• To the optimist, the glass is half full.
• To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
• To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
• To the marketer, the glass is a handy new special beverage container solution to your drink related problems
• To the hypnotist, the glass is just a metaphor for how you store all your fluid knowledge deep inside now…that’s right
• The NLPer just asks which glass specifically and then models your answer
• And the Persuasion Artist would just drink and then talk you in to buying them another

Want to develop the attitude of a Persuasion Skills Artist?

If you want to learn how to install the attitude, develop the skills and stay motivated to achieve massive results for both yourself and others click through and find out more about the only NLP Practitioner Course I am running in the foreseeable future.

What Pattern Should I use here?

I often get emails saying something like, “I am going in to the most important meeting in my life. What patterns should I use?”

Whenever I get one of these emails I am forever reminded of my old pure maths lecturer at university. On the night before his exam he would take his class out to the pub for the evening. Take this the right way it wasn’t a wild night of drinking just a couple of pints and some social chat.

My lecturer’s point was that if you have done the work during the term you won’t need to cram for the night and if you haven’t done the work then going out for a pint will be better for you than trying to spend the night cramming.

Applying Key Persuasion Skills

Hypnotic language and NLP based persuasion skills are incredibly powerful once you get the basics down. If you are not listening and responding to your audience then it doesn’t matter what great patterns you have… They won’t work.

The key to learning great hypnotic language patterns is to practice them, over learn them, make them your own instinctive phrases that you use naturally all the time. The secret is to use them and continue to use them whenever it doesn’t matter so that when it does matter you can just focus on the conversation and trust that the patterns will come out as natural speech.

Conversation Management

When I first started learning NLP and Hypnosis I learnt large hypnotic scripts. These were great because they had a load of patterns and structure to them. They were awful because when I had my nose in the script I wasn’t looking at what was happening to my client or my audience.

One thing that makes a lot of my material different is that I break patterns into small discrete chunks so you can just use a little bit, see what happens, learn to use it and then build the next bit on to it. I also show you a conversation management model so you can steer the patterns in the direction you want to go. And we start with a super pattern that you can hijack any conversation and move it directly towards your goals.

In the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Course you can watch me using these skills directly with an audience as I teach them some hypnotic persuasion skills and then you can go through my notes that deconstruct the patterns as well as learn how you can use them for yourself in different contexts. Click through to find out more here.

Asking the Right Questions

The original article was about how I used a specific pattern to  develop a trance state  very quickly. The article is really about watching and timing. In NLP jargon, having the sensory acuity to  notice what you have got  and then the using it. Here is the article if you didn’t  read it initially.

Asking about the details on how  you create patterns, if they need to rhyme or what sort of voice inflection you should use doesn’t quite  hit the right point. The issue is not the detail of the interrupt, the issue is doing something that interrupts the subject’s flow and then inserting a new direction in the pause between thoughts.

Applying Pattern Interrupts in Sales

I was asked how I would use this approach in sales. So here is an article I wrote a while ago deconstructing various approaches to a specific objection including a pattern interrupt.

When I was developing my coaching practice one approach I used frequently to interrupt people’s programming would be to refuse to sell them my coaching programme until they had jumped through some hoops for me. It used to start from when they told me I was expensive. The pattern went something like,

“That’s right I am expensive, it’s because I deliver XYZ and you will find very few coaches can do this. But I don’t want you to buy from me until you recognise just how much value you get from me, so I want you to call some of the other coaches in the area, ask them these questions and find out that they don’t provide the solutions that I can give you. Once you have called a few and recognised how great a result you can get from me come back and we can discuss booking you on to the programme.”

You may want to explore the embedded commands and presuppositions that are running through this pattern as well. I agree I would lose a few by taking this approach but the quality of clients I used to work with was terrific and they would often be begging to work with me.

 But What Really Makes It Work

You might recognise that I don’t write articles about every time I use my NLP persuasion skills. I usually only write about incidents where I can demonstrate a good learning point. So you don’t know how many times I try things like this and fail completely, have a partial success or even how often it works.

