Maximize Your Persuasion With Persona

Current research reveals that people make decisions nearly instantaneously. They don't need overwhelming information to "thin slice" what they see and make a decision.

Malcolm Gladwell in his exceptional book on how we think, called Blink, (Little, Brown, 2005) discusses in detail how art experts are able to detect a forgery nearly the second they look at an object; long before they can conclusively explain why they know it is a forgery, they "thin slice" the information and make a decision.

The same principle allows you and me to make decisions in the blink of an eye about whether or not someone is being honest, if they know what they are talking about and if they have our best intentions at heart.

There are three elements of developing your persona you must focus on and develop in order to persuade at the highest levels:

1. Appearance
2. Voice and Communication Skills
3. Positioning

What I mean is that you need to develop fully a positive set of skills that become an integral part of your personality. You may employ the skills more or less throughout the day, but you will always employ them fully when you are persuading.

As you become more adept at persuading and as you practice the skills more and more, they'll soon become an unconscious part of you that you automatically apply in the appropriate situations.

The persuasive persona does not consist of a few big things to make it work; it is all the little things you do right that add up to success.

The power behind developing your persona is in guiding your audience to the conclusions you want them to draw and to get them to trust you, respect you and value you before you say a word.

Let them be pulled in by your carefully crafted persona and let them remain enthralled by its depth, complexity and completeness. If you make your persona one that they themselves would like to emulate, you've done your persuasion job perfectly.

Persona is the invisible persuasion technique, working beneath conscious evaluation to help people make the instantaneous decisions that they will make about it in our favor.