Persistence as a Persuasion Skill

By Rintu Basu NLP Case Studies, NLP Learning 4 Comments 10th April 2013

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I received an email from Tom the other day that has a great structure for using redefine patterns. Tom also does something that could be potentially really dangerous so I thought we could deconstruct that as well.

Conversations Using NLP Reframing

One of the things I advocate in The Persuasion Skills Black Book is practising in live conversations. The game is to take the pattern of the day and use it as many times as possible in one conversation.

One of the things I have noticed is that doing this, particularly with the redefine pattern, gives you two options. Firstly to take the conversation to where ever you want it to go. The second is to hold the conversation to what you want to discuss.

Tom sent me an email reminding me of this and putting this down as a process in a really clear structure. But before I show you the email I need to add a danger warning. We don’t know what technique Tom used nor the whole circumstances so it could easily be something that was very beneficial for the client.

There are some things you should always with things like medical conditions which Tom may well have covered but just didn’t tell us about in his email below. So let’s first deal with the genius way Tom approaches the redefine and then can I ask you to stay with this article to understand how much potential there is to do harm given this set of circumstances on face value.

Just Give Me Five Minutes

Here is the email in full:

Developing the NLP Language Pattern

So let me deconstruct this into a process. All Tom is saying:

“The issue isn’t what you are saying. The issue is what I want to discuss. Is what I want to discuss important to you?..Give me five minutes.”

The last sentence is an embedded command. The first part is a redefine pattern. Tom uses this as many times as he wants to hold the client on the health issue. This is pretty good, particularly since Tom is doing this on the fly, and because we are not in the pressure of the moment we can make it even better.

Before we do though, lets clear some stuff up about convincer strategies. Generally people have to go through things a few times before they “get it”. Think about how many times you have to do something before you know that you are good at it. This number can range from none through a fixed number of times right up to never or infinity. For the majority of people this number is three. That is why you will see things repeated in cycles of three. Listen to any great speech and you will hear the rule of three in play. If you watch the daily news you will notice that they tend to give you a headline, later they go through the details and then end with a summary. That is the rule of three working and what Tom is getting at as a convincer strategy. I am not sure it is a useful belief to hold but I do think it is a really useful piece of information to know. Meanwhile, back at the pattern:

First we can validate the client by acknowledging that we have heard what he has to say. That would be an agreement frame and would look like, “I agree you are in a hurry,” or, “I can see you are late for a meeting.”

And then we can go into the redefine pattern, “The issue isn’t being late the issue is about your health.” This is as straight forward as Tom has it above.

Now to drive this home Tom asks a closed question; “Are you concerned about your health?” or “Is your health important to you?” You can see the danger of this question in that the client does at one point answer the question by saying no. For the client in the moment the issue is one of priority and the meeting at that point in time is more important to him.

If you changed the question to one that presupposes a belief that you want to install you will create extra leverage that you can use. For example, “How important is health to you?” or “What is important to you about your health?” You then pause for the answer and end it with the embedded command.

So now the whole phrase would look like,

“I can see that you are running late and the issue isn’t the meeting. It is about your health. How important is your health to you? (Pause, let them answer and then use their answer to build into the embedded command e.g. ) I can see how xy and z can affect you. Give me five minutes and I can give you something that can help.”

The Dangerous Bit

The pattern and the opportunity for learning that Tom has given us is brilliant. And there is something we should also look at is ecology. Tom may well have done all this but left it out of his description as his focus is to discuss the patterns. But it does give me an opportunity to discuss this really important aspect of persuasion.

For the NLP jargon junkies out there ecology is the NLP posh term for saying before making any intervention let’s just make sure that it is good for the client. I think this is a really serious issue for any persuasive personality. If you have the ability to dramatically alter people’s beliefs should you not make sure what you are doing is good for them?

Tom doesn’t mention the technique he used or how he checked it would be good for his client. I suspect it was all fine and I am just pointing it out because it is a good learning opportunity for us and not checking ecology could be really dangerous for you, your client or both.

How to Find Out More

The redefine and lots of other patterns are fully explored in the Persuasion Skills Black Book. You can find it on Amazon here in the UK or on Amazon.Com But if you want to develop a powerful persuasive personality and understand hypnotic language patterns at such a deep level that you are spontaneously creating them in conversations you will want to click through here:

Tags: Case Studies, Language, Persuasion Skills Black Book