How To Instantly And Easily Tell If Someone Is Listening To You Or Simply Paying You Idle Lip Service

Have you ever been in a situation when you’ve been talking to someone in a persuasion situation? You thought you were getting your important message across and felt comfortable that you were having an element of success in influencing the situation. You thought they understood your message loud and clear.

However later on you discover that that message went right through them, like water through a sieve, you might as well have not said a thing.

Frustration

This can understandably lead to a lot of frustration. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort tying to persuade your child to do something or putting across a persuasive sales message to a client and it was all more or less wasted.

Well here is a tip to help you discover if someone has really processed your message. It is based on the NLP concept of “eye accessing cues”.

How We Process Information

When we process information we tend do look in a certain direction to access that sense. Some people hold that position for a second or so while others will emphasize the fact by actually pointing their whole head in a particular direction.

Sights

Try this with one of your friends. Ask them a question like “what color is your front door.” This is a question that will require them to access a visual memory of their front door. The chances are will look up and either to the left of right.

Sounds

Then ask them to remember a sound. For example “What was the last thing you can remember your partner saying to you”. It is highly likely that they will look to the left or right. This is the sound eye-accessing cue.

Feelings

Finally ask them how they know when they feel totally relaxed, totally chilled out and at ease. They will have to access their feelings and will likely look down. Note: they may look up first to remember a time in the past visually before looking down either to the left or right to recall the actual feeling.

Now that said, how can we use this in an influence or persuasion situation? Well simple really. If you as someone a question an they are looking straight at you then it his highly likely that they have not actually processed the question. They have simply answered on auto pilot. You need to either repeat the question or ask it a different way.

So in summary, each time you ask someone a question make sure their eyes move either up down, or to the side, different people have different styles. This means that they have processed the question. Whether they have understood it is a question is a question for another day!

To your persuasion success.

Jason D