Sustentabilidad urbana

I’d like to discuss now some things that are really important adjuncts to sleight of mouth. These are things that will make your sleight of mouth work much more effectively. One of these adjuncts is rapport. If you’ve studied NLP at all, you know rapport is part and parcel of NLP, and the idea of rapport is to establish and maintain a sense of connection with the other person.

When I describe and explain sleight of mouth patterns, I sometimes say things like the argument is formed in a particular way. When I do that I’m talking about the patterns from a logical construct point of view. The subtlety I want to add here is that although the use of a particular sleight of mouth pattern may take the form of a logical argument, you don’t have to be argumentative in your

delivery of the pattern. You can have that sense of rapport while still maintaining your position.

Actors go through many months, even years, of training, where they look at a single line and discover how they can say it in a million different ways. The choices an actor makes in that regard are extremely important to the success of the eventual performance. The same thing applies to your use of sleight of mouth. If you’re going to say something like, “If you continue to believe that, you’ll never find any happiness,” you can say it in a way that drips with sincerity. Tony Robbins once said, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

But seriously, you can make the same statement in a variety of ways. You could say it sarcastically; you could say it sincerely; you could say it with a great deal of compassion. You could just say it as if you were reading a menu. There are a million ways. So bear that in mind throughout all these communications. The impact of a communication depends much more strongly on how you say it

than on the words themselves.

Another highly useful adjunct to sleight of mouth is called the “agreement frame.” Just for the record, I was taught the “agreement frame” by Anthony Robbins. I don’t know whether he made it up or whether he got it from someone else, but I learned it from him, so I’m grateful. It’s very, very valuable. The agreement frame is kind of like verbal Aikido. In the martial art of Aikido, when someone attacks you, you align with the attack. The agreement frame is very much like this.

Let’s say someone is going to attack you with their fist. A person trained in Aikido would respond by sort of stepping aside and helping the fist to keep going past the attacker’s point of balance so that the attacker ends up on the floor. It’s not like you try to block the fist or hit back at the attacker. Instead, you just redirect the attack somewhere else, and the floor is a great place for that attack to end up.

The agreement frame works in very much the same way. Rather than verbally blocking or directly confronting what the other person has said, you align with it. You say things like, “I agree with you. That’s true, you’re so right. And if you look at it from this perspective, it could be something different that you want to appreciate.”

You can do this in one of three ways. First, you can say, “I agree with such and such and such,” and align with it in that way. Second, you can say, “I

appreciate . . .” something about what they’ve said or about their intention behind saying it. Or third, you can say, “I respect . . .” again, something about their intention or what they’ve said.

There are endless stylistic variants that are possible with this. You could say, “I agree with you. That’s absolutely right.” Or, “I appreciate your point of view. It’s so good to hear somebody speaking their mind so clearly and honestly. And [blah, blah, blah, blah, blah] . . . .” Or you could say, “I respect your intensity of emotion with this. It’s great to see somebody who is really so passionate about what they believe. And [blah, blah, blah, blah, blah] . . . .” You lead from there.

The essence of the agreement frame is that the word “and” is what leads the other person from wherever he’s at to wherever you want him to go. By contrast, the word “but” has a very different effect in that it negates what came before. Most people tend to use the word “but” a lot. I know I use it all the time. Sometimes I use it intentionally because I mean to negate what came before it. A lot of times, however, I use it just because I’m not thinking about it and it just comes out. It’s a common habit.

When you’re using persuasion skills, though, you’re usually more attuned what exactly you’re saying. That’s a good thing. You want to be attuned to when you’re using the word “and” or the word “but” because sometimes you want to