How To Talk To Humans
How To Talk To Humans
Active Listening to Enhance Gift Giving (Personal & Business) Holiday Special Part 1
Larry Wilson of "The Wilson Method" shares some stories to help teach some important aspects of listening, and to use those listening skills in purchasing the perfect gifts for Personal or Business relationships.
This is part One, Part two follows immediately as there is no dropped episode on Christmas Day!
Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method
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Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and eluded you so far? I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies extraterrestrials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned from 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. One of the problems with living so long is I can't remember of all the comedians I've worked with and all these guys I was friends with, and some of them who are no longer with us, I can't always remember whose jokes were whose. And today's Zoom training, which I think might be the most important training of the year, I'm reminded of this joke. I think my old friend, Gary Schandling, I think it was a Gary Schandling joke, where he talked about visiting a couple, friends of his who just had a new baby, and they were talking, and suddenly he smelled a terrible smell in the room. And everyone looked at the baby, and the mother went over and sort of peeled back the baby's diaper for a second, and with great ex seriously excited, not pretend, not being sarcastic, she was really delighted. She said to the new father, she said, Oh, look what your baby made for you. And Shanling's joke was, he said, I thought, wow, this guy must be easy to shop for. Maybe it doesn't strike other people the way it strikes from me, but I always thought that was hilarious. That, of course, is the real theme for tonight's training. It's about something that at first blush may seem like I'm being very light-hearted or I'm being silly, but I'm I take it very seriously. It's how to buy the perfect gift. Now, I know that some of you are thinking, oh, I don't care about this. Well, maybe not, but you might be surprised how much your business can benefit from this knowledge. Let's begin at the most obvious entry-level place of this discussion, which is the holidays are upon us now. Uh, I guess uh Thanksgiving is two weeks away, and then Christmas and the Hanukkah and on and on. It never ends. And for some of you, it's enough to induce a nervous breakdown, just buying for your family and friends. That's tough enough. I'm gonna show you tonight how to make it so easy and how to make yourself into a hero where people are so impressed with you, never forget you. Isn't that what we want? If we're talking about business, I know it's what we want. I know that those of you who some of you may be uh entrepreneurs, you may be a one-man band, one-woman band, others of you have small businesses. Some of you are looking to expand your one-person operation into larger. What we're gonna cover tonight is mission critical to your success. Because uh, as I've often pointed out to people in various different places where I've been uh paid as a consultant, sometimes they think, oh, I'm just gonna spend a bunch of money on advertising. And it's not a bad thing, especially if you have a clever campaign and you know your market and you have a good market-to-message match, so that what you're saying is going to strike a chord with the people who are really your tribe. Because of course that's what we're looking for. It's not a bad thing, but I'm always quick to point out that hate advertisements. As you know, I am the world's biggest fan of unspoken, sometimes almost subconscious communication, what we call semiotic communication. And hate advertising carries with it some semiotic information that may not always be to your advantage, without telling people, without putting too fine a point on it. When people see something in print, I don't know where things are in print, in a magazine or a newspaper or online, and it says, oh, so-and-so is great and does a great job, and you'll love us, somewhere in their consciousness, they realize you paid for this. So of course you're going to say complimentary things about your goods or services that you provide. And who knows, you may even be pushed to exaggerate a little sometimes. Somewhere they're thinking that sometimes your end consumer is very conscious of it. And if you ask them to believe too much, that kind of breaks through the wall of consciousness where they just sort of go, Well, that's not true. These guys are just saying it because they're paying for the ad. An alternative to this, of course, and it still might involve paid placements, still might involve, it could be used online on any of the million platforms that are popping up now. It could be on YouTube, on Instagram, on the dreaded TikTok, it could be on Facebook, it could be on anything. But testimonials, I think, carry much more weight. And I think they have a much more persuasive effect on your consumer who's your end user. It's you know, it's not a simple either-or situation. Your testimonial has to be very believable. It has to, there has to be no question it's authentic. It is not fabricated or falsified or sweetened up somehow. And it has to, my in my opinion, the more the merrier. If you could present six testimonials in rapid succession, maybe each one was just five or six seconds, so it's a half minute or 36 seconds of testimonials, boy, they better land right on target. And I'm going to make one up now. I don't know why, I guess because I heard something like this before. If you were offering a health program that was a weight loss program, if you had five, four, five, six people in rapid succession, now maybe they're audio, maybe they're speaking, maybe it's video, you see them, maybe it's in print. But if what they're saying addresses the main concerns of your target audience, of your target market, and it targets them really unequivocally. It doesn't say, yeah, I kind of like this, and I thought, no, it has to be things like I didn't think this was going to work, I was wrong. I lost 20 pounds in six weeks, and it was easy. I couldn't believe how easy. Just something simple like that. If somebody else says, I'm terrified of shots, I don't want any of those GLP1 drugs, this exercise program was so much healthier and safer. Fast, fast, fast, really faster. I think if you have half a dozen of those, it carries so much more weight with your target market. Because in their minds, I I think it creates a feeling of, well, all these people couldn't be lying. You know, if you have just one person saying, oh, Joe Bob's chicken restaurant is really good. Well, you may think, ah, I don't know. When you have a bunch of people, people saying, I've never tasted chicken this great, cuts the