Welcome to this valuable series of postings that I’m starting this week. In this series I’ll show you how to take better control of your work and career through the art of making powerful offers.

6 Steps to Powerful Offers and Why They Are So Important

In this series you’ll learn:

• What makes up a powerful offer so that you can speak with intention instead of just saying whatever pops out of your mouth

• How to better understand the different types of people to whom you will be making offers so that you can communicate your offers more effectively

• Ways to practice so that when you “play with live bullets” you are effective

• How to build trust so that your offers are taken seriously

• How to target your offers

• How to design a BIG offer

By learning the distinctions and the art of making powerful offers you can add new vitality to your career. If you’re working for a company, you can increase your value to it. If you’re self-employed, you can achieve bigger results than you ever thought possible.

The Story of Fred

I have a coaching client, call him Fred, who is bright, successful, and well paid. But Fred would get very discouraged–why was he sometimes passed over for the choice projects he would love to work on? When he wasn’t chosen and he asked why, he got vague responses and nothing that he could learn from. He was thinking of leaving his job. But the job climate wasn’t so rosy so he endured the frustration. In the meantime, his general mood was souring.

Listening to Fred, I observed that he had an ineffective interpretation of the role that language plays in his day-to-day world and, in particular, the art of making offers. His view was one held by many: we use language to describe things, and to “communicate.”

Fred had the common dictionary understanding of communication, including “to convey knowledge or information” and “to cause to pass from one to another.” There’s nothing wrong with these definitions. But if you think of communication as an iceberg, these definitions merely reveal the tip.

When Fred learned and started practicing the 6 steps to powerful offers, he began to consistently get the assignments he wanted. But perhaps more importantly, his mood shifted. Rather than slipping into hopelessness and resignation about where his career was headed, he became excited and energized.

The critical part of an iceberg is under the surface. So let’s look there . . .

Language Doesn’t Just Describe Your World, It Helps Shape It

A variety of business leaders, academics, scientists, and philosophers have explored the “generative role of language.” They’ve demonstrated that we have the power to shape our world with language.

Quite literally, through language, you can cause things to happen that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. One of the primary ways you can do this is by making powerful offers.

What Makes a Powerful Offer?

Let’s be clear: I’m talking about offers that literally change the course of events in your life and even the lives of others. This is about not settling for the status quo or “waiting to see what happens.” Powerful offers are about taking the bull by the horns and being a sculptor of your world.

Looking at the elements of a powerful offer, some may seem obvious. But I urge you not to dismiss any of it as trivial. Unless you are clear about these distinctions, you may find yourself making powerful offers from time-to-time, but what will be missing is consistency and optimal results.

The elements of a powerful offer are the following:

• There is a clear understanding by you that you are making an offer. You have a clear intention of specifically making an offer. As you become more skilled in making offers this will become less and less conscious. But to develop the powerful offer-muscle, you want to be clear about what you are doing.

• There is someone making the offer: you. It seems obvious so why is this worth mentioning? Because I see many people engaging in the amorphous “we” way of speaking. Like “Why don’t we go to the movies,” when the offer you could make is the following:

  “I offer to take you to the movies on Friday and show you a really great time. My offer includes dinner at 6 at Luigi’s, and the movie tickets. However, I’ll be coming from downtown so I won’t be able to drive you to where we’ll meet. Really, I just want to spend some time together. Any movie you pick is fine with me.”

• There is someone to listen to the offer. If you’re not clear about who is going to receive the offer, your well-crafted offer may fall on deaf ears. What would the consequences be of making the movie offer to your friend’s brother who perhaps never really cared for you? A different listener will likely produce a different outcome.

• There is a clear timeframe. In the movie example, the timeframe is very specific: Friday at 6.

• There are specific conditions that you will fulfill if your offer is accepted. These vary by offer. In the example above, they include going to the movies, dinner at Luigi’s first, meet at the restaurant, and any movie is fine (that is, you won’t complain about the choice).

• You create a clear “context” for your offer. To make a powerful offer you want to take care to create a mutual understanding and framework for your offer. That can include crafting a time and place to present your offer, presenting some of the background that gives rise to this offer, and relating the offer to some concern or opportunity.

• You pay attention to the mood of the offer conversation. You take responsibility for creating a mood that supports the outcome you’re seeking. But it also means paying attention to your listener’s mood. If the conversation calls for being open and visionary and you realize that the listener is agitated, upset, or impatient, it’s probably best to defer the conversation if you’re not able to shift the listener’s mood.

• You open up new possibilities–the key element of a powerful offer. That is, you bring into the realm of possibility something that wasn’t possible before. More than likely, it’s possibilities that weren’t even seen before, or weren’t taken seriously.

In Part 2 of this series we’ll look at listeners and specific ways to “get in their shoes” so that you can speak directly to how they listen. This is not about manipulation, but rather relating and building trust.

I’ll post Part 2 next Friday.

© 2006 Gold Nugget Coaching