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How To Adjust Your Lens

So now we have some framing basics. By no means can framing be summed up in three little articles, but in that, there's a beginning foundation from which to build our persuasion arsenals.

With frames in mind, it's time to examine the lenses we're looking through. If you wear glasses to see better, you don't walk around with just frames on, you have lenses made to fit your prescription.

Some people walk around with very distorted lenses. Take drug addicts and alcoholics. . . they are looking through a lens of 'how can I get more' and they exist in denial much of the time that what they're doing is not unsafe or unhealthy.

Are all of our specific issues lenses? If these issues are strong enough to warp and distort reality, then I'd say, yes. My whole life I was using a really strong lens when it came to food. I'd think about my next meal as I was eating. My blood sugar was so out of whack that I craved more and more sugar or simple carbohydrates after finishing and filling up on an entire meal. The lens I was looking through was overpoweringly focused on unhealthy foods and fear of scarcity. But by adjusting this view, things have changed dramatically.

On the opposite end of things, consider an anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees themselves as fat when they actually have little or no body fat whatsoever. Distortion.

Social issues are also lenses. Consider the camp from Northern California which teaches campers to unlearn social issues of racism and sexism. The lessons are based on the presupposition that if we have grown up in the U.S., attended institutions of learning, been exposed to the media in any way, then we have been indoctrinated into a racist, sexist society. Their claim is that equality and social change can only happen if we examine these lenses through which we've been viewing the world.

Now, whether or not you believe this, it's a very strong frame and by 'unlearning' these 'isms', they believed the distortion of the lens is lessened.

What are some other distortions that prevent us from seeing the real picture? How about religious fanaticism? How scratched, cracked and myopic is a suicide bomber's lens on the world? VERY. Their views go WAY beyond framing.

Addicts have distortions, violent criminals, the mentally ill. . . Extremists such as the Klan literally view the world in terms of 'black and white'.

Think on how your lenses might be distorted. In persuasion one of the first steps to truly persuasion excellence is the ability to persuade ourselves. This isn't to say that we have to eliminate all of the things we hold near and dear such as blockages and weaknesses and blind spots (though self improvement is never a bad thing)--I'm suggesting that if we realize what we believe is dictated by our particular fames and lenses, we must also believe that there may be an equally strong opposing belief out there somewhere.

I'll tell you a little secret. My lens is powerfully, intensely, vigorously focused on persuasion. Some might thing to the extreme. Okay, maybe that's not a secret. But it's definitely my lens to the world and I'm thrilled to share it with you.

Article Source: http://www.dummiesguideto.com

Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of wealthy clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.

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