next person. We've been everywhere. Texas, New York, Boston, Chicago, LA. This is the best chicken. Right. If you have a series of those, you know, it carries a great deal of weight. Now, what has this got to do with picking the perfect gift? Well, it is the same semiotic experience that we get when we hear testimonial as when we receive a gift from someone that connects on the points we're going to connect on tonight. And that is, it's simple. I I hope someone will raise their hand and attack me if I ever try to teach you something that isn't simple. I have no time for that, and I don't think anyone else does either. It's so simple. The key to picking the perfect gift is that it should carry a semiotic message. That is, a message that is not spoken is not written. Now, this doesn't mean you can't have something, it doesn't mean you can't write a card with feelings that you're expressing or ideas or gratitude, whatever it is. But the semiotic message, again, is very simple, but so powerful. And that message is from you, the gift giver, to the recipient of the gift, I see you. I really see you as you are. That's the most basic semiotic part of the message. Radations and more layers of it are, and I feel so good about you. I feel good about knowing you. I feel good that you're my friend or my customer, or someone I've gotten to know, that I wanted to do something special for you. Now, you know, I should go back because I get carried away here. But in many ways, the genesis of tonight's training comes from a television commercial that now must be 40 years old. I wonder if anyone else remembers this commercial. I should try to find it, I'm sure it's somewhere online. Oh my god, did this commercial drive me insane? It always came out about this time of year, about mid-November. It came out. And it was a man and woman, presumably husband and wife, and I I feel like they were, they might have been in their dressing gowns or pajamas, but it was at night, dimly lit room, but there's a suggestion of great, I don't know, like great wealth, but they certainly, my memory is that we could see out the window, and they were like in a penthouse luxury apartment or something. We could see the skyline, the difference. There was a roaring fire, but most of the other lights were subdued in the room. And they were opening Christmas gifts. And the man, with great anticipation, has handed his wife this little gift wrap box, and she's opened it, and she looks at it, and her face falls. She's excited, and then uh. And the man says, What is it? And the woman trying to recover says, Oh, it it's lovely. I was just hoping for a longine. Now, longine was this uh brand of watch, some kind of expensive watch. It made me crazy seeing this commercial because I thought, oh my god, this man went to the trouble of buying his wife a gift, and she has the bad manners to say, oh, I was hoping for a long Jean. Now you know it's funny, because it reminds me of another comedian friend of mine, Jay Leno, because he used to he used to do a joke about that television commercial, and he used to say he expected the guy to go, yeah, well, I was hoping for a blonde with big boobs, and I got you, you know. So that was kind of Jay's reaction to it. But my reaction was much more visceral. I I really took offense to I thought it was a horribly emasculating, hostile, really mean-spirited commercial. Because the semiotic message was very clear. If you don't buy your wife a long jean watch, you're garbage. You're you're less than garbage. I don't know what that would be, but you're you're a horrible, horrible excuse for a husband. Don't you know that's what every one wife wants is a long jean? And for those of you who are not sure, I hasten to point out, I don't believe it's true. I don't believe uh most women want a long gene watch. I can't remember ever seeing a woman ever wearing one. But I bring up this commercial because it is playing on the very popular and untrue idea that I think a lot of people have at this time of year. I have to pick something expensive, and I have to pick something that really shows how much money I was ready to splash out. Incorrect. You don't need to do this. I mean, if you have no other resources, if you don't know Larry Wilson, if you don't know any Wilson method training, then yeah, go ahead, do whatever you want. I'm sure a gold bar uh with a nice ribbon around it will always be gratefully accepted as a gift. But it won't have the same effect. In fact, it could really backfire on you. Uh, you know, I spent most of my adult life in Hollywood living there, and I saw some horrible things. Um when I say horrible, they're not the way you think of horrible, I think. They're just the worst elements of humanity. I remember a guy who I really liked, who was a really nice guy, and he had gotten a very special job as an assistant to some big Hollywood producer. And the Hollywood producer uh he'd only had the job like a week or so. And the Hollywood producer said, Yeah, yeah, uh, we were having a party. We want the most amazing Christmas tree in town, anywhere. I don't care where you have to go, I don't care what you have to spend, don't come back without it. And this guy I knew, he went and looked everywhere. He finally found it, except it had already been sold to a family. And on the spot, because of course almost everyone in Hollywood, regardless of their day job, is an actor or has that actor training. He had a great deal of background in improv. And he started this whole rap about his special needs child. Now, totally made up. He wasn't married, he didn't have kids. But this is what Hollywood does to you. And he started this whole rap because he told me about a litter and he was ashamed but that his special needs child had some also, besides being special needs, also had some fatal illness or something. He wasn't expected to live to see another Christmas, and all he wanted was the most beautiful tree that he'd ever seen, and they were driving by and had seen it, and he said, Daddy, can you get me that? And he he plucked the heartstrings of these people so they wound up giving him the tree that they had previously promised to somebody else, and I think had actually already accepted money from someone else. They gave it to this guy for free because they felt so horrible. And he took it and gave it to his boss, who probably didn't think twice about it. And uh, you know, they have their party, and you know. Please don't let me go too far astray here. You know, sometimes I get so involved that time just slips away. There's so much here I want to share with you, but I don't want to take up more of your life. So we're gonna continue the second. Part of this next week. And it only gets better. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. In fact, if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single one. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Humans.
