Sidestepping Logic to Get To The Boss: The Unconscious Mind

"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding." ~ Ambrose Bierce

For too long emotions and the uncharted waters of the other than conscious mind were not thought of as tools to help us in business. But I'm here to tell you, that's exactly where we need to go with persuasion, especially as we focus on persuading the affluent.

Our conscious mind can only hold seven (plus or minus two) bits of information at a time. Seven bits of information. . . that's not a whole lot, is it?

If you think about how many millions of things you could be consciously thinking about, your mind might have a bit of a meltdown. We've got a very limited amount of conscious space for a good reason.

Our conscious mind couldn't possibly absorb and process everything that's going on around us which is why our unconscious has such a huge job.

So what happens to the information around us that is available to us at any moment in time, but that we don't pay attention to. Where's it going? Well, it goes into our other-than-conscious. It's not that it isn't perceived--it is often being perceived--it's just that we're not consciously aware of it.

A visual representation of the would have the conscious mind as a tiny crumb with the unconscious mind being the entire rest of the pie.

So how can we take another person's consciousness and side step it to access the real boss of their unconscious?

Most people are persuaded based on emotions, feelings that are going on inside of them, not with rational, logical things that are going on inside them. People make their decisions emotionally and then back up these decisions with logic.

So we want to give them some logic at the end so that they feel good about what they've done emotionally, but that's about the extent of it. We need not over-stress about what the person is consciously thinking, but learn to appeal to the unconscious through all these different kinds of strategies that we're talking about here in these posts.

By eliciting criteria we are getting to the emotional core of what is important to our prospects and clients.

For example, let's say their top value is 'Freedom'. When we trigger their need for freedom we're stirring up a whole cauldron of emotions.

Freedom as a high value can be seen as frustration and humiliation in a person with an 'away from' orientation. They want freedom from their constraints. Freedom as a high value in a person with a 'towards' orientation is manifested as a feeling of dominion, as in, 'I want more of this feeling'. If you can maneuver your way through these two orientations with your product or service as the answer to their emotional need to move away from constraint or towards more freedom, you'll have navigated a landscape where business fears to tread.

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.

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