Here's How to Use Emotions To Persuade the Affluent
Side Stepping Logic to Get to the Boss:
The Unconscious
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
When it comes to persuading the affluent, or anyone for that matter, we’ve got to dig deeper… into uncharted waters… where most business people are afraid to go. We’ve got to appeal to the unconscious mind, using emotions in our selling.
Our conscious mind can only hold seven (plus or minus two) bits of information at a time. Seven bits of information. . . that’s not a whole lot, is it?
Think about how many things there are to think about–the smell of a peeled orange, the way the ceiling fan feels, the pebble in your shoes, the feel of the ring on your finger, the sound of the car outside, the child crying, the rumble in your stomach, the itch on your neck, the song on the radio. . . on and on and on.
There are so many things going on around us at any given moment that there is absolutely no way for the conscious mind to pay attention to and process almost all of it. It just goes to show you just what a huge job our unconscious has.
So what happens to the information around us that is available to us at any moment in time, but that we don’t pay attention to. Where’s it going? Well, it goes into our other-than-conscious. It’s not that it isn’t perceived–it is often being perceived–it’s just that we’re not consciously aware of it.
I would argue that there’s too much being made of what we are as a consciousness, so to speak. People think that we have logic therefore we are and that’s not true. What’s in our conscious mind is of the least importance.
It does separate us from lesser conscious things like maybe dirt or trees or a building, but the mind is like an iceberg; It’s the tiny sliver that sticks above the water compared to the giant amount that’s actually underneath.
The same is true with the way our conscious and unconscious mind works. We pay attention to that tiny little sliver that we see out there in the world when in reality it’s all of the other perceptions that are also coming in to influence us.
How do we take the conscious mind of another individual, the tip of their iceberg, and set it aside so it doesn’t object to us as we go directly and access the real boss, the unconscious mind?
Knowing that this is the case, we need to realize it’s true that people are actually persuaded based on emotional things that are going on with them, not logical things. Logic helps, but people make the decision emotionally and they back it up logically.
So we want to give them some logic at the end so that they feel good about what they’ve done emotionally, but that’s about the extent of it. We need not over-stress about what the person is consciously thinking, but learn to appeal to the unconscious through all these different kinds of strategies that we’re talking about here in these posts.
When we elicit criteria we’re side stepping logic and getting to the core of what’s important for the prospect or client.
For example, let’s say their top value is ‘Freedom’. When we trigger their need for freedom we’re stirring up a whole cauldron of emotions. For an ‘away from’ personality this could range from when that ex-employer humiliated them, to when they felt trapped in a bad relationship, to, possibly, when they were stuck in traffic on the way to see you.
For that ‘towards’ person, they’re feeling that time when they were on their yacht or the day they finally had enough money in the bank, I like to call it ‘F-you’ money, to dictate their own terms in business and in life. They’re feeling that freedom and want more of it.
So the way you interact with that emotion of humiliation or frustration or rage (in the ‘away from’ person) or the liberation and feeling of dominion (in the ‘towards’ personality) and make your product or service the antidote (away) or access to more of (towards), then you will have succeeded in navigating the uncharted, murky (emotional) landscape where most business transactions are afraid to go.
What are some examples from your business life when you allowed yourself to be fearless in the face of (gasp!) emotion? How were you able to make a connection that transcended the logical mind?
Keep checking in to the MAXpersuasion blog for upcoming posts on hundreds of other persuasion topics!
Until next time,
Kenrick E. Cleveland
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