Secrets of Hypnotic Influence and Persuasion Virtual Classroom Series

In this lesson I want to teach you a questioning strategy that is very effective at beginning to elicit the floodgate experience and diving into your clients compelling emotional outcome. In our last lesson we talked about getting to the answer behind the answer. Today we are going to actually use a pre-frame to point the client in the direction of what we are looking to understand for them. And the question itself is a simple one to learn, it has a couple of complexities in there that we will talk about but it points their unconscious mind in the direction of looking for those compelling emotional outcomes. Literally what we are asking them to do is position themselves out in the future, bake a happiness cake, bake us right in and then tell us the recipe.

The question goes like this:

If we were to begin working together, what would have to have happened for us to be sitting here at some point in the future, I am going to use a year from now, and for you to look back and think to yourself, this has been an absolutely wonderful investment of my time, my energy and my assets?

Now that is the exact question that I teach financial advisors to use, you can change it based on your industry. A year may or may not be appropriate for you. For example if you were in the mortgage business I wouldn’t make it a year, I would say, “what would have to have happened between now and closing for your to look back and say to yourself this has been the absolute smoothest, easiest, best mortgage transaction that I have ever been through in my life.”

Now lets break down a couple of components:

First we start of with a little mental aikido and that is ‘if’. If we were to begin working together. That’s something for the critical mind; I’m not saying that we are going to but if, hypothetical question, no reason to light up the critical mind. We were to begin working together; this is where we are baking ourselves into the happiness cake. What would have to have happened, now that is grammatically awkward, that is the future perfect tense. And what you are asking their unconscious mind to do is, as you think about this actually do me a favor and code it as a memory. And you can look back at the way that you store memories in your brain and think about for example, last weekend what is something that you actually did last weekend? And notice how you store that!

And then think of something that you could have done but didn’t do. Now that is more of a fantasy. And you will notice that you store those two thoughts differently in your mind. So using that future perfect tense we are offering up the suggestion that they store this as a memory. Now we are getting a little bit more specific, for us to be sitting here in this office a year from now and for you to look back and think to yourself this has been an absolutely wonderful investment of my times, my energy and my assets. We are asking them to project themselves into the future think about working with us in an extremely positive way and then by saying, what would have to have happened, we are saying tell what are the ingredients. What are you looking for? What would you need to see in order for you to be experiencing these absolutely wonderful outcomes in the only place that it really matters your mind?

Now this is actually a hypnotic version of a question that has been out for a long time, called the R Factor question. We have added a couple of hypnotic components into the mix to make it significantly more powerful. And this is something that we consider one of our big gun type questions. In fact in the jumpstart program I tell you I don’t recommend that you lead off with this one. I think it’s a good idea to have a couple of precursor questions that come before this.

And this is one of four very powerful hyper open-ended questions that we teach you in the JumpStart Program.

So your homework assignment for this is customize this for your industry, for your timeframe, for your outcomes that suspect people would like to see and go out and use this question in your initial sales calls. And once you have got the answer, remember now you are getting the presenting answer so make sure that you are diving in getting the answers behind the answers and make sure you are taking those answers four levels deep.