I am often asked about recommendations for books. And the truth is I will eventually put up a page on the website  and the hundreds of books that I think are worth reading subdivided into categories. But in this article I want to just focus on two rather special and unique books that I think you should have a look at and what makes them special.

These two books were written by graduates from my NLP Practitioner Course, in fact they were on the same course.

A Brief NLP Interlude

I should make people aware that my NLP Practitioner Course is not about creating authors. The course is about learning the tools and methodology of modelling. Both John and Joe have taken this idea and applied it twofold. Firstly they have modelled the process of writing a book and applied that to themselves. And you will see when I start talking about their books they have also modelled a whole bunch of processes within their chosen subjects.

I am only running one NLP Practitioner course this year. And I can’t promise that you will become an author as a result of it. What I can promise is that you will learn to model and apply learning processes. And you will test your ability by doubling your reading speed, learning to juggle and use hypnotic language patterns.

You will learn a whole load of tools and techniques but the whole point is you will learn the core fundamentals that will allow you to create, improvise and synthesise new tools and techniques when you want them.

Find out more, including what recent graduates are saying when you click through the image below:

Meanwhile Back at the Point

John McKinstry – War Stories, A parable about anger in the office

There are lots of books and material around anger management. John has done a great job at taking the subject of workplace anger and treating it with a fresh new approach. He skilfully describes a range of ideas and tools that have proven value.

But the important thing is not just the content but the way that John skilfully demonstrates and teaches you the skills by using the story of guy having trouble both in and out of work.

Obviously if you have had challenges with misplaced anger at work then this book would be ideal but there are so many other reasons for looking at this book.

If you are interested in NLP then this book is packed full of the stuff on at least three different levels. There is the first level of just tools, techniques and content that John is teaching the reader. That on its own is valuable. But then there how John skilfully uses metaphor. This you need to look at from two different levels. Firstly he is demonstrating the tools and techniques he wants the reader to learn. And he also uses the story to motivate the reader to engage the reader and draw them in. You can get the book on Amazon:

Joseph Benn – Brilliant Business Ideas – The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Profitable Creativity

Joe’s book appears more straight forward. Joe has a lot of experience with business start-ups. His source of frustration would come from people coming in wanting to start a business but with no idea what in all the way through to people with really strange ideas but so invested in them that they were not prepared to listen to any advice no matter where it came from. I remember having discussions with him about the fact that there are hundreds of books on creativity but most don’t have a process for doing it and rarely to they talk about being creative within parameters.

Joe has been spending time developing a set of techniques designed to get people very creative but within a business context. So this book is about having ideas, being creative and problem solving but from inside the box. Again the book is quite superb but the issue isn’t just about the content. Joe is another one who has taken key NLP material and used it to create a great result for himself and his readers. You can get the book on Amazon

A Big Book of NLPness

Don’t be fooled by the guys that want to sell you some rot about a book of NLP techniques or a course of the same nature. NLP is an unregulated industry with and no standard definitions. So they can do whatever they like and call it NLP and they are most welcome to do that.

For me there are two reasons why I take the approach I take. Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP defined this body of knowledge as; an attitude (of wanton curiosity) and a methodology (of modelling) leaving behind a trail of techniques. This spoke volumes for me when I first heard it. If we take on the attitude and learn the methodology we can create our own techniques.

Both these great books come from practitioners from my NLP course that espouses this approach. In both books you will find tools and techniques that almost but not quite look like standard NLP techniques. They have either been altered or created from the ground up by the authors to create the specific results they were looking for.

But beyond this they also figured out, modelled if you like, the process of writing a book. Just as a little thought experiment have a scan around the internet and find a few NLP Techniques, if you don’t already know some. Ask yourself the question, would knowing a bunch of these techniques allow you to write a book. Or would you prefer to develop and attitude and learn a methodology? Find out more about the one NLP Practitioner Course that I am running this year when you click through here:

Persuasion Skills don’t have to be Rocket Science

There are all sorts of clever ideas, tools and tactics that you can use in persuasion. And the issue is if you have missed the foundations you are doomed to make things hard work. A key element that I see missed out a lot is just seeing things from the view point of the person you are trying to persuade. It sounds simple but so many people just either get it wrong or refuse to even look from that perspective.

Here are a couple of examples of this can lead you in to trouble or create instant success depending on how much you consider the other person.

Job Hunting an Exercise in Perceptual Positions

We are seeing a growth of people self-publishing on social media platforms as a route to employment. There have been a few media events, like the guy who set up his website with the “honest” CV, the “worst CV in the world” and that sort of thing. And several people setting up websites complaining about traditional job search methods not working any more so they are driving traffic to their CV on a website they have set up.

