RAPID COACHING ACADEMY: PROFESSIONAL COACH TRAINING SYSTEM, VERSION 2.0
Session 11: Master Your Psychology, Part V, Subconscious Tools of Influence
Christian:Welcome, to the Rapid Coaching Academy. This is session number 11, which is subconscious tools of influence, part of the mastering your psychology series. I think it’s part five of that. Tonight we’re going to be talking about how to influence our clients on an unconscious or subconscious level and I’ll be actually using the word subconscious and unconscious interchangeably. They mean pretty much the same thing. Unconscious also has another meaning which means being asleep or being knocked out somehow but also shares the same meaning as subconscious so I’ll probably flip back and forth between the two and just get the idea that I’m talking about your subconscious mind. How is everybody doing tonight?
Participant:Great.
Participant:Excellent.
Participant:Fantastic.
Participant:Awesome.
Christian:Out of your mind wonderful is how everyone doing tonight.
Participant:Whoo.
Participant:Ya-hoo.
Participant:Yeah.
Christian:Yeah, look at that, look how quickly we can ramp up the energy just by asking some crazy questions.
Participant:Do you feel better now?
Christian:Yeah I do feel a lot better now. I do, actually I feel great. Thank you. Anyone who is not feeling as crazy out of your mind wonderful as everybody else on the call? Anybody who is not feeling spectacular.
Participant:Sorry, I have to admit I’m home, I’ve been home the last three days with the flu.
Christian:I can hear it in your voice.
Participant:But, I’m grateful for the energy.
Christian:Good. Let’s all send her tons of good energy.
Participant:Thank you.
Christian:Excellent. I see you healing faster and faster just as you’re sitting there listening to this class.
Participant:Phone hugs.
Christian:Phone hugs. A group hug with her in the middle.
Participant:Thank you.
Participant:That’s the best kind, no germs get passed along.
Christian:You guys are so fun. I think it will be very sad for me when this program is over so we’ll definitely have to come up with something new that everybody can be a part of and play within. I have something in mind which I mentioned I think on the last call so I’ll keep you posted on that. I just want to check in and hear how are things going? How’s your coaching going? How are you feeling as a coach? You’ve had weeks and weeks of experiencing now practice coaching. Are you feeling more confident now, are you feeling more valuable as a coach now? How’s your coaching going and how are you feeling as a coach?
Participant:I do feel a lot better as a coach. I’ve been doing it as a natural extension of myself more so than having clients and I actually have a new client doing the free session tomorrow morning so I feel very good about that.
Christian:Yeah. I believe you have the Free Sessions That Sell program right?
Participant:Yes.
Christian:Did you get the new updated field guide?
Participant:I will make sure I get that tonight.
Christian:Print that out, it’s so good. Very good. I worked hard on that. Good. And, I definitely want you to get a new client. That would be fantastic. I would love to hear that good news next time.
Participant:She is a really great coach, having been coached by her for the last couple of weeks. She’s really great. You are, you’re amazing.
Christian:Okay. Yeah. Anybody start using that prep form with your coaching since the last week or two? Well, if you haven’t been using it, start using it or maybe you’ve been using them right along and that’s okay too. [Cameen’s] feeling more confident, anyone else feeling more confident, more solid in your coaching? I’d like to hear that everybody is.
Participant:Well, that’s a definite for me. Every coaching session that I’ve had in the last two or three months since we started this program has been getting better and better all the time. I’m getting in to different areas that I never thought I would get in to. I’m trying new things and feeling really positive about it.
Christian:Great. Awesome. You’re actually using your stuff with real paying clients, right?
Participant:Yes.
Christian:So that’s extra good.
Participant:Yeah.
Christian:Fantastic. How about anyone else? I’d love to hear how is your coaching going, do you feel better about your ability to coach? Anybody feel less confident which could happen because sometimes when you don’t know what you don’t know and then all of a sudden you learn all these different things you could be doing in your coaching, sometimes that can be a little scary and you might start worrying about if you’re doing everything right and things like that. Anybody feel less confident? So everybody feels at least as confident it not more so?
Participant:Yes.
Participant:Definitely.
Participant:Another thing, I had my very first client, actually I had two clients in the last week ago that were signed up for three months that signed up again for an additional six months.
Christian:Wow.
Participant:That’s awesome.
Christian:Wow. What did you do to have them sign up for six more months instead of three more months?
