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by: KenrickCleveland
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"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances - to choose one's own way." - Victor Frankl

The phrase "thinking outside the box" comes up quite a lot in conversations about business management and every time I hear it, I laugh to myself. It's a cliche at this point that has sort become so overused it's almost lost its meaning. Coaching, management, sales, self help, even in education and sports, this catchphrase rears itself in all manner of arenas. People are constantly saying that you have to step outside the box to find success or find higher levels of achievement. Society has set up these boxes, and it is up to the innovators to step outside of them, in essence. What the heck is this box? And why have they hindered us for so long? Isn't this just another way of saying that we have to enlarge the frames through which we view the world?

As persuaders, we must be flexible in all situations. We have to have a fluidity in our creative approach to our prospects and clients. Many business coaches and sales trainers are very rigid in their approach and by trying to distill something as complex as sales into something as limited as a script, further pushes people into boxes.

Every situation is particular, each client or prospect has a very specific key or trigger which our creative sleuthing requires us to uncover. Remaining static is not an option in this quest. We have to have agile, almost yogic minds, able to bend the way our prospect bends, and twist the way our clients twist.

We are all very different and old-fashioned sales training attempts to turn us into anonymous cookie cutter dupes. Over and over, they use the same techniques. Through learning persuasion, we can understand that if we don't accept the boxes from the get go, we are starting of ahead of the game. Instead, we use frames, which like your glasses or your picture frames, can contain different views. These frames are far more powerful in understanding our prospects and determining their needs as we work with them.

When we choose how we view the world instead of allowing outside forces to choose for us, we have a magnificent capacity to influence and sell like never before.

Our ability to frame improves with practice, as does our ability to do absolutely everything in life (learning an instrument, a language, etc.) In order to really get something, we have to do it and do it again. There's no avoiding "the work". Do it and do it again and you will succeed.

Writing out exercises and repeating language patterns within our given fields, coming up with lists of objections that we commonly get and then reframing the objections before they even come up in conversations with our prospects and clients, studying the thirty six Chinese stratagems as a way to further our internal understanding of what it means to be persuasive. . . these are easy steps to really installing in yourself the ability to persuade powerfully.

About the Author

Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques.

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