Sleight Of Mouth – Positive Prior Cause Framing
That’s Exactly Why You Can Easily Do This
Sleight of Mouth Language patterns are extremely useful to easily and quickly defuse limiting beliefs, and overcome objections. When most people come up against an objection, like “I can’t buy that, it’s too expensive,” or “That’s too difficult, I can’t do it,” they stammer, repeat themselves, and somehow hope that saying the same thing over and over again will somehow be persuasive.
With the Sleight of Mouth Language Patterns, you will have 24 different structures to easily dismantle any belief or objection you come across. The are extremely versatile, and can be used in any conversational, therapeutic, or sales situation.
Today’s pattern is very similar to the previous one, “Prior Positive Intention Framing,” only with this one you reframe the prior cause, rather than the intention.
It’s a bit more difficult than reframing an intention, as it’s fairly easy to assume that everybody is working off good intentions, despite the occasional negative behavior that these good intentions can turn into.
Uncovering a prior cause, and reframing it in a positive light is a bit tougher, although it basically works the same way. It gives your listener a much more resourceful perspective, allowing them a little bit more mental wiggle room to overcome their seemingly set-in-stone belief or objection.
Generally speaking, it’s best to put the event, or cause “out there,” in the world, so it’s not personal. Then you can describe their belief as something that was a result of something that was, in some part, not completely in their control. This can help them find more resourceful ways to think about their objection.
This one can sometimes border to accepting excuses, or sometimes even making them for others, as you shall see. However, when you word them carefully, your listeners can accept their prior actions in light of events with a more resourceful outlook.
For example, somebody says, “I can’t get a date, because I’m too fat.”
To put this in “X causes Y,” we get, “Being too fat causes not being able to get a date.”
Now the trick is to think of something that happened, external to them, that they may have framed in some way that wasn’t very useful, which lead to this belief. Then we can reframe that event, use that new “meaning” of the same event to lead to a different belief.
So maybe they were rejected before, by somebody, and they assumed it was because of their weight.
You could easily pull, “being fat means I can’t get a date” from that event, but you could also pull:
- Some people you click with, and some people you don’t.
- Some people aren’t emotionally available for a relationship.
- You have to talk to a lot of people before you find “The One.”
So now you can reframe that initial event, and spin it a slightly different way, so you get a different outcome:
Yea, it’s tough dating. And I know you’ve had experience getting rejected a lot. And that means you’ve talked to a lot of people. And I’m sure you know that some people you just click with, and some people you don’t. But since you are the kind of person who talks to people to find out if you click or not, you’re just the kind of person that is destined to find “The One” sooner or later. I wish we could all be as lucky as you.
How about a sales example?
“I can’t buy your product because it costs too much.”
Expensive product means I can’t buy it.
What would be something “out there” that happened to give them this belief?
Maybe they saw a product, it was out of their price range, and they didn’t buy it.
So from that experience, seeing an expensive product, and not buying it, could lead to the belief, “I can’t buy expensive products.”
But from that same event, seeing an expensive product, you could also get:
- Expensive products have more value.
- Expensive products have more features.
- Expensive products have longer lifetimes.
- Expensive products have better service contracts.
So you could take a previous experience of theirs (or assume one) and describe an expensive product in different terms.
It’s good that you think rationally when buying products. I’m sure you have certain value requirements in the products that you buy. I’m sure you have bought many product that have turned out to be good purchases. Let me give you some more information about this product along those lines that can help you make a better informed decision.
OK, one more.
I can’t learn all these language patterns because they are too complicated.
Prior cause = Previous experience with difficult material, that didn’t turn out so well.
Reframe = You are somebody that isn’t afraid to tackle difficult material, even though you aren’t certain it will turn out so well.
Yea, they can be difficult, and I can tell you’re somebody who has tried things like this before. Other people never try anything unless that are guaranteed an easy success. But since you tackle things and then make up your own mind, you are much more likely to see the absolute power and usefulness of these patterns. In fact, I can’t think of anybody that could master these patterns faster than you could.
A good way to mentally practice this is to simply reframe events, three or four ways, as you see them. Just watch people doing things, things that you would normally judge negatively, and think of different ways to frame that behavior in more positive light.
