Seeing Yourself In Others' Skin - An Exercise In Compassion
We've all heard the saying, you can't know a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes
. This technique is a figurative expression of that saying. It is about how to gain rapport by putting ourselves inside the person we're trying to persuade. Harper Lee wrote in To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
As we step into the skin of our prospects, we experience them and their affluence, their decision making strategies and emotional states. We can then give them exactly what they need.
Our other than conscious minds are goal seekers. We have a strong pull toward pattern recognition. We can immediately pick up characteristics of others so that when we step inside them, our unconscious has already formulated what we will experience.
How do we step inside another person's skin? Easy: jump in. Have an image in your mind of yourself, looking at the prospect or client and just imagine yourself jumping in. Once inside, begin to model and/or mirror the other person.
You might ask, is this real? I don't know and frankly, I don't care. It's a mental construct that I create in my mind. I make up that I am in your body looking out at the world through your eyes.
I've never seen a faster way of gaining rapport than this exercise. If we're specifically working with an affluent clientle, this is phenomenally powerful especially if we're not as wealthy as we want to be.
Assume that there are a very finite number of patterns that can exist. Go to a bigger level, think 'astrological signs' or personality types or any number of systems you can work with. We have many different ways to classify people, and our pattern recognition systems seek out the limited possible combinations.
Building these images is a construct. We might not always be accurate in our assessments, but if we are in front of our prospect, and we're hearing them and talking with them, seeing them move, keeping them in our sites, then we can instantly change our constructs moment by moment. The construct gets more complete and more powerful as we lock onto the personality of our prospect.
As you step into your client, leave yourself behind. See through their eyes. This allows you to move along the process of rapport on a very deep level. You are so completely identifying with their behaviors and all of who they are.
One way you can make this more powerful, more tangible, is to "feel" what their clothes feel like. If the person is of the opposite sex, you might feel what their gender feels like and actually take on a few of those characteristics.
What are their physical characteristics? How does it feel to have those characteristics? Notice when you step into the other person, where you feel the connection to them. Do you feel the connection in your stomach, in your feet, in your hands, in your chest, in your head? Where do you feel the connection? By asking yourself these questions you'll deepen the rapport.
Keep this in mind before you do this: if the person is physically sick, mentally ill, or if you have the intuition that they might not be a savory character, do not jump into them. This can be hard to shake off and may stick with you in an unpleasant way.
This is a powerful exercise and even if you're not tremendously in touch with "energy", you can still use this to your advantage in persuasion.
Seeing Yourself In Others' Skin - An Exercise In Compassion
By: Jeremiah Slivka
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