The Art of Persuasion (Collection)

Rehearse Their Answer

Right, you’ve rehearsed your lines, but what about theirs? What are they going to say? And actually, how can you have rehearsed all your lines without knowing how they’ll react? Well you haven’t, of course. You’ve rehearsed your opening gambit—you’ve practiced how to put your case across. But after they respond you’ll be clueless. You’ve no idea what they’re going to say, so you’ll be completely unprepared. If this is something big, they’re hardly likely to say yes right away, are they? They’ll want to talk about it, ask questions, suggest alternatives, I don’t know—anything might happen.

Well, not quite. It’s true that you don’t know exactly what they’ll say, but you do have a pretty good idea of the options. After all, ...