All the time we wish we could get more insight into what people are thinking, and here a little knowledge can go a long way.
An example from NLP is how to decode other people’s non-verbal cues.
Think of it this way, right before you say yes or no, you do something with your body. Maybe your face scrunches on no, or on yes you’re already nodding.
With a little bit of practice, you can easily read minds by reading these cues!
Become Fake Psychic
You don’t need to be an expert at this like the FBI’s Joe Navarro who can interpret a micro gesture on someone’s cheek, but it can be easy and helpful to know if people are agreeing with what you’re saying.
Imagine sitting in a negotiation, and before they say anything, just by reading their cues, you know whether they’re in agreement with you.
Top negotiators I know do this unconsciously in “reading the room,” and others do this more deliberately.
This is how some of the fake psychics work.
It’s an art and a science called cold reading where you do something like…
Fishing For Agreement
I am seeing a picture appearing in the fog.
It appears to be a woman but she’s a distance away, maybe an older woman.
Then, as she watches the client to see what they hope to hear, she adjusts her bait in some way.
If the face is telling her, actually it’s more like a young man, then she talks about the fog clearing and wow, that prince charming appearing…
With these types of Barnum statements and the skill to read non-verbal cues a fake psychic can tell a customer EXACTLY what they want to hear.
You can do the same in business too.
Imagine in a transaction saying, it seems to us that you are more focused on getting cash out than in being partners over the long-run, and we can find ways to be agreeable on terms…
Consciously you may seem to be stating facts or checking details, but you’re also eliciting their unconscious cues to help you faster move to agreement.
This can be powerful in business, and every other aspect of your life where agreement matters. (e.g. happy wife = happy life = agreeable husband)
You can practice doing this in two steps.
1. Practice Eliciting Cues
With anyone who you are interacting with, you can get to their non-verbal cues quite quickly.
You might begin asking about something that they will obviously say yes to like if you saw them show up in a car asking if they came by car.
You do the same to get to their no non-verbal by asking something they will obviously say no to, like… you didn’t come by subway, did you?
You’re looking for that thing they do with their body or face before they answer you.
2. Test And Refine
Once you see the non-verbal cue that is telling you yes before their words do, then, before you start rolling it out on major ideas you want to test it a few times.
The same on no.
You want to keep testing and refining your mind-reading throughout your interaction.
And just about wherever else you can…
Like the FBI’s human lie detector, Joe Navarro, the more you do this the better you get.