Posts

Mark Rodgers’ Ultimate Guide to Self-Persuasion Success — Part 2

in

In a recent post, I introduced what I like to call the “Ultimate Guide to Self-Persuasion Success.”

At the core of this approach is learning to become more resilient. Just as the body needs air, nutrition and regular exercise, your mind needs a fitness regimen, too. You must regularly stretch, feed, work, coach and rest your mind.

What follows are seven more keys to self-persuasion success. Consider this your all-access, lifetime membership to Mark’s Self-Persuasion World Gym.

1. Dopamine up.

Exercise can fuel dopamine production in your brain, making you feel good, look good and present your ideas with confidence. Plus, if your target doesn’t say “yes,” that response won’t bother you so much!

2. Be present.

Research suggests that the majority of people’s thoughts are almost entirely consumed with past regrets (“What I should have said was …”) or focused on anxiety about the future (“What if this next guy doesn’t buy?”). Such thinking makes us sacrifice the present moment, which is the most precious gift we have. So throw yourself into what you’re doing right now, and if your thoughts start to wander, tell yourself to “get back to work.”

3. Undergo digital detox.

Turn off all your gadgets for, say, 60 minutes a day — and enjoy the quiet. Think about it: No TV. No Spotify. No Twitter or Facebook. Making this a daily regimen will calm your brain and allow you to focus on the present.

4. Be convinced of your own value.

Ask yourself these questions and try to respond positively:

  • Do people compliment your work?
  • Do others ask for your advice?
  • Have you contributed an idea at work?
  • Have you sought additional education?
  • Can you produce testimonials and references?
  • Can you list best practices that make you successful?
  • Have you participated in or contributed to a professional organization?
  • Do clients or customers ask for you by name?

You might not have positive responses to all of these, but you probably have more than you thought. These are the accomplishments that should pass through your mind whenever your pathological critic works his way back into your self-talk.

5. Use positive affirmations.

In sports, team captains often rally their teammates by yelling at them: “We got this! We got this!” While it may not be grammatically correct, from a psychological perspective, it’s dead on. When you catch yourself slipping into negative self-talk, replace it with something positive. I realize this sounds goofy, but it works. Find a repeatable phrase and run it through your mind. I like one made famous by the late French psychotherapist Émile Coué:

“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Find one that works for you and keep using it. You got this.

6. Always create high-quality options.

Never allow yourself to have just one option for your persuasion project. Always have Plan A, Plan B and Plan C. Offering high-quality options for everything you do will transform your mental state.

7. Keep a success journal.

Every night before you go bed, write down three things you did well that day. Some people are wired to magnify setbacks in their mind and minimize success. This isn’t healthy — mentally or physically. By forcing yourself to reflect on your day and capture three positive aspects, you can reverse this dynamic. Such an exercise takes incredible discipline, but if you can do this consistently, it can have the same mood-improving impact as anti-depressant drugs

Next time, I’ll share how to create an honest self-assessment.

Mark Rodgers’ Ultimate Guide to Self-Persuasion Success — Part 1

in

Living with low self-esteem, self-efficacy and self-confidence steals your energy and ability to cope with anxiety, problems, challenges and risks. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that attaining high self-esteem, solid self-efficacy and weapons-grade self-confidence does exactly the opposite. It enables you to solve problems rather than worry about them, find ways to win people over, and work directly and purposefully to address interpersonal issues.

Many of the following ideas could fall under a category of psychology referred to as cognitive therapy. That is, participating in activities, exercises and conversations that improve your “self-talk” or ongoing internal dialogue, and therefore impacting everything from your emotional state to your persuasive performance. For some, this is the purview of incense-burning, beard-wearing types who wouldn’t be caught dead without their yoga mats. If you can break through that bias, though, you’ll discover that it’s powerful stuff.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University studied 240 depressed patients who were randomly placed in groups. Some received anti-depressant medication, others participated in cognitive therapy, and still others received a placebo. After 16 weeks, both the anti-depressant group and the cognitive therapy group had improved at about the same rate. The real difference was that the cognitive therapy group was found less likely to relapse during the two years following therapy. Why? They had acquired the skills and behaviors to think more positively.

This example illustrates the key to becoming more resilient. Just like the body needs air, nutrition and regular exercise, your mind needs a fitness regimen, too. You must regularly stretch, feed, work, coach and rest your mind, so consider what follows as your all-access, lifetime membership to Mark’s Self-Persuasion World Gym.

1. Be cognitively aware of your internal dialogue.

When you make a mistake and find yourself thinking, “I always mess up!” or “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid,” hit “stop.” Don’t keep running the video clip on a loop in your head. Stop and reframe your negative thoughts.

2. Reframe negative thoughts.

Don’t scold. Fix. You don’t always mess up. It’s not that you’ll never get anything right. You did land the job in the first place. And you’ve done many things well and achieved success. You simply have some aspect of a project or relationship that is giving you a hard time. Break it down and troubleshoot. Maybe it’s not the entire board presentation that’s giving you fits; it’s only the intro or anticipating resistance. Identify and fix. If you don’t currently possess the skills to make a fix, acquire them. If you don’t have the information you need, find the data.

