Top 10 Effective Influencing Skills
By Nick Hill at 26 March, 2010, 3:27 pm
1). Know your outcome
Top class communicators know exactly what it is they want to achieve. Before your meeting think about your personal objectives and the win/win solution. Unless you know your list of objectives, how can you track if you are getting what you want?
2). Create a ‘Frame‘
Setting the scene to get shared agreement on the purpose of the communication and ‘course of events’ is a key skill. Agree what is to be covered, what your objectives are, what shared objectives there are and agree the way forward for the meeting. By doing this everyone is now aware of the course of events and knows what to expect.
3). Use tools that engage and encourage a person to see your perspective
Let’s face it. You’ve got an outcome and you want to achieve it so your role is to use language to steer a person towards your way of thinking about your idea. Language patterns are great, especially patterns like mind reading and tag questions.
M.R – “When it comes to something like business tips you want tools that you can easily learn and immediately use”
T.Q – “That’s really important that you can use these tips right away isn’t it.”
4). Get in rapport
The ability to create a ‘connection’ with another person and develop rapport heightens the strength of the relationship with the other person. Pay attention to the other person’s behaviours, movements, voice speed, tonality, hand gestures. By mirroring their ‘patterns’ you create an environment where a person accepts that you are ‘similar’ to them and ‘connects with you’.
5). Use pacing statements to create more ‘connection’
“As you’re reading these tips, (Yep), taking on board the information, (OK), digesting it in your mind, (aha), you might begin to think about the next meeting you are going to and how by using these techniques you might get a different result!”
By making statements that a person can’t disagree with you are plugging them into your communication. “Yep, OK, aha, mmm”
6). Use language that offers options
Could you be interested? Would you be interested if..? Might you be happy to move forwards….? I’m not telling you, I’m just asking if you might/could/would be?
Suggestive language gets you your true response as the decision is made by the person.
7). Heighten your level of ‘awareness‘
Did the other person just ‘move’ or frown or look as if they were about to say something? If you assess the non-verbal movements of your prospects whilst communicating to them you’ll get a good idea of whether or not your information was received as it was intended. Non-verbal movements from another can mean that they need clarification or have a question.
8). Matching of patterns
Ever been with someone who looks at you one minute, then looks away, then back again, and away again, then…… Are they rude? NO! It’s another pattern of theirs so ‘match’ it. It’s how they communicate and how they preferred to be communicated to!
9). Understand the other person’s needs and values
Whatever the statement made by the person, there’s a reason they’ve asked it and its important! Only by asking “Why is that important to you?” can you begin to understand the ‘driver’ behind the statement. This is the real reason they said what they said!
10). Re-cap, Re-cap & Re-cap
“So. You started reading at the top of the page, have taken in the information, learned or confirmed a few things and maybe now could be a good time to go out there and start using these tips to give you the edge in your meetings.” Just like ‘pacing statements’ re-capping not only re-confirms what has happened, it re-plugs the person back into your communication loop.
Their attention is now back on you.
These tips were brought to you by Nick Hill, Director and Trainer at Binary Vision, Leeds, UK.
nickhill (at) binaryvision-nlp (dot) co (dot) uk
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