Cold reading is an area I’ve been interested in for many years and have used with much success in the field. I remember laying HB Sunday after I used cold reading on her and her friends in the guise of palmistry. I’d met her a couple of weeks before and made out with her in some bars then I came across her on a night out with her friends. Using the strategy of disarming potential cockblocks, I worked on her female friends first, using palmistry to cold read first one, then many. They were literally lining up to be ‘read’ by me.
Following on from this display of value, social proof kicked in and HB Sunday’s friends gave her the ‘go ahead’ or the validation that I was definitely someone she ought to get closer to. Interestingly, ‘becoming closer to this person’, was a theme I had embedded and linked to myself during some of the palmistry I’d been doing on her friends.
If you have seen psychics/mediums/tarot card or palm readers/clairvoyants either in real life or in the media, chances are you will be observing and listening to a display of cold reading. Once you have studied the techniques, you’ll see how much of what works can be explained through the non-psychic techniques anyone can learn with some training.
In my own field of sarging, cold reading can be combined with other techniques such as Cialdini’s Weapons of Influence, Speed Seduction, Ericksonian hypnosis, NLP and knowledge of cognitive biases. When you can put all these together and use them in your daily interactions with people, you really can turbo-charge your persuasive impact, connect with people and display value. There is much overlap within these areas and they naturally extend into each other’s territory in many aspects.
Take, for example, cold reading and cognitive biases -people tend to forget the ‘misses’ and remember the ‘hits’, thus crediting you the reader/sarger with deep levels of understanding which you simply did not have but were able to guess at within a probability game set up by you and whose odds are tipped greatly in your favour.
It’s a huge area and one I can and will write a lot more about.