I suspect this sort of thing will get you noticed and possibly get you in front of someone that might hire you. With a little bit of thought this could be enormously successful. In fact I have seen a few people that have used social media to get great jobs. Below I will outline one strategy that I have seen used several times and has been so successful each time I have seen it used that I recommend it in my book; the Persuasion Skills Black Book of Job Hunting Techniques. But before we get to that I want to hit home the important point so let us switch contexts.

Whose Needs are We Talking About?

I spend a lot of my time on the internet and find myself raging at a lot of web sites. Many websites have lots my custom instantly because in their excitement to tell me all about themselves they don’t bother to tell me why I should want to know about them. It might be really nice for them that they have been in business for hundreds of years, have a great list of values and won so many different awards…but why should I care? What I want to know is what are you / your company / your products and services going to do for me.

Over the years I have been taken through a sales process many times over. In fact I am a complete pushover, love being sold to and as a consequence will buy almost anything when they do a good job of selling. But if they start with what a great product / service / company it is; or hit me with benefits without finding out my needs first, they will not get my business.

On the same grounds in a recruitment situation if an interview candidate can’t tell me how their skills, experience and attitude will fit with my company or the role then I already know they are thinking about themselves and not what they can do for my company. I am already less inclined to hire them.

Perceptual Positions are Key

Imagine you are on the internet and you are looking for a particular service, for the illustration let us say you need an accountant for your new owner run one person start up business. As you search the internet you come across three websites:

1. Accountants ‘R’ Us – We deal with all your accountancy needs large companies, small start-ups, international tax law, dealing with insolvency, audits and mergers. If you need an accountant we will have one for you. Here is a list of all the accountancy awards we have won from around the globe and a list of all the huge mega corporations we have worked with.
2. Small Business Accountant – I specialise in accountancy services for small owner run start-up businesses. Here are a number of case studies of successfully run one person business operations I have helped to get started. Give me a call and I can arrange for you to go and speak with any of these businesses about the quality of service that I provide.
3. Accountants ‘n’ Chips – I run a Fish and Chip shop and do some painting and decorating jobs on the side. I also do all my own accounts. Since the economy is slow at the moment I need to bring in some extra cash so I am hiring myself out as an accountant, any takers?

Are there any of these three that you would automatically call or any that you would automatically reject?

Appeal to All Appeals to None

You might thing the example above is a little silly and I would agree with you. I have recently seen a number of websites with people using social media to try and get a job doing exactly this. In all the recent cases I’ve seen they have posted a general CV that is nothing more than a list of their experience and have listed several unrelated jobs that they would be willing to do. To make things worse they generally start with saying that they have tried the “traditional route” and it hasn’t worked so they are trying this instead.

Now look at the impression this creates for any potential recruiter. For me it shows that they are desperate, they are just thinking about themselves and doesn’t sell me any benefits of employing them. Unless I have a specific role or unique place for them I will have rejected them as quickly as I would if their CV / Resume had landed on my desk. Bluntly if they just did some decent work on their CVs / Resumes they would find that the “traditional route” still works fine.

Whenever I have spoken to guys doing this sort of thing they usually tell me that this strategy has generated more interested than their months of sending out CVs and Resumes. And I can see this, at the moment it is a quirky, relatively unknown and newsworthy way of job hunting. So people will watch with interest and with a little activity traffic will get to the CV / Resume.

Over the last six months I have seen this strategy being employed four or five times. When the novelty value wears off I suspect this won’t work as well and even if it does targeting is the key. How much more effective would it be if you wrote your CV / Resume to target a specific job and then drove specific targeted traffic to it? To do this you need to get into the heads of the people that you want to see your CV / Resume.

A Social Media Job Hunting Strategy

Compare and contrast that approach to something I have seen work several times over.

The candidate builds their CV relating it specifically to the role they are searching for. Instead of a bland list of “work experience” (Who except a 16 year old just leaving school describes their career as work experience? ) they have a highly targeted profile that links their experience to the specific job. They fill their professional experience with key achievements that provide evidence of the benefits they can provide.

Once they have the CV up and running they join forums and groups related to the job. LinkedIn is the perfect environment; in fact it was developed for this sort of networking. The candidate asks opinions, writes articles and debates key issues within their industry. On LinkedIn you can set up groups for specific niches, you can also ask or answer questions about relevant topics. A few days of this sort of activity will allow you to demonstrate your expertise and if you are not already talking with the people you need to network with you are better placed to approach them directly.

I have seen this approach work several times and I can see it work in wider, more general social networking groups.

Getting the Foundations Right

All the people I have seen that are bemoaning that the traditional route doesn’t work and are trying a social media strategy have been missing some fundamentals. The biggest part being they fail to look at this from the employer’s perspective. If they did they would have better CVs / Resumes displayed on their websites. The odd thing is if they had a targeted CV the traditional route still works very effectively. All you need to do is understand what your potential employer needs and then write your CV / Resume to demonstrate how you meet those needs.

