Good For You Coaching

Good For You Coaching Client Engagement Training and Coaching

Helping sales individuals and others who simply want to be more effective, more persuasive, more productive in their relations with others with concrete coaching and training on understanding and communicating with people - reading and responding to their real motivations, their underlying desires - and structuring your behavior for maximum effectiveness.

10/30/2011

Weekly Communication TIP:

Curious thing about the word “don’t” – it cannot be pictured in the brain. Why, you ask is that important? The brain turns language - our words - into pictures, to process visually (mental images) in order to determine content for behavior. Since the word “don’t” can’t be pictured, it has great power to structure thinking in an unconscious way. This is beneficial knowledge if you are trying to persuade someone.

If I say “Don’t think of a large grey elephant” immediately a large grey elephant pops into your head – you simply can’t help picturing it, regardless of what I said. That’s because the brain skips right over the word “don’t” that it can’t picture and moves right onto the words it can picture.

Think of these statements:
Don’t worry about me.
Don’t feel as though you have to help me with this.
Don’t decide now. You can wait until later if you want.
I don’t know if my opinion will change your mind at all on this

Now take the word ‘don’t’ out of all the above statements – what you have left, and what the brain processes as understandable, is a clear command to action. Try this language pattern and see how more persuasive your language suddenly is.

And we wonder why children have a hard time behaving, when so many of the commands given to them start with “don’t”…

10/18/2011

Weekly communication TIP:

You have to deliver a reprimand for a mistake made, a poor performance review, a report of valid criticism – and you just know that this self-esteem blow is not going to be received well by the person. How do you lessen the negative impact but maintain the seriousness of the charge?

First, always have something positive to say about the person – it should be genuine and specific, related to their behavior, not about their personal characteristics. So what do you present first, the good ‘news’ or the bad ‘news’? That depends on the gender of the person.

When the person is a male, it doesn’t matter which is presented in either order because males will remember and process both items, offsetting the good and the bad by thinking, “Well, I have something to work on, but I’m also doing something right.”

On the other hand a female hearing the bad news first will be consumed by the negative and not hear the ensuing good words at all. If the criticism is heard last, she will remember it and dwell on it for the rest of the day, regardless how good the positive comments were. So when delivering a reprimand to a female, you should sandwich the bad between the good. Start out with the positive comment so she hears it, add the necessary negative criticism, and follow up with the good again.

To recap, males remember both good and bad feedback; females remember the last thing they heard.

10/05/2011

Weekly communication TIP:

Oops, somehow you’ve unintentionally offended someone or you just have a feeling that they don’t like you and you want (or need) to get into their good graces. What to do? Well, as non-intuitive as it sounds, try to get them to do you a small favor. That’s right – have them do you a favor, and don’t turn this around and do them the small favor, or you risk the law of reciprocity kicking in. You might think this would work – that you do them a favor to get them to like you, but it’s actually the reverse.

The way the brain works is that if we do a favor for someone, we logically assume that we must like them since we wouldn’t do a favor for someone that we don’t like. After that thought quickly registers, then the law of consistency takes effect – we have decided that we like the person, so we then act consistent with our decision.

So if you really haven’t done anything that you know about to make the person dislike you, it’s probably that something about you reminds them of someone they don’t like – something like your name or another trait that isn’t your fault! Get them to dissociate from that unwarranted negative connection and change to liking you with this simple technique.

Asking for a favor is easy to do – simply ask: “Would you mind picking me up a regular coffee while you’re going out?”; “Would you loan me your copy of that bestseller you raved about to Mary in the lunchroom?”; “Would you do me a favor and give me a half-hour of your time sometime next week to pick your brain about the XYZ project?”

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