Module 07. Glossary
Terms of the module
- Amateur and professional
- “Control spider” (6 steps)
- Criteria for choosing a partner (14)
- Difficult conversation (9 steps)
- “Formula for change” (7 steps)
- “Invitation to dialogue” (5 steps)
- Motivating conversation (6 steps)
- Partnership (14 steps of agreement)
- Positive intention (5 steps)
- Principles of developing professionalism (14)
- Sales funnel (6 stages and 4 levers)
- “Step back and take the lead” (4 steps)
- Techniques for utilizing hooks (8)
- “The best result of our cooperation”
- The professional’s “+ + +” state
- Value vectors (price — service — quality)
Amateur and professional
Two inner positions in working with people. For the amateur, the sale is the goal: to sell no matter what; for the professional, the sale is a side effect, and the main thing is to be useful. The amateur expects a fight from the client and is afraid of questions; the professional expects cooperation and is glad of questions. The amateur is afraid to disagree and afraid not to be liked; the professional is ready for both. The amateur pushes under the mask of help and explains things murkily; the professional cares, insists, leaves freedom of choice and explains things simply. The amateur counts their own benefit and makes compromises with their conscience; the professional counts the client’s benefit and is ready to risk not making the sale. The amateur asks few, formal questions and will sell even the wrong thing; the professional looks closely into things and makes the client an expert in their own choice. The amateur feels like a fraud, the professional like a gift, and is curious how the person uses what they bought. In Berne’s language the amateur works from the position “I’m not OK, and the client is not OK” — hence both the fear and the pressure — while the professional works from “I’m OK — You’re OK”; the feeling of being a fraud, meanwhile, has nothing to do with real competence: psychology knows it as the impostor phenomenon, which most often strikes capable people in particular — those who have not owned their results.
The difference is not in experience but in what you stand on: an amateur with twenty years in the business remains an amateur if they are still fed by fear rather than by usefulness. The course also lists the techniques of amateurs — fear-sellers: “Wouldn’t you like to be truly happy?”, “Are you really satisfied with the way you live?”, “What are you waiting for, wake up” — so that you can recognize them in yourself and in others. The professional’s footing is built by the “+ + +” state.
“Control spider” (6 steps)
A model for running meetings — a formula of the Structuring Parent (module 1). A positive start: confirm what is good. “We have X amount of time” — draw a circle and write the time in the center: this is the spider’s body. “What questions do you have that you’d like to discuss today?” — each question is written down as one of the spider’s legs. “And I have a question for you” — also a leg. “Which question shall we start with?” Summing up, gratitude, agreeing on the next meeting. The circle with the time in the center is an antidote to Parkinson’s law, according to which work expands to fill all the time allotted to it, and the spider’s legs are the simplest mind map, which keeps the topics before the group’s eyes rather than in the facilitator’s head; psychologically the model does the same thing as the frame in a therapist’s office: time and order set in advance give the participants a sense of safety within which they can argue on the substance.
The image helps you not to spread yourself thin and to hold all the threads at one point: time is limited by the body, topics by the legs, and a question for which no leg was found is honestly carried over to the next meeting instead of being discussed in the corridor. Structure here is a form of care for the result and for people’s time, not pressure; a meeting turns from “we talked and went our separate ways” into a tool with clear decisions.
Criteria for choosing a partner (14)
Fourteen guideposts for choosing a life partner: agreement about the hierarchy in the couple — there are no right or wrong hierarchies, the main thing is agreement; respect for the partner’s family; experience of living together; not overestimating your power over your partner and not trying to change them; a shared level of education, culture and aspirations; feeling comfortable together — wanting to hug and be close; a shared vision of the future, right down to “dacha or city”; the absence of false motives (“just to get Mom off my back”); the partner resembles a childhood friend or one of the parents — positive transference; a friendly relationship, shared interests and conversations; the same cashflow quadrants, and the man earns more; no interference from parents and friends (“you two absolutely have to be together!”); a match in the degree of innovativeness and conservatism; complementarity — a younger daughter and an older son, or both only children. Behind the list stand three layers of research: sociology has long known that stable marriages are more often matched in education and aspirations; Freud noticed that finding a love object is in fact refinding it, and so a resemblance to a figure from childhood is not a flaw but the norm, as long as the transference is positive; the last criterion is the discovery of Walter Toman, who studied birth order: brothers and sisters rehearse our future roles in us, and the older brother of sisters and the younger sister of brothers recognize each other, while two only children spend a long time sharing one place.