What I can say is that the key is persistence, flexibility and sensory acuity. Here is an article I wrote a while ago where I took several bits at the apple and eventually got it to work. In this article I fully deconstruct what I am doing with the shop keeper and take you through the three times I applied different patterns before he eventually handed over the money. Just click the photograph and read the article here:

And here is a follow up article where amnesia was created accidentally, but created so strongly even the witnesses were starting to lose their confidence in what they saw happening. Just click the photograph and read the article here:

Crime Scene Investigations

And finally if you want to hear an extremely funny but masterful version of how far you can take this approach take a look here:

The Difference that Makes the Difference

If you have not already noticed the various articles all eventually point to the two key issues being:

1. Sensory Acuity – Noticing what is happening in terms of the programme your subject is running
2. Flexibility – Being able to respond to their programme and nudge it in the direction you want them to go in

Now the issue is not about learning some fancy pattern or technique but installing an attitude where you automatically use your persuasion skills to create these results.

On the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed download programme you will see me talk through how you can install a highly hypnotic personality. You will see me do this with a student on the course and you will have my notes on how you can do that for yourself.

But that is only a small part of the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed Course. You can click through and read more about it here:

Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

If we define our comfort zone as all that we know how to do. All the situations, behaviours and thoughts that are habitual and ingrained into your life might be another way of saying comfort zone.

Then all of your learning, growth and development must be outside of your comfort zone and therefore uncomfortable to some degree. To me this means that if you want to learn, grow and develop being a little bit uncomfortable is a natural part of the process.

A Persuasion Skills Interlude

I am currently working on a new course, Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed. It consists of three hours of video recording of a Hypnotic Persuasion Skills Seminar that starts at the same level as the Persuasion Skills Black Book but builds hugely on those foundations with some really cool new techniques and ideas.

But that is not what makes this course special. If you have read some of my articles, books and seen my videos you already know that I use hypnotic persuasion techniques to teach hypnotic persuasion techniques. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that the whole training is transcribed and deconstructed. All my patterns, anchors and sneaky trainer tricks that are demonstrated throughout the videos are deconstructed, written down and explained in the accompanying report. It seems to have created a little bit of a stir. You can click through and read a few of the responses here.

The Importance of Mindset

One of the things I deconstruct on the course is how to preframe a conversation so that people are already thinking the way you want them to before you get to anything contentious. For example if I wanted you to donate to a save the elephant fund (I don’t even know if they are endangered it was the first thing that came into my head when searching for an example) I would want to set a frame around the conversation first.

After introductions and any scene setting that we needed to do I would discuss the ivory trade, the near extinction of certain types of elephant, the cruelty and barbarism of it all. The important thing would be to engage you into the conversation in such a way that you state open support for doing something about helping elephants. I guess you can see how much easier I could now get a donation from you, and you would, depending on how the conversation was managed be even happier to donate the money.

On this course I used the idea of comfort zones and turning confusion to understanding as an important element of preframing the mindset that I want the students in. What has completely amazed me is what Bill managed to do with this little concept. Here he is in his own words:

 Some Concluding Thoughts

When I look at accelerated learning for a subject I look for three things. The easy one is the tools and techniques. For example with NLP language Patterns the patterns are the tools we focus on. The trouble is there is no point in learning these tools if you have beliefs that don’t support you using them.

In short I want to work on a beliefs and identity level with you before I introduce you to any content. The tools are generally easy to learn and apply once the beliefs are in the right place. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that you get to see me work that process with the students on the recording and that also works on you as you watch the course.

You can then go through the deconstruction and break it down so you see how I constructed it in the first place and how you can build it up for your own purposes. You get it again on a third level when you look at the whole course overall and notice that I have applied the same process again to the whole course.

The best thing about this is because you have to think through the course on multiple levels we can bypass much of your conscious faculties and you can take on a lot of the information on an unconscious level. Here is an example of how powerful that can be.

Getting the Edge

Some poker players have a very mathematical way of playing the game. They work the probabilities and they will make the bet every time so long as they have an edge. In the long game they will always win. Here is a simple version of what I mean:

Let’s say we bet on a coin flip, so we both have a 50% chance of winning. But let us also say that somehow you have got me to agree that every time I win you will pay me £1.00 but every time you win I will pay you £1.01. Over time we will both win and lose the same amount of times, but over time you will become considerably richer I would become considerably poorer. A poker player works on the same basis and looks for that edge on each play. So long as you can do this correctly over time you will always eventually win. You may not win every hand, the rules of probability won’t allow that, but in the long game you will always come out ahead.

The concept I am about to share with you gives you that edge over life, the universe and everything. I am even going to show you examples demonstrating how people are putting this into action and winning in the most fun and fraught ways. But take this the right way though you will see in one of these videos that the game being played was dangerous to the point where people were possibly going to be murdered. The man using this strategy was exceptionally brave and I don’t know if I would have had the courage to have done the things you will hear about in the video.

NLP Presuppositions - Behavioural Flexibility is the Key

Dependant on the whims of your NLP Trainer there are a random number between nine and sixteen presuppositions of NLP. At least I have not seen any more or any less. If anyone has please feel free to leave a comment about their “find” with someone that cares. One presupposition that is usually quoted is something like, “The person with the most flexibility in the system has the most influence.” This idea will give you an edge each and every time. And that means over time you will get what you want. All you need to do is learn to develop the concept.

So far all we have done is look at this conceptually so let us ground this into the real world and look at a few examples:

Deep Meaningless Sex

When I was at university I met a guy who seemed to be able to pick up women non-stop. He was the king of the one night stand and being young, packed full of teenaged angst and hormones I desperately wanted to know how he did it. Eventually I asked him and he said that he just walks up to women and very politely he just tells them that he finds them attractive and would they like no strings attached sex tonight. I was amazed. He told me he occasionally got slapped or a drink poured over him, most of the time he got a no, but EVERY night he eventually got a yes. As I have gotten older I have found lots of ideas and strategies that make this approach much more successful but even at this level this guy had the gumption to just do what no one else would and he was getting the results he wanted.

The Heart of Religion

A person very close to me has a great frame on her religion, Hinduism. Her basic idea is that people should be the best they can be at whatever they are doing. And if they fulfil that criteria then they are being a good Hindu. So, for example you are fully immersed reading this article, understanding concepts and working out how you are going to use these ideas. This would make you, in the moment a good article reading Hindu. It would not matter what your beliefs and faiths are. If you are adamant that you are an atheist, this would just make you a good Hindu atheist.

Perhaps you can imagine the fun and jolly japes that happen when the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses or any other religious conversation brigade came to the door. My friend would be one of the only people in the neighbourhood that would invite them in. She didn’t actually try to convert them to Hinduism as in her eyes they already were and because they had such strong faith they were very good practicing Hindus. They just practised their Hinduism in a Mormon / Jehovah’s Witness / Christian way.

She would listen to them, ask questions, point out the connections with the Hindu faith and how they are being great Hindus. She would take on their religious observances and point out that she does them as a practicing Hindu. She would bless them for trying to save her soul. She tell them they will be reincarnated into a higher plane for their actions and that they may well consider this heaven. And as they became better Hindu Mormons that they will discover heaven on earth and quote passages from the bible alluding to that concept. She would let them know the more strongly they held to their religious faith, the solidly they held to their Christian beliefs the better a Hindu they were becoming.

It didn’t matter what anyone would say my friend had a bigger Hindu frame to place round it. I was amazed with just how often people entered her house with an agenda and left wanting to explore more about the Hindu faith.

Avoiding People Talking to You

Here is one young woman that has really got this behavioural flexibility thing totally worked out. As soon as you see her technique you know it will work in hundreds of different circumstances.

One Man Fights the Klan with Love and Wins

This video is an amazing story. This is the ultimate in behavioural flexibility. I had never heard of the Reverend Wade Watts until I saw this video and now that I have he has become a real inspiration for me. This is an incredibly powerful example of what you can do when you have the behavioural flexibility.

Developing the Attitude

One thing I think helps developing behavioural flexibility is in any given situation asking yourself, “How else can I interpret this situation?” If you spend a few minutes daily reframing what people say, finding alternative meanings and interpretations to situations you will suddenly find yourself doing this as a natural ability. From there your behavioural flexibility is just based on how prepared you are to use these alternative frames.

On the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed Programme I demonstrate on a student the exact process you can use to install a persuasive personality that has the authority, the agility, humour and skill to use spur of the moment behavioural flexibility. And I also give you detail instruction on how you can do this for yourself and for others. You can  find out more when you  click through the picture below: