The Inner Game of Selling Yourself shows you how to communicate in ways that will ensure people will listen and act on what you say.

This advice is from James Borg who has a Post Graduate degree in Psychology. He advises on marketing techniques and the application of Psychology in the workplace. He also contributes to Newspapers and Magazines.

He begins by introducing mental techniques that allow you to get inside the other person's mind using ESP - EMPATHY, SINCERITY, PERSPICACITY.
Once you have an understanding of what the other person wants and feels you can then have a clearer idea of how to approach that person and communicate more effectively.

One of the chapters focussed on 'Listening'. Most people I know are very poor listeners, including myself and many of the marks of a poor listener include; interrupting, finishing off other people's sentences, talking over the other person etc.

The book also includes ways of making the best use of our memory, the telephone, body language, meetings, even the words we use to speak! There are a number of tools available to us that can help towards better communication that we simply overlook or don't know how to use.

There is also a useful chapter on personality types, which can further help towards understanding the way people communicate according to their personality, which in turn can help us to know what approach to adopt when dealing with these different personality types.

The advice and information in The Inner Game of Selling Yourself is not as aggressive or self-serving as it sounds from the title. It simply provides basic and useful information we should all know in order to communicate more effectively and get what we want.

He summarises the concept of influencing, or 'selling yourself' as 'trying to get other people to do or give something, trying to get a point across or get somebody to agree to a course of action.... (it) is essentially about appealing to human nature.... using the art of gentle persuasion (author's italics) to achieve an outcome that brings mutual benefit.'

Without theorising about perception, he conveys a lively sense of why intelligent listening, with empathy for the person(s) you are listening to, forms the foundation of effective listening. He not only highlights the significance of winning attention but gets across several practical ways of adapting in the face of inattention, including simply withdrawing rather than wasting time. He presents the part played by 'body language' - especially 'paralinguistics', non-verbal aspects of speech - in conversation well.. And he introduces how the discipline of 'psycholinguistics' illuminates ways in which words affects how we sense, interpret and feel.

Borg indicates how adroit management of memory can enhance the quality of your communications with others, how voicemail and forgotten promises can become a source of mischief and how business cards can act as a support to short-term and long-term memory in business contacts. His practical illustrations bring a touch of real life to research on memory - 'A poor memory can destroy relationships' - along with crisp problem-confronting advice: 'Simply take more interest in whatever is important to the other person'. And with guidance on creating imaginative associations to recall data you need in business, without jeopardising your rapport with others.

Regarding applications to business, there are interesting chapters on communication by telephone - 'Because it conveys impressions, your 'telephone self' needs to be on top form' - and on negotiation. The book would have been more compelling with adequate treatment of the written word, especially through electronic media. The observation 'E-mails don't smile or exhibit any 'paralanguage' to enforce impressions' is hardly an adequate guide to its potential or its pitfalls.

Where the book falls down fairly badly is in its treatment of emotions, personality and sources of variation amongst people. Neither research on the biological basis of emotional behaviour nor research on the part played by emotions in stress is mentioned. No mention is made of the realities of stress experienced by many people in work generally or in selling themselves. The chapter on personality 'types' is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the book. This is partly due to the difficulties of simplifying theory in this area, and partly due to the author's idiosyncratic mix of two particular schools of personality.

Nonetheless, the qualities of realism and of empathy that shine through James Borg's writing make this, on balance, a useful guide to selling and good value for money.

Kieran Duignan, a chartered occupational psychologist and qualified counsellor