I wanted to start off today by saying that I am grateful, first of all, for the men and women that have fought for my country. I am grateful to live in a country where I can exercise my first amendment, the right to free speech, and I thought today would be a great day to exercise that right that others have fought for. We have talked about the right to the freedom of speech once before on this blog, and now I want to cover a book that explores some of the ramifications of the freedom.

Before I go into today’s book report, I want to thank my very good friend for giving me this book. He has been an incredible friend for over a decade and there is no one who I have spent more time face to face discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with; other than my wife. My friend Taylor (I am not paid in anyway to share this link) shared this book with me on one of our many walks around Liberty Park in Salt Lake City, and I am very excited to give my thoughts on the matter.

Now, if you don’t know who Jordan Belfort is, well… do a search for the full details. But the long skinny is the guy is a power house of a salesperson who built a tremendous business for himself and others, and he did it by teaching others his methodology: The Straight Line. I am not going to get into the ethics, or the controversies that surround Belfort, but I am going to get to the real material that is incredibly beneficial to know.

When you approach this book, you have to understand that Belfort is a natural story teller and also a natural salesperson. So as you go through his story of how the Straight Line Persuasion method came to be, you also get to take a peek into the psychologies that play into the mechanics of his method. For a very quick rundown of what SLP is, it is intentional and goal oriented selling. It is not about manipulation, it is not about tricking people, Straight Line Persuasion is about knowing all the words that the customer needs you to say and in the way they want you to say it to them. Basically, this sales book is really about customer service.

Okay, that sounds like a broad claim. You are probably asking, ‘how is knowing what to say and how to say it doing a customer any service?’ Well, if you so happen to be dealing with an absolute novice in a company and you are about to spend your money, you want to make sure that you are receiving the best treatment possible along the way. Having a methodology for how to talk to people, having a model to work from, can radically improve your results of providing service to others.

So now my guess is that you are incredible confused. Okay, let’s put it like this, on one end you have the start of a conversation, and on the other end you have the customer satisfaction you are looking to achieve:

start———end

Your goal as a human being is to gather intelligence from the person you are talking with, selling or serving or just chatting, and you need to be developing rapport on the way to the close of the engagement. The most difficult thing that most people have, regardless of whether they are in a profession or not, is being able to communicate with others effectively enough to effect the change that they want to see happen. You want to get a raise, you want to close a sale, you want to go on a date, you want to get the service personnel you have been talking to for over an hour to refund you your money you felt swindled out of, you want your loved one to get their dang feet off the couch and go do the dishes? What you need to know is that along the way to getting everything you want out of the conversation, you are going to need to know what you are going to say (each step you are going to take on your conversational journey) and you are going to need know how you say it (the speed and pacing you take the conversational journey).

That should make things a little bit more clear to you, and admittedly, Belfort does an incredible job of taking you through the stages of any uncertainty that you may be feeling as a speaker and communicator, and he is able to help you gain confidence in your self in a massive way. And if you are lacking confidence in getting your way, don’t worry about it, aside from Belfort systematically demonstrating how you can build massive confidence in your self by learning a skill called state control, you can learn from this guy we wrote about too.

State control is really the bread and butter to the Straight Line Persuasion methodology. If you aren’t able to get yourself in an empowered state, confidence being one of them, how are you to help someone else become empowered in seeing your way through? The simple answer is you won’t, that is unless you put a gun to someone’s head and that entirely eliminates people’s freedoms. Don’t do that. But seriously though, you have inside of you this ability to harness your emotional energy in such a way that it can be channeled into your words, into your communication, which leads to conveying tremendous power into your communication the likes of which you have never seen, or have but only in an unconscious way.

But if all this hyperbole sounds like utter baloney to you, ask your self the following questions:

• Have I ever felt on my A-game?
• When I was on my A-game, did it feel like things went my way?
• Did I feel that there was an energy and charisma about myself that lead to saying and doing things that empowered me like a dynamo of energy?

If you have felt any of these to be true, then you have, on some unconscious level, be persuading the world into your empowered state. Having a model for how to communicate leads to an empowered state, that’s what the Straight Line Method does. And that empowered state leads to effectively communicating emotions to others who have an interest in being in an empowered state like you. And so by practicing and fine tuning your skills as a communicator you naturally grow in confidence of your abilities to communicate, which leads to a more perfect expression of your right to free speech. (You were wondering when I was going to tie that back in, weren’t you?)

You see, as a person that has a right to bear arms, or to exercise the second amendment right, if you lack the skill to do so because you haven’t practiced, you put your self and others at risk when you willy-nilly exercise that right. Likewise, when you implement your first amendment right in a manner that is sloppy, lazy or hap-hazardous, you put your self and others at risk of you disempowered state.

And so I implore you, if you care about the rights that Veterans of this Great Country have defended, and you have an interest in bettering your self and exercising your rights to the most optimal state, consider learning how to become a more effective communicator. And one of the best ways that you can do that is by learning from one of the most successful teachers in effective communication the twenty first century has ever known: Jordan Belfort.