Participant:I told them that was the minimum.
Participant:I made them.
Christian:Where did you learn that?
Participant:I wonder?
Christian:Okay, good. All of you who are on this call that are thinking you want to actually get paid for coaching and things like that, if you don’t have Free Sessions That Sell yet this is a big commercial for it right now because it is a really strong process and it’s people to sign up for longer and all that stuff. Good. I’m proud of you, very proud of you.
Participant:High five.
Christian:Yeah, high five over the phone. Yee-haw. Excellent. So, we’re going to do a quick thing here, if you can hear the sound of my voice say yes.
Participant:Yes.
Participant:Yes.
Christian:If you feel more confident as a coach than you did when we first started this program say yes.
Participant:Yes.
Participant:Yes.
Christian:Okay, alright. That’s a lot of yeses even though a lot of you didn’t speak up to tell me how much more confident you are right now. That’s okay. You can start thinking about how much more and more confident you are as we go through this call. In fact, this class in and of itself will make you more confident and probably double your confidence as a coach. The reason I say that is because just hearing what I have to say will trigger things in your subconscious mind that will kick in new ways of thinking and ways of seeing yourself so that you feel that more solid, secure, certain and confident feeling inside of yourself when you’re coaching. You’ll also start feeling it more and more just as you go through everyday life in anything that you do. You’ll start feeling more and more confident now. How does that sound?
Participant:Excellent.
Participant:Great.
Participant:Awesome.
Christian:Good. That’s a little taste of what’s to come here in our call. This call is subconscious tools of influence. First of all I’m going to tell you a little bit about our subconscious mind and then I’m going to tell you a little bit about where influence fits in with working with clients because there are a lot of coach training companies and things like that would tell you that we shouldn’t be influencing our clients at all. I say not only should we be influencing our clients, we can’t help but influence them. We’re going to be influencing them whether we want to or not.
Okay, I’m jumping ahead here. First of all, what we’re going to do is I’m going to tell you about your unconscious mind, we’ll talk about influencing our clients and we’ll talk about different ways that we already influence them and how to take control on how we influence our clients and you’ll be learning specific subconscious tools of influence. Tools and techniques to make the impact that we have on our clients even more powerful. Sound good?
Participant:Perfect.
Christian:Okay. I’ll even teach you some magic words.
Participant:That sounds like fun.
Christian:Alright. I’m glad. You guys are so fun. Our unconscious mind how it works is basically it takes everything in. So if you can imagine like right now your conscious mind is focused probably on the words I’m saying, the information that’s coming across from the words that I’m saying but your unconscious mind, your subconscious mind takes in everything. It takes in the words that I’m saying right now, it’s noticing the amount of light that’s in the room, it’s pumping your heart so that you stay alive, it’s causing you to breathe, it’s noticing whatever is in front of you whatever you are looking at right now even if you’re not focused on what you’re looking at.
You might be kind of zoning out from your eye. The input is coming in to your eye and you may not have even been focusing on it. You’re probably focusing on your ears and listening to me and this call but yet all this other information is coming in to our subconscious mind, everything comes in. There’s no filters to the subconscious mind, everything comes in to the subconscious mind. But, our conscious mind has filters and our conscious mind is deciding on what to focus on at any given moment. The conscious mind is making decisions, you’re making decisions.
I would say there’s probably a range of consciousness, right? Like you just know, “Hey I want to be on this call.” You’re not thinking, “I need to listen right now versus looking out the window.” That decision was already made by getting on this call. We aren’t consciously aware of everything that is happening at any given moment. We only have so much attention. We talk about attention span which is how long you’re able to maintain your attention on any given thing but our attention in and of itself can only be focused basically on one thing at a time. Sometimes people talk about multitasking where you can kind of be brushing your teeth while going to the bathroom, or putting your contacts in while flossing.
But, for the most part we can really only focus consciously on one thing at a time. Maybe a little bit more than one thing, maybe we’re having a conversation while watching TV or something but for the most part our conscious attention is limited, our unconscious takes in everything. That’s number one. That’s a little background about how our subconscious mind works.
