Setting your motivation… Mind Scripts

Getting into character is an important part of being successful on a social engineering engagement. You may be physically impersonating a sales guy, engineer, employee, or you may be carrying out your fiendish work remotely gathering data, and setting up meetings. Either way you should be clear in your mind who you are, who you are engaging with, and what you want out of the activity, you need to be clear on your motivation.

When I think of this, my immature side (say nothing) hears a rather camp actor shouting at the director asking, “what’s my motivation darling”. OK so I am odd, lets use the above imagery to demonstrate the motivation to run through the opposition to score 🙂

So with this in mind I wanted to quickly talk about something a little NLP’esk that I think you will find helpful, and if full embraced will really help with your attitude, approach, body language, facial expression, tonality and more when carrying out an engagement. This little something is called Mind Scripts, and is something I first heard about when studying cold reading and hypnosis, but have also heard similar approaches from an NLP context, and in sales type books on engaging and building rapport with people. (I am not 100% sure who coined this term, I think it may have been Ian Rowland, but please don’t hold me to that).

So what is a Mind Script? Well a mind script is just a simple, short,concise and positive statement about the activity or interaction you are about to engage in. This statement you repeat to yourself mentally before and during the engagement.

Don’t reject this concept just yet please, as some pointless simplistic activity. You will actually find that you make a huge difference as to how you come across to the person(s) you are interacting with when you you run an appropriate mind script. If you think about it we are unconsciously running a mind script of some kind all of the time, simply waking up and telling yourself its going to be a crappy day, then becomes a script you will be running. This then effects how you interact, attitude and the effect you have on others unknowingly.

Here are a couple of example of a mind script to give you an idea of how simple they are. I then encourage you to try running appropriate scripts before going into meeting, interacting with people one to one as a form of practice. If you think about it, it really does make sense, but I would like to hear from people with their thoughts, comments, success and failures. Obviously remember there is NO FAIL 🙂

I know you, you know me, I belong here

I like you, you like me, this will go well

I respect you, you respect me, and we will have a good discussion

I am an expert, you know I am an expert, there will be confidence in my recommendations

Hopefully you get the general idea from these brief examples, think positive, be positive. A positive mental attitude, positive things happen to positive people, that’s what I tell myself anyway 🙂