It is now offi­cial; the news­pa­pers have announced that the world has entered one of the worst reces­sions in his­tory. In actual facts, whether this is actu­ally true or not is irrel­e­vant, because what really mat­ters is our per­cep­tion of the eco­nomic downturn.

A few days ago, I was facil­i­tat­ing a round table at a Cham­ber of Com­merce on the sub­ject of “How to grow your busi­ness in an eco­nomic down­turn”. We had fas­ci­nat­ing input from the man­agers and CEOs who attended. And guess what the con­clu­sion was? For most atten­dees, the actual impact of the eco­nomic down­turn on their activ­ity was rel­a­tively mild, HOWEVER, almost ALL of them said they were prepar­ing for the worst in the future, and focus­ing all efforts on boost­ing their effec­tive­ness ratio, by set­ting extremely strin­gent require­ments for results with their employ­ees, but also in their deal­ings with out­siders as well.

So what does this mean? Well, to start with, it means that we often for­get the pos­i­tive effects of going through tough times, but that’s not the point.

The point is

1. BAD NEWS: Com­pa­nies are not will­ing to spend freely on stuff that does not deliver mea­sur­able, tan­gi­ble and imme­di­ate, rock solid results. Indi­vid­u­als are also expect­ing bet­ter results for each dol­lar spent. In a word, peo­ple want real RESULTS.

2. GOOD NEWS: The other side of the coin of course is that if you’re REALLY good, if you can deliver liq­uid gold, you’ll make a killing in this environment.

So what’s new?

Well, bot­tom line is… if you do not have a con­sis­tent, reli­able, steel-tough method and the accom­pa­ny­ing tech­niques to make a MASSIVE and pal­pa­ble dif­fer­ence, you’re dead!

So here’s 3 tips that will make a major dif­fer­ence FAST:

1. Meet peo­ple where THEY are, not where you want them to be.

Put your­self in other people’s shoes to under­stand how they see the world, then lead them where you want them to go.

This is a basic start­ing point, but often overlooked.

Once, I had a lady come to me whose pre­sent­ing prob­lem was smok­ing, she wanted to stop. I started to ques­tion her about her smok­ing habits and real­ized she smoked 2 cig­a­rettes a day, some­times less; she could stop any­time for any amount of time she wanted, like when she was on hol­i­days. She kept smok­ing because she found it relaxed her.

Some­how, I couldn’t really grasp how smok­ing was a gen­uine prob­lem. So I ques­tioned fur­ther, and even­tu­ally realised that smok­ing was not the real prob­lem. What really had brought her to me was the con­stant anx­i­ety she was suf­fer­ing from when she was at work.

2. Look for lack of clar­ity

This is THE fac­tor that will deter­mine suc­cess when deal­ing with some­one. 90% of the time,people have prob­lems because of blurry think­ing about the mat­ter. Trust me on that one! I had SEVERAL expe­ri­ences when a prospec­tive client called me to ask whether I could do some­thing for them, I asked them ONE ques­tion, they thought for 5 min­utes, and the prob­lem was solved.

In fact, about a month ago, a cor­po­rate client was com­plain­ing that he could not find any good sales­per­son in Hong Kong; he had to let go the last 3 after a few weeks. I asked him “what are the qual­i­ties you are look­ing for to fill this posi­tion?” “enthu­si­asm!” he blurted out. “Good, and what else” I asked. He looked at me blankly, not know­ing what to say. In less than an hour, he had a crys­tal clear, coher­ent, unam­bigu­ous job descrip­tion. He found his dream sales­man 5 days later.

This is also often true with stu­dents as well.

3. Don’t solely rely on the words peo­ple say…

A study on com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia in 1970 by an anthro­pol­o­gist called Ray Bird­whis­tell (don’t you love the name?) deter­mined that only 7% of what we com­mu­ni­cate is done through words, and a whoop­ing 93% is done through non-verbal means (tone of voice, body pos­ture, breath­ing etc). The match between our ver­bal and non-verbal com­mu­ni­ca­tion indi­cates our level of con­gru­ency, and the more con­gru­ent, the more we achieve what we want.

Mes­sages are sent mostly through non-verbal means. So, when deal­ing with peo­ple (clients, stu­dents, other par­ties in a nego­ti­a­tion process, staff etc…) look as much as you lis­ten to estab­lish the level of con­gru­ency.

Want to learn more?

The NLP Coach day course (in one day, learn the most effec­tive NLP tech­niques that will boost your results when deal­ing with people)

The NLP Coach Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (Become a Cer­ti­fied NLP Coach, and start coach­ing peo­ple right away!)

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