises right when I wake up, so I do them in the same room where I sleep.

It’s interesting the things you notice when you change your schedule just a little bit. The human mind is a fantastic thinking machine that has developed an extraordinary amount of flexibility over the years. And when I say over the years, I mean over the last million years or so of evolution. On the one hand, the brain is incredibly flexible and adaptive, but on the other hand it can get into a rut rather quickly.

I was reading an interesting article the other day that was talking about how many of superstitions actually stem from the fact that people are afraid to change their habits. Which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once superstition grows to a certain level of acceptance in any society, it becomes a familiarity in and of itself. Likely rooted in the natural and beneficial human desire for safety, humans tend to stick to what works, without having much of a proclivity to stray from the beaten path. Once you something over and over again, and you like the results, there is tendency to stop look for small ways to improve yourself, and start to develop a strong attachment for the same way of doing things. The funny thing is, according to this article, is that many of the methods and techniques we pick up along the way are completely random, and don’t really have anything to do with the outcome.

Just because we tried one random thing, and happened to coincidently get the same outcome, we somehow convince ourselves everything that we did contributes to the outcome.

This is how people grow attached to lucky shirts, going through the same pre-swing ritual in baseball and golf. I’m not sure if I agree with this guys theory but it seems to make a bit of since.

Sometimes when you change your schedule or routine, really cool things can happen. You can notice new ideas, and look at things in a different way.

Once I was driving to a friend’s house, and there was construction going on that I didn’t know about. I had to take a different route to get there, one that I’d never taken before. I found a bagel shop (for those of you that know, I love bagels). I had to stop, and was surprised to find out they have some of the most delicious bagels I’ve ever eaten. They had a salted bagel that had really huge chunks of sea salt all over it, like fourteen-carat chunks of salt. This something that you don’t’ come across everyday, so needless to say I was happy that I had to take a detour.

And what I noticed in my new bedroom this morning while I was doing setups as how much softer the floor is. And to think I’d been wasting all my time sitting in chair on this soft tatami mat floor.

Expectations

This morning I was out on my normal walk. The weather was a little hotter, and a little drier than normal, and there had been a bit of a wind last night, so the visibility was extraordinary. You could see details on the mountains that you normally could only guess at. And they looked a lot differently than I usually imagine. Not that I spend a lot of time contemplating what the mountains appear through the normal haze that surrounds my small town in the mornings, but nonetheless it was interesting to see the detail and outlines that you don’t normally see.

Once I was supposed to meet a regional supervisor at this company where I used to work. Nobody that I’d spoken to had met her before, although they all had an idea of the kind of person that she was. Most had heard stories from other people who knew somebody that talked to somebody that had met her, and had the real inside scoop, if you know what I mean. One of the more interesting things about getting the inside scoop is you are never really sure if the scoop is actual information, or somebody’s secret interpretation of someone else’s imagination.

Like sometimes when you read a movie review in the newspaper, and it somehow colors your perception of the movie that you want to see. Maybe you only kind of wanted to see this movie, and the reviewer said it was the best thing to come out since “The Sound of Music,” and of course because you love musicals, you really got excited. Then when you saw the movie you were a little bit let down because the singing and the cinematography wasn’t exactly up to your standards. Or maybe you have the pleasurable experience of having a so-so expectation of a movie, and then a review you happen to accidentally glance over describes the movie as only slightly more entertaining that having a root canal by a monkey without any anesthesia for you, or the monkey. Then when you see the actual movie, it is not so bad. Of course, in light of the horrible review you read, perhaps because the reviewer wrote it after having said root canal, you are completely blown away as the movie in question beats all your expectations.

Sometimes when a company will release its earnings report, at first it seems like they are doing pretty good. Like they may say they earned fourteen dollars per share, which is pretty fantastic in today’s market. But when you realize that they were expected to earn fourteen dollars and three cents per share, and only earned fourteen, you can understand why their stock dropped seventy five percent in the first twelve minutes of trading.

I don’t know if you’ve ever met somebody before without any notice whatsoever, but it is kind of an unnerving experience. It’s like you are sitting there minding your own business, and then this person walks into your office and says “Hi I’m your new boss,” or something like that. After you spend a few seconds searching through your brain on how you are supposed to respond to this person, and you come up completely blank, sometimes the best thing to do is just simply pretend they are an old friend. Because more than likely, the other person is going through the same transderivational search in their own brain, so when you act like you are best friends, instead of imposing your reality on them, you are actually doing them a favor by filling in the blanks. And since they are your new boss, it can’t help to have been best friends with them before you’ve even met them. It can be tricky of course, but the benefits are fabulous.

So when I finally met my boss, she turned out to be pretty nice. It seems that everybody I talked to had her confused with somebody else. Maybe a character from mythology or from TV, I’m not sure. And I don’t know how long the mountains will stay as clear as they are, but I kind of like looking at them through the fog of vagueness, as it seems more romantic that way to imagine some mystical mountain creatures living there, even though nobody has ever seen them before.

Powering Flowers can lead to Startling Realizations

Once there was a lady that owned a flower shop. She had opened the flower shop several years ago, and after the inevitable rough start up times that many small business face, she started to eke out a profit. Within a year she had realized one of her life long dreams. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed of owning a small flower shop. Buying the flowers from the distributors, arranging them, selling them to people knowing that they would in turn give them to others to increase pleasure and happiness. This was probably her greatest reward, knowing that she was supplying people with something that they used to make others feel good.

