How Do I Work With Someone Who Has An Ego?
Ego kicks in anytime someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to do your business, your immediate and instinctive reaction is to prove them wrong! When employing this tactic, be careful to avoid damaging the ego. VERY IMPORTANT: When you cause damage instead of producing a challenge, you will create an air of indifference from 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!
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 it comes to persuasion we are faced with a very tricky task of building up the egos of our prospects and placing our egos on hold. To be effective at persuasion you have to let go you your ego and focus on the objective at hand. You don’t want to have to deal with a bruised ego. So check your ego at the door and remember your overriding purpose is on persuasion and not you.
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.
categories: ego,persuasion,sales training,sales coaching,business
