I’m the new guy over here at JS2, beginning my summer as a social media intern. Everyone here is sharp as a tack and I feel like I’m trying to cut a steak with a crayon.

To make me a better asset in my position, I was enrolled in Randy Marcoz’s Intelligent Communication class. I was dropped into a group of students already around 10 lessons deep into Intelligent Communication.

Suddenly I felt like Neo from The Matrix when the true world was revealed to him and I was faced with a choice: take the blue pill and the easy way out, sticking to my old forms of communication. Or take the red pill, and break my communication down so it can be built back up stronger and more efficiently than before.

_{The blue pill takes me right back to not being able to articulate that “no, I don’t volunteer to clean the barracks.”}

^{IMAGE: http://mrg.bz/2417dc}

To continue with my Matrix analogy to learning how to do communication kung-fu, I had to be taught with having no prior training. I was given an access code to all of the current class’ previously recorded lectures with Randy. I had taken the pill, now I was waiting for it to kick in.

Unlike the live lecture I was dropped into, the first lecture in the Intelligent Communication series had broken down how each student would learn to communicate more effectively without any hand holding. The pill had finally kicked in and I was learning big boy concepts with big boy science behind it with profound real world practicality. Randy tailors this science towards high profile negotiations, sales influence, and the elicitation of information.

Part of effectively communicating is getting what you want. To get what you want from your target you need to be able to influence and persuade them with both actions blending as a natural part of the conversation. Randy goes into depth on influence and persuasion tactics and lays out their practical applications usually through a personal anecdote of his from his 20 plus years of operating as an intelligence agent. Randy makes us take an oath to only use these tactics for good, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.

_{“No Mom I swear, Dad practically begged to buy me this pony.”}

^{IMAGE: http://mrg.bz/e8c2e1}

Back to the Matrix. So Neo is good at shooting and jumping across buildings but his bread and butter is his hand to hand combat. This is the foundation for all his victories. Like Neo’s kung-fu, your foundation for influence and persuasion is rapport.

Rapport, Randy explains is like a checking account. The more rapport you have with a client, target, boss, or coworker the bigger your pool of trust and influence with them is that you can withdraw to get what you want. Learning how to communicate more effectively to get what you want is the whole reason for the Intelligent Communication class.

You could be the most introverted person in the continental US, but Randy will teach you how to build rapport. Live or over the internet, Randy will sit with you in a video conference and teach, answer questions, and make you see casual conversation as a scientific dance between competing goals.

_{“I’ll have 2 persuasions please.”
-“I’m sorry sir, your rapport is currently overdrawn.”}

^{IMAGE: http://mrg.bz/61887b}

So I took the pill and went down the rabbit hole. I’ve caught up in the lessons with the rest of the class over these past couple weeks and we are about halfway done in total. We have just started the persuasion phase of Intelligent Communication and I’m genuinely excited.

For any of you wanting to hear about this from the horse’s mouth, Randy has his own blog on Marcoz.net where you can sign up for his newsletter. I intend to keep you all updated on my journey towards communicating to get what I want, my way.

-The New Guy