Putting Messages in Conversations

Every time you communicate effectively and powerfully with another person, several things are taking place. First, you are conveying a sense of similarity and shared understanding to your listener.

Second, you are inviting the listener to experience something he or she hasn't personally seen or touched or heard or tasted, or some fresh aspect of an otherwise familiar thing.

Third, you are engaging the listener’s Gut, making the listener feel that watching and listening to you feels good.

Obviously, face-to-face human communication isn’t like reading a book or a transcript of an audio tape. There are many, many little pieces which are flashed and transmitted back and forth which have little to do with the words being used. It’s mastering these subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuances that will give your communication its greatest possible effect. So that you can learn to master them, here, then are some of the elements of human communication:

facial expression;
posture and muscle tone;
bodily movements and gestures;
the pitch, tempo, resonance, and melody of your voice; and, lastly,
the literal meaning of what you say.

Note that what you say is only a fraction of all that you communicate. Therefore, the way you look and sound and move can either undermine your words, or add to their power enormously. Henceforth, we'll refer to the sum total of your various communications as Output.

Before showing you how to look and sound and move in a way that rachets up your emotional impact, you’re going to learn more about how to grab hold of someone’s attention, so that what you say rivets them, and your words make your listener feel intensely and imagine richly.

We call it the Verbal Match.

Verbal Matching, or How to Make Someone Listen and Instinctively Agree

VERBAL MATCHING

Saying only things that your listener can verify with his or her senses, and/or things which he/she believes to be true. By telling O only those things which match O's sensory perceptions and abstract beliefs, O is set at ease, reassured that you u nderstand his/her needs. After you offer a long series of statements which, for O, are true, whatever you say next will seem truer, more compelling, and more inspiring. After you have extensively Verbally Matched someone, when you then describe how good it can feel to ski or solve a math problem, O will more easily try out the good feeling you are indirectly suggesting he/she should feel.

Verbal Matching is a method of

a) grabbing your listener’s attention,
b) winning your listener’s trust and goodwill, and
c) causing your listener to become more emotionally involved and responsive to what is being said.

Verbal Matching, performed well, causes your listener to open his/her imagination and emotions, so that what you say after you match is felt as more significant, more persuasive, and more compelling than it would be otherwise.

The message that your Verbal Matching leads up to we call the Punchline (or just the Punch).

We’ll explain Verbal Matching’s whys and wherefores later, but for now, we’re going to lay out the basics, so you can use it as fast as possible.

Empirical Verbal Matching consists of verbally stating what your listener can already see, hear, or tactilely feel.

Abstract Verbal Matching consists of verbally stating what your listener already believes to be true.