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Choosing Your Own Way 
By: Kenrick Cleveland
"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
"Thinking outside the box". . . you hear this all the time from business coaches, to management, to sales training, to sports training, to self help and educational areas. It's overused so much it's almost become meaningless. How many times have you heard this cliche that suggests you have to step outside "their" box in order to succeed and achieve? Are these boxes, boxes that have been set up by society? By our teachers and parents? By our bosses and management? And if so, why are they hindering everything so much? I believe that 'the box' is just another way to say that we must enlarge the frame through which we view a problem or situation in order to find solutions.
In theory I agree with the use of flexibility in all situations. Being creative and flexible in any given situation allows us to not be easily restricted by other's limitations. In business, we find rigid constraint in many areas for a variety of reasons (cost, fear, etc.). And yet, we see a rise in old fashioned sales training which attempts to cut down something as complex as sales into easily digestible pieces that seem anything but 'outside the box' and in fact are the very epitome of the box.
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.
Old fashioned sales training attempts to cram people into boxes incessantly. Instead, in persuasion, our goal is to really learn all we can from our prospects and clients, what it is that drives them at their core, and combine that with our products and service. By using frames instead of boxes, we have the ability to be agile with how we present, how we speak to, how we work with, a huge variety of people.
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.
Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles
Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.
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