THE ART OF CONVERSATIONAL MAGIC, PART II

Thanks to all of you who showed up for the LA Meet & Greet. The number of people was exactly right for the size of the room, and we had a good time doing some drills from the Tao of Dating Transformation Weekend, the Tao of Persuasion and How to Work A Room.

Things like nonverbal rapport, verbal rapport and the Million-Dollar Handshake were simply meant to be taught in a live setting, so I was glad to have an opportunity to interact with some of you one-on-one.

I told you that I would talk some more about the techniques of conversational magic, so here we go.

Last night's session with the boys reminded me that you don't need a lot of time to convey some powerful information. So this message is going to be brief but high-impact.

I was telling the group that persuasion , when done correctly, won't feel like you're doing any persuading at all. It will be a precise matching of your product to your customer's need in a way that seems perfectly natural to him—even obvious.

When she (or he) decides to buy from you, it will be like, "Duh—why wouldn't I?"

(And by 'customer', we mean anyone that you're going to deal with, whether in a social or business situation. Your customer could be that hottie you want to ask out or your boss.)

The way you achieve that level of smoothness and credibility is by recognizing that persuasion , at its most artful, happens at the level of the unconscious mind.

And the best way to access that unconscious level is through language that is processed unconsciously.

Now *all* language is processed unconsciously. If you had to think about parsing every word in a sentence, you'd go nuts before getting past the first period in this sentence.

My point here is that you want to artfully frame your request—your 'major premise'—in a way that is accepted unconsciously.

Let's look at the difference between these two phrases for the major premise 'buy me a beer', which we discussed last night at the live event:

Phrasing 1: 'Hey bro. Want to buy me a beer?'Phrasing 2: 'Hey man—what do you want to talk about after you get us beers?'

The first one is just a very blunt instrument, and it sets you up for failure because now, you're just waiting for him to say 'yes' or 'no' (and more likely the latter than the former).

You don't ever want to put yourself in that situation.

Whereas the second phrasing, although still cheeky, indirectly plants the notion of the beer in an innocuous-sounding question. You still may not score a free beer, but the possibility of 'no' has been eliminated, and now the seed of the notion has been planted in your friend's head.

Now the key word in that second phrasing is 'after'. Because when you put that in there, it presupposes that the purchase of the beer is already done and in the past. In order for your friend to comprehend what you're saying at all, he needs to make a picture of himself buying you a beer.

Once he's done that, you're one step closer to free Heineken. Why? Because when he pictures it like that, it feels like it's his own idea.

Nobody knows why this works like that—it just does. Moreover, you're not allowing an opening for him to say 'no' (unless he's really savvy and says 'hold it there mister' and nixes the beer idea, which rarely happens).

Words like 'before', 'after' and 'during' play with our mental sense of time and create presuppositions that are processed consciously.

The power of presuppositions is in their softness. It's just not perceived as a command because it sounds like normal conversation. As such, you won't get the conscious mind rising up and giving you resistance.

The key to making presuppositions work to actually give you an outcome is to use lots of them. One is nice; many work even better.

Presuppositions are a vast topic, and I could go on about them for days. For the purposes of this article, I just want you to get used to using the word 'after' in a persuasive context. And when you get good at that, you can start throwing in 'before' and 'during'.

Because when you start using presuppositions in combination, they start to have irresistible power. And that's the point where I want to get you to—the point where you have irresistible power.

In the meantime, I hope you've found this lesson useful by actually putting it to use.

The power is within you,
Dr Alex
www.thetaoofdating.com