Taking It Down A Notch

Taking It Down A Notch:
The Power of Simplicity in Persuasion

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”—Henry David Thoreau

My daughter, Victoria, is becoming a beautiful pianist. Beginning piano students have a huge body of knowledge to learn—how to read music, hand position, tempo, foot pedals, where on the keyboard to place their hands. It takes lots and lots of effort to make a piece sound effortless. Students are not simply given a Beethoven Piano Sonata and expected to put it all together at once and play it.

Even an advanced player learns a piece ‘hands alone’, as in, learning the right hand separately from the left hand and then, eventually, putting them together.

There’s a long road from

beginning student to a sonata.

Breaking things down to their element and practicing, practicing, practicing… that’s the goal with learning anything, from the piano to persuasion.

I think everything is powerful in its simplicity and

when we start junking it up

with too much complexity,

that’s when it goes awry.

When I first got involved in the world of persuasion, I thought about all the trainers and teachers in this field who have not succeeded. I realized that it’s partly because they are trying to do all these complex things all together and none of it works.

So what I started doing is going back to the real basics, to the real simple things and say, ‘I’ve got to master this basic idea until I can do it in my sleep, blindfolded, when I’m exhausted, in the middle of my dreams, in the middle of my third dream, I want to do it that way.’

So I started working to do that and I started to put those things together. But all of a sudden the more complex things just started happening. I wondered,

“Why is it that I work on

the basics and the complex things

get better? I don’t get it.”

Well now I get it, and I’ll tell you something, the most profound things in the world are that which are really simple. And when you get really good at it, the big things start coming together more and more.

Take a few moments and evaluate the core of what you’re persuading people to do. What are the simple principles? Focus on these, and watch your results begin to climb.

Remember to connect them to your prospect’s deepest values. To learn more about how to do this, check out the Persuasion Factor at www.PersuasionFactor.com.

Have A Profitable Day,

Kenrick E. Cleveland