A few weeks ago, I attended a free personal development seminar. This free seminar was intended as a preview to a paid and rather expensive seminar.
Towards the end of the seminar, the speaker started selling his other paid seminar of a similar topic to the audience, which I was one of them.
He used a great closing strategy to persuade this group of people to take out their wallets.
He declared that he was going to slash the price of the seminar by 50% for the first 10 participants who signed up that very day.
In marketing terms, this was a very common tactic this to persuade people to take action and purchase the seats to this seminar. I bet every marketer have used this strategy before at some point in their career.
And so the strategy did its job.
Out of the 150 or so participants in the room, quite a number of them got up and hurried to the crew's desk to register for the seminar.
Some were even running for fear they wouldn't be the top 10 people who were entitled the 50% price tag cut.
He let everyone who signed up that day get the 50% off, when in fact there were some twenty-odd people who actually registred that day.
Though a very useful closing strategy, this speaker made a mistake. Can you spot the mistake?
He stated that the 50% price cut was only entitled to the first 10 participants in the room, yet he was granting some 20 something people that steep discount.
We as humans are not stupid. Can you imagine if you were one of the 10 participants who hurried and ran to register for the seminar, only to find out minutes later that everyone who signed up (regardless he was number 1 or number 10 or number 20) actually got the discount. How would you feel?
Cheated? Treated like a moron? I bet you will. I will.
So what can we learn here?
Covert Persuasion Tip: When coming up with an excellent sales closing strategy such as the one mentioned above, be sure to honor what you say. If you say you only have 5 units of your product left, make sure there are really only 5 left. If you say the price of the apartment you're selling is going up next week, be certain it actually is. All too often, sales people are using these limited-time or limited-quantity strategies without honoring what they say. Always remember this: people don't like to be cheated. Once you disappoint them, they'll almost never believe you a second time. Be sure to use these tactics carefully or they will backfire.
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Dangerous Hypnosis: Polarizing and Proactive Persuasion Secret Truth You Can’t Handle!
Two Dangerous Hypnosis "experiments" in two major persuasion events this week involved me, Dave Lakhani, Dr. Ben Mack, Dr. Kevin Hogan, Joel Bauer, and my Regis University professor, Dr. C.J. Hannon, who is currently teaching a course I am enrolled in called “Persuasion, Motivation & Influence.” Dave Lakhani’s “Renegades of Persuasion” inaugural event was the polarizing and proactive persuasion event of my lifetime, and it happened this week.
This is one of the most important letters you will ever decode and internalize. If you can deconstruct the truth from this message I’m sending you, it will make you a million dollars over the next coming years of your life. Persuasion is THAT powerful, and yet you must learn the skill of it for good! You must learn to polarize groups and proactively persuade for your own good and theirs, or you will not fare well on planet earth.
I may lose membership in my Facebook groups for revealing truths here that polarize the group. Some of you are squeamish and fearful and offended easily and will leave. The brave and smart ones will stay. The really brave and smart will post on the wall with commentary about this controversial subject.
I am finishing up my Bachelor’s Degree at Regis University. I graduate in a few weeks and decided to take this class in persuasion to see if I could learn a thing or two about a thing or two.
What’s interesting to me about academia is that most college students operate out of fear. I am not entirely excluded from this model, as I am on the cusp of graduating with Honors, just over 3.5 GPA and requiring 3.5 GPA to graduate with Honors (so grades are very important to me, especially now).
Students are typically very, very afraid that they will receive a poor grade if they say what is true, what they (really) think, or anything that is not what the instructor or the other students want to hear. So they feed the group a bunch of crap. This is unsettling to my very core, as I have chosen a career that requires me to tell people the truth—especially when it comes to the truth about HOW exactly they are being LIED to from just about every source imaginable.
The text book in the course is “Persuasion: Reception and Responsibility, Eleventh Edition” by Charles U. Larson. It’s an excellent book. I read every word of it. I personally know many of the cited authors, and it’s a great primer on the technologies of persuasion and how to receive, deconstruct, and act on persuasive messages (you must first decode).
When we were discussing subliminal persuasion in advertising last week, Kevin Hogan was cited in the book. What the class accepted as true, Kevin Hogan proved otherwise. I explained to the class that I had spent two days training with Kevin Hogan in person just this week, and that people needed to learn about persuasion to have a life that can surpass mediocrity by deconstructing elaborate lies or for adding value rather than stealing souls or attitudes or money.
There is a war for your mind; will you win it?
