Playing with NLP Language Patterns
By Rintu Basu NLP Learning, NLP Sales No Comments 9th November 2012You might not have the flexibility to use this hypnotic language pattern everywhere, but what if it were possible to flip just another 5% of decisions in your favour through using this technique. Would that make enough of a difference for you to read this article and discover how?
In old style sales techniques there is a common pattern. Here are a couple of examples:
- Do you prefer it in black or red?
- Would you rather pay by cash or card?
You may notice that this type of question excludes all other possibilities other than the ones being offered. For example in the first version a green version or the option of not preferring any is not offered. Simply you are being led to the solution the sales advisor is looking for.
You can expand these questions to include more options, for example:
- Which colour do you prefer?
- How would you like to pay for that?
And use them in other contexts, for example:
- Shall we go for a meal or to see a film tonight?
- Or if you have already decided you want to go see a film, “What film shall we go to see tonight?”
In sales these are called alternative closes. But what if just by tweaking them a little we could use it in a much broader context? I’m not saying it is possible, but if it were what would you use it for?
If you were to examine my previous paragraph again here is what is happening:
- The first sentence is a preframe. I have restricted the direction of thought to just talking about sales.
- The second sentence opens out the possibilities to much more than just the thing I deliberately preframed in the first sentence. This has the effect of making things feel expansive. First I closed everything down… this is about sales and then expanded things to include a much wider possibilities.
- The third sentence displaces me from the idea. You can’t argue with me about the possibility because I’m not actually saying if it is possible, just asking you to hypothesise. I then ask you to create your own benefit statements to pull you in the direction wanting it to work or reading on.
A simple version based on the examples about might include:
- I don’t know if there are any other colours available, but if they were, which colour would you prefer?
- Cheque and cash are our preferred payment solutions and is there a different option that you would prefer?
But this misses the real beauty of this concept. In my longer example about we closed down the option, opened it up again and then completely changed the topic of conversation, did you notice?
Have a read of this article again and see how many different patterns there are that you can use.
If you want to discover how easy it is to develop this approach to covert, conversational, hypnotic language patterns have a look at Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed where I deliver a course and then deconstruct all the patterns I use on the students. You can find out more here:
Tags: Case Studies, Influence, Reframing