How To Throw Lighting, Heal Deaf Ears, Warm Cold Hearts, and Wide-Open Closed Minds.

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides. ~ Rita Mae Brown

It doesn’t matter how good looking, how smart, how committed, how sincere, how honest, or how much we deserve success; if our interaction (conversation/sharing) and communication (marketing/promotion/advertising) is dirt-clod ordinary, and egregiously expected, our audience becomes bored, and love-less!

According to experts like marketing genius Marta Kagan, marketers, promoters, and sales types, attempt to pimp-slap our conscious awareness with between three thousand and five thousand marketing messages per day!

This number most likely includes the vast herds of real estate agents, bleating, “I’ll exceed your expectations!”, “I’m Number One!, blah, blah, yada-yada. (Don’t hate, I’m guilty from time, to time too.)  As annoying as we find them, when we notice them, most of them whiz by us, an invisible breeze.  We’d go insane in the membrane if they all registered on our radar.  We couldn’t take it.

Thankfully, our blessed brains have a built in safeguard called Broca.  The Broca area of our brain, a walnut sized area, in the middleish part of our brains, anticipates, discounts, and ignores the ordinary and predictable.  Generally, the ordinary and predictable includes the daily barrage advertising.  Specifically, and most important to us, Broca ignores the expected, ordinary and boring, bleat and squawk, from sales people.  This includes our conversations, personal and professional, advertising, presentations, consultations, negotiations, and more.  (Broca also arranges our words into understandable sentences.)

Broca keeps all the crap from registering on our “what’s in it for me” radar.  This is why, as sales people, when we sound, and behave like every-other sales person intent on focusing “what’s in it for them, and me, me, me” instead of standing out, we become invisible, or worse, annoying, then shunned.

The secret to standing out and being heard, is understanding how to befriend Broca.

When speaking or writing, imagine Broca as your audience’s muscle-bound doorman, guarding the entryway to conscious awareness.  Mr. Broca decides if your message (spoken, written, and any other meida) is worthy of attention. Broca is impressed by the surprise of the unexpected. Surprise Broca and you’re message will be heard, and you will be on your way to being perceived as interesting, remarkable, and remembered.  When you become interesting, remarkable and remembered, you become attractive, chosen, and referable. Which make you persistently successful.

How To Surprise and Befriend Broca.

In all forms of communication; presentations, consultations, explanations, negotiations, advertising, marketing, sharing, and status updates, consider this.

If our conversation and media, is not consciously engineered to surprise, and sprinkled with unexpected shimmer, it falls on deaf ears, cold hearts, and closed minds.  If we aren’t heard, we can’t be appreciated, trusted, recommended, referred or hired.

The art-of-surprise isn’t magic, or a mystery, anyone can learn how to surprise Broca and earn positive attention.  With a bit of scientific savvy we can consciously do what genius-class writers, and speakers do instinctively. All we need to do is foreplay with wordplay, behave uncommonly, and deliver on our promises.

Foreplay With Wordplay

In written, verbal, and all media forms, what we say, and how we say it, is everything.  Many people detest the idea of prepared sales scripts, canned presentations, and rehearsed dialogue, believing it’s lame, and for losers.

I believe we don’t detest prepared sales scripts, and canned presentations.  What we universally detest is flaccidly crafted, lamely, and lazily delivered, communication and presentation.  I believe this because; Academy Award winning movies like Schindler’s List, Forest Gump, and Pulp Fiction, are crafted from scripts. President Lincoln’s, Gettysburg Address and Dr. Martin Luther King’s, I Have A Dream speeches, poems, and literature you love, all were written, edited, reedited, rehearsed, and re-rehearsed before they became legend. When we want to arrest attention, heat hearts, and move minds, knowing what we’re going to say before we say it, and knowing with confidence, how we’re going to say it, is the difference between a girl and a woman, a boy and a man.  We both know, the lazy and the ignorant, wing it, and we’re neither.  Let’s look at the art-of-surprise, using thoughtful word play.

Here are three platinum-pass, big ju-ju, rocket-surgery secrets, to surprising Mr. Broca.

1.  The Radioactive Verb Surprise

When writing, or speaking,  dump the dirt-clod-common verbs, and replace them with verbs that glow radioactive, sparkle and fizz.

