You may be familiar with the concept of sleight of hand which is a technique magicians use to perform card tricks. Richard Bandler was one of the co-founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and he was also a magician, but with his words, not his hands.
One of Bandler’s early students, Robert Dilts. observed that he rarely if ever lost an argument. Dilts modelled Bandlers speech and in so doing developed the NLP technique of ‘Sleight of Mouth’.
“Words, either you control them, or those that control them control you..”
Richard Bandler, co-creator of NLP
Sleight of mouth patterns can be used to address objections, complaints, problems and disagreements. It is applicable in the areas of sales and negotiation as well as in general communication, when one party is resistant to a suggestion. The applications are virtually limitless however as with many communication skills most people don’t use sleight of mouth because they are not trained to do so.
There are many different ways to deliver sleight of mouth, so I will focus on one of my favourites, the “Consequence” approach, to show how the technique works.
We need to start with an objection, complaint, problem or disagreement to give context to the sleight of mouth responses that we shall develop. For the sake of discussion I am going to use the same generic ‘complaint’ that I use when teaching sleight of mouth to my clients, and that is “Your being late means to don’t care about me”.
All SOM patterns comprise of a ‘challenge’ and a ‘response’. The ‘challenge’ is simply a pre-fabricated question that never changes. For the consequence approach, this question is “What will happen if they continue to think this way?”
The answers to the challenge are unlimited, however only usable answers would be defined as a “response”. In practise we settle on one or two responses which we use repeatedly. The response is not meant to fix the problem – that would be outside the scope of sleight of mouth. The objective of the response is to ‘shake up’ the listeners mental model, to give them another way of thinking about the problem, a new perspective.
A response that I like to the challenge of “your being late means you don’t care about me” is
“If I hadn’t been late, I might have lost my job but I care too much about you to risk that”. This takes the conversation in another direction by adding context and highlighting consequence.
Sleight of mouth is an advanced linguistic skill which takes some practise however, the good news is that once you have developed sleight of mouth responses for common scenarios such as recurring client objections or customer complaints, the same response can be used time and time again. SOM allows companies to build a glossary of best practise responses to commonly encountered challenges and should be part of every client-centric staff training programme.
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