Cracking the Code

Some communicