Setting the Scene

I was driving to a casino for a poker game and I was late for registration so was in a hurry. The map will give you my exact location. I came up North Street and turned right on to Sauchiehall Street. The traffic light on that corner were just turning from amber to red. I got through those but the lights at the junction of Sauchihall Street and A804 had turned red before I had crossed them.

The police car had been at the other arm of the junction and were in clear line of sight of the traffic light. It was a dry, cold and dark night. But the area is well lit, traffic was light and the visibility was good.

As I continued down Sauchiehall Street I saw the police car in my rear view mirror and realised that they must have seen me run the red light.

Define your Outcomes

I made a quick decision to turn right in to Elmbank Street. I was simply looking for information. If they turned with me I knew I would be stopped and it would give me a few moments to set some objectives for the encounter. They did follow me on to Elmbank Street and almost immediately signalled me to pull over, which I did.

I decided my overall objectives for this encounter were just to get away from the situation as quick as possible without a ticket. Sadly that was not how the police were looking at it.

Getting in to a Persuasive State

I don’t know how much you have noticed but when you experience negative emotions your communication skills get worse. This is true of almost all skills but is most obvious with communications. You tend to be able to perform better when you are in a relaxed, happy and usually slightly detached state.

I teach my students to develop a persuasion state that has certain elements built into it. First you should be relaxed, having fun and confident in your ability to react to an on-going situation on multiple levels. And just as importantly I teach them to have their attention outside of themselves and on the person they are speaking with.

The problem with most persuasion contexts is that there are emotions, normally negative ones involved such as the desperation of “needing” the result, the fear of the consequences not achieving and anger at being caught out. I pick these three as examples because I was feeling these as pulled over to speak to the police. The reality is these emotions can be the very thing that stops you achieving the result.

Luckily you can learn to develop this persuasive state so it kicks in automatically when you need it. I fully explain the process and how you can develop it for yourself as part of my Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme. In simple terms once you have built the state and can access it you just anchor it to something that happens automatically when you need your persuasive state.

As I watched the police car pull over and an officer get out carrying his clipboard and ticket book. His intentions were clear. It looked like I would need all my persuasive ability to get out of this one. I let myself breathe deeply, went into my persuasion state and started to relish the challenge of convincing this officer that letting me go was a better option for everyone.

In the next article we will discuss different forms of rapport, how to subtly undermine your opponent’s argument and how to shovel post hypnotic commands into the heads of police officers.

Advanced Persuasion Patterns is currently closed. But I will open it for a new intake in the next couple of days. For the moment you can click through here and find out more about the course.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Interview For?

One of the real problems with job interviews is that candidates tend to walking in with a begging bowl mentality that makes them subservient to the interviewer. This can make it very easy to be taken advantage of. Whilst I wouldn’t expect people to face extreme negative feedback like the video below I have heard some really reprehensible questions asked of candidates in interview situations.

Categories of Dumb Interview Questions

At least in the UK most forms of discrimination are illegal. Unfortunately discrimination is alive and well in the country and I suspect in many other countries too. If you are asked a question that you think may be discriminatory the first think to do is to check out the intent behind the question. For example you might be asked about your age as a way of determining something about your relative level of experience. In which case it should be easy for the interviewer to explain or reframe the question to get the point they were looking for.

If you are not satisfied with their explanation of why they are asking the question just refuse to answer and let your interviewer know why. At this point the interview will be very defensive and the likely hood of you getting the job are probably quite small. The reality is though would you want to work for an organisation that are willing to put you in that position even before you start?

The sad thing is I’ve spoken with quite a few people that have left companies and they knew right from the interview that it was not going to work for them. They ended up accepting the job because it was offered to them and they felt obliged to take it. So the first thing to be able to react better to this sort of thing is to have the self esteem to stand your ground and the confidence to know that there are other jobs out there. The reality is that when you frame your experience and aim it at the kind of work you want to do there are usually lots of jobs for you. My NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills System is based round creating that winning attitude first and then framing your experience so you can target jobs in a way that interviewers will be begging you to come for interview. Once you are there it is far easier to negotiate from a position of strength.

Some of the people that have been through my system tell me that after setting the interviewer straight on the issue they have walked out of the interview and addressed it by writing to the CEO of the company.

Ego Driven Questions An interview should be a two way process designed for you to give the company the opportunity to explore the benefits of employing you and for you to decide if the company can provide you with a rewarding and fulfilling environment to work in.

Some interviewers mistake the interview context as an opportunity to act up and try to act clever. They ask questions designed to trip you up or they just play silly games. Any difficult, awkward or plain stupid question just needs to be redirected to something more intelligent. I like doing this by including a soft verbal bitch slap for the interviewer for being stupid. If you don’t feel like being that adversarial then you can easily soften the approach. The general approach is:

• Acknowledge the question
• Redirect it to something more sensible
• Answer the new question with your prepared material

Let’s look at how this might work in a couple of different examples. Typical dumb interview questions focus on negative or the past that don’t give you the opportunity to open up the real issue, which is how you can provide benefit to the new company or role. A typical question might be something like; “Why do you want to leave your current position?”

Using our general formula the answer might look something like:

“The issue is not about leaving my current position. The issue is about why I want to come and work for you. I want to do that because based on my research I think I can provide you with a great return of investment for example…” and then you can launch into one of your prepared examples.

Here is another rubbish ego driven question that does deserve the interviewer being gently bitch slapped. The question is something like, “What is one interview question you would hate to be asked?” After you answer they obviously follow up by asking you that question. You can tone this down if you want to be easy with the interviewer but my preferred response would go something like:

“The worst question you could ask me in interview is any question that is ego driven and designed to play games rather than to explore the benefits I can provide for your organisation. The issue is not about playing games but being able to demonstrate the things I can do in the role that you are offering. For example I can…” and again you can launch in to one of your prepared examples.

As you can see both examples follow the general formula we discussed earlier. In my NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills System we discuss how to develop answering difficult questions so you can respond to almost everything (extreme negative feedback excluded) with a prepared example that links you directly with the role and the company values as well a leaves the interviewer with an image in their head of you being the ideal candidate for the role. The system is full written up in the Persuasion Skills Black Book of Job Hunting Techniques. 

Buy it from Amazon.com: Paperback orKindle

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk: Paperbackor Kindle

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:

Reshaping Reality Using Hypnotic Language

One of the great things about language is that we can use it to frame our reality. Imagine how great a persuasion tool you have if just by the very words that you use you reshape reality around you. I suspect some readers won’t believe that it makes sense, it is possible or that it is easy to do. In this video you will see me doing it as part of teaching a bunch of student how to do it.

This video is almost an hour and half long and this is just the start of the material we discuss. You can imagine just how powerful the rest of it is. If you want an opportunity to see the rest of the video keep an eye on this article page or sign up to my list. I will be releasing details on how you can get a copy in the next few days.

Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed

Alternatively if you want to start studying how you can apply these concepts to everyday persuasion situations then click through and find out more here.

The Power of Shifting Tenses

What Shaz has done is used the past to pace the reader. He is building a connection between what he wants you to do to things that you have done in the past. That is a fairly common way of pacing people and I am sure you will recognise using this approach yourself. For example it often happens naturally when meeting new people. A common tactic is to look for commonality like commons places you have lived, worked or holidayed in.

In this particular case Shaz is making a direct link, learning one thing is like learning another thing and look at the incredible benefits you got from learning to XYZ.

Shaz then goes into the present connecting the new things he wants you to learn and then out to the future to build motivation. This is all great stuff and I would do it slightly differently.

Outcomes are Key with NLP Techniques

Shaz has made a great attempt at putting together a whole slew of patterns and he should be proud of this. The best part of this is once you start seeing the underlying patterns you will naturally start creating sequences like this naturally and in the moment. I suspect this is where Shaz’s pattern came from and that is impressive work. Now that we have this here is how I would start refining it.

I am going to assume that the intention is to motivate the recipient to learn some powerful hypnotic language. In which case I might still start with a metaphor from the past and then go out to benefits from the future to apply to the current situation. An example of that might be:

That is just me taking some of the ideas Shaz started with and just playing around with them. I don’t think I would use this in written form and is seems a little clunky. But to open a course on hypnotic language, it needs a little work but the core of the idea I think is pretty solid.

More than Switching Tenses

Have a couple of scans through the paragraph again. You will find a whole lot more in there from embedded commands through sequences of internal representations and how I use referential indexes. See what you spot and feel free to leave a comment or two below or on the facebook page about what you found.

One of the key ways of learning things is through a process of modelling. This is how you learn to walk and talk and do hundreds of other skills that you are extremely proficient at. Many people, Shaz included are dramatically improving their persuasion skills by paying close attention to the hypnotic language patterns they are finding in my material and then practising with it.

My most powerful course to date is the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed because it takes you through the modelling process and you get to see hypnotic language patterns several times over from multiple different perspectives. This means you learn as a student, as an observer and through looking at the situation through my eyes as well as applying the skills to your own life. You can find out more about the programme here.