The Ego, Why It Can Be Persuasion And Influence’s Biggest Challenge
Your ego goes to work whenever someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to take care of your business, your quick and instinctive reaction is to show them they are wrong! When using this tactic, be cautious not to damage the ego. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: If you cause damage instead of creating a challenge, you are producing and air of indifference from your prospect.
In a team environment sports coaches commonly use another challenge to player’s egos. Lets say during practice a player isn’t trying very hard, is continually late for team meetings, or keeps making the same mistake again and again. The coach uses a perfect ego based remedy. He’ll bring the team together and explain what is happening with the individual player and the he makes the whole team except for that player run laps. The punishment is a challenge to the ego of this football player. Such a situation only has to happen once to be persuasive for every 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!
Another example is giving people credit for things they don’t even know. When you give people credit for knowing something they really know nothing about, they generally will say nothing and allow you to believe them to be smarter or more aware than they really are. The catch is that they then will try to live up to the undeserved credit that you have bestowed upon them in order to lead you to believe they really are smart. You have heard such phrases as, “You probably already know….” or “You will soon realize…” These are direct challenges to our egos.
When talking about persuasion, we are faced with the never easy task of building up the egos of our listeners placing our own egos on hold. In order to persuade effectively you have to let go of your ego and make sure you focus on the objective. You won’t have time to fix a bruised ego so check your ego at the door and focus on persuasion.
Want to find out more about persuasion skills, then visit Kurt Mortensen’s site. Take Kurt’s FREE Persuasion IQ test and see where your strengths lie and where you need improvement.
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