How we change what others think, feel, believe and do

Checklist for Influencers: questions for sellers, coaches, leaders, change agents

Guest articles > Checklist for Influencers: questions for sellers, coaches, leaders, change agents

by: Sharon Drew Morgen

Most of you are really good at what you do: as influencers, sellers, coaches, change agents, or leaders, your intuition, excellent skills, and history of success guide your ability to facilitate change for your clients. And yet…. Using conventional models and questions – both designed to drive the predisposition of the facilitator - it’s inevitable that your interactions will have bias, and will unwittingly restrict possible outcomes accordingly. Here’s a checklist of questions to help you determine the extent of your bias:

• When attempting to influence someone (as sellers, leaders, etc.) can you be certain that your natural assumptions, unconscious expectations, and goals play no/little role in biasing or restricting the outcome?
• Are you aware of, and make allowances for, your full range of biases? Can you think of the role your biases play that might predispose outcomes?
• Can you think of any of your Communication Partner’s (CP) biases that were overlooked but ended up determining the outcome? How do you manage your CP’s biases, triggers, filters, and assumptions to expand choice and possibility, and avoid unconscious resistance, fallout, and restricted results? (Not to mention lost sales and difficult implementations.)
• Do you know what you’d need to do differently to enter a conversation without bias or assumptions to facilitate your client in determining their own systemic parameters?
• Are you aware how your curiosity and questions are subjectively biased toward the goal you think you need to reach – and 1. potentially lose a more congruent outcome, 2. alienate many who might need your solutions?
• How can you be certain you’re speaking to all the right people, or using the best questions for them, specifically, to gather the most appropriate information given their idiosyncratic knowledge and culture?
• Do your current methods of avoiding resistance work?
• Are you aware of how much your brain filters what you hear and how much more is being said than what you’re hearing? Are you aware of the cost of misunderstanding what’s going on outside of your goals and expectations?
• How much of the early data you gather turns out to be accurate? How do you know when/if you ever get to the accurate data? How do your expectations and the bias in your questions interfere with the Other’s recognition of the full fact pattern (largely unconscious at the start)?
• What would you need to believe differently to consider that your current skill set, biased mind set, and habitual set of expectations is creating a diminished ability to influence the full extent of real change and avoid resistance?
• How often do you assume something is ‘working’ or was successful – a coaching client was changing, or a buyer was going to buy – and you were wrong? Do you know for certain what happened behind-the-scenes that caused the failure and you could have circumvented?
• Are you aware of how your own biases, assumptions, triggers, and filters, have gotten in the way of success – or do you believe you’re right and the other person wrong/stupid?
• What would you need to believe differently to be willing to add some new skills to use less bias? To enable your CPs to recognize and manage their unconscious systems elements that have informed all choices and need to be shifted for change (a purchase, an implementation) to occur so they can easily buy, change or adopt your terrific material?

FACILITATING CHOICE

We’re all in the business of influencing, or attempting to get what we want. Yet we fail a very high percentage of the time; sellers loses 94% of their prospects; coaches lose 70% of follow on clients; implementations fail 97% of the time. It’s not our fault: we fail because our conventional skills are focused on

• content push
• premature goal setting
• the facilitator’s expectations
• listening for pre-determined details

and miss the unspoken meta-messages, values, history, rules, and consensus issues that make up our CPs status quo. It’s possible to enable our CP partners to do the change work from within, without us biasing and limiting possibility to our own subjective view.

I have developed a generic change management model with a unique skill set that facilitates decision making and change at the core unconscious, systemic level and avoids bias and resistance. I developed it over many decades by coding my own Asperger’s systemizing brain and designing a new form of listening, a new type of question, and coding the steps that happen unconsciously during all change. I’ve trained it to 100,000 sales people, coaches, leaders, and negotiators globally. It’s a model that must be learned and added to your current skill set; it takes some time to learn and practice because it’s so different from conventional models. But it’s scalable. DuPont, for example, trained 8,000 sales people and KPMG trained 6,000 consultants.

Using this new decision facilitation model, you’ll be able to help others determine how to quickly and congruently buy, change, implement, etc. themselves in the area you are facilitating. No more delayed sales cycles or lost prospects; no more failed implementations; no more resistance to change. You can close 40% of all qualified prospects from first call, in half the time; you can help coaching clients discover their unconscious incongruences on the first call; you can implement large change events with no resistance.

I can teach you how to unhook from your personal biases and enter conversations in a way that leads/ discovers/ creates all that's possible through win/win, servant leadership and congruent change. Imagine being able to enter every conversation and have it reach its most ethical, financial, and creative possibility. Imagine.