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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.
There are many challenging messages geared towards our egos. Think of a multilevel marketing meeting, where managers say they are looking for “go-getters” and “people who can take action.” Or what about a teacher who tells the student, “I’d like you to do these advanced assignments”? I have seen sales representatives make a subtle attack on the prospect’s ego when they were not getting the sale. They simply say, “I guess you don’t have the authority to make that decision.” You should see the egos take action!
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.
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.
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. This and other unique content ‘ego’ articles are available with free reprint rights.
