How To Handle Their Ego, But What About Yours?
Posted by Kurt Mortensen, under Self ImprovementWhenever 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.
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!
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…”
In persuasion, we are faced with the difficult task of building the egos of our listeners while placing our own egos on hold. In order to effectively persuade, you have to let go of your ego and focus on your objective. You don’t have time to mend a bruised ego. Check your ego in at the door and remember your overriding purpose. Focus on persuasion, not on yourself.
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. Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service