Here is an email that I received a couple of days ago:

The Key Point in Persuasion

Just learn to see things from the other guy’s perspective, find out what is in it for them and then present that to them in a way that is compelling for them.

In the job Hunting context the NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills Course shows you have you can write your CV / Resume so that your targeted employer is almost compelled to call you for interview. It also shows you how you can answer most interview questions leaving the interviewer with an image of you as the perfect candidate. And for all those difficult questions; the course shows you have you can reframe them into questions that you want to answer. Click through and find out more here:

A recent email I received spurred me to write a little about dealing with subtle aggression. If you have a difficult person in your life that is never quite openly abusive but is constantly putting you down in small ways this article may help.

Subtle Aggression

People that you interact with frequently, like family members or co-workers, can easily use patronising words and phrases together that taken on an individual basis may not mean anything. But when you put all the instances together they form a subtly aggressive attack on you.

These sorts of attacks are notoriously difficult to deal with because if you get angry they will most likely respond with things like:

• “Your blowing it out of proportion.”
• “It’s only a joke.”
• “You are too sensitive”

It can be a difficult thing to deal with because that one act on its own doesn’t seem like a big thing and it only becomes so once you see it in the context of other conversations.

Here is the email that I was sent:

A Process to Tackle the Problem

Here is the process:

State Management

The first thing you need to do is keep hold of your emotions. They are doing this to get an emotional response, so let’s start by denying them that. Also by keeping hold of your emotions you are able to think and use your skills more effectively.

Here is one way I personally do this. I imagine myself as a stealthy crouching tiger just stalking my prey. I know if I keep calm and clear headed just waiting for the right moment the person that is doing the attacking is going to get seriously mauled and it will be me doing it.

I like this imagery because it gives me back the psychological edge that the person was seeking to deny me. I am now stalking my victim rather than reacting to whatever they said.

Pause

It may take you a moment to get a grip of your emotions and that is great. Just pause, ideally just look at the space between their eyebrows as you pause. By staring at this point it looks like you are making eye contact, but obviously you aren’t quite. This is good for you because not making eye contact means it doesn’t get any more intense for you. But for the person you are just about to deal with the situation is starting to ramp up.

Remember they are looking for an emotional reaction from you. What they have got is you holding their eye contact without giving them anything. If you can keep looking unemotionally at that space between the eyebrows until it feels really uncomfortable and then count slowly to ten before speaking. If you manage this, and it is easy with just a little practice, I will guarantee that the other person will start to speak again. It is almost impossible to keep that void in conversation.

Reflect the Offending Behaviour Back and Ask for an Explanation

Depending on how forceful you want to be either stop them from saying anything else or let them say whatever without responding and let them run out of steam. Then use the super redefine pattern to get to the heart of the matter. Here are a couple of examples of the whole phrase getting more extreme as we go:

I agree you want me to prove it and the issue isn’t my having to prove anything. It is about you explaining why you think I should have to justify anything to you at all. Explain to me what makes you think that is acceptable behaviour.

I agree that you need more information on how I form my opinions and the issue isn’t the information you need but how is it that you have so low self-esteem that you need to try to put me down constantly. Where did your low self-esteem come from?

I agree proof is useful and the issue isn’t about proving my point, it is about explaining why you constantly need to prove that you have no social skills. How have you managed to grow up without developing proper social skills?

Toning it Down a Bit

I agree that these examples might seem a bit extreme and the issue is not about the language and is everything about the pattern allowing you to deflect from they are talking about and point directly to the heart of the matter. And then by asking a question about that heart creates a totally different conversation that is focused on their behaviour.

And trust me this will make them squirm. Especially if you keep using the pattern as they try to get away from discussing their behaviour. My favourite way of doing this is to keep repeating the pattern but getting more extreme as I go just like the above example.

Remember I am not trying to be conciliatory here. And just because I am choosing to deal with this in an adversarial, almost confrontational manner doesn’t mean that you can’t turn this into something much more collaborative and reconciliatory for example:

I can see that proof is important to you and before we discuss that I would like you to be aware of the impact that your behaviour is having on me. Let’s discuss how you can talk to me without me feeling like I am being attacked.

You can find this and many more patterns in the international bestselling Persuasion Skills Black Book. But the key that really makes this work is the state management and emotional handling skills. The Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed course gives you emotion and state control techniques as well as a method of developing a persuasive personality that can handle stressful environments like when you are being bullied. Click Through and find out more here.

Why do you want the Job?

