By Kenrick Cleveland+
When we’re persuading the affluent, (which is after all, where the money is) it’s useful to be as much like them as possible.
But when you get right down to it, it’s very individual. How do we individualize our presentation for each of our prospects? As it relates to rapport, we can do so by effectively learning how their mind thinks.
There are three major ways our minds think and we are all predominantly one (and often a combination) of them:
(1) seeing, (2) hearing and (3) feeling.
Another way to describe these categories is Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK, if you want to get technical). People get used to targeting one of these by paying attention to one more so than the others.
By increasing your precision with language, you’re going to learn how to create rapport verbally. You’ll also learn how to begin the process of training your prospects to follow your ideas and suggestions. To do this you must first develop a few skills that will give you far more flexibility in your language as well as laying the groundwork for powerful strategies to come.
What is the difference between reality and our THOUGHTS of reality?
What is the difference between experience, (I mean, that which is happening around us), and what we remember about what has happened around us?
to get into this, let’s talk a little bit about how we perceive the world around us…
We perceive our world through our five senses. Our five senses, of course, are visual, auditory, kinesthetic (feeling), taste and smell.
If something happens in the world around you, let’s say within ten feet of you, (and you have the ability to see, hear or feel it, your eyes are open and you’re watching it), do you perceive that it happened as fast as it happened?
The answer is no, you don’t. It actually happens a split second before you can perceive it. Why? Because the information is being filtered through your five senses. In other words, how do you become aware that there even is an experience going on around you?
Another way to look at this is, if a pencil were in a room and something happened but you weren’t there, would the pencil know that it happened?
There are some who argue, yes, the pencil knows and if someone tunes into the pencil, it will tell them. Well, maybe so, but I doubt it.
It takes an observer to be there in the room to know that something happened. And how do we observe? By absorbing what takes place coming into our mind through our five senses. And once the information comes into our five senses, we can remember it and talk about it.
We perceive our world through our five senses. Now most people think, when they first start their study of this, ‘My perception of what happened and reality are the same thing.’
Well if that’s true, how is it that no two people experience things the same?
There are filters that change our perception of things. Our five senses are distorted. In fact, they go through three basic processes that are fundamental to all human beings.
What comes in is distorted, or generalized and/or deleted. Distorted, deleted or generalized.
In other words, there are so many things happening every second around us that if you could possibly pay attention to all of those things, it would pretty much drive you crazy and nothing would make sense.
So we learn to tune our senses to pick up the things that we believe are important.
As we study persuasion even deeper, we will explore each of the three main ways of perception, how they affect rapport, and how you can tune into them in order to maximize persuasion.
Until Next Time,
Kenrick E. Cleveland