My strongest persuasion techniue

How to enter into a prospect's model of reality

If you want to make real money you need an edge. 

With a bit of effort you can master the basics of persuasion, and that may even be enough, especially if you’re in a market where no one else knows the first thing about real influence. 

But if you want to play in the big boy markets, that ain’t going to cut it. They all know how to write compelling headlines, leads and hooks. Offering stacking. Pricing psychology. Standard objection handling.

Pretty much they’ve figured it all out… or so they think.

I have a technique I use that I have only seen one other marketer use… and it helped him build a $112 million dollar company from scratch. 

And he learned the technique from me. 

I didn’t invent it. I learned it from the father of conversational hypnosis, Milton H. Erickson. My contribution is I learned how to shift it from a one-to-one therapeutic environment to a one-to-many sales environment. 

The technique is simple in practice but because it’s so different, a lot of people struggle to wrap their heads around it. I am insane enough to think I can teach it to you though, so here we go. 

While reality may be objective in the grand scheme, every single one of usmake 100% of our decisions based on our own “model of reality”. Note the universal language qualifier I used - every. There is almost never a time you can legitimately make a statement with words like every, all, none, never, always, etc. 

This is the exception. 

Your model of reality guides all the decisions you make, from the shirt you chose to wear today to what you do and don’t spend your money on.

In the areas where you constantly make bad decisions and know you are making bad decisions, you have an impoverished model of reality. Something is broken and if we can fix it, we can automatically fix your broken decision making process. 

I demonstrated this technique so eloquently on a recent webinar I did where we promoted an Amazon training program. My Rapid Crush Insiders and I are calling it the “Gene Close”. 

Here’s how it started:

When I saw this comment, I became instantly curious to what Gene’s model of reality was for making (or not making) this investment. 

So I asked: “How will you know when you’re done thinking about it?”

That’s a doozy of a question! I didn’t ask what he needed to think about. I didn’t lecture him on the importance of making decisions. Instead, I elicited his model of reality.

Here’s what you’ll find when you start doing this - it’s rare that the person can satisfactorily provide you an answer.

Any answer. 

The brain is wonderful in that it’s designed to protect you. 

So when you start thinking about something that begins to overwhelm you, you know what you do? You shut it down. What’s likely happening is Gene wants to buy it, but he’s also scared of something. When your fear response is triggered you either fight it, you flee from it or you freeze up. None of those responses help you grow, they are merely there to protect you in the short term. 

Gene doesn’t know the answer, because Gene’s brain hasn’t gone past step one. With some digging, I discover he really wants to feel confident that buying is the right decision. 

So I ask: “How would you know you’re confident?”

His answer:

Yes! I couldn’t have asked for a better response. 

Gene wants to buy the course only if he feels confident enough but - right now - the only way he can measure confidence is by making money with the course first. But he can’t buy the course until he makes money.

He’s in a conundrum. There is no possible way he can move forward. He’s stuck.

Don’t be so quick to judge. 

Every one of you (and me, too) have some aspect of our life where we are stuck in this exact same fashion. 

My favorite example is when someone says: “I don’t have time to meditate.” Those who say that are the ones who most need to meditate. 

Whatever. You must do this work with love and care and compassion. And in that moment my heart went out to Gene. Here is a guy who is trying to better himself, better his situation. 

He’s investing time to learn and educate himself. He wants to move forward, but his brain is pulling him in two different directions at the same time. 

The hardest part about this technique is you must do it without judgement.

There is nothing wrong with Gene (or you or me) for getting stuck in this feedback loop. It happens to all of us. My compassion shows up when I ask him if he is open to an alternative way of working through his problem. 

He has now let me fully into his model of reality as its new interior decorator. He still makes the decisions, but I can suggest new designs. 

We establish a new way to measure confidence via progress throughout the course (if he were to invest in it) and then use that to determine if he stays in the course or not. 

Gene signed up. 

I congratulate him because he did something most people struggle with so hard, and that is that he opened his mind up to a different way of thinking. Good for him. 

Now there is one word in his response that says it all -TRUST. 

Gene trusted me because he felt I understood him… maybe even better than he understood himself. He trusted me to help assist him in how he should spend his money. 

I gained this extra “buyer” trust in the span of a few short minutes by first understanding how he makes his decisions, getting him to consider alternative strategies for making those decisions, and then helping him compare which decisions he could make that would serve him best.

If I didn’t clear up his internal inconsistencies, I doubt I would’ve made the sale. 

I united both his heart and his brain. Most of the time you think with one or the other. You’re all intellectual and you miss out sometimes on the forest, because you’re staring at the trees. Or you’re too emotional, and as a result you jump in and out of things as the emotions come and go. 

The only thing worse than going down the wrong road is going down it as fast as possible since you’re fueled by passion.  

A holistic alignment of the heart and head is how you can make sound decisions and pursue them with passion. 

Try it out and start small. Ask your friend this question: “How do you know when you made a good decision?” Ask five friends and you’ll get five different answers. You may have to probe because your model of reality automates your decision making process. It makes it unconscious and so it’s hard to describe at first consciously. 

So a conversion might go like this. 

You: “How do you know when you made a good decision?”

Friend: “It just feels right.”

You: “Can you describe that feeling?”

Friend: “Hmmm. I don’t know, it just feels good.”

You: “Where does it feel best?”

Friend: “Great question. In my chest.”

You: “Interesting. Anyway, what do you want to eat tonight, Mexican or Chinese?”

Friend: “I’m not sure, both sound good.”

You: “Think of each and see which one gives you more of that good feeling in your chest.”

Friend: “Actually, Italian is feeling best.” 

You: “Cool, I haven’t had pasta in a while.” 

Best,
Jason “map ≠ territory” Fladlien

P.S. One time Milton Erickson was asked what he would do if a parent brought their kid to him, because the kid had taken to walking around the neighborhood carrying a large cross. 

Erickson said he’d want to examine the cross. See if they could - together - find a minor improvement on it. If he could get that improvement agreed to, that would open the way to larger changes. He could discuss with the kid the advantages of having different crosses for different occasions and how the kid would know when to carry which cross. 

His point is it’s hard to consistently hold onto a distributive belief when examining it across multiple scenarios and perspectives. I call this “collapsing the model of reality”. There are only two ways you change something - you create something new or you destroy what exists. Destroying is usually more effective. 

Something to think about.