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THE TECHNIQUES OF CONVERSATIONAL MAGIC, PART I
by Dr. Alex Benzer
of Tao of Dating
November 19th, 2007
Funny story happened Tuesday night. I was at this private gathering where Chris Howard was speaking.
Some of you may have heard of him already. His company is the biggest NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) training company in the world. And he gives Tony Robbins-style seminars, and he's fast on the rise. If he's giving one of his free seminars in the neighborhood, you may want to check him out.
So Chris was giving this great talk about personal change, and he started talking about one of his (and my) personal heroes, Dr Milton Erickson.
Erickson was trained as a psychiatrist. However, he wasn't one to let the traditional aspects of his profession constrain him. And he developed some radically effective ways of getting his patients to access their own resources for change.
Erickson was so dramatically effective in his methods that Richard Bandler and John Grinder studied him to develop NLP.
Anyway, legend has it that Erickson would just start rambling on some seemingly random topic—say, a tomato plant—without ever actually putting someone in a trance. And then, miraculously, the patient would leave the session feeling lighter and rid of the problem they came with. Again and again and again.
How the heck did he do it?
He did it through a process of what I call 'conversational trance'. Basically, through storytelling in a very deliberate way, he would get his patients to change.
This was mega-effective for many reasons, one of which being that it was a very soft approach. Often the easiest way to get people to say 'no' is to tell them to do something. People *hate* to be told what to do.
Even when they come to me, for example, for a hypnosis session, they sometimes resist because it's all very set up and obvious.
But if you just come along for a ride in this story—hey, everybody loves stories. Like the one about the Deep Down Comforter Store which Chris Howard told about Milton Erickson, when Milton was a kid and lived in some state. I don't know exactly what state—the state can change from time to time, can't it.
And sometimes when the story of you reading about Dr Alex going to see Chris Howard talk about Milton Erickson who was telling a story about his own childhood and his visit to the Deep Down Comforter Store and the state he was in, it may just become difficult to try to keep track of all that as the conscious mind gets overloaded. And it just becomes very easy to just relax. And go into a
Needless to say, at this point in the narrative, my eyes had started to water and my head was beginning to slump. And I could see half the people in the audience already out in a trance. And I was loving it all the way.
See, to me, the art of persuasion is to let you find your own reasons to take action. And the process of effecting personal change in someone is the ultimate act of persuasion.
I mean, it's one thing if I can convince you to take me out to dinner. Or buy something from me.
It's a completely different story for me to ask you to change a part of your identity or personality.
Been smoking for 14 years. Terrified of getting on planes. Just can't get over your ex.
And I've got 20 minutes to somehow arrange things so that you can change your own mind.
No sweat.
Since I've done this, I know it's possible. The trick is to use the right tools for the job. In this case, they are techniques derived from NLP and hypnosis.
And if you can convince someone that quickly to get rid of a decades-long habit, or to do something with ease that just minutes ago felt life-threatening—well, then getting a phone number or having them go on a date or give you a raise or fund your venture is kinda elementary in comparison.
The crazy thing is that when you're using these techniques, they don't look like persuasion at all. Chris was just telling a story that night. A very well-crafted story, with some deliberate techniques engineered in, but still—just a story.
And it was a 'consultative sale', meaning that he was finding out what your conscious and unconscious needs were and then matching the pitch to fit those optimally.
That's why The Tao of Persuasion course draws so much upon NLP and hypnosis techniques and emphasizes the consultative process. And why, to the untrained eye, it doesn't look like a course on persuasion at all.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And when I first started using NLP-based persuasion techniques—well, they really did seem magical in their effectiveness. You phrase a request in a certain way, and boom—they say yes. With alarming regularity. And you have no idea why.
Here's one simple technique which is remarkably effective. It's called time distortion, or if you want to get really technical geeky, 'pseudo-orientation in time.'
It basically involves presupposing that the event that you want has already happened and you're looking back on it now. Simple enough.
First you need a major premise, an outcome. Let's say your outcome is for a girl to take you out to dinner. Great. Here's how you would phrase it:
"Y'know, Jennifer, one of the great things about having an amazing experience is that you can look back on that experience later on, long after it's over, and savor it over and over again. For example, let's say you take me out to dinner at Gladstone's this week, and then a month or two down the road, you look back on that night when we listened to the crashing of the waves, enjoyed the succulent fish, tasted the amazing desserts, and just had a wonderful time together, how good do you feel about having made that decision now and today having been the start of it all?"
So I'm doing a lot here, and going a little bit into the Silver Bullet technique from the course, but you essentially see what's going on: You create the experience and phrase it as if it's already happened while you attach great feelings to it.
Notice how this is different from saying, "Hey babe. I know you want me. Why don't you take me to a fancy dinner this Wednesday
If you think this kind of thing is beyond your comfort zone—don't worry. It's that way for everyone.
It's a little like drinking beer or eating sushi.
These were activities which at some point, if you're anything close to normal, you found outside of your comfort zone but don't anymore. Let's face it—the first time around, beer tastes like crap and sushi is totally gross raw fish. Right?
Now it's really rare for someone to be naturally good at this stuff. Milton Erickson was phenomenal. Chris Howard is really, really good. But these guys spent their whole lives learning and mastering these techniques. It's their job.
A 2-week NLP training would be the gold standard to get you started. My own course, the Tao of Persuasion, also provides an excellent training in the basics.
Anyway, to finish the story—halfway through Chris's talk, I was massively tranced out with my head on my chest. I was giggling a little bit because, heck, I'm *trained* to do this stuff, I knew every little trick he was using. And it still worked, and I was loving it.
And if that ain't a great description of how persuasion should really work, I don't know what is.
I'll be giving you more persuasion gems that can directly impact your social and business life in the coming weeks in the Art of Conversational Magic series of articles. Until then, feel free to send me your questions.
The power is within you,
Dr Alex
www.taoofpersuasion.com
PS: If it seems as if I left off mid-sentence somewhere or didn't finish a thought, don't wor
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