Whenever your abilities are challenged by someone your ego kicks in. Especially in the case of doing business, the immediate and very instinctive reaction is to make sure your prove the other person wrong. Be careful to avoid damaging the ego when employing these tactics. WARNING: When damage is caused rather than producing a challenge, you will create an air indifference in your prospect.
Another challenge to someone’s ego is commonly used by sports coaches in a team environment. When during football practice a player is not putting in 100 percent, is late for meetings, or keeps making the same mistake, the coach has a perfect ego-based solution. He brings the team together and explains exactly what has happened with that particular player. He then has the whole team, except for the guilty player, run laps. This punishment is a challenge to the ego of this football player. Such a situation only has to happen once to be persuasive for each member of the team.
We face many challenging messages geared toward our egos. For instance a multilevel marketing meeting, managers might say they are only looking for “go-getters” and “people who know how to take action.” A teacher may say to a student, “I’d like you to do these advanced assignments”. I have witnessed sale reps make a subtle attack on their prospect’s ego when they felt they were not making the sale. They said something like, “I guess you do not have the authority to make the decision.” You should see how quickly the ego kicks in!
Giving people credit for something they know nothing about is another example. When you give them credit for knowing something they know nothing about they generally will be quiet and let believe tat they are as smart as said they were. The catch here is they then will try to live up to the undeserved credit you gave them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. You’ve probably heard phrases like, “You probably know…” or “You will soon realize…” These types of statements are a direct challenge to our egos.
In persuasion, we are faced with the difficult task of building the egos of our listeners while placing our own egos on hold. In order to effectively persuade, you have to let go of your ego and focus on your objective. You don’t have time to mend a bruised ego. Check your ego in at the door and remember your overriding purpose. Focus on persuasion, not on yourself.
Everything we want out of life is on the other side of persuasion. Find out where you are strong and what I can help you improve by taking the Persuasion IQ test, it’s free and informative.
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