Livre sur la Communication Manipulation Persuasion et aussi Ton système mental
Words That Change Minds: The 14 Patterns for Mastering the Language of Influence
Highlights
Use Words that Change Minds in Speaking & Writing
Do you know the Influencing and Persuasion Principle?
“To get people to go somewhere with you, you need to meet them where they are… and not just pretend that they are already where you want them to be.
Instead, go to their bus stop and from their bus stop, invite them on the bus.”
Most people, particularly successful people, use the same strategy with others that they used to convince themselves to believe or do something, but… other people are different!
Creating Our Model of the World
Creating Our Model of the World
Every person has a certain number of filters by which they let in certain parts of the real world. In Noam Chomsky’s 1957 Ph.D. thesis, Transformational Grammar, he said there are three processes by which people create the filters of their individual Model of the World:
Deletion
The first process is called deletion. We delete lots of information from the environment around us as well as internally. In his 1956 paper entitled Seven Plus or Minus Two, George Miller, an American psychologist, said that our conscious minds can only handle seven plus-or-minus two bits of information at any one time, and that we delete the rest. That means on a good day we can deal with nine bits in total and on a bad day, maybe only five.
This explains why most telephone numbers are a maximum of seven digits. However, while I was living in Paris back in the 1980s, they changed the phone numbers to eight digits. Everyone then had to decide whether to remember phone numbers by groups of two, or four, or to simply add the new Paris code - the number four - onto the front of their old number. No one had an easy way of keeping eight digits in their head at once. Each person had to find their own way to break it down. People would give out their new phone numbers in their own peculiar manner. It created a great deal of confusion.
So, seven plus or minus two bits of information, is what we can comfortably be aware of at one time. Using the process of deletion, we filter lots of things out, either without being aware of them or consciously choosing to do so.
Distortion
The second process is called distortion. We distort things. Have you ever moved to a new place and gone into the living room before you moved your things in, and picturing what it was going to look like furnished? Well, you were hallucinating. Your furniture was not actually in the room, was it? So, you were distorting Reality.
Two examples of distortion are hallucination and creativity. They are both similar in that the external information is changed to something else. That is what the process of distortion is all about.
Generalization
Chomsky’s third mental filtering process is called generalization. It is the opposite of Cartesian Logic (where you can go from a general rule to specific examples but not the other way around). Generalization is where you take a few examples and then create a general principle. This is how learning occurs. A small child learns to open one, two, or possibly three, doors and then she knows how to open them all. The child develops a Generalization about how to open doors. That is, until they have to enter a high-tech company and realize that, to open the door, there is a magnetic card that has to be slid down a slot in a certain way. The child has to relearn how to open doors to deal with those exceptions.
Generalization is about how we unconsciously generate rules, beliefs, and principles about what is true, untrue, possible, and impossible. Some women, for example, may have had several bad experiences with men and then come to the conclusion that men (i.e., all men) cannot be trusted. They develop the rule: Never trust a man. People have a certain number of experiences of a similar type and then make a rule or develop a belief.
With these three filters, Deletion, Distortion and Generalization, we each create our own model of the world.
Meta Programs
Leslie Cameron-Bandler (now Leslie Lebeau) took Chomsky’s work even further. She postulated that each person makes specific kinds of Deletions, Distortions and Generalizations, which then show up in a person’s behavior. From her work in therapeutic settings, she identified about sixty different Patterns, which she called Meta Programs.
Meta Programs are the specific filters we use to interact with the world. They edit and shape what we allow to come in from the outside world. They also mold what comes from inside ourselves as we communicate and behave in the world.
Meta Programs are like a door through which we interact with the world. This door has a particular shape and has the power to let only certain things in, or out. This may appear to be part of our individual nature, and therefore be permanent but in fact, the shape of the door itself can shift in response to changes in ourselves and our surrounding environment.
Reality
From Noam Chomsky and many others, we know that people do not actually live in Reality. By deleting, distorting and generalizing, we inhabit our perceptions and interpretations of Reality.
How the LAB Profile® Works in Communication
that person talks about his experience, they only communicate a minute portion of the actual event. They have to edit out the vast majority of what was going on, just to be able to communicate it in a reasonable time frame. It means that in order for you to tell someone about reading this book, you will need to eliminate most of what you experienced.
How the LAB Profile® Works in Communication
People transform their actual experience, their opinions, and so on, in ways that correspond to their own particular Deletions, Distortions, and Generalizations.
How the LAB Profile® Works in Communication
Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Rodger Bailey determined that people who use the same language patterns in their speech have the same behaviors. The Language and Behavior Profile got its name from the connections between a person’s language and how they behave.
Language and Behavior Patterns
Once you know a person’s Patterns, you can then tailor your language so that it has maximum impact for that person.
Imagine for a moment that someone who did not master your mother tongue very well was attempting to get some ideas across to you. Chances are that you would spend a lot of energy translating it into terms that were more meaningful to you. When someone uses terms that you can immediately understand, none of your energy is lost in translating; the meaning just goes in.
Context
To help you identify when someone is talking about or has switched Contexts, listen for:
When?
Where?
With whom?
and a verb.
When people use these cues, they are telling you what a Context is for them:
“When we are sitting in the living room with the kids, arguing about whether it’s bedtime.”