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The Ego, Why It Can Be Persuasion And Influence's Biggest Challenge |
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Written by Kurt Mortensen
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Monday, 08 February 2010 09:17 |
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Ego kicks in anytime someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to do your business, your immediate and instinctive reaction is to prove them wrong! When employing this tactic, be careful to avoid damaging the ego. VERY IMPORTANT: When you cause damage instead of producing a challenge, you will create an air of indifference from your prospect.
by KurtMortensen
Ego kicks in anytime someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to do your business, your immediate and instinctive reaction is to prove them wrong! When employing this tactic, be careful to avoid damaging the ego. VERY IMPORTANT: When you cause damage instead of producing a challenge, you will create an air of indifference from your prospect.
Sports coaches use another challenge to the ego in a team environment. For instance during football practice one of the players is not giving it 100%, doesn't make meeting on time, or makes the same mistake over and over, the coach has the perfect ego based solution. He call a team meeting explains to the teams what been going on with this particular player. He then has every one on the team except the guilty player run some laps. The punishment is a challenge to that football player's ego. Situations like that only have to take place once to be persuasive for each member of the team.
We face many challenging messages geared toward our egos. For instance a multilevel marketing meeting, managers might say they are only looking for "go-getters" and "people who know how to take action." A teacher may say to a student, "I'd like you to do these advanced assignments". I have witnessed sale reps make a subtle attack on their prospect's ego when they felt they were not making the sale. They said something like, "I guess you do not have the authority to make the decision." You should see how quickly the ego kicks in!
Another way is to give people credit for things they don't know. When you do this they will generally say nothing and allow you to believe them to be smarter and more aware than they really are. Then they will try to live up to the undeserved credit you have just bestowed upon them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. Here are a couple more phrases that are direct challenges to our egos, "You probably already know...." or "You will soon realize..."
When it comes to persuasion we are faced with a very tricky task of building up the egos of our prospects and placing our egos on hold. To be effective at persuasion you have to let go you your ego and focus on the objective at hand. You don't want to have to deal with a bruised ego. So check your ego at the door and remember your overriding purpose is on persuasion and not you.
About the Author:
Everything we want out of life is on the other side of persuasion. Find out where you are strong and what I can help you improve by taking the Persuasion IQ test, it's free and informative. |