3. Use success ranges.

Don’t turn every situation into an all-or-nothing case. In other words, don’t enter every client meeting thinking you need to come out with new business or else it wasn’t a successful meeting.

4. Understand the physical side of self-persuasion.

Get enough sleep and rest, because “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Williams Shakespeare said that first, but U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton and football coach Vince Lombardi also picked up on it. Regardless, it still rings true today. Without enough rest, you won’t be able to form your arguments, look your best and articulate your positions to the best of your abilities. Ask me how I know: I’ve worked myself into a state of almost mental incoherence, and subsequently lost business.

5. Too much caffeine hurts your persuasion attempts.

Caffeine makes you seem nervous and uncertain, even if you don’t have a visible case of the jitters. So much for oozing self-confidence. You might, however, want to hope that your target has downed a few cups of coffee or cans of Mountain Dew. Australian researchers several years ago determined that people who drank two cups of strong coffee were much more easily swayed to change their minds than test subjects who were given a placebo instead.

Look for more self-persuasion tips next time.

Confidence vs. Cockiness: What’s the Difference?

in

Self-confidence means having and demonstrating an overall general sense that you will be successful.

Be careful here, though, as the line between confidence and cockiness is paved with peril. For me, confidence is best displayed by the assuredness that you will be able to accomplish a task. Whether it’s winning the business, meeting the deadline or smoothing the ruffled feathers of a relationship gone awry, you have the capacity to maintain the cool demeanor to get the job done. You may experience some obstacles, but you’ll do what’s necessary to make it happen.

Here are five examples of confident behavior:

  1. Listening to others and considering their viewpoints, regardless of their ranking in the organization
  2. Sharing the credit with others
  3. Not equivocating with decision or direction
  4. Using reason, not melodrama
  5. Evenly arguing a contrarian point of view

Emulating confident people can result in greater self-confidence. Here are my top three candidates for the Persuasively Confident Hall of Fame:

  1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: He guided the United States through the Great Depression and World War II, and his most famous line is a resounding endorsement of self-confidence: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
  2. Neil Armstrong: Imagine the confidence it took to say stand at the exit of Apollo 11 and say, “Yeah, I’ll go first …”
  3. Sandy Koufax: He left baseball at the top of his game; less confident people remain long past their prime.

Cockiness, on the other hand, is simply acting like you know it all without actually delivering.

Here are five examples of cocky behavior:

  1. Brashly talking about what you’re going to do
  2. Stating in an argument that you’re being “disrespected”
  3. Participating in one-upmanship
  4. Feeling the need to always add your voice to the conversation, regardless of whether you know what you’re talking about
  5. Engaging in overly aggressive body language.

You don’t have to look far to find cocky people. The world of sports is ripe with cockiness. Fans want athletes to win and be humble — unless those athletes play for “their”  team. My choices for the Cockiness Hall of Fame include such bigmouths as Muhammad Ali, Donald Trump and Miley Cyrus

As Ben Franklin said: “Well done is better than well said.”

How to Make a Positive (and Provocative) First Impression

in

We all know that feeling of walking into a room in which we know absolutely nobody. You might think everyone is staring at you, and that could be true. In fact, they’re already forming opinions about you based on your posture, demeanor, attire, and overall appearance. That can be a harsh reality to face, especially if you’re looking back at a conference room full of expressionless members of the board of directors.

The same thing happens in networking situations, which is why you should enter a room of strangers with a minimum/maximum mindset. Develop a range of goals, which will help you survive in uncomfortable situations. For example, during a social function at an industry trade show, don’t set expectations so high (drumming up new business with everyone you meet) that you’re bound to wind up disappointed. Instead, determine that your minimum objective will be, say, to leave with at least one solid lead for a new client, while your maximum objective could be to set up a personal meeting or teleconference to hammer out details of the new business you just acquired.

To get to that point, though, you must exude confidence. So be prepared by researching your targets, developing three intriguing questions for any new person you meet  — Where are you from? How did you land in your current position? What’s your take on the new industry regulations? — and then be genuinely interested in what they say. In turn, your targets will take an interest in you and your business. Think of this counterintuitively: When they are talking, you are making a good impression.

While what you have to say and how you say it can trump the fact that you might have a pumpernickel seed stuck between your front teeth after that morning bagel, it still pays to practice sartorial persuasion. In other words, dress well. In most business situations, that means your attire when visiting an organization’s headquarters should be 10 percent more professional than what employees typically wear there to work every day. If the men dress in polo shirts and button-downs, you should wear a sport coat without a tie. If the women wear skirts and blouses, you do the same and add a blazer with a bit of jewelry. If you don’t know what the office attire is, better to err on the side of caution. Same goes for trade shows and industry gatherings.

Would you rather be overdressed or underdressed? Do you want people to think that you give your appearance thoughtful consideration? You better, because if you’re reliable in your attire, people will presume you’re also a likeable and trustworthy person to whom they can (and should) say “yes.” Remember the halo effect?