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How to sound convinced when you're not

 

Mark Palmer and Scott Solder

 

Convincing an audience of an argument that you aren't convinced of yourself can be tough. Mark Palmer and Scott Solder show now neuro-linguistic programming can help you pull it off

 

 

 

How do you get your point across when you don't fully believe it yourself? Well, how did you do it last time? Because there was a last time, wasn't there? You probably have to do it quite a lot. Not just in politics - but at home, with your family, with your friends and elsewhere. It ranges from answering the almost universal 'does my bum look big in this?' to assuring your electorate that you didn't have sexual relations with that woman, and on to leading your country into war having found 'evidence' of weapons of mass destruction.

 

Whenever your last time was, you probably went about it in completely the wrong way. Or, to put it another way, you could have been much more convincing. You probably changed the tone of your voice to make it sound even more emphatic than usual; you may have clenched your fist and gesticulated a lot. You might have made a conscious point of looking people in the eye as you  spoke (probably for slightly longer than usual). You almost definitely made the same point several times, and there's every chance you kept nodding your head, leaned forward and possibly spoke a bit more loudly than you normally  do. And you will have madelots of what  psychologists call 'self-affirming gestures' to comfort  yourself as you did so - which probably means you touched your face (particularly your nose and ears) a bit more than you usually do.

 

Your audience will have picked up subconsciously on all the 'tells' that you weren't fully to be believed. You won't have noticed (but they will have) that your statements of 'fact' carried the slight intonation of a question. You won't have noticed (but they will have) that you tended to use the word 'no' as a quick form of punctuation between your points; "no, let me just say...".

 

You won't have noticed that all kinds of other changes had also begun to take place in you as a result of your lack of conviction; like the depth and rate of your breathing, your skin tone, your blink rate and the fact that the numerous tiny muscles in your face were now moving in a slightly different pattern. Without knowing it, you'll have been conveying minute messages of fear, doubt and surprise about what you were saying. In some cases, you will even have sent out slight messages of contempt.

 

The point is this: you can't not communicate what's going on in your head. If you try too hard, you end up over-compensating. If you don't try enough, or at all, you're unconvincing. Either way, you're unbelievable. And here's the worst bit: people pick up on this at a deep and subconscious level - often without realising.

 

So that's the bad news delivered. Now here's the good news. You can be convincing when you're not fully convinced by your own message. You just need to focus on what you're thinking - and how you're thinking it - as well as what you're doing and saying externally.

 

Before we get to acting, behaving and speaking convincingly, we need to talk about thinking convincingly. Here's what you can do straight away to get fast and instant results. The trick is to start small. Think of something you're not quite convinced by. Grab someone you know and trust; you're about to deliver the same message twice.

 

The first time, try to be convincing in your usual way. The second time, do this: think in advance of something you know for a fact you're good at.

 

To explain briefly, in neurolinguistic programming terms there's no such thing as just thinking. Thinking mainly breaks down into seeing pictures in your mind's eye (internal visual representation), talking yourself into or out of things (internal dialogue) and the resulting feelings you get (internal kinaesthetic). In other words, as you think about whatever you know yourself to be good at, you're (even now) seeing some form of image, saying something to yourself and getting some form of emotional response from within. And, as you do that, you will inadvertently begin to send out more convincing messages both verbally and non-verbally. This is because you've chosen a useful belief which in turn has altered your state of mind. That means you've actually changed the chemistry in your brain so that it can make better connections more suited to speaking convincingly. This change isn't just in your mind - it's physical.

 

So once you've chosen the thing you know you're good at, hold that thought. Focus on that thought and remember a vivid occasion when you've proved how good you are at this. Don't even worry about how to speak, how to gesture or anything else - just hold that thought until you notice it triggering a positive feeling within you (that's the physical, chemical change) and now deliver your message again. Your brain will do the rest of the work automatically. Obviously, you must know your subject matter very well - otherwise you'll be distracted by trying to think of two things at once.

 

Now ask the person you're trying it out on how different the two versions were, and which one was more convincing. You won't have noticed that you looked and acted differently, even using different words each time, as the subconscious part of your brain took over how you came across.

 

This technique works well in many contexts. You don't have to be delivering the keynote speech at conference - you could be canvassing in the street, getting your own team on board or toeing the party line.

 

Now that you've fixed the way you're thinking, most of your external communication will have fixed itself and you'll automatically come across as more natural and believable.

 

 

Here are three basic ways to put the icing on the cake.

1. Make sure your tonal inflection goes downwards when you're making an emphatic statement. Most statements have flat intonation, but commands go downwards. So if your statement goes downwards, it comes across subconsciously as a command - and people will subconsciously be inclined to listen more closely to you and find you more persuasive.

 

2. As you speak, remain relatively still. Don't shift around or fidget.

 

3. If you're delivering someone else's words, feel free to tweak them (within reason) so that you use words that are more natural for you. Otherwise you'll come across as fake.

 

 

 

Mark Palmer and Scott Solder are licensed trainers and practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming