How To Handle Their Ego, But What About Yours?
Written by Kurt Mortensen   
Thursday, 18 March 2010 08:38
Your ego goes to work whenever someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to take care of your business, your quick and instinctive reaction is to show them they are wrong! When using this tactic, be cautious not to damage the ego. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: If you cause damage instead of creating a challenge, you are producing and air of indifference from your prospect.
by KurtMortensen


Your ego goes to work whenever someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to take care of your business, your quick and instinctive reaction is to show them they are wrong! When using this tactic, be cautious not to damage the ego. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: If you cause damage instead of creating a challenge, you are producing and air of indifference from your prospect.

Sports coaches use another challenge to the ego in a team environment. For instance during football practice one of the players is not giving it 100%, doesn't make meeting on time, or makes the same mistake over and over, the coach has the perfect ego based solution. He call a team meeting explains to the teams what been going on with this particular player. He then has every one on the team except the guilty player run some laps. The punishment is a challenge to that football player's ego. Situations like that only have to take place once to be persuasive for each member of the team.

We very often have challenging messages geared directly at our egos. As an example in a multilevel meeting, managers may say they only want to work with the "go-getters" and "people that can take action." Teachers may phrase it to a student like this, "I'd like for you to do the advanced assignments." I have even seen sales representatives attack their prospect with a subtle suggestion like, "I guess you don't have the authority to make that decision." You should see the egos come alive.

Giving people credit for something they know nothing about is another example. When you give them credit for knowing something they know nothing about they generally will be quiet and let believe tat they are as smart as said they were. The catch here is they then will try to live up to the undeserved credit you gave them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. You've probably heard phrases like, "You probably know..." or "You will soon realize..." These types of statements are a direct challenge to our egos.

When talking about persuasion, we are faced with the never easy task of building up the egos of our listeners placing our own egos on hold. In order to persuade effectively you have to let go of your ego and make sure you focus on the objective. You won't have time to fix a bruised ego so check your ego at the door and focus on persuasion.

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Learn more about persuasion and handling egos. Stop by Kurt Mortensen's Persuasion IQ site where you can find out where your persuasion strengths lie and what you can improve to get what you want out of life.