Here’s how to radioactive your verb:

A.  Write like you normally do. Go ahead, clickty-clack till your done.

B.  When finished, reread it out loud.  Listen and feel, for the egregiously expected, and dirt-clod common verbs.  Replace them with evocative, unexpected, or surprising verbs.  If you’re imagination is stuck in neutral, and you can’t conjure diamonds, don’t fret, Cubic Zirconiums will do.  Use a Thesaurus, or use Google as a resource.  Replace the common, with the uncommon.

You can also use these five techniques as shared by Roy H. Williams in his Wizard Academy Monday Morning Memo titled – Magic Words

Use a noun as a verb: “Just Harley-Davidson your way to the head of the line.”

Use a verb as noun: “If you can’t deliver dazzle, I’ll settle for twinkle.”

Use a modifier as a verb: “He’s planning to slippery his way through the press conference.”

Use a verb as a modifier: “It’s a kicking shade of pink.”

Use a modifier as a noun: “I’m on the road to lethargic.”

Will you take the time to radio-activate your communication?  Try it and see how your sharing, communication, and conversation, shimmers with new found glory.

2.  The Seussing Surprise

You’ve read Dr. Seuss, right?   Dr. Seuss in beloved, and famous, for his whimsical style of made up words and meter.  Turns out Broca loves Dr. Seuess’s style too.  A message zings, and Broca beams, when he sees a word he’s never heard, but knows it’s meaning intuitively.

Here’s an example-handful of directionally correct, Seusssing Style words:

Crap Sandwich

Bamboozle

Eye Candy

Shazam

Rocket-Surgery

Sheeple

Sham-Wow

Woot

Flim-Flamed

Rick-Rolled

Glarmy

Reader’s Block

Blogger’s Butt

Shiny Object Syndrome

Punked

Blame-Storm

Are you audacious enough to go Lady Ga Ga, and paint your message with unofficial word glitter?  Try it.

Not convinced?  Consider the long life stickiness enjoyed by the word “strategery”.  See what I mean.

3.  The Counter-Contextual Surprise.

We expect sales people to gush bootlick, advertisers to yammer in ad-speak, politicians to drone politician like, and business people to speak obfusely-official, and personality-free. When they do, and mostly they always do, we the audience, are either bored to snoredom, or annoyed, or both.

When we shatter the expected, with unexpected conter-context, ears perk, eyes widen, and our audience pauses, purrs, and ponders what’s been shared. Our message is heard.

As sales people, we shatter the expected when we behave like good-people, instead of sales people, and we; avoid cliché’s, treating people as leads and targets; we listen more than we talk, act humbly, discuss disadvantages as candidly as advantages, and treat people the way they want to be treated.

Give These Ideas A Whirl.

Be bold.  Have some fun, foreplay with wordplay.  Radioactive your verbs.  Surprise with a sprinkling of Dr. Seuss.  Shatter the expected, go counter-contextual.  It’s easy, it’s free, and it’s smart.

Lastly, I want to encourage you to consider the dramatic positive effect of, knowing what you’re going to say before you say it, will have on your natural ability to connect, influence, and impress.  Remember, Academy Award winning movies, history-making speeches, culture shaping literature, and renowned communicators, all work from prepared, and rehearsed scripts.   Scripts don’t kill messages, people do.

If you’re still adverse to the idea of scripts, let’s call them “directed dialogues”.  In any event, what ever you call them, when making a listing presentation, showing property, answering common questions, presenting a market analysis, negotiation, sharing, and status updating, consider these words of wisdom from Mark Twain, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

Let me ask you a question, will you throw lighting bolts, or . . .?

Give it whirl and see what happens.

PS.  Here’s a handy tip. Start a word jewel collection.  Carry a Moleskine, or a notepad, and a pen.  When reading any-and-everything, look for snappy verbs, shiny sentences, glimmery word combinations, and quotes that shout; when you find stand-outs, write them down.

If  the saying, ”we are what we eat” is accurate, so is, “we write what we read”.  Seek out and read, well-written books.  Here’s three recommendations:

The Book Thief. – Markus Zuska

In Cold Blood. – Truman Copote

Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas – Tom Robbins

The Wizard of Ads, Tools and Techniques for Profitable Persuasion – Roy A. Williams

There you have it…my tip-of-the-iceberg tips.  Good luck, speed and grace.