Effortless Persuasion

By Allan Smith

Master the art of persuasion with Effortless Persuasion by Allan Smith. This comprehensive guide offers a step-by-step approach to using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques for improving your persuasion and influencing skills. From establishing rapport to building desire and momentum, and handling objections and closing, this book provides you with the tools and insights to get more of what you want in your personal and professional life. Whether you're looking to increase your sales closures, create more business opportunities, or gain the cooperation of your colleagues, this book will help you achieve your goals with ease.

Effortless Persuasion is a comprehensive guide that is perfect for anyone looking to enhance their persuasion and influencing skills. Whether you're new to NLP or a seasoned professional, this book offers practical insights and techniques that will help you get more of what you want in your personal and professional life.

What to Expect Inside the Book:

Introduction to the fundamentals of persuasion and NLP techniques

Insights on managing your feelings, clearing up the past, and establishing your default state

Techniques for establishing rapport, including pacing and demonstrating understanding

Strategies for building desire and momentum, including embedding suggestions and commands, temporal language, and more

Tips on handling objections and closing, including information gathering, decision points, and closing choices

If you're ready to enhance your persuasion and influencing skills, then Effortless Persuasion by Allan Smith is the book for you. Get your copy today and start using NLP techniques to achieve your goals with ease.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Persuence Publications
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739356217

Book preview

FOREWORD

I have known Allan for many years, going back to the mid 1990s. I have watched him develop business since then, and frankly, I was more than surprised early on when he actually accomplished what he set out to accomplish at a very young age!

This book is a great culmination of what Allan has been using to help others to develop and grow their business quickly and profitably. He is more than generous in sharing what makes up his own strategies for success.

As a business consultant and trainer, Allan is well skilled in both presenting information and getting to the point of critical change when helping others.

Do not just read this book. Study it and learn the well-planted platinum gems in it that can boost your business and show your best as a leader quickly!

John La Valle, co-author of Persuasion Engineering® with Dr. Richard Bandler

PART I – INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to enhance your persuasion and influencing skills so that you can get more of what you want. Whether this relates to increasing your sales closures, creating more new business opportunities, gaining the co-operation of work colleagues or other everyday activities that we often take for granted, this book will guide you through the most impactful methods for achieving your preferred outcomes.

If we have something of value to communicate, it is essential for us to know how best to connect our thoughts, ideas, views or service/product offerings to the thoughts and lives of others. This is so that they can make a decision. The largely automated processes of, what is known as, the unconscious mind drive our decision-making and actions. If we’re only paying attention to what happens in our conscious awareness then we’re missing an awful lot.

In this book, I’m going to be referring to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, my favourite neuroscientist. She is a university-distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, USA, and has appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. She is in the top one per cent of neuroscientists on our planet and has written extensively on the latest developments in neurology. Through her writings and simplifications, people like myself, with no scientific background, can understand more about this incredibly fascinating and complex field. I thoroughly recommend you explore her work and read her book, How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain.

The details of what you are communicating may satisfy the logical reasoning of the conscious mind, but how you are communicating will affect the unconscious thought processing of this information which includes how you are communicating with yourself. This processing creates the feelings that happen at a neurological level and provide meaning to the thoughts of your past, present and future. Ultimately, these feelings drive decisions and actions, so you’ll probably agree that using your language in a deliberate and purposeful way is a critical factor in determining what others do.

I’ve spent over thirty years in the recruitment industry and, throughout this time, the process of influence has always fascinated me. How is it that some companies are able to attract the high-calibre professionals that will take their business forward when others aren’t? It’s not just the brand, product or service offering that defines the success of a business, the quality of its leadership team is also a major factor. High-performing leaders are people who understand how to influence. They excel at communicating their ideas to gain the co-operation and ‘buy-in’ from others, such as customers, suppliers, superiors, peers and subordinates. Their thoughts and, consequently, their words affect the behaviours of others. They intuitively create receptive states in others. In my experience, the most successful in this regard have an understated humbleness, calmness and assuredness which form an effective basis for their interactions. Operators of high influence know the value of mutual co-operation and leveraging the resources of others. They lack the brash arrogance and oversized ego that can stunt the progress of some ambitious, and otherwise capable, individuals.

There is no magic circle of secrets hidden from everyday society to which these ‘influencers’ are privy. There are learned skills, which are developed and refined over time, often through trial and error, along with those that we acquire through training. In this book, I will be giving you the insights that matter, and they will be all that you need, so that more of what you want to happen actually takes place!

I have known countless occasions when highly qualified people have crashed and burned when being interviewed for a job. They have had the experience, credentials and qualifications required but failed to be convincing during the interview. Persuasion is a life skill that is not solely in the domain of salespeople but is a requirement for pretty much everyone. There are many times in your life that you will need to be convincing to other people, not just job interviews. A doctor may need to be convincing about the efficacy of a treatment in order for the patient to follow the prescription. A teacher may need to convince their students to do the required study activities so that they can attain their grades. A police officer may need to convince a young lad to put down a weapon before they injure someone and spend an extended period sewing mailbags at His Majesty’s pleasure. Yesterday, I had to convince a clerk at the sheriff’s court to accept a late payment for a speeding fine, so that I didn’t incur an increased levy, despite the fact that it should have been paid some weeks ago.

