Recently, I watched as my two boys unwrapped their gifts from Grandma.  The joy on their faces as they discovered their new toy cars — one blue, one yellow — did not last long.  In less than a minute, each boy wanted the other’s car.  Discontent overtook them as the other’s car became more desirous than the one each boy held in his hand.  It was then ­— when my boys became only 99.9 percent content with their situations — that their desire was born.

Desire is a strong force operating in each of our lives and there are two ways to learn how to use desire to strengthen your business, your career and your personal life.

The first thing one must realize is that, when ignored or dismissed, desire creates restlessness, anxiety or jealousy.

However, when embraced fully, desire has the ability to change your behavior, help you grow stronger and to drive you towards achieving more in all aspects of your life.

When you are overcome with desire you must choose to move fully toward your desire or reevaluate that desire and enjoy your status.  In other words, you have two options to receive desire’s full value: You must decide whether you are zero percent content with your life and make the decision to change; or, you must choose and earnestly believe that you are 100 percent content with your life and make the decision to enjoy it fully.

Allowing yourself to remain anywhere in between will only result in the aforementioned, counterproductive states of restlessness, anxiety or jealousy.

There is immense value in acting upon your desire because there is immense value in acting decisively.  You will feel peaceful, confident and proud knowing what you want and moving progressively toward it —even if that means accepting that you are 100 percent content with where you are.  You will finally be happy with the green grass growing on your own side of the fence and will no longer feel the stress of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Acting decisively, you will give yourself permission to be productive, creative and profitable and, by acting decisively on your desirous feelings, you will create value for yourself and those with whom you come into contact on a daily basis.

The second way to use desire to strengthen yourself is to recognize the value of persuasion.  Persuasion, contrary to its evil cousin coercion, is the art of providing value and service by tapping into people’s existing desires and providing them with the solutions that return them to a state of being 100 percent content.  Persuasion is the art of figuring out what people want and, then, finding a way to give it to them.

Whether you are trying to persuade an entire conference room of prospects or trying to persuade a child that it is time for bed, you must understand that you cannot persuade someone to do something that they do not already have a desire.

Desire cannot be manufactured.  You can only tap into existing desire, and the moment you understand that your job in business is not to convince anybody of anything, you will feel a large weight being lifted from your shoulders.  To be successful in business, you must facilitate solutions for existing desire.  Consider yourself a detective whose only goal is to help your customer feel 100 percent content — like a tour guide with all of the answers, not a slick salesperson trying to sell snake oil.  Your job is to persuade, not coerce.

Persuasion is synonymous with providing value because, when successful, you are helping your customer get what he or she desires.  You, yourself, will be 100 percent content with your own situation because you understand how to use desire to strengthen yourself and because you will be there for the next sale.

For more ways to become an effective persuader go to www.boltfromtheblue.com and enter PERSUADE into the blueprint box.

Tom Richard is a Toledo-based sales and marketing consultant, keynote speaker and owner of Bolt from the Blue direct response advertising. For more information, visit www.BoltFromTheBlue.com or call (419) 441-1005.

Tags: sales, selling points

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Selling Points, Toledo Business Link.
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