Things You'll Need:
- A persuasion objective
- A person you want to persuade
- An understanding of that person's core beliefs
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Step 1
Evaluate the person you wish to persuade and determine what kind of visualization is likely to cause a powerful emotional desire to comply with your persuasion goal.
In the case of a car salesman, he may only have several minutes or less to try and understand what motivates the prospective buyer. A good salesman quickly strikes up a conversation and tries to get a feel for the core values of the prospective customer. For example, is this person conservative or liberal, does he have a large discretionary income or is money tight, etc. In other cases you might have the luxury of a much longer planning period. If your persuasion objective is to convince your supervisor to accept your new proposal, you might have plenty of time and information about who your supervisor is and what her belief systems are like. In either case the more accurately you assess what kind of visualization will garner the result you want, the more powerful the visualization tool will be.
Let’s imagine that your prospective car buyer is a “stay at home mom” with three children. Creating a visualization about beating another sports car in a drag race at a stoplight probably won’t get the emotional response you want. Instead, you’d try and create a visualization of the babies being securely tucked in while the nine year old occupies himself with the factory installed DVD player. -
Step 2
Use the power of suggestion so the person you wish to persuade envisions as a reality the picture you are painting for him.
Find a way to verbally create a set of circumstances so the person you wish to persuade can plausibly see them being planted in this vision. If you’re trying to sell a reader a new exercise system and you know that this person will likely be a middle aged male, your picture should reflect a set of circumstances that seem possible.
You wouldn’t tell your reader to see himself being dropped from a military fighter plane by parachute behind enemy lines and taking out a brigade of special force combat troops in a hand-to-hand battle. It’d be much more effective to paint a picture more along the lines of going to a summer barbecue, ripping off his shirt and having all the other guy’s wives whistling seductively as his buddies sneer with jealousy. -
Step 3
Once you've evoked this kind of emotional desire from the person you wish to persuade you make a close and solicit an agreement.
