In the Abundance for Life course Paul Scheele talks about stuff he learned from Mark Orth. On the interview CDs, Mark talks about how he uses language to get information about a person's map of the world to persuade that individual.
It's pretty powerful stuff.
If you have Bandler's old Patterns of Persuasion tapes you'll have heard a great deal of these patterns and some of them are in the Persuasion Engineering book.
The way Bandler uses them, is, I don't know ... I would never want to use them that way. It would feel skeevy. But the way Mark uses them is different. It feels more caring.
Basically, you will ask questions about a hypothetical situation involving a product, service, or outcome to get someone's map of it.
An example I've experienced first hand was when this woman was talking to me about her boyfriend, with whom she seemed about to break up. She said that her boyfriend, and previous boyfriends were all uncomfortable with how powerful a person she was. She said that I looked like a guy who might like a powerful girlfriend, and she just wanted to know what my point of view would be about her if I were her boyfriend.
So, I pretended I was her boyfriend and talked about the things I might think and feel about her, having known her for a little while. She began to ask me questions about what I said. "Well, what about that would make you feel that? What do you have to think in order for that to be true?"
After we stopped talking and I went home, I realized I was seriously hot for her. I mean I wanted her bad. Later I realized what she had done. It was pretty slick.
She had gotten me to imagine we were already together and got me to investigate and develop my mental map for being together with her, enjoying her, appreciating her, and being turned on by her. By the time we were finished talking, I had had a seriously detailed set of representations of us being together, etc.
It wasn't ethical, but man did it work. I ended up getting together with another person, and I saw this same (persuasive) girl during that time. We had a similar conversation, but I was hip to her ... and she seemed to back off a bit.
So, that's how it's done. It's pretty damned effective. What I didn't think about was using the same sorts of techniques with myself. I realized that most goal setting techniques are merely attempts at enriching your map conerning the benefits and positive role in your life of any desired outcome.
It's persausion ... but at the same time it is more than persuasion. It isn't only fooling yourself. An interesting thing about Mark Orth's approach is that he'll ask questions involving the negative aspects of something as well. "If you owned this car, what do you imagine would be some of the things that might dissatify you, having owned it for some time?"
The client will talk about dissatisfaction, but in doing so will enrich the experience of already having owned the car. Of course, I am assuming later on in the discussion he would address those concerns (dissatisfactions).
Pretty neat, huh?
