Neuro Linguistic Programming

Wounded children walking

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“Every man you’ve ever known, loved, and trusted has lied to you.”

That was the sentence that Chris Haddad tacked on at the front of one of his VSLs in the relationship niche. Chris says this one sentence doubled conversions.

So what’s going on?

Well, the sentence is shocking. And shocking pattern interrupts work well at the start of a VSL to attract attention. But there’s more to it than that.

I heard a successful copywriter say that if you take a product’s features, you can ask “So what?” to get to the benefit of that feature.

And you can ask “So what?” again, to get to the benefit of that benefit.

And you can keep asking the same “So what?” question… until you get to the end. And the end is always the same:

“So I can feel better about myself.”

This same copywriter summed it up with a self-help quote. “We are all wounded children walking around in adult bodies.”

For somebody who’s in the direct response relationship market, that wound might be a broken promise or rejection or harm early on in life… which has trailed this person like a hungry shadow ever since.

In other parts of the direct response world, the wound might be something different.

But everybody — at least everybody who’s of interest to you if you write copy — has such a wound. And if you can address it right at the start of your message, like Chris did with his VSL… then the right people will listen.

Listen:

I have an email newsletter where I write about persuasion and copywriting. If you consider yourself to be a smart, ambitious person, and you have uncomfortably high standards for yourself… then you might find it valuable. You can subscribe here.

How dirty is your underwear right now?

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Seriously, how dirty is it? I’m asking because it’s a personal question and borderline insulting. And if my guess is right, it got your attention. Here’s why I need it.

I’ve been thinking about pattern interrupts and how to do them. Here are a few examples, in case you’re not familiar with this term, of what I mean by “pattern interrupt”:

1. Tony Robbins once threw water in a woman’s face. Repeatedly.

​​She was trying to talk through her marriage problems with Tony. But each time she started talking about her husband, she started to get negative. ​​So Tony threw water in her face, shocked her, and got her laughing.

​​”What is wrong with you?” she asked each time he did it. But she stopped being negative when talking about her husband.

2. “Coffee’s for closers only.”

​​You might know this famous scene from Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin comes in to give his “Always be closing” speech to a bunch of real estate salesmen… but they aren’t taking him seriously.

​​So when one of them goes to get a cup of coffee, Baldwin stares and says, “Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only. You think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you.” The salesman puts the coffee down and starts to listen.

* Shooting the apple out of the pig’s mouth.

​​In the first Hunger Games movie, Katniss is supposed to show off her archery skills to a bunch of rich sponsors. But she misses the target. The sponsors laugh and start chatting among themselves.

​​Katniss next hits a bullseye… but the sponsors aren’t paying attention any more. ​​So she turns towards the sponsors, takes aim, and shoots an arrow through the apple stuck in a pig’s mouth in the middle of the banquet table. All the sponsors shut up and look at her.

I bet there are a bunch of different ways to create an effective pattern interrupt. The three situations above all do it. And though they might seem very different, I think they share a common element:

They cross private boundaries, whether physical or of personal sovereignty. They are intrusive, threatening, or borderline insulting.

So if you too need to get somebody’s attention, and change their set ways of thinking, try such a “personal sovereignty” pattern interrupt. Just make sure you have a good reason for doing so — otherwise you might get slapped in the face.

Anyways, since I still have your attention:

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A scary story for Halloween

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It being Halloween today, I want to tell you a scary story from my own life:

Many years ago, I had an ill-advised one-night stand with a friend of a friend. The next morning, as I was leaving the girl’s house, she told me she was flying home for two weeks. She lived in another country.

“Thank God,” I said to myself. “I won’t have to pretend to want to see her again.” So I told her to have a safe flight and I walked out of her life.

Or so I thought.

Because about six weeks later, I got a text message.

“Hi Bejako. It’s A. [Common friend] gave me your number. Could we meet? I have to talk to you and I’d rather do it in person.”

I could clearly hear a baby wailing somewhere nearby. Images of a shotgun wedding fired in my head.

We agreed to meet that evening in a cafe. I was there on time, she was not. With each passing minute, life drained out of my body and by the time the girl arrived, I had sunk so far in my chair that just my eyes were above the level of the table.