The list continues the relationships thread of the fourth module — healthy attraction, mature love — and the star of trust: a harmony of values and a shared future can be measured. It is also useful for looking at a relationship that already exists: which criteria matched, and which ones still need to be agreed on; the first criterion is the quickest to check — it is enough to ask each other who makes the decisions in the couple and hear two different answers.
Difficult conversation (9 steps)
A strategy for a hard talk, using the example of a project that has failed and an employee whose vacation is at stake. “I take full responsibility — this defeat is mine.” “I’ve already accepted that the project has failed” — relieving the pressure. “You have nothing to worry about, it’s not your fault” — relieving the guilt. “I know the project matters to you: three months of work is no small thing” — acknowledging the contribution. “And I want to discuss with you that we have one chance, we can influence this.” “But I can’t manage without you” — acknowledging the person’s value. “I know you have a vacation coming, and I’m not laying claim to it” — respect for boundaries. A pause — time to take it in and live through the first emotions. “And if, after this conversation, my proposal doesn’t seem interesting to you, tell me so” — freedom of choice. The Harvard Negotiation Project found that in any difficult conversation three are going on at once: about what happened, about feelings, and about who I am after this — and the first three steps of the strategy cover all three at once, taking away the threat to the employee’s image of themselves; in psychoanalytic language the manager here does what Bion called containment: takes in the failure and the guilt, digests them and gives them back to the team in a bearable form, and Klein considered the ability to acknowledge one’s own part in the damage a sign of maturity and the beginning of reparation.
The framework keeps you from sliding into either accusation or hushing the topic up: name the problem, preserve the relationship, motivate and leave the person a choice. In essence it assembles cushioning, taking the lead, positive intention and relying on strengths into one confident script, and the eighth step, the pause, often decides more than words: in the silence the person finds on their own the answer they would have searched for for a week under pressure.
“Formula for change” (7 steps)
A negotiation technique for working with resistance — your own or someone else’s — through questions. Acknowledging that there is a problem or a task: “It’s great that you realize this situation exists.” Normalization: “It’s natural that you’ve run into this.” Intensifying dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs: “What exactly doesn’t suit you about…?” A clear vision of what is desired: “And how would you like it to be, ideally?” Generating ideas: “What could help you move from the present to what you want?” A sequence of actions and strategies: “Where would it make sense to start?” The first concrete step: “What is the very first, perhaps small, step you will take?” The name is no accident: in the theory of organizational change there is Gleicher’s formula, popularized by Beckhard and Harris — change happens when the product of dissatisfaction with the present, a clear image of the future and first steps is greater than the resistance — and the three middle steps of the course are exactly those three factors; a zero in any of them cancels everything out, which is why “everything’s fine, but let’s change things” never works. The second step, normalization, is known from group therapy as universality: on learning that everyone runs into this, a person stops wasting energy on shame.
A change a person has arrived at themselves holds; an imposed one is rejected. The formula complements the view “from the inside” of the fourteen causes of resistance (module 5): there — why I resist, here — how to help someone shift; in module 8 — pre-empting and utilizing resistance.
“Invitation to dialogue” (5 steps)
A speech technique for opening a difficult conversation or making a proposal. “I see A” — a statement of fact, a point of contact. “I think that B matters to you” — a hypothesis about a need or a value. “I would like to offer you C” — a stated intention. “So that you can minimize harm D and gain advantage E” — the benefits. Taking the lead — a question that hands over the initiative. The structure of the technique repeats Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication — observation without evaluation, need, request — and its necessity is confirmed by John Gottman’s research: a conversation almost always ends the way it began, and a harsh start decides the outcome within the first minutes. The first step demands the most discipline: “I see that the report was handed in three days late” is a fact; “I see that you don’t care” is already an accusation, and after it there is no one left to invite.
