minds, metaphors and (ethical) manipulation
Posts tagged sales
Leveraging the Unconscious Mind
Jul 5th
Welcome! If you're interested in how people think, click to get The X-Ray Listener's Quick Guide To Metaphor and unlock a new perspective on the mind... for free.
At least 95 per cent of “thinking” occurs outside our conscious awareness. All kinds of things are going on in our bodies, and in the shadows of our brains, that we’ll never become aware of. And this unconscious processing is, to a large extent, what drives our behaviours.
As Daniel Wenger puts it in The Illusion of Conscious Will: “Most of what we know we don’t know we know. It usually seems that we consciously will our actions, but this is an illusion.”
Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think suggests imagining a filter that enables you to see, in colour, the variations in the heat intensity of objects. Through such a filter, a fresh loaf of bread would look like a rainbow as it cooled. Wonderful!
“Now imagine a similar filter applied to consumers’ unconscious thoughts,” he suggests.
“More colours appear than any firework show could ever hope to display. These new colours represent the hidden treasures in the shadow of the mind.”
X-Ray Listening provides such a filter, a particularly effective way of seeing these colours. No wonder I love it!
Zaltman More >
Why Don’t You Ask More Questions?
Jun 6th
Why don’t you ask more questions?
It’s a question that’s been nagging me for a while, as I’ve been busy both exhorting people to do more asking – for example, in this video – and training people to ask specific kinds of questions.
And (doh!) one possible answer has just struck me.
Presumably, something’s stopping you.
The fact you’re reading this blog means that you’re an intelligent person, curious about the world, wanting to learn. It’s also a fair bet that you’re a nice person, wanting to help and do good work.
Why would somebody like that not ask lots of questions? What might stop you?
From here on I’m into pure speculation. But my guess is that what’s holding you back is that you don’t want to be selfish.
You know that great questions will bring you great information, and enable you to have more power and influence over the people you communicate with. You know that the person asking the questions controls the conversation. You want to be polite and kind and helpful… not manipulative… and so you talk to fill the silence, rather than asking questions.
But here’s the thing. Most people love to talk about themselves. And most people find it much easier to talk than More >
How to get people to trust you
Apr 18th
I’ve been blogging recently about the relationship between words, physical actions, metaphor and influence.
One expert who really “gets” this, who I had the privilege of meeting recently, is Mark Bowden, author of Winning Body Language.
Let me share my biggest takeaway from the many useful things he taught me. It’s something I started using straight away and, based on my results, I’m not about to stop any time soon!
Mark says: “The following simple piece of body language, hundreds of thousands of years old and still applicable today, is totally overlooked in understanding by nonverbal communication “experts” and business presentation trainers around the globe. It has, however, been handed down within the community of visual communicators for centuries. Until this point, it has never been put in writing for any business audience…
“So here is that signal that instantly lets the members of an audience know that you are genuine in intention and can be trusted: Gestures on a horizontal plane extending from the navel.”
Mark calls this horizontal plane the TruthPlane and adds:
“When the hands gesture within the TruthPlane, an energized calm, confident and balanced effect is felt by both the communicator and the receiver.”
And: “Across all cultures and at all times, it More >
