Choosing Your Own Way

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way." - Victor Frankl

Every time I hear someone talk about "thinking outside the box" I chuckle. Like any cliche or catchphrase, thinking outside the box has been so overused as to become downright irritating. From business coaches and management consultants to the realms of education, sports, sales and self help. . .think about how many times you've heard someone say in order to succeed or break through to higher levels of achievement, we have to step outside of the boxes that society has dictated we exist in. Well, what is this box and why is it such a hindrance? And isn't this just another way to say we need to be creative with the frames that we use to view the world?

As persuaders, we must be flexible in all situations. We have to have a fluidity in our creative approach to our prospects and clients. Many business coaches and sales trainers are very rigid in their approach and by trying to distill something as complex as sales into something as limited as a script, further pushes people into boxes.

Everyone has a special trigger, or a key, to the very depth of their being, and it's our job as persuaders to uncover what these triggers and keys are for each and every client and prospect. It's not as hard as it sounds, but it does require us to do a little work, a sleuthing, in essence, to really determine how best we can serve them with our product or service.

Old fashioned sales training attempts to cram people into boxes incessantly. Instead, in persuasion, our goal is to really learn all we can from our prospects and clients, what it is that drives them at their core, and combine that with our products and service. By using frames instead of boxes, we have the ability to be agile with how we present, how we speak to, how we work with, a huge variety of people.

When we choose how we view the world instead of allowing outside forces to choose for us, we have a magnificent capacity to influence and sell like never before.

Our capacity to frame improves with practice (similar to all things from learning a language, to learning an instrument, to learning yoga or starting an exercise regime). We absolutely do improve the more we try something. There's no getting around that. The key is to do it. And do it again.

Writing out exercises and repeating language patterns within our given fields, coming up with lists of objections that we commonly get and then reframing the objections before they even come up in conversations with our prospects and clients, studying the thirty six Chinese stratagems as a way to further our internal understanding of what it means to be persuasive. . . these are easy steps to really installing in yourself the ability to persuade powerfully.

About the Author

Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.

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