As an interviewer I often ask candidates the question why do you want this job? I ask that question because however it is answered it gives me a great deal of information about the candidate. Let’s go through the pit falls and then we can look at how this interview question is a golden opportunity for you to get the job.

Attitude Makes a Difference

Many people going into job interviews just begging for a job. They think the balance of power is with the employers. They have low self-esteem and think there are other people out there that can do the job as well if not better than they can. They have a mistaken belief that the interview is about them.

Look at this from the employer’s view. Imagine a candidate is walking in with an attitude based round things like “Please employ me…I’ll do my best…I’ll try my hardest…” Would you employ them? I wouldn’t.

Imagine how someone with this attitude is going to answer a question like “Why do you want this job?” Even if they are desperately trying to hide their attitude what sort of answers would they give? Have a think about it and compare your answers to those from a different mindset below.

What do employers want?

Now here is something people need to recognise. The “best” person for the job revolves around two things:

• Can you do the job i.e. skills, qualifications and experience
• Does your face fit i.e. do you hold the company values, do you have the right attitude, ambitions or more succinctly, will you do a good job.

The things is companies hire based on the first and they fire due to deficiencies on the second. Your job in the interview is not about demonstrating the first, it is demonstrating incontrovertibly that you fit the second.

How does this help?

I could tell you about a particular situation when I was researching job hunting techniques where I got offered a £60 000 (almost $100k) a year job after I told the recruiters that I had lied on my CV (never do this to get a job – I was researching job hunting techniques so I had to fake credentials to get to different types of interviews – lying on a CV can be classed as a criminal offence), that I didn’t have any of the qualifications or experience that they were looking for. But here is an email I received a while ago instead:

What is the Difference that Makes the Difference?

What Drew did in preparation for his interview was to look at what he would bring to the new role. He looked at what would make him the ideal candidate and how he could drive the role forward, what he would enjoy about the job and how the company would benefit from it.

He then looked through his professional life looking for examples of where he had demonstrated the exact qualities that made him the perfect candidate. Imagine how different Drew must have looked when he walked in to that interview.

I don’t know if he was asked that question but imagine he was. The sort of answer I think he would give would be something like, “I want the role because I am a great candidate, here are a couple of examples of how I have demonstrated the key qualities that you are looking for in the role and here are some specific results you can expect from me when I am working with you.”

How different does that look as an answer compared to someone that has a “Poor Me. Please give me a job because I’ll try my best,” attitude?

And if you have a system for doing this you can generate these answers like Drew did, in a couple of hours the night before the interview.

As a recruiter I was desperate to just hear someone say, “I want the job because I would be great at it and here is my evidence to say so. If you employ me I will make you money / save you money / save you time and effort. Here is specifically how I would do that. I will enjoy doing it and that is why I want the job.” It didn’t happen often enough and in almost every case where it did they got the job.

But what if it is just a job to me?

Imagine if you were confident enough and with enough tools and techniques to get any job you wanted. Would you have a different attitude to job hunting? My guess would be that you would go for jobs that you would enjoy or jobs that gave you the experience that you need to further your career or has some personal meaning to you. And then you would simply move on when your criteria had been met.

To me this makes more sense than doing a job that does not fulfil any of your needs. Think about this, most people spend at least forty hours a week at work and many people spend a lot more, especially if they have to commute. Once you have finished with sleeping and chores this is longer than you spend with friends and family, hobbies and interests or doing the things that bring meaning to your life.

I think you owe it to yourself, your loved ones and any employers you choose to work with that you only apply and do the work that has some sort of personal meaning to you. If you want to know exactly how to do that then have a look at the NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills Course.

Shaking People Out of Trance

People are hypnosis machines. They flit from trance to trance. If you are not sure about this spend a few moments watching people on the streets in the middle of any large town. What you will see is people going about their business almost completely oblivious to their surroundings.

One important area of hypnotic persuasion is getting people out of the trance they are in and into the trance that you want them in. One great way of doing this is called pattern interrupts. The theory is simple.

When something so completely outside of your normal experience happens it often takes a few moments for you to work out how to act. And in those few seconds you are open and suggestible to a new direction.

Learn to Pattern Interrupt

Here is comedian Jack Vale just pattern interrupting for comedy effect. Watch the video because it is really funny but also notice how many of the people just slip into trance. In particular watch the guy at 1.35 As a hypnotic persuader at that point you could have taken this guy anywhere.

But How Useful is a Pattern Interrupt?

In the Persuasion Skills Black Book you will read about a particular circumstance where a pattern interrupt saved my life. Here is an article where a pattern interrupt allowed me lead a complete stranger out to some odd places. That little pause between thoughts is a great place to place some imaginative suggestions. Here is the article

If you want to find more about a strategic approach to hypnotic persuasion skills then the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is a great place to start. Click though and find out more here.