The next thing I want to talk about is that we are always influencing people whether we intend to or not. Even if we don’t mean to influence people we do. Children model our behavior more than our words. We say, “Do as I say not as I do.” But, children are going to do as you do. For the most part they are going to pick up on your behaviors and model many of those. We’re influencing them just by who we are. We influence our friends just by who we are, by how we behave, by the questions that we ask, by the phrases that we use. You may notice that as you hang around someone new if they have something that they say a lot of the time, like if they say, “Far out,” and they said far out all the time then you might start noticing yourself saying, “Oh, man that’s really far out.”
We pick up on things. We pick up on that stuff. We don’t necessarily consciously decide to start saying far out or saying cool dude or whatever, we just start saying it. We start asking ourselves the kinds of questions that we hear other people ask. We just pick up on a lot of things unconsciously without even anybody trying to influence us. We’re influenced by things without being consciously aware of it and we influence others without consciously being aware of how we influence them. We can’t help it. It’s not something we can stop doing. It’s just something that we can be more deliberate with.
Now, as coaches we do want to influence our clients. Now again, there are a lot of coaching schools that will tell you that you need to ask questions in a certain way and you should never give advice and all this other stuff. I don’t know what happens in all the other coaching schools, all I know is that the truth is we can’t help but influence people so we mind as well influence our clients for their good. If we’re going to be influencing them anyway to a certain extent no matter what, we may as well influence them for their best.
We want to influence our clients in certain ways. We want them to believe in themselves when they are doubting themselves. We want them to have positive expectations for what’s going to happen, for the results that they’re going to be able to produce. We want them to achieve their goals. We want them to see it is easy, we want them to see achieving their goals as something that is doable, that’s easy, that’s achievable without being unrealistic of course. We want them to see it as something that feels good and is achievable. We don’t want it to seem like something that is hard so we want to influence to get them to the point where they see it as comfortable if possible.
We want them to be happy, we want our clients to be happy without of course dishonoring anything that they may be going through which again, we talked about in the previous session. We want to respect their humanity, respect what they’re going through, respect wherever they are but ultimately on the big picture grand scheme of things we want them to be happy. We want things for our clients and they want things for themselves and they want results so by the fact that they’re hiring us then they want our influence. That’s part of the reason they’re hiring us. They want our influence, they want to be influenced by us to help achieve their goals, be happy, etc. Any questions about any of this so far?
Participant:Actually, a lot of the influencing people thing comes up when I teach non-verbal communication. People have heard this before, 7% of your message is what you say and 93% is the non-verbal part of the message, relational messages and so forth. While people are listening to your words, they’re really listening to a whole host of other things and actually that’s I think one of the strong benefits of coaching over the telephone because people have fewer non-verbal queues to get tied up in and can focus a little bit more on the words. But, you’re absolutely right, even the tone of voice that you use, the speed at which you say your words or ask your question or whatever can draw certain things and influence people so you’re absolutely right, you can’t help but influence people.
Christian:Yeah.
Participant:That was just an observation.
Christian:Yeah, you’re right. Thank you for sharing that. Definitely. Anyone else have any comments or questions about what I’ve covered so far? I know I went really quick. Okay, I assume everybody gets it yes?
Participant:Yes.
Participant:Yeah.
Christian:So the idea is we do want to influence our clients, we can’t help but influence them and now knowing this and actually whether you knew it or not, sometimes I’m sure there are times when you’ve wanted to influence your clients in the past anyway. Knowing that we want to influence people, we want to influence our clients, we can’t help but do it anyways so we mind as well do it for their own good. When we attempt to influence them sometimes we are able to, sometimes we influence them and sometimes we don’t actually end up influencing them.
Now, we’re always communicating on both a conscious level and on a subconscious level. On a conscious level you may be thinking about the words that we’re saying but on a subconscious level sometimes it will come through stronger to the other person if we’re more confident, if we’re more certain about it. Our confidence, our certainty translates through energetically to everyone that is listening. It becomes more powerful when we are in a strong mental or emotional state. That’s one of the factors of influence is getting yourself in to a strong state, a strong emotional state and that will transfer over.
Sometimes, we’re communicating with our words, our voice quality, voice tone and our body, our physical body but ultimately it’s the energy of the emotions that comes across, that’s one of the things that will definitely influence people. Sometimes your excitement and enthusiasm is contagious, sometimes it’s your peacefulness and centeredness and certainly sometimes it’s your fear. I know sales professionals they can be saying and doing all the right things but not getting the results they want because deep down inside they’re worried that the person is going to say no and then they’re going to feel rejected.