NLP has not yet modelled James Carville. Until that happens, this book helps you understand what makes people tick and how to communicate. It is great book for lobbyists and political campaigners, yet it does not mention those words in 357 pages.
Instead, it provides you with a model for how to communicate with and persuade people. Communication and persuasion are the real skills of the successful lobbyist and political campaigner. Too many lobbyists act as if their job is being their client’s flabby cheerleader, policy wonk for a day, or blustering Robert Duval like consigliere.
What Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall remind us in ‘People Patten Power’ is that people think their own way and not your way. Until you grasp that, it is likely you are going to fail in communicating with, let alone, persuade them. Too many lobbyists think that repeating the same points of why they are right and others are wrong, to every decision maker and influencer is persuasive. If it is not working, they may raise their game a bit, and repeat the same points more loudly and emphatically. This book shows why this approach is unlikely to work.
Can you understand what makes people tick
It is worth quoting direct from pages 4-8. I think the points are self-explanatory.
Tailor your communication
“To get another person to change what he is doing or his way of thinking, it is necessary to tailor your communication to the way that he thinks and behaves. What may cause you to change is often quite different from what will cause him to change”.
Do these four things
“It is necessary to match their model of the world in order for them to be influenced by your communication. In order to accomplish this, you need to do four things which are focus, observe, communicate and verify.”
Purposive Communication
“To focus means knowing what your specific outcome is for that specific communication. All of your communications need to be purposive. Do not just do things arbitrarily and impulsively, but always have an outcome in mind for everything you do and say. … Effective communicators always operate from well-formed outcomes. Without outcomes clearly in mind, communication is simply a chance activity. Your outcome should include how you want the other person to think or to behave. Once you have this clearly in mind you can tailor your communication to get the response you want.”
Observe Deeply
“To observe means that you need to pay attention to and observe the person with whom you are communicating until you understand his or her model of the world. … Observe until can think the way that the person with whom you are communicating does. Observe until the structure if his way of thinking becomes the way you are thinking. Only then will you be able to match the communication to that person’s model of the world
To observe, also, means …. Observe the person with whom you are communicating to see how they are responding to you. You have to see if what you are doing is working or not.”
What is success … it is what they think, not what you think
“In other words, it is not what you intend to communicate, or what you think that you communicate, but what the other person perceives you as communicating that matters. …. If his response is what you intended, then you are successful. If his response is not what you intended, then your communication has not succeeded in getting your outcome. I this case, you need to do something else. Anything else certainly has a higher probability of success than what doesn’t work. If you are getting the response that you want, repeating yourself louder and more emphatically is not likely to lead to success either. You have to change your communication and to continue to observe and monitor these responses until you are successful.
Speak their language
It is critical to communicate with a person by matching the form of his thought process. Remember that it is the form of what you say rather than the content of what you say that is important. It would be like speaking a foreign language … If the person does not understand your language, you can repeat the content until you are blue in the face, and he will still not understand. If you speak that person’s language, however, then he will understand what you are saying immediately. Usually, people get caught up in content, and forget that content has to be expressed in the other person’s language before he can understand it … Remember, too that things get better by chance and selde0m do they improve by chance. For other people to change, you have to change the way that you communicate with them.”
Share their reality … even if for an instance
“The goal is to enter the other person’s reality and to share his model even if only temporarily for the purposes of the interaction
What really counts is matching the model of the world of the person with whom you are communicating.”