This followed a firestorm of an argument in which I polarized the class by my “outlandish” display of anger and dissatisfaction over the experience of the prior week’s class, in which Dr. C.J. Hannon “freaked out” on the class, disrespecting and humiliating all the classmates, bullying us with grade-threats and insulting us with demeaning authoritative and unkind language for several hours.
Last week, the class (in its entirety) was polarized against Professor Hannon by her own brutal and incongruent behavior. One student stood up to defend the class very articulately. I began to speak and was silenced immediately by Dr. Hannon’s aggressive and authoritative bullying. “Don’t argue with me, Simone. I am the Professor and I will tell you how it’s going to be!”
I stewed all week about the incident, wrestling with feelings I can trace back to my first grade class with Sister Clementine in Catholic School, in which we were regularly beaten and bruised by the teacher if we misbehaved. No, seriously; if we peed in our pants, she made us wear urine-soaked underwear on our heads all day. If I was suicidal, I may have taken out a gun last week and shot myself in the head. It was very, very intense and painful….and it was a lie.
Or, was it a lie? Let me deconstruct.
I complained to the administration of Regis University and found that half the class had also complained about the bizarre behavior of Dr. Hannon. Her message was incongruent with her behavior (to say the least). Any student of communication can recognize that messages incongruent with the messenger are not decoded or received well, if at all. Was she secretly experimenting with us, without our knowledge, to “teach” us something at great personal expense of the students? Was she just having a really, really bad day? Was she mentally or medically challenged? What in frigging hell was going on? Everyone wants to know!
I made a conscious decision to defend the classmates and myself at any cost, whether or not I may be failed from the course or even arrested and drug out of the classroom.
I brought a digital recorder to the class and recorded the four hour class in secret to see if similar behavior would occur, to protect myself in the event of an unethically issued poor grade, and also to gather evidence in the case that Dr. Hannon may possibly have no business teaching at Regis University or anywhere else for that matter, and so that the other students in the class would have evidence to protect them, as well, in the event that what happened was for real, and it certainly felt real.
I am a student of language and communication. The FACS or Facial Action Coding System by Paul Ekman is one of my favorite subjects of learning. Because of FACS, I can tell you exactly how to tell 100% how O.J. Simpson lied and Bill Clinton lied. You simply cannot lie to Stage Hypnotist Simone. He’s watching your nose crinkles, gaze shifts, and smile controls. The face reveals more by wrinkles and muscle-movements in micro-seconds about truth or lies than any other message sent by a communicator.
I was all over Dr. Hannon’s messaging by watching her face. It did not match her message. I am an actor, as well as a student and teacher of persuasion and hypnosis. If this was a secret experiment on her part, she was not fooling me. The message I bought, hook, line and sinker, was, “My teacher is crazy, and I’m going to get an “F” if I don’t sit quietly and behave.”
Now, the kicker.
Dr. Hannon came to class Thursday night and (while I secretly recorded every word) she claimed that the entire four hour class of teacher-to-student authoritarian-style abuse was a “secret experiment to teach us de-motivation.” When she asked us how we felt about it, the shit hit the fan.
One student admitted reporting the teacher. The students on either side of me, and I, myself, proclaimed that we were disrespected, insulted, demeaned, and abused in a very outlandish way, and that, in no uncertain terms, we were angry and hurt by her “secret experiment.” In later discussions with the other students, the majority believed it to NOT be an experiment, but that Dr. Hannon was actually just trying to cover her tracks for behavior that could cost her her Teaching Credentials.
I said, “It’s interesting, Dr. Hannon, that you would use us as guinea pigs for your secret experiment, and not reveal the truth about the your secret experiment until a week later, when in the meantime any number of bad things could have happened. Your message is incongruent with your behavior. We’ve all invested a lot of time and money in this class, and many of us could have dropped the course last week after what you did, or worse.”
We paid Regis University for content that Dr. Hannon was obligated to teach. I don’t recall signing up as a volunteer for any secret experiment—especially at great personal expense, financial, emotional, or otherwise.
I cussed and yelled and polarized. The students sitting on my side of the room were in agreement with me about the abuse we endured over the experience she claims was an elaborate, acted-out, pre-planned, secret experiment. The other side of the room was made up of giggling, snickering, brown-nosing, scared sucker-uppers who were still fearful of a poor grade or saying something true.
I then directed my comments to them, instead of Dr. Hannon, “(paraphrase) It’s interesting to me that I am risking my own grade in this class to defend myself and YOU from a very inappropriate persuasive lie administered by an unqualified messenger, Dr. Hannon, at our personal expense, and yet you snicker and act like a five year old, making fun of me and agreeing that what Dr. Hannon did was not only OK, but it was the truth and it was wonderful.”
