The Law of Involvement–Create and Awaken Curiosity
Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.-STEPHEN COVEY
The law of involvement suggests that the more you engage someone’s five senses, involve them mentally and physically, and create the right atmosphere for persuasion, the more effective and persuasive you’ll be. Listening can be a very passive act; you can listen to an entire speech and not feel or do a thing. As a persuader, you need to help your audience be one step closer to taking action. As a Master Persuader, your goal is to decrease the distance someone has to go to reach your objective.
Increasing Participation
You can create involvement through increased participation. The more we take an active role and get involved, the more open to persuasion we become. When we take an active part in something, we feel more connected to and have stronger feelings for the issue at hand. We have a personal stake in what we are doing.One of the keys to successful participation is making your problem their problem. This technique creates ownership and a willingness to help on the part of your prospects. Obviously, asking for help is much milder than telling someone what to do or think. You will have more success involving your prospects in the solution if you give them the option of participating. Feeling that it was their choice and their solution, your prospects will take ownership-they have persuaded themselves. It becomes their own problem and their own solution. By nature, people will support what they help create.
Creating Atmosphere
Another way to boost participation is with atmosphere. Atmosphere is really just a state of mind that you can create. Think about the following locations and the atmosphere they purposefully create:
Hardware stores
Bookstores
Malls
Casinos
Theme restaurants
Amusement parks
Sporting goods stores
Bars
Hospitals
Law offices
Maintaining Attention
It is common sense to realize you have to keep your audience’s attention in order to persuade them. If you lose them, you lose your chance for them to understand and accept your proposal. We know from our own personal experience that we tend to let our minds naturally drift when we are listening to other people. We cannot focus on one item for too long unless we are forced to do so. Master Persuaders can make a person want to pay attention and stay focused. You may lose your audience’s attention from time to time but it is your job to bring them back to full attention status. You can help your prospect lose track of time.
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Using the Art of Questioning
Of all the tools in your persuasion toolbox, questioning is probably the one most often used by Master Persuaders. Questions gain immediate involvement. Questions are used in the persuasion process to create mental involvement, to guide the conversation, to set the pace of conversation, to clarify statements and objections, to determine beliefs, attitudes, and values, to force you to slow down, to find out what your prospect needs, and to show your sincerity. Questioning is a very diverse and useful tool. Negotiation experts Neil Rackham and John Carlisle observed hundreds of negotiators in action in an attempt to discover what it takes to be a top negotiator. Their key finding was that skilled negotiators ask more than twice as many questions as average negotiators.[17]
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Telling Mesmerizing Stories
Stories are powerful tools for persuaders. Compelling storytelling automatically creates attention and involvement with your audience. We can all think of a time when we were in an audience and not paying attention to the speaker. We were off in our own world when all of a sudden we perked up and started to listen because the speaker had begun to tell a story. We sat up, listened attentively, took note of what was being said, and wanted to know what would happen next. Whenever you sense your audience is starting to wander, you should have a relevant story ready.
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Repeating and Repackaging
The more you expose someone to a particular concept or idea, the more that concept or idea will become favorable to them. Things do grow on us. Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you didn’t like until it started to grow on you? This is also true with people. You may not like some people at first, but after awhile you grow to like them, and sometimes you even become their friend. Ever wonder why politicians want signs and posters with their names and faces all over everyone’s yards, street corners, bumpers, and windows? The use of repetition can be very effective. It is often said that repetition is the mother of all learning, but it is also the mother of effective persuasion. Repetition increases awareness, understanding, and retention.
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Building Suspense and Distraction
The element of mystery can be effectively employed to involve your audience. We are all naturally curious about the unknown. When we feel we’ve been left hanging, it drives us crazy! We want to know the end of the story. We want our tasks to be completed so we can check them off our list. This is also known as the ‘‘Zeigarnik Effect,’’ named after Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychologist. This effect is the tendency we have to remember uncompleted thoughts, ideas, or tasks more than completed ones.
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Generating Competition
Most humans are very competitive. When you package something as a competition, most people will want to be involved. Certainly some personality types shy away from competition, but most people are naturally competitive. Master Persuaders must be able to see how the use of competition works within the group they are dealing with. As you introduce competition into your presentation, you can create rivalry between different entities. Maybe you are using a competition where each individual is competing against himself or perhaps you create competition among the individual members of the group. Maybe you are pitting the group against another group or perhaps you are trying to get them to compete against the status quo.
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Engaging the Five Senses
We were all born with five senses, each helping us to make generalizations about the world. You should engage all five sensations when trying to persuade an audience. When we learn, 75 percent comes to us visually, 13 percent comes through hearing, and 12 percent comes through smell, taste and touch.[26]
However, keep in mind that there are three dominant senses we gravitate toward. They are sight, hearing, and feeling, or, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensations. Most people tend to favor one of these perceptions over the others. As a Master Persuader, you need to identify and use your prospect’s dominant perspective on the world. Granted, we generally make use of all three senses, but the point is to find the dominant perception. As you determine the dominant mode, consider the size of your audience. If you are speaking to one person, for example, you would want to pinpoint the one perception that is dominant in that person. If you have an audience of one hundred, on the other hand, you need to use all three styles.
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