Not likely, but either way we lost them. Why?
When I was a kid my mom used to say,
“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”.
With that in mind, could we have said it another way? Is there a better way, a better language for some? Do we need to wrap the truth of 911 in a piece of bread so the kids can swallow it without them choking on “911 Was an Inside Job”? Can we break it down to digestible pieces that don’t overwhelm and require little more than absorption by the receiver? I think we can.
Often times I believe we are in such a rush to spread the Truth we don’t take the few seconds involved to discern who it is we are talking to and then gauge how to effectively talk to them.
I have a key chain that says,
“Hurry, your first impression is almost up”.
I live by that so let’s start there.
Many of us encounter people and willingly bring up the subject of 911 – not always receptively, nearly everywhere we go, whether it is an organized action or a trip to the grocery store, we just have to talk about it. If we can acknowledge we have less than sixty seconds to connect with an individual, and engage them, how would we do it?
I look at this like a job interview. You walk into a would be boss’s office and what do you do? If you are like me, you take inventory the minute your eyes can see through the door. You begin categorizing what you see and mentally filing it away. It could be a framed photo of a child, an award, or even clutter on a desk. These to me are clues and tools. I use every appropriate piece of visual information to my advantage in that interview allowing me to quickly weave a thread of common ground that gives me an edge.
We can apply this method to meeting someone on the street, at a store or anywhere and bringing up 911. We all have something in common with one another and in sixty seconds or less we can find that commonality. This can level the playing field because you are not coming at them with dire facts that they weren’t expecting, nor are you hitting them with an aggressive anger they do not understand. Instead, you are commenting on the fact that you too have a 3 yr old, or that you too looked at that magazine rack, but didn’t want to spend the extra money for a copy of the latest Readers Digest. These are conversation starters that put you on the same human level as the person you are engaging. Where the conversation goes from there is up to you. How hard would it be to jump from; not wanting to waste extra money on a magazine, to the outdated/untrue content of the magazine, to using the Internet as a resource and on over to 911? Not very.
By the time they don’t like what you say, they already like you.
