How To Handle Their Ego, But What About Yours?
Whenever your abilities are challenged by someone your ego kicks in. Especially in the case of doing business, the immediate and very instinctive reaction is to make sure your prove the other person wrong. Be careful to avoid damaging the ego when employing these tactics. WARNING: When damage is caused rather than producing a challenge, you will create an air indifference in your prospect.
Another challenge to someone’s ego is commonly used by sports coaches in a team environment. When during football practice a player is not putting in 100 percent, is late for meetings, or keeps making the same mistake, the coach has a perfect ego-based solution. He brings the team together and explains exactly what has happened with that particular player. He then has the whole team, except for the guilty player, run laps. This punishment is a challenge to the ego of this football player. Such a situation only has to happen once to be persuasive for each member of the team.
We very often have challenging messages geared directly at our egos. As an example in a multilevel meeting, managers may say they only want to work with the “go-getters” and “people that can take action.” Teachers may phrase it to a student like this, “I’d like for you to do the advanced assignments.” I have even seen sales representatives attack their prospect with a subtle suggestion like, “I guess you don’t have the authority to make that decision.” You should see the egos come alive.
Another way is to give people credit for things they don’t know. When you do this they will generally say nothing and allow you to believe them to be smarter and more aware than they really are. Then they will try to live up to the undeserved credit you have just bestowed upon them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. Here are a couple more phrases that are direct challenges to our egos, “You probably already know….” or “You will soon realize…”
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. Don’t reprint this exact article. Instead, reprint a free unique content version of this same article.
categories: ego,persuasion,sales training,sales coaching,business