One of these students was an ex-combat-marine. I am a veteran myself, and I thought he might be the one person in the room with a set of balls big enough to tell the truth, but I was wrong. He sat snickering and sending quiet messages between two girls who also acted fearfully and without concern for the truth. Did they believe the “secret experiment” was for real, that it was ok if they were abused and assaulted on many levels for the sake of an “A” in the class, so long as they didn’t rock the boat on the river of lies?
It was also interesting to note that two girls from this group later apologized to me for belittling me and attempting to silence me just as the teacher did when I insisted on speaking the truth.
So many things were interesting about this entire exchange. For example, when I noted that Dr. Hannon had not apologized at any time, she defended her right to secretly experiment with us students, as if teaching us a lesson on de-motivation was a valid reason to hurt us. I brought it up twice. Even after the four hour class in which she layered out more lies to cover up her other lies, she still has not given a single apology to even one student. I specifically asked for an apology and was refused--Arrogance, beyond belief.
Now, I used my own acting skills to give the Professor her lie as real, and I applauded her skill as an actor as I explained that I have studied persuasion and communication for 7 years and never has anybody lied to me so skillfully as she had. She “got” me!....in a “good” way, I lied.
If I ever conduct such an elaborate experiment to teach de-motivation at the expense of my students, I may want to inform the administration of the university in detail about my plans. I may also want to be congruent about the messages sent—all lies or all truth. Then, when I reveal the hoax to the student/victims, perhaps I will maintain my credibility by a shred. Maybe I will not let a week pass before revealing the hoax, but rather reveal the experiment at the close of the evening, giving them detailed handouts breaking down what I wanted them to learn, providing valuable takeaways, without risking that some vulnerable student may commit suicide or drop the class or do something as crazy as I would.
Now, I chime in here to offer that the jury may be out as to whether or not the class was a genuine experiment, or if we were truly a mass group of victims of an unqualified and abusive university professor, but I have made a decision as to what I personally believe to be true, which you can decode for yourself.
I used hypnotic command and persuasion suggestion to get an “A” for the class, and I did so without fear of anything, because when you’re right, you’re right, especially in the fight for your own mind, for your own reality, for your own dream.
It is my dream to be among the finest persuaders and influencers in the world. People like Dr. Ben Mack, Dave Lakhani, Joel Bauer and Kevin Hogan who have taught me to polarize and proactively persuade from the platform have changed my life forever by using me in legitimate experiments to teach without harm how to persuade.
People love me or hate me, I don’t care. I am responsible for the truth, as I see it. You are too!
By the way, I just lied to you.
I do care. I have profound passion for the art of persuasion. It’s why I risk everything to teach you the truth. I’ll tell you anything you want to hear, and don’t want to hear, if you will promise me one thing:
Seek the truth, learn how to use it to persuade the world, and create the world of your dreams.
Your Friend,
Stage Hypnotist Simone
Facebook Group: Hypnosis in Persuasion, Influence & Negotiation
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23243041350&ref=share
Thank you Stage Hypnotist Simone for taking my wife and son away from me. Thank you for having an affair with my wife, even sleeping with her in the same bed with my baby son. Thank you for threatening me and causing me to lose my job. Thank you for forcing my wife to file a false restraining order on me that you filled out and forced my wife to sign. Thank you for stealing my family away from me and telling me that you will kidnap my son and wife and take them back to Las Vegas, Nevada with you in May 2009. Thank you for ruining my life because you failed at your marriage and decided to ruin my marriage and take away my family so you could feel better about whatever reason you are hiding your real name and moving all over the United States and changed your name from David Patrick Simone to Stage Hypnotist Simone. Thank you for not telling your wife Linda, or your children that you were sleeping with and living with my wife for several months, even while you know you were still married. Thank you for not allowing me to ever see my baby son again and for holding both my wife and my baby son hostages in your home and threatening their lives if they contact me. Thank you for giving me a reason to show the world who you really are and not a world famous hypnotist, but a scam artist, a con man, a crook and a predator that controls and kidnaps young women and small children from their families and uses the law to help you kidnap women and children, hold hostages and even ruin peoples lives because you are a failure in your own life. Thank you for allowing me the chance to show the entire world who you are and asking anyone that knows you to testify against you in court so I can get my family back and put you in prison so you cannot kidnap anymore women and children and hide them or make them hostages. Anyone that knows who David Patrick Simone aka Stage Hypnotist Simone really is and can testify to his controlling nature or that he has also kidnapped their wife or baby please email me and I tell me how to find the truth and bring it before a judge so I can save my family before he kills them and blames it on me. vietjohn@msn.com
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