I tend to turn this whole thing on its head.
Being dominant from below is a very powerful thing, especially for the woman on the recieving end.
If you can place yourself lower and still maintain it then it sends a very powerful message straight to her essence.
I purposefully do this, something i found myself doing naturally then someone pointed it out to me one day in a meeting at work. he had watched it and was stunned at how well it worked and also picked up that it was not planned. this was quite a few years ago.
Yeah, but how do you do it ? It never happened to me like that.
Thanks to Prodigy in this thread :
http://www.naturalfreedom.info/viewtopi ... 556#p33556
I realised I had not answered this question, so here goes.
The example from when someone else pointed it out to me was:
We were in a meeting, two rows of about 8-10 people, facing each other, separate long desks with a gap in between (think: I <gap> I) with a projection screen at the top of the I's.
It was the company I was doing some consulting for on one side and their clients on the other side. I was not the leader on our side, at best I was in position 3-4.
The two sides just could not agree on what was going to happen, on their side the middle 3 people were all women and were the decision makers at our clients in relation to this project. They were getting more and more frustrated at a couple of the 'salespeople' on our side (I was external to the company I was working for) and were clamming up. The salespeople were undermining my efforts to help us reach an agreement on what we were going to do and were just spinning more and more bullshit and making promises that both sides plainly knew we could not live up to. Our tech guys were just wilting under all this pressure and bullshit.
After a while, I sat back observing this and came to the conclusion that nothing was happening or was going to happen, which pissed me off a bit to say the least. Both sides had put up brick walls, these walls were getting stronger by the minute. I knew we could make the clients happy if we did what we could, however our side was not helping us reach an agreement.
I pondered this for a while and formulated something we could deliver, loosely as a concept in my mind, not all planned out but the outline, something I could run with.
After a while, I got up, slowly, walked around in between the two I's, while all around me people kept talking at cross purposes, walked up to the desk of the woman in charge on their end, right in front of her, lowered myself down on my knees, so i was propped up on my legs with a straight back, put my elbows and arms flat on the desk right in front of her. At this point my chin was resting on my arms, flat on the desk.
I looked up at her, and just paused. She eventually stopped talking with the others and looked back at me, noticing me there for the first time.
At this point my entire focus was on her, no one else was in the room or mattered to me at all, I could not hear them and they were not making any impression on my vision or hearing.
When I felt her attention was with me and not with the rest of the room, I continued.
I then calmly told her all the things she had been told that we could do that we really could not (by the salesmen), then what we could do and what we could do towards addressing the other bits they wanted doing. What the implications would be cost and timescale wise and what was realistic without any bullshit. She sat there and let me talk, she was really in the moment and present and was also ignoring everyone else in the room. She was with me.
I just laid it all out there, this is the way it is, anything else is just bullshit. Some bits I don't know yet, but am sure we can work them out if we put contingency in for them, really straight and honest.
During this I asked myself questions that I was sure would be on her mind, answered them also. It was a monologue, went on for a few minutes.
If you are happy with this, then we can reach an agreement and get the work done, if you are not then I am best leaving now and i'll leave you all to it, you will still be here next week debating this and you know it.
She had two choices, accept or decline.
After a few minor questions, really minor, she chose to accept. No changes to the terms at all, no wrangling, no maneuvering, no bartering at all.
She was glowing as she left that room. Some of her team looked very disorientated.
Some of my side were wondering what we just agreed to and started giving me shit about it. I let them, I let them rail on me, heard what they had to say and logged it away. They really had no idea what I had just proposed to the clients, it had been a private conversation between two people in a room filled with people, right in front of them all.
Next day I was called into the boss's office and congratulated. I had managed to wangle in a fair sized contingency on top of our previous quote, far in excess of what the salesmen were asking her to sign up to, and promised her less in return but more suited to her needs and something that I KNEW we could deliver. She had just sent over the signed approval for the contract about an hour previously (which I had written up on the train ride home the previous night and emailed to her). We were set to do well out of it and so was her company. Translated into a nice little consultancy bonus at the end of the project.
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It was the first time someone pointed it out to me and it was one of the salesman on our side who did, he just could not stop talking about it on the train ride back up to our city later in the day. He was trying to formulate it into a technique he could use. I restrained myself from telling him the folly in that. I later realised I had done variations of this for years, without any thought or prompting.
To the majority of people on my side of the table, it appeared that I had gone over and given all my power away, submitted and bowed down before the clients..
The client knew that that was far from the truth of it. I had gone over, bypassing all the protocols and formalities of the situation, put myself at her level (below it, resting on the table top), at an intimate distance, addressed her one on one - removing everyone else in the room, laid out a proposal with decreased deliverables, tighter limits and increased cost but more suited to their requirements and said there it is, take it or leave it.
In my view you would be crazy to leave it and you will not be able to find a better offer, I know you are the person who makes the decision - all the rest of your table are irrelevant, you are the person to decide, so decide, are we doing business?
That one salesman saw it also, he saw the effect it had on the client and how quickly she agreed to the proposal and how she did not ask for ANY changes at all to what was proposed.