She sat down. She ran on for a few minutes, chipper and chatty.

I eventually collected enough strength to speak. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

“Yeah…” she said with a bit of embarrassment. “I guess we should really get to it.”

It turned out she had started working with a life coach. And as part of her transformation, she was supposed to contact people from her past — such as one-night stand partners — and ask them,

“Do you have any feedback for me?”

That was it. No pregnancy. No marriage. No on Golden Pond.

At this point, I brightened considerably. I told her my feedback was she shouldn’t scare people like that. I also ordered four drinks in about 15 minutes and — lesson never learned — even tried to take the girl home again.

So what’s my point?

Well, for the past few days, I’ve been writing about ideas taken from NLP. And the scary story above popped up in my head when I read one such idea:

“Failure is only feedback.”

This is a way to reframe an instance of rejection or failure… take the sting out… and maybe even get something useful out of it.

Whenever I practice this approach to life, I always come out amazed and amused. Thing is, I often forget.

So I wanted to remind myself, and maybe you, to treat failure as feedback. And no better way to remember something than to tie it to a scary story.

And now for something even more scary:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s filled with gruesome persuasion ideas to make you gasp and to chill your blood. If you want in on this haunted house, click here to subscribe.

How to make $75 million with an email newsletter

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News broke today that Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider.

Morning Brew, as you might know, is a daily email newsletter started a few years ago. The insight behind it was to take business news — a boring topic, thanks for nothing, Wall Street Journal — and make it more millennial-friendly.

Well it worked. Business Insider paid $75 million for a controlling stake in Morning Brew. Not bad for an email newsletter.

I bring this up for reasons one and two.

Reason one is that it fits my post from yesterday. That’s where I suggested that if you take a dry but useful topic and sexy it up, you can become a star. Or in the case of Morning Brew, you can earn yourself a $75 million buyout in about five years’ time.

Reason two has to do with my current romp through NLP axioms. The axiom I have in mind is,

“The past does not equal the future.”

In other words, even if a shadow has trailed you all your life — I mean a phobia, or some limiting belief, or just “how you are” — that doesn’t mean you cannot change, and change quickly.

That, in theory, is what NLP is all about. Of course, there are also other ways to effect change quickly.

For example, a few months ago I listened to an interview with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. Lieberman said how he can’t see any reason to sell his company.

Well, $75 million later, he found a reason.

“The past does not equal the future.”

Human brains love patterns and trends. But that’s not how the world works much of the time. Things can stay the same, day after day after day, and then suddenly — your tomorrow can be different.

Speaking of a different tomorrow:

I have a daily email newsletter. Its current valuation is -$39.17, which is what I’ve paid for the software to send the emails.

The insight behind my newsletter is to take the boring topics of marketing and copywriting and sexy them up. If you’d like to get on this rocket ship before it shoots to the moon, click here to subscribe.

Tony Robbins leaves clues

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In a recent post, I used the phrase, “Success leaves clues.” I didn’t realize somebody had colonized my mind and those words were not my own.

This phrase, as far as I could find, goes back to Tony Robbins. It makes sense he would say it. After all, the idea of success leaving clues is basically the central idea of neuro linguistic programming — NLP — and NLP is where Tony Robbins got his start.

I’ve been curious about NLP for a long time. Unfortunately, from what I see, the field is filled with blowhards and snake oil salesmen.

​​The first, the blowhards, are people who use fancy words like “Primary Representational System” to impress their seriousness and authority on you.

​​The second, the snake oil salesmen, make ridiculous claims like “if any human being can do anything, so can you.”

That’s a shame, because NLP is interesting and in my experience works. The reason I know is that I’ve gone through and applied Tony Robbins’s Personal Power, which is pretty much NLP for the masses.

And that’s my message for you for today:

If you can take a dry, inaccessible, but useful topic, and simply sexy it up without venturing into snake oil territory, you can become a star. (Maybe not Tony Robbins, but you know what I mean…) The good news is that right now, there are more such dry but useful topics than ever.

Let me leave you with a quote from the book Positioning by Jack Ries and Al Trout. This is basically what I’m trying to say but more concise — just swap “blowhardness” for “poetry” and “credibility-destroying hype” for “creativity”:

“For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.”

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