After a few years, she started to notice that her sales, and her customer base were fairly consistent. After the first couple of years where moved out of the red and started to make a profit, her profits slowly increased every year, until recently. In the past three or four years, her profits had been almost exactly the same. She started seeing the same customers come into her shop, and she noticed she was selling the same arrangements to the same people during the same times of year.

Even valentines day she noticed the same people come in, that she usually only saw once per year, and by a dozen roses or some other traditional arrangement. Her original satisfaction that she had enjoyed when she started to make money was starting to grow into a complacency that she hadn’t expected. It wasn’t long before she saw her dream turn into another routine that she did on a daily basis. Gone were the times when she was able to generate good feelings as she headed into she shop every morning. More and more often, she would wake up sometimes with a feeling of just another day at work.

She started to notice this attitude among her customers as well. She wasn’t sure if it was she that was affecting them, or they affecting her. It was like everybody was trapped in a routine that they couldn’t’ escape from. Pretty soon the flowers themselves stopped looking so pretty, and began to take on a mundane everyday part of the background feeling to them.

She didn’t’ really notice this, as things like this usually sneak up on you slowly, and before you know it, something that was exciting is suddenly normal and you feel like you’ve always been doing this. You don’t really want to stop, because you’ve been doing it for so long, and it seems that the only that is really keeping you going is inertial. It’s like you are in some kind of a daze, doing the same things over and over again without any real feeling to them.

Then something terrible happened. Her neighbor’s daughter was hit by a car. She was rushed to the hospital and into surgery for three hours. After a long horrible wait, the doctors said she would be fine. It was close though. Her parents were obviously relieved. The flower shop lady decided to visit this little girl in the hospital, as she always exchanged a few words with her on the way to work.

What she saw in the hospital shocked her beyond belief. She had never been in a hospital. She was lucky enough to never have been sick, and although she was happily married, she didn’t have any children. What she saw was the abundance of flowers in the hospital. And she saw looks of happiness on people’s face that she had never seen before in her flower shop. When she visited the little girls room, she couldn’t help but to burst into tears at what happened. The little girls room was filled with flowers bought for the little girl by all of the neighbors. All from the lady’s flower shop. She didn’t notice this at first, but when she walked in, the little girl, who was still recovering from a painful three-hour surgery, beamed at her.

“Look at all your flowers! Did you know you had so many pretty flowers?”

And she did know, and she did notice. And she never forgot.

How Other People’s Criteria Can Get You Everything You Want

I was sitting in a bookshop the other day, like I like to do, as those of you that read this blog on a daily basis have noticed. And I saw some guy walking around the shop giving out his business cards. He was very bold. He would just walk up to somebody, introduce himself, and give a quick introduction, and then before his mark knew it, they were holding one of his business cards. I wasn’t near enough to listen to what he was saying to people, because I was sitting in the coffee shop section of the bookshop.

I was reading this interesting book on metaphor. The book was talking about how all word are really metaphors for things that, with our limited capacities of understanding, can only approximate through our language. The best we can do as communicators is share our metaphors with each other, and hope that our underlying understanding of what it is that we are talking about overlaps enough so that we can communicate our ideas and feelings to each other. Sometimes though, when people communicate, there are several different meanings on several different levels, and you can never be quite sure what it is that this person is saying, even if you can lip read and have a clear view of their mouth.

But as this guy kept handing out his business cards, and judging by the expressions on the faces of the people that were on the receiving end, I got the sinking suspicion he was trying to sells something. I don’t think he was giving out free information like how to keep your car in tip top shape or how to make sure that when you bake your thanksgiving turkey it comes out with a moist juicy inside, and a crunchy delicious outside. I got the sinking suspicion he was a network marketer of some sort.

And judging by his approach, he seemed to be going for the shotgun marketing technique, or what is sometimes called the spaghetti marketing technique. This, as you are well aware, is when you throw your pitch to as many people as possible, and inevitably you will get a few that buy into your ideas. If you do this enough, you will likely be successful, so long as you follow the old ABC rule of sales: Always Be Closing.

“That works, but it takes a lot of energy. And the thing is, for every sale you get; you are going to have a few people that are angry that you approached them. Which is fine, you have a thick skin. But some people starting out, that’s not the best way to go.”

I heard a voice from behind me say. I looked, and I guess it was obvious that I was watching this guy.

“Oh?” I said.
“What do you recommend?”

“Well, the best way is to have a business card with a website on it. Then just give out the business card to as many people as possible, but without asking for a sale. Just tell them to visit the website if they are interested in the general kind of products you are offering. The on the website you have information about your product, and an email form to fill out if you are interested in more information. The people that fill in the information are called warm leads. These are much easier to convert to sales than cold leads, like that poor fellow is trying to do.”

“Hmm, sound interesting.” I said.

“What do you do when they say they want more information?”

“It’s all about criteria. All you need to do, is to find out what’s important to them. Once they tell you what’s important to them, all you have to do is show them how they will satisfy that need in buying your product.”

“Interesting. You are in sales, I take it?” I asked him.

“Oh, no,” he said.
“I’m an architect. I just like studying human behavior as a hobby.”

“So where did you learn this?” I asked him.

“I took a seminar from a guy a few years back, and he said that selling things to people, ideas, products, new behaviors is all really part of the same structure. People are a walking set of unmet needs. And these needs go very deep. He said that when you can elicit just one or two of these needs, and show them how it can be satisfied by one of your products or ideas, or new behaviors, they will not only eagerly accept it, but they will thank you afterwards.”

Hmm, interesting, I thought, turning back to my book on metaphors. In case you’re interested, the book is “Metaphors We Live By,” by George Lakoff. It’s fascinating, and I highly recommend it.