In the process of persuasion, you do need sound logic and rationale to satisfy the reasoning of the conscious mind. What differentiates the successful influencer from others is the understanding that sound logic and reasoning on their own don’t always cut it. When you last bought something you really desired, it wasn’t logic and reasoning that compelled you to make the purchase, it was that unique set of feelings called desire that caused it to happen. This is the unique set of sensations, which accompany your inner voice, that says something along the lines of, I really want that. The feelings you experience is your neurology operating unconsciously, beyond your everyday awareness. To be consistent and successful in influencing others, you need to be affecting unconscious thought processes, both yours and theirs. The sound logic and rationale of your conscious mind simply serve the purpose of supporting unconscious convictions that result in decisions and actions. Logical arguments can consciously explain decisions to others; feelings unconsciously explain decisions to yourself.

Much of what you do is unconscious, and much of what every other person absorbs is unconscious. This book is about creating the unconscious experience in others, which says and acts upon YES, and aligning it with the logical reasoning of the conscious mind.

I’m not interested in the type of persuasion purveyed by creepy, caricature salespeople, who are only interested in themselves, with scant regard for you after you’ve parted with your hard-earned cash. My mother, who is in her eighties, recently had an experience with one of these characters who insisted upon immediate payment for something that she was interested in buying. There was no time to think about it, and the insistence for payment today was relentless. There is a special place in the afterlife for those people.

There is an ecology to a sales or influencing process that should be respected. I’m interested in persuasion and influence which is congruent with mutually beneficial relationships, that stand the test of time, and are underpinned with values and integrity.

All of the things contained in this book can be practised individually. However, the whole is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. It is when they are used collectively that things will really change and you’ll recognise this in your successes. It’s through breaking your communication down to its individual elements, to understand the importance of each one, and then weaving them together into purposeful, well-directed conversation that you’ll realise the foundation of elegant and effortless persuasion.

You may need this book more than you can begin to easily realise, now.

FUNDAMENTALS

In my spare time I learn Gracie jiu-jitsu, a self-defence system derived from judo and developed into a global martial art by the Gracie family from Brazil. Master Rickson Gracie is considered by many to be its leading exponent, and he is certainly one of the most significant martial artists in all of history. Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to train directly under one of his black belts. Gracie jiu-jitsu is a very technical martial art and requires much study and constant practise with classes, drills and sparring, which we call rolling. These classes keep me fit and provide an endless stream of learning, as I try to evade these savages attempting to remove my limbs, or choke me unconscious! In reality, it’s very safe if you train in the right environment, as the moment you’re in trouble you tap your training partner to signal them to stop, and you then reset and go again. I’m an enthusiastic student and participant of this art form. I’m constantly on the receiving end of attacks from stronger and better practitioners, all of us at different stages of our journey. A typical jiu-jitsu dojo will be full of the nicest bunch of killers you’re ever likely to meet, and where I train is no exception!

Master Rickson teaches the fundamentals… that’s it! These fundamentals don’t just consider the techniques, and how you are applying them to others, they also focus on how you manage yourself, such as your breathing and body tension. How you think and feel are critical to your success, in a very real sense; too tense and you’ll be easier for your training partner to manoeuvre, too rushed and your training partner might use your momentum to reverse the position and improve their own. Ego is misplaced on the mats. You need to be able to manage your whole being, thinking and move intuitively whilst you are in some very tight, difficult situations. This is a huge part of the fundamentals.

The learnings within jiu-jitsu fundamentals never stop, and one of the reasons is because it’s dynamic. It’s not static, you respond in real time to what the other person is doing. You use set-ups to encourage a response that leads to an opportunity where you can capitalise. Your training partner’s response will determine your next move. Good jiu-jitsu practitioners are thinking many moves ahead.

Your personal interactions with others are very much the same. What you say, and how you say it, creates a response in others, which in turn you respond to, and so on. The response dictates the appropriate action in which to manoeuvre the conversation in the right direction. The route is not predefined, although the direction and outcome should be. Persuasive communication is purposeful. Each communication that you have with another is dynamic. You need to pay attention to the information presented to you, and act upon it accordingly. A preset routine will work until it fails, and then what?

I intend to present the fundamentals in influential communication. These have helped many of the people I’ve trained and coached in becoming highly proficient in influencing others. How you think and feel in any given set of circumstances will determine your success, to a large extent. The more you practise and focus on these fundamentals, the easier you’ll find it to navigate through life and get more of what you want.

Fundamentals provide the base layer foundation for you to build on. I’ve always been interested in people developing their own style so that they are authentic. When I was first working in sales, I was practically two different people. One when I was at work and another when I was outside of my work with my friends and family. I was a young and inexperienced twenty-year-old who didn’t have the confidence, or training, to integrate my personality with my sales skills. I wanted to sound ultra professional at work, and I somewhat overcooked it in my early years. I thought using jargon and big words would take me forward. I made up for this deficiency with hard work, and I copied the style of people who I worked with that were most successful. I became a bit of a clone, which wasn’t a bad short-term strategy and served me well during my early days. My self-confidence grew over time and, when I became more of myself at work, my performance improved massively.

So, when I say fundamentals, to what exactly am I referring?

Creating your inner game – how you think and feel