Powerful Persuasion--Eliciting Peak Emotional States with Music
Kenrick Cleveland
Have you ever had this experience? You're driving down the road and a song comes on the radio and suddenly you're transported to a time and place. . .maybe ten, twenty years ago, when you were having the time of your life, or falling in love for the first time, or struggling through a broken heart.
As you listen to that song, you drift back in your memory to that first date, the first time you held hands, the first kiss. . .
When I was about sixteen years old, I met my first wife. She lived east of Portland in a rural area. At the time we started going out, the song 'Twenty-five or Six to Four' by Chicago was popular. When that song comes on the radio now, I'm transported back to that time, driving my new Toyota Celica GT east on 84 through the Columbia Gorge toward my future wife's house, the new car smell still in the air, and Chicago is on the radio. I feel full of anticipation and power and I'm thrilled to be alive.
That was over thirty years ago and it's crystal clear. And I'm taken back by a song.
You might even have an 'our song' with your significant other, that's the song where when you both hear it, you say, 'oh, that's our song'. Or maybe you've had one in the past that you can remember.
What is this? And what does it have to do with persuasion?
It's called anchoring and anchoring has everything to do with persuasion. Music has the ability to put you in intense emotional states. These emotional states are connected with the stimulus of the memory. They travel through neuro-pathways of emotions and memories that words and language cannot. And sometimes music affects us so intensely that we want to share it with others, but a song that touches me deeply may not touch you as deeply. It's extraordinarily individual and powerful. Aldous Huxley said, 'After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.' We're constantly exposed to things that we have been conditioned to react to. It's often been said that we are far more reactive than proactive. The human brain is really more on automatic pilot than it is a conscious device. We think we're conscious. We have a vested interest in thinking that. But we're really not.
Most of our activities in life are habitual. At our deepest core are things we do completely automatically. As an example, how long can you pay conscious attention to your breathing? Seconds? Minutes? Maybe if you're into meditation, you can sit for an hour and simply focus on your breath. But you certainly don't do it twenty-four hours a day. You can't. You have to sleep.
As this applies to persuasion, we simply need to elicit an emotion and get that emotion up to it's peak. We then pair that peak emotional response to a unique stimulus. And thereafter, every time we trigger that unique stimulus, our prospect or client is reminded of that peak state.
This is not to say we're going to elicit our prospect's musical history and play the songs and attach that special, happy, excited or calm feelings to ourselves, but if you can understand the way anchoring works through the example of 'our song', then you've internalized the concept of anchoring.
This information can be used in this way with clients: elicit their strongest emotional states, i.e. their criteria. When someone tells you their highest criteria, they are tapping into emotion. They feel it. And when this happens, simply pair it with a unique stimulus.
Stay tuned for future articles on anchoring as one of the most important tools in your persuasion toolbox.
Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent clients using
http://www.maxpersuasion.com/ persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in
http://www.maxpersuasion.com/ persuasion strategies. You can get a
http://www.uberarticles.com/?id=25671&b=79 unique content version of this article.
