The full title of this book by Julian Moore is
The James Bond Cold Reading: A Re-Imagining Of The Classic Reading.
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a Four Stars rating. This means it is Good and Well Worth Reading.
Here is my book review.
A clever idea
The idea of using a short James Bond plot to help you cold read is very clever, as are the underlying,12 classic lines.
Inevitably it will still take effort to learn them and even more to practice using them in a love situation.
The author has done a nice job of giving ideas of how improvisations around the classic lines can be constructed.
While cold reading and associated skills may be an act, these ideas can also be used in every day life.
My interest is how these ideas can be used for business and the book has set my grey matter churning.
……………………………………………………………………………..
That was where my review on Amazon ended but I want to explain to you what cold reading is and why I think it can be helpful.
Cold reading is used by mentalists, spiritualists, fortune tellers and other similar trades to trick you into thinking they know more about you than they could possibly know, unless they had special psychic powers.
I realise that sounds dodgy but it’s an interesting read to find out how people can fall for these acts and believe everything they say.
The secret is that they do know something about you but not because of psychic powers. Not normally anyway. They know because we all have similar thoughts and emotions and, if they are expressed in generic enough terms, we can see ourselves in them.
The classic reading is based on 12 statements that were very insightful and form the basis for people to improvise off the theme.
One is along the lines of “Sometimes you like to be on your own but sometimes you need to have fun with family and friends”.
It’s hard to disagree with that kind of statement.
Where we differ is where we lie along the line which measures the proportion of time we want to be on our own versus with other people. Some are 10/90 and most of the time, want to be with others but some are 90/10 and much prefer being on their own and allowed to do what they want, when they want. Very rarely will someone be at the extreme.
So why am I interested in this for business? Well, encouraging people to believe that you understand them and you’re like them (and like them) is a key to being persuasive. Cold reading can be used as a rapport building technique in personal selling, either face to face or on the telephone.
It can also be used in copywriting. You want people to feel as if the copy is being written about them and how they feel about the problem you can solve.
Here is a quote from Dan Kennedy in an interview with Stephan Spencer.
“It’s pretty advanced. I’ll give you a pretty advanced one. You won’t find it in the sales letter book, and really a lot of copywriters don’t talk about it. It’s a reverse cold read. A cold read is what a psychic, a mind reader, the people who pretend to get you messages from your dead uncle, it’s what they do to you in order to be able to convince you that they have psychic power. They are really engaged in a combination fishing expedition in a way of describing you back to you that you agree with. These scripts date all the way to the 1800s. They’re actually sort of mad libs, fill in the blank, general enough that they get what are called a lot of hits. They get misses, people kind of forgive the misses and they get a lot of hits. A reverse cold read is I don’t have the opportunity to sit across from you face to face but I know enough about the list you’re from, the profession you’re from, the audience you’re from that I can do this in copy and I can describe you to you as the reason why you receive this and are going to want it. If people Google cold read or cold reading, or they go to Amazon and enter cold read or cold reading, they will find resources about this and they will find both expose books and they will find actually how-to books. Highly skilled copywriters tend to build this into their copy a lot.”
You can read the full interview at https://www.marketingspeak.com/transcripts/dan-kennedy/
The first cold reading book I tried to read years ago was too technical for a subject I didn’t want to study in depth. This book is much more straightforward and using the James Bond character and plot does help you to remember the broad details.
You can buy the book at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
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