Ego kicks in anytime someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to do your business, your immediate and instinctive reaction is to prove them wrong! When employing this tactic, be careful to avoid damaging the ego. VERY IMPORTANT: When you cause damage instead of producing a challenge, you will create an air of indifference from your prospect.

In a team environment sports coaches commonly use another challenge to player’s egos. Lets say during practice a player isn’t trying very hard, is continually late for team meetings, or keeps making the same mistake again and again. The coach uses a perfect ego based remedy. He’ll bring the team together and explain what is happening with the individual player and the he makes the whole team except for that player run laps. The punishment is a challenge to the ego of this football player. Such a situation only has to happen once to be persuasive for every member of the team.

We face many challenging messages geared toward our egos. For instance a multilevel marketing meeting, managers might say they are only looking for “go-getters” and “people who know how to take action.” A teacher may say to a student, “I’d like you to do these advanced assignments”. I have witnessed sale reps make a subtle attack on their prospect’s ego when they felt they were not making the sale. They said something like, “I guess you do not have the authority to make the decision.” You should see how quickly the ego kicks in!

Another way is to give people credit for things they don’t know. When you do this they will generally say nothing and allow you to believe them to be smarter and more aware than they really are. Then they will try to live up to the undeserved credit you have just bestowed upon them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. Here are a couple more phrases that are direct challenges to our egos, “You probably already know….” or “You will soon realize…”

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.

Want to find out more about persuasion skills, then visit Kurt Mortensen’s site. Take Kurt’s FREE Persuasion IQ test and see where your strengths lie and where you need improvement.