The other person is invited, not driven into a corner: safety and voluntariness are set from the first sentence, and they don’t go on the defensive. It develops taking the lead and open questions (module 1); it is a convenient way to begin a difficult conversation.
Motivating conversation (6 steps)
A conversation with an employee or a partner after which the person wants to act on their own. Begin with strengths: “Kirill, I see your strong results, and I’m proud…”. Cards on the table — name the task or the problem straight away. The power of silence: let the person say out loud that it is difficult and impossible, and don’t argue. Checking their attitude to the company as a whole: “right now it’s not about whether we’ll do this or not…”. “What do you propose for solving this task? What else? What else?” Specifics: what steps, who and when. The scheme matches Miller and Rollnick’s motivational interviewing: don’t argue with resistance but let it have its say, and draw out with questions the person’s own talk about change — what they have said themselves, they defend as their own; the third step is better known to psychoanalysts than to anyone: a silence in which the person hears their own “impossible” and begins to doubt it without anyone else’s help.
An order produces formal compliance, a motivating conversation produces involvement; self-determination theory explains why: a person invests in what they have chosen themselves. The fifth step requires patience: the first suggestion is usually a formality, and the real one comes on the third “what else?”. It directly uses open questions (module 1) and “Strengthen the strong” (module 5); useful for managers, parents and mentors — wherever what matters is not to force but to ignite.
Partnership (14 steps of agreement)
A conversation that turns implied “psychological” contracts into clear agreements — for a business, a project, any joint undertaking. The steps: initiating synchronization — suggest setting aside time to discuss goals, expectations, rules and responsibility; a vision of the best result a year from now with measurable criteria; values and rules — what is inviolable and what is unacceptable; the division of responsibility and profit; rules of communication; potential difficulties and a plan for responding to them; the consequences of failing to keep agreements; the terms for leaving the partnership; the worst-case scenario; intermediate goals; a check for trust, voluntariness and safety; possible obstacles to cooperation; regular meetings for synchronization; gratitude and a summary. Organizational psychology calls unspoken expectations the psychological contract and knows that breaking it hurts more than breaking a written one, because each side considered its own “it goes without saying” obvious; the ninth step is what Gary Klein called a premortem: imagining failure in advance, while it still costs nothing; the eighth, the terms for leaving, is the one partners skip most often, even though it is exactly what lets them go in without fear.
Talking everything through before you set sail is awkward, but it is exactly what creates lasting alliances: it removes the games and manipulations that come from mismatched expectations and reduces “mind reading” and catastrophizing. In business the absence of clear agreements is a direct road to losses and to the destruction of relationships; a friendship that can’t survive two hours of such a conversation wouldn’t have survived the first loss either. A scaling up of the ten principles of agreements (module 1).
Positive intention (5 steps)
A speech technique and an attitude: looking for and putting into words the good intention behind the other person’s words instead of attributing the worst to them. Cushioning — don’t argue, accept: “okay,” “I understand,” “I hear you.” I value or I respect — express respect for the very fact that they spoke up. Positive intention — a hypothesis: “you want…”. Taking the lead — a question that steers things in a constructive direction. Lightness — treating it not as a hard battle but as a chance to understand the other person more deeply. “You’re nitpicking” turns into “It matters to you that it’s done well, right? How do you see what could be strengthened here?” The attitude “behind any behavior there is a positive intention” came from neuro-linguistic programming, but it was Winnicott who grounded it most deeply: even stealing by a deprived child is a sign of hope, an attempt to get back what was once taken away, and an adult who sees hope behind the act responds differently from one who sees only the act. Modern psychoanalysis calls this skill mentalization — the capacity to assume understandable feelings and intentions behind someone else’s behavior.
