How Do I Work With Someone Who Has An Ego?

Your ego goes to work whenever someone challenges your abilities, especially your abilities to take care of your business, your quick and instinctive reaction is to show them they are wrong! When using this tactic, be cautious not to damage the ego. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: If you cause damage instead of creating a challenge, you are producing and air of indifference from your prospect.

Another challenge to someone’s ego is commonly used by sports coaches in a team environment. When during football practice a player is not putting in 100 percent, is late for meetings, or keeps making the same mistake, the coach has a perfect ego-based solution. He brings the team together and explains exactly what has happened with that particular player. He then has the whole team, except for the guilty player, run laps. This punishment is a challenge to the ego of this football player. Such a situation only has to happen once to be persuasive for each member of the team.

We very often have challenging messages geared directly at our egos. As an example in a multilevel meeting, managers may say they only want to work with the “go-getters” and “people that can take action.” Teachers may phrase it to a student like this, “I’d like for you to do the advanced assignments.” I have even seen sales representatives attack their prospect with a subtle suggestion like, “I guess you don’t have the authority to make that decision.” You should see the egos come alive.

Giving people credit for something they know nothing about is another example. When you give them credit for knowing something they know nothing about they generally will be quiet and let believe tat they are as smart as said they were. The catch here is they then will try to live up to the undeserved credit you gave them, just so they can lead you to believe they are really smart. You’ve probably heard phrases like, “You probably know…” or “You will soon realize…” These types of statements are a direct challenge to our egos.

In persuasion, we are faced with the difficult task of building the egos of our listeners while placing our own egos on hold. In order to effectively persuade, you have to let go of your ego and focus on your objective. You don’t have time to mend a bruised ego. Check your ego in at the door and remember your overriding purpose. Focus on persuasion, not on yourself.

Everything we want out of life is on the other side of persuasion. Find out where you are strong and what I can help you improve by taking the Persuasion IQ test, it’s free and informative. This and other unique content ‘ego’ articles are available with free reprint rights.

Technorati Tags: business, ego, Money, persuasion, sales coaching, sales training