Keeping It Interesting

Dear Persuaders,

This might be kind of a personal question, or perhaps uncomfortable, but it’s something that will advance your persuasion skills immeasurably.   Are you interesting?  In other words, is what you’re saying and how you’re saying it, engaging and appealing to your prospects and clients?  I’m not just talking about the presentation of your product or service, but the before and after talk when you’re simply conversing.

Do you have the ability to talk about any subject off the top of your head?  And I mean most any subject, because the people you’re talking with are going to bring things up and it behooves you to keep up and have the ability to talk about them too.

If you answered no,  you can’t converse on most any subject, here’s a good creativity exercise for you that will help you to gain power with this ability.

Pick a word, a noun, a person, place, thing, or idea, and then come up with other things that it reminds you of.  This is free association.   For example, the word ‘elephant’.  When you hear the word ‘elephant’, what other words do you think of?  Some that I thought of are: tusks, herds, Africa, large game animals, hunting, knowing when and where you’ll die or issues of death, survival, slow and deliberate, memory. ..  you get the point.   I could have gone on for an hour or more because every one of those words would remind me of other things.

By the way, do you know that elephants know where they’re going to die and when?  There are places called elephant graveyards.  When an elephant gets ready to die, (provided that they aren’t hunted down) they go off to the elephant graveyard for their particular herd.

I’ve also heard that elephants have very sensitive souls.  I saw this on an Animal Planet show.  When I heard that, I couldn’t figure out if the souls of their feet are sensitive or if their spiritual souls are sensitive, because both were present in the story.

See?  There are two interesting (I think) tidbits about elephants.  You wouldn’t believe how much is stored up there in your other than conscious which you can really enhance too.

If you were to do this exercise at least once per day, you’ll find after a few weeks that you start getting far more creative and far more capable of talking on any subject that happens to come up.  It will actually help to make you become more interesting.

Another way to determine if you’re interesting is to record yourself and listen to what you’ve said.  Would you bore you?   Do you have really strange inflections or breathing patterns?  Do you breathe noisily into the phone?  Do you have other linguistic afflictions?  Do you go off on tangents and forget to turn back to where you were heading?

If you have trouble figuring this out yourself, ask a close friend to rate your communication.

If they’re game and actually go through with it, giving you feedback, don’t get mad when they come up with something.

Work on these things and mainly, keep alert.  If you see your prospect’s eyes glazing over or losing their train of thought, or if they begin to fidget check in with them, and check in with yourself.

Kenrick