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You know we love talking about "Negotiaton's Dirty Deeds." \xa0A recent article by the Harvard Business Review gave some great pointers on deflecting some of the more common negotiation tactics. \xa0

One of the best ways to insure a smooth transaction is through managing your clients expectations correctly. \xa0Persuaders are most effective when they're persuading, not when they're stuck resolving client questions and concerns that could have been avoided in the first place. \xa0On this episode, Kurt and Steve discuss this very issue. \xa0

Expectations as Assumptions: Expect with Confidence

Consider the profound impact this can have in your own life. Are the assumptions and expectations you have about yourself (or others) liberating or victimizing? There are countless examples of "self-fulfilling prophecies," or the Law of Expectations at work in everyday life. Ever notice how people who think they're going to be fired suddenly experience a drop in the quality and enthusiasm for their work? Then what happens? They get fired! Their belief causes them to act a certain way, and those expectations then work to bring about the very thing that at first was only a figment of their imagination.

There was a study done on a military base that was used to train combat soldiers.\xa0 They created two groups of soldiers of equal aptitude and were randomly selected into three groups.\xa0 Now these 3 groups were assigned 3 different types of instructor\u2019s.\xa0 One was high expectancy, regular expectancy and unspecified expectancy.\xa0 We already know the high expectancy group that was expected to perform better, scored significantly higher on achievement tests, felt more positive and had better attitudes.

In another study, second graders listened to statements from their teachers before taking a math test. There were three types of statements: expectation, persuasion, or reinforcement. The expectation statements went something like, "You know your math really well!" or "You work really hard at your math." Persuasion statements involved sentences like, "You should be good at math." or "You should be getting better math grades." Finally, for the reinforcement statements, teachers said things like, "I'm really happy about your progress" or "This is excellent work!" Now, what do you think the results were? The scores were the highest in the "expectation" category! Why were the expectation statements the most effective? They created personal assumptions within each student. Those assumptions conditioned the actual external results.

This can also be called implicit priming.\xa0 Let\u2019s look at a few studies and how to apply this.\xa0 A study was done where they asked participants to complete a scrambled sentenced in a puzzle.\xa0 They were shown various groups of words to create these sentences.\xa0 Some of the participants were shown rude type words (obnoxious, aggressively, annoyingly, disturb, interrupt, impolitely).

The other group was shown polite type words (respect, courteous, considerate, patiently, polite, and behaved).\xa0 When they went to the next room to complete a second task they would find the experimenter with another student trying to explain a task that the student could not comprehend. The group that was primed with the rude words waited an average of 5.5 minutes and the group primed with the polite words waited an average of 9.3 minutes.

Here is an interesting study. Watch how these numbers prime your brain. Participants were given this set of numbers and were told to estimate (not calculate) the answer in 5 seconds.

8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1

Than they would find another person to estimate the following numbers:

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8

Now logically we know the estimation should be the same for both (40,320). Remember one group was primed with the 8 in front of the problem and the other group was primed with the 1 in front of the problem. The average estimation for the first problem was 2250. The average estimation for the second problem was 512.\xa0 Isn\u2019t it interesting how no one even came close to the right answer.