Part 30 (2/2)

Get the other person saying ”Yes, yes” at the outset.

Keep your opponent, if possible, from saying ”No.”

A ”No” response, according to Professor Overstreet,*

is a most difficult handicap to overcome. When you have said ”No,” all your pride of personality demands that you remain consistent with yourself. You may later feel that the ”No” was ill-advised; nevertheless, there is your precious pride to consider! Once having said a thing, you feel you must stick to it. Hence it is of the very greatest importance that a person be started in the affirmative direction.

* Harry A. Overstreet, lnfluencing Humun Behavior (New Humun Behavior (New York: Norton, York: Norton, 1925).

The skillful speaker gets, at the outset, a number of ”Yes” responses. This sets the psychological process of the listeners moving in the affirmative direction. It is like the movement of a billiard ball. Propel in one direction, and it takes some force to deflect it; far more force to send it back in the opposite direction.

The psychological patterns here are quite clear. When a person says ”No” and really means it, he or she is doing far more than saying a word of two letters. The entire organism - glandular, nervous, muscular - gathers itself together into a condition of rejection. There is, usually in minute but sometimes in observable degree, a physical withdrawal or readiness for withdrawal. The whole neuromuscular system, in short, sets itself on guard against acceptance. When, to the contrary, a person says ”Yes,” none of the withdrawal activities takes place. The organism is in a forward - moving, accepting, open att.i.tude. Hence the more ”Yeses” we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

It is a very simple technique - this yes response. And yet, how much it is neglected! It often seems as if people get a sense of their own importance by antagonizing others at the outset.

Get a student to say ”No” at the beginning, or a customer, child, husband, or wife, and it takes the wisdom and the patience of angels to transform that bristling negative into an affirmative.

The use of this ”yes, yes” technique enabled James Eberson, who was a teller in the Greenwich Savings Bank, in New York City, to secure a prospective customer who might otherwise have been lost.

”This man came in to open an account,” said Mr.

Eberson, ”and I gave him our usual form to fill out. Some of the questions he answered willingly, but there were others he flatly refused to answer.

”Before I began the study of human relations, I would have told this prospective depositor that if he refused to give the bank this information, we should have to refuse to accept this account. I am ashamed that I have been guilty of doing that very thing in the past. Naturally, an ultimatum like that made me feel good. I had shown who was boss, that the bank's rules and regulations couldn't be flouted. But that sort of att.i.tude certainly didn't give a feeling of welcome and importance to the man who had walked in to give us his patronage.

”I resolved this morning to use a little horse sense. I resolved not to talk about what the bank wanted but about what the customer wanted. And above all else, I was determined to get him saying 'yes, yes' from the very start. So I agreed with him. I told him the information he refused to give was not absolutely necessary.

” 'However,' I said, 'suppose you have money in this bank at your death. Wouldn't you like to have the bank transfer it to your next of kin, who is ent.i.tled to it according to law?'

” 'Yes, of course,' he replied.

” 'Don't you think,' I continued, 'that it would be a good idea to give us the name of your next of kin so that, in the event of your death, we could carry out your wishes without error or delay?'

”Again he said, 'Yes.'

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