3 Ways to Improve Emotional Influence | FPG
As a leader, how many times have you coached someone on the same problem over and over again? You’re telling them all the right things to do, but you’re just not seeing a different result. The reason why this happens so often is that we’re neglecting to investigate the emotions at play.
To avoid situations like this with your own team, you must get in tune with emotional influence. And the biggest impact you have as a leader on emotions is through your words. Words hold power, and their meaning forms perceptions that shape our beliefs, drive our behavior and create our reality. Their power arises from our emotional responses when we read, speak, or hear them. According to Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, words can literally change your brain. In their book, Words Can Change Your Brain, they write: “a single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.”
Someone can intellectually say that they get something and how to do it, but then they don’t do it because they are too caught up in the emotions around it. They’re too angry, scared, sad, or whatever the emotion is, to use the knowledge they have. Emotions are so powerful! For example, you use the same exact part of your brain to process fear and excitement, the amygdala. Your BRAIN has the same reaction to seeing a grizzly bear in front of you as it does if you were surprised with a brand-new car. You begin to sweat, your heart rate increases, your hands might shake, the pitch in your voice goes up. However, the way you label those feelings determines your behavior.
3 ways to influence emotions around you!
So, if you truly want to experience different results, here are 3 ways to influence emotions around you.
Ask the Emotion
Be mindful about how your salespeople are speaking. Pay attention to the words being used. You need to clarify the emotion surrounding the circumstance by saying “So I know you wanted to coach before this call you have coming up, but first let me ask you, how are you currently feeling about it?” The reason this is so important is that if someone comes in for coaching, but they are feeling frustrated, nervous, or even angry, the coaching you’re about to give them is going to do nothing for them. Once you clarify an emotion, you can replace the emotion by asking how they want to feel instead. It’s about moving them away from the actual circumstance for a minute, hearing what emotions they’re feeling about it, so that you can change their feeling about the circumstance, change their behaviors, and get the results you want.
Speak the Emotion
As a leader, what do you want your people to do? This lesson is all about speaking in ways that cause people to FEEL something that CAUSES them to do something. So, to get the results, you want from your team that, how do they need to feel? What do you need to say to make them feel that way? Your awareness of the words you use as a leader is vital to the success you have as a company. So, my question for you is what would happen if you could come up with 30 words and most of them were positive? What would be the quality of your life? How would that allow you to speak emotions that motivate people? And how would that influence the results you see?
Coach the Emotion
In life, there are the circumstances that we have, and the meanings that we give them. If you want to change the results a person is getting, you need to change the behaviors leading to those results. To change the behaviors, we must change the motivation those results are coming from, and to change those motivations, we must change the emotions. We created an entire course at FPG dedicated to teaching this process, but the main idea of coaching the emotion is this: When you’re coaching someone, they are going to remember the instructions and the process you give them much better if you can remove their negative emotion and replace it with a positive one. That’s how you coach the emotion. That’s how you truly change behavior. When you can change the emotion, you change the motivation. When you change the motivation, you change the behavior. When you change the behavior, you CHANGE THE RESULTS.
To learn more about our Influencing Emotion course, and see the other courses we offer, contact us today.
Don’t Just Hire. Hire for Success!
In FPG, we use a scientific process to assess your candidates and identify those with the specific traits that signal a top producer. We call it to brain wiring, you’ll call it genius. Take a look at our Sales Recruiting Process. We have years of experience helping businesses just like yours find the best possible candidates for their open positions.
