Are your sales pitches falling on deaf ears? Are you consistently failing to get your point across to your spouse or your kids? If so, then you will want to learn how to sell effective with metaphors – a powerful tool to influence others, make your point and get the message across!
Do you love watching movies? Do you love listening to stories?
Since ancient times, stories have been recognized as one of the most effective mediums of conveying a message to others. In NLP, storytelling (metaphor) is a powerful technique that you can use to win influence over others.
The use of metaphors in the areas of persuasion always seem to work like magic since they are universal, transcending boundaries of age, culture etc.
For those who want to learn how to sell effectively, the first lesson will be to understand what’s metaphor and how to use it elegantly…
The Best Way to Influence Is Not to Influence!
If you have ever tried persuading or influencing someone, haven’t you been greeted with tons of resistance? It seems that most of your clients tend to form a defensive barrier in front of them the moment they sense that you are trying to sell them something.
The key to succeed in influence is to understand that people do not like to be sold. People prefer to be “bought over”. Thus NLP teaches that the best way to influence anyone may be to do it subtly.
Learn How to Sell By Speaking to the Unconscious
[pullquote style=”right” quote=”dark”]The use of metaphors in the areas of persuasion always seem to work like magic since they are universal, transcending boundaries of age, culture etc.[/pullquote]When communicating with others, we can either do so by speaking to their conscious or their unconscious mind. However, imagine what would have happened if Obama had asked the Americans to vote for him directly when he was running for the President back in year 2008?
Instead, Obama (who is obviously a trained NLP Practitioner) decided to convey the same message across to his voters by connecting to their unconscious mind- “If one voice can change the nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.”
Similarly, whenever we share a metaphor with someone, we usually find it easier to deliver our intended message across to someone, since this NLP tool helps us to bypass any conscious blocks or resistance to information. In our NLP courses, NLP coaches also use metaphors as means of dissociating clients from a situation and motivating them to take certain actions implicitly.
Once in our NLP Practitioner Certification course, I remember helping a client who was experiencing a relationship conflict with her colleagues to overcome her challenge just by seeing the same “problem” in a different perspective. This was accomplished through the use of various NLP tools such as Metaphors and Perceptual Positions.
So here are three basic steps that you can follow to use NLP metaphors and influence more effectively and effortlessly:
- Identify your desired outcome. What is the purpose of sharing the metaphor? Is the use of metaphors an ideal manner of getting your message across?
- After you have identified your desired outcome, create a metaphor with the relevant characters and situations. You should map out the present situation in terms of the relationships and strategies currently used with similar characters and situations to build a story. For instance, if you were to share the story of the “three little pigs”, what will each of the three pigs represent in the client’s real life situation?Like many other powerful NLP influence techniques, the key here is to dissociate your client from his own situation or problem, and pick up learning points from the metaphor as you have planned.
- Finally, you can weave in any new strategies and resources into the story so that you may lead the other person to the desired outcome.
To find out more about the use of NLP metaphors and other NLP tools to influence others, come join us for one of our new NLP Singapore Sharing events and discover how influence can be as easy as ABC.