The technique lowers the other person’s defenses and turns the conversation toward cooperation; you consciously choose to see an ally in the other, and in most cases after that they become one, because it is hard for a person to attack someone who has just named the best in them. The hypothesis about the intention may be wrong — then the other person will correct it, and that, too, is movement toward the substance. One of the eight techniques for utilizing hooks; the same choice of intention opens the humor techniques (module 5).
Principles of developing professionalism (14)
Guideposts for long-term growth in your work: if I don’t develop something through daily actions, then that something has already ended; does my activity imply a desire to keep improving; a small step is better than none; a range of steps all pointing the same way; this process will never end; every day I move the process forward; all of this is necessary for life to be interesting; this is how I prevent a crisis; to walk you have to run, to stand still you have to walk, and if a person has stopped, they have already fallen; what small steps every day — big steps don’t exist; what I do — production, sales, services, what value I create; value vectors; the mission of your work — “I, as a specialist, help such-and-such people get rid of such-and-such a problem and get such-and-such a result”; what was most useful for me. The ninth principle is the Red Queen’s rule from Alice, which became a law in biology: to stay in place you have to run, because everything around you is running too; the first six are Japanese kaizen, small improvements every day instead of rare spurts, and Anders Ericsson’s research on mastery, where the count is in years of daily deliberate practice; the thirteenth is the question with which Peter Drucker began his work with any company: what business are we really in, and for whom.
The principles help you make decisions about development not impulsively but from a strategy; they fit onto the vision of the future and the 12 elements of strategy (module 9), and their heart is the power of small steps (module 10). Checking yourself against the first principle is unpleasant and useful: name a skill you are proud of, and the day you last developed it.
Sales funnel (6 stages and 4 levers)
The client’s path: impressions — how a person finds out that I exist at all; engagement — what intrigue and interest I create so that an impression turns into a click; the “freebie” — what of value I give away for free; an introductory service, so that the client can get to know me better; the core service — the flagship product; additional sales and a VIP service for existing clients. Four levers that influence this path: trust — what I do to inspire it; awareness — how I make it known that the service exists and is needed; motivation — why the client should work with me right now; ability to pay — how to make paying comfortable. The funnel is more than a century old: back at the end of the nineteenth century the adman Elmo Lewis described the buyer’s path as attention — interest — desire — action; the “freebie,” for its part, works on the law of reciprocity, which Cialdini considered the strongest of the social mechanisms: someone who has received a gift feels indebted even if they never asked for it, and so something valuable given for free is not charity but the first rung of trust.
A systematic view instead of chaotic attempts to “sell somehow”: you can see at which stage clients are lost and which lever to pull; the funnel leaks where trust is lacking, not where there is too little advertising. It builds on honest selling (module 4) and the “Three circles” (module 6): lead the person through the stages, helping them decide rather than squeezing out their consent. It carries over into the end of a talk as the selling close (module 10).
“Step back and take the lead” (4 steps)
A technique for a situation where the plan has failed and tension has arisen: the meeting turned out to be unnecessary, the client sharply refuses, a boss is scolding the person who brought you in. Take responsibility: “It seems I wasn’t able to get the value across” — this disarms. Acknowledge reality: “If you already have a solution…”. Taking the lead — offering an alternative value: “Since we’re here anyway, would you be willing to set aside fifteen minutes to see how this works for a real client?” Add strength to taking the lead — an exit option: “If it’s a no, it’s a no, and we’ll wrap up the meeting. What do you think?” William Ury advised a negotiator under attack to “go to the balcony” — to step back so as to see the whole scene — and the technique does this out loud; the third step uses the rule Cialdini called rejection-then-retreat: a small request after a large one has been turned down is accepted much more willingly; the fourth relies on one of the most reliable effects in social psychology — the phrase “you are free to refuse” doubles agreement, because it gives back to a person what they are most afraid of losing, their freedom.
When a person isn’t being pressured, they have no reason to dig in their heels, and they take a step toward you themselves. The technique saves face, lowers the level of conflict and draws benefit even from a losing position — at least information or experience; in psychoanalysis they would say that taking responsibility for a failure means staying in a position where you can think rather than defend yourself. The same logic as cushioning (module 1): first accept, then lead; one of the eight techniques for utilizing hooks.
Techniques for utilizing hooks (8)
A summary map of responses to provocation, gathered from the whole course; each one begins with cushioning and ends with taking the lead. A substantive answer that strengthens the lead. “The last thing I’d want is X, because Y matters to me.” “You probably think X, although in fact Y.” Magic: “what if X” — humor and lightness. The anti-bite: “Your words make me want to X; instead, I invite you to Y.” “It’s good that you mentioned this now, because X.” Positive intention: “I value your wish to X.” Step back: “It seems something in our communication has gone wrong; please tell me how you see the situation.” The very word “utilization” is the legacy of Milton Erickson, who instead of overcoming a patient’s resistance used it as material: everything a person brings, including an attack, can be put to use; in this logic a hook is not a blow to be fended off but energy that can be redirected.
The eight formulas are the five speech techniques (module 3), the anti-bite (module 2), humor (module 5) and the professional’s techniques gathered into one working set. The point of the training is not to choose the “right” technique but to have several answers to one and the same hook, so that no hook leaves you without a move: someone who has one answer to everything is predictable, and it is the predictable who get caught.
“The best result of our cooperation”
A speech technique for opening a meeting: “If this meeting of ours is a space for answers to questions that are important to you, then what questions do you face as professionals? What would be the best result of our interaction for you?” The focus shifts from “I want to tell you something and sell it to you” to “how can I be useful to you right now.” Solution-focused therapy opens every first session with a similar question about the best hopes from the conversation and considers it the most important question of the entire therapy: the answer sets the direction, and everything said afterward becomes movement toward it; Bion required the analyst to enter a session without memory and desire — the same technique frees the seller, for the first few minutes, from their own desire to sell and makes them able to listen.
The meeting is built around the client’s real requests, not around what the seller considers important, and goes straight to the substance; quite often the client names as the best result something entirely different from what they were going to be sold, and that saves both of them an hour. One of the professional’s speech techniques, alongside the “Invitation to dialogue,” the “Step back” and positive intention; the same question about the best result opens RBT (module 5) and the partnership conversation.
The professional’s “+ + +” state
The professional’s inner footing — three pluses: the company, the product, the client. The company: why it benefits the client to work with us, what qualities we develop in people, which of our values make the world better. The product: what the benefit is for the client, how the product differs from others, what additional benefits it gives. The client: how we make the client happy, what stories about satisfied clients I can tell, how a conflict turned into cooperation. The three pluses are a business version of Berne’s position “I’m OK — You’re OK — They’re OK”: as long as the seller has a minus in their head on at least one of the three points, they are either embarrassed by the price, or don’t believe in the product, or are afraid of the client, and it can be heard in the first sentence; Simon Sinek showed the same thing from the market’s side — people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
The answers to these questions turn belief in the value of your work from a slogan into a justification: the seller genuinely knows they are offering something useful, and so they need neither to beg nor to coerce. A bank of stories about the good the work has done helps you withstand refusals and doubts — in a hard moment, a story about a client who was helped is a firmer footing than any objection-handling training. It is from this state that the professional’s thinking grows.
Value vectors (price — service — quality)
A client judges an offer along three axes — price, customer service, quality; the course suggests drawing them as a triangle with scales and honestly marking where you are now. Strategic management knows these axes as the three disciplines of market leaders: operational excellence gives the best price, product leadership the best quality, customer intimacy the best service, and the research of Treacy and Wiersema showed that the winners are exceptional on one axis and merely decent on the other two, while those who try to be the best at everything end up the best at nothing. The practical conclusion: if you lose on price, strengthen quality or service and talk about exactly those, rather than competing on price alone.
One of the fourteen principles of developing professionalism. It helps you explain value in the client’s own words and hold on to the honest definition of sales (module 4): show the value rather than knock down the price; a discount is the most expensive way of admitting that you have nothing to say about the other two vectors.