Covert Persuasion With Presuppositions – Counterfactual Conditional Clauses
Had You Read This Yesterday You’d Already Know The Secrets
Today’s lesson on linguistic presuppositions, those powerful language patterns that you can use to easily and powerfully persuade others, is another doozy.
Logically, then send the listener in a quick time distortion combined with what in sales they call the “takeaway.” Then, all of a sudden, there they are in the present with a huge opportunity to get what they seemingly just lost, and all they have to do is to believe whatever it is you are trying to persuade them!
Sounds cool, right?
The pattern today is called the Counterfactual Conditional Clause, or clauses that are in the Subjunctive Tense. Both mean talking about something that isn’t true, as if it were.
If I were tall, I would play basketball.
If I saw a UFO, I would take a picture.
The actual definition of the Subjunctive is rather vague. The basic definition is talking about something as if it were true, even though it is unlikely that it is.
The way to use this in persuasion is take the idea you’d like to persuade your listener of, put it into a conditional clause, put it in the subjunctive, or counterfactual voice, and finally, put it in the past tense.
For example, first lets create a conditional clause:
If I go out to dinner, I’ll eat chicken. (Eating chicken is dependent upon going out to dinner.)
Now we put it in the subjunctive, or counterfactual voice:
If I went out to dinner, I’d eat chicken. (Eating chicken is dependent on going out to dinner, but it’s not likely to happen.)
Now put it in the past tense.
If I had gone out to dinner, I could have eaten chicken. Since it’s in the past tense, all my chances of eating chicken are gone, so I feel like I’ve missed out on something.
For persuasion, lets use the previously used examples:
Idea = exercise is the best way to lose weight
If you had started a simple exercise program a month ago, you could have lost about ten pounds by now.
Hearing this makes it sound as if the person in question has missed out on losing ten pounds. And since losing something of value is highly persuasive, they would be much more likely to start an exercise program than if we’d said:
If you exercise, you’ll lose weight.
Idea = dollar cost averaging is the best way to make money in the stock market
If you had started a simple dollar cost averaging program five years ago, with only as little as 50 dollars a month, you could have generated a huge bank account by now, which could have given you an easy cushion against any unemployment that may come the future.
Now it sounds like we’re really missing the boat, and we’d better sign up for whatever investment plan is offered to us, so we can get back that money that we didn’t make in the first place. We don’t even question the idea that dollar cost averaging is the best way to make money in the stock market.
Now just imagine now, how powerfully persuasive you’d be today if only you’d started studying these amazing language patterns only a couple years ago.
You could have been able to influence more people, close more sales, and been the center of attention at every social gathering. Just talking to people could have been an interesting experiment in covert mind control, as you would have had the power by now to walk up to any stranger, any place, and strike up a simple conversation and within moments literally having them eat out of your hands.
Not only that, but you would have been impervious to manipulation, as you could have been able to see people with less than noble intentions a mile away, and would have quickly been able to dismantle their efforts at verbally tricking you.
What you do now, of course, is up to you. But some people decide that learning these patterns is a skill that can powerfully influence all areas of your life to affect positive changes in the lives of others.
