Your Pre-Persuasion Checklist–The Inside Secrets of Maximum Influence
Before anything else, getting ready is the secret to success.
—HENRY FORD
To be an effective persuader, you cannot use the same techniques for all people all the time. You have to customize your message to fit the demographics, interests, and values of your audience. This chapter presents what I call the Pre-Persuasion Checklist. It will help you to effectively adapt your persuasive techniques to your target audience. The foundation of the Pre-Persuasion Checklist is rooted in a solid understanding of human psychology, the ways to handle resistance, and the methods of effectively structuring a persuasive argument. This is the knowledge necessary to make the Pre-Persuasion Checklist work in any persuasive situation.
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Monitoring Mindset: The Mental Game of Persuasion
Beliefs
Understanding your audience’s beliefs will help you know what approach to take. Beliefs are those things we accept as truth, consciously or subconsciously, proven or unproven. Beliefs come from our environment, our culture, our education, our experience, or even through osmosis from our friends and family. One of the most common sources of our beliefs comes from being a part of a group, such as a family or a type of tight-knit community. People often take on the beliefs and rules of the groups to which they belong and then behave in accordance with those beliefs and rules.
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Monitoring the Ability to Change: Getting Inside the Closed Mind
Life is change; persuasion is change. As a Master Persuader, you must be able to create and motivate change. Understanding human nature is knowing that most people will resist change and burrow into their comfort zones. We tend to follow the path of least resistance. However, change is the only thing that can lift us up from where we currently lie. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘‘Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.’’ We all want to become a better person and to be ‘‘stretched’’ to accomplish more things, but we are stuck in our daily patterns.
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Monitoring the Acceptance Level: Determine Where the Audience Stands
An important part of the Pre-Persuasion Checklist is determining what the audience’s current acceptance level is for the subject you want to present. Ask yourself the following questions when making this determination:
Knowledge: What does my audience know about the topic I want to talk about?
Interest: How interested is the audience in my subject?
Background: What are the common demographics of my audience?
Support: How much support already exists for my views?
Beliefs: What are my audience’s common beliefs?
Understanding different types of audiences will also help you determine their acceptance level. Following are some different categories of audiences and how to deal with each of them.
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Monitoring Your Listening Skills: Crack the Code
Fortune 500 companies commonly require listening training, even though many employees think it’s a waste of time. The truth is, poor listening skills account for the majority of communication problems. Dale Carnegie asserted many years ago that listening is one of the most crucial human relations skills. Listening is how we find out people’s code, preferences, desires, wants, and needs. It is how we learn to customize our message to our prospects. Of all the skills one could master, listening is probably the one that will pay you back the most.
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Monitoring Personality Directions: Fine-Tune Your Persuasion Radar
The more we understand personality directions and personality types, the better we will be able to customize our persuasive presentations. A personality direction is the way we lean most of the time in terms of the way we act and react to most stimuli. We hate to be put in a box and categorized, but the reality is that (most of the time) we are predictable. Sure, people can never be 100 percent predictable, but you will be amazed at how predictable they actually are as you become a student of human nature.
Each personality direction will dictate how you customize your message. When you analyze personality directions, ask yourself the following questions:
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Structuring Winning Arguments
Why should we be concerned with the structure of an argument? Well, persuasive messages have several pieces that must be included. Just as Plato stated that every message should have a structure like an animal (head, body, and feet), so must our arguments follow an understandable pattern.
There are two basic elements to any persuasive message. These are the substance (arguments, facts, and content) and the form (pattern of arrangement). If you make up the form and pattern of your presentation as it comes into your head, it will be a detriment to long-term persuasion. A confused mind says ‘‘no.’’ If the audience can’t follow your facts or the substance of your message, their brains will not accept your message—there is no clear message to accept.
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Giving a Call to Action
The call to action is the most important part of your presentation. This is where your audience understands exactly what you want them to do. It’s where you define yourself as a persuader instead of a presenter. This conclusion should not come as a shock to your audience. Throughout your presentation, you should have gently led them to the same conclusion that you are now giving them. You should have already prompted them to want to do what you are about to tell them to do.
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Structure Points
Once the call to action has taken place, your audience needs to remember, retain, and respond to your message. They have to keep doing what you want them to do. Have your points been memorable, easy to understand, and simple to follow? Remember, your message will boil down not to what you say and do, but to what the other person remembers. The following critical items must be included in your persuasive presentation.
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Inoculation: Defend Against the Attack
During the Korean War, Americans were shocked at the number of captured soldiers who willingly cooperated with the enemy. Initially they wondered whether the soldiers had been tortured and beaten into submission. Investigation revealed that the soldiers had not been tortured, but rather that they had been subjected to brainwashing sessions led by a skillful questioner. Soldiers were questioned about American ideologies such as freedom, democracy, and equality. Surprisingly, many of the soldiers had great difficulty defending their beliefs. The captors persisted in attacking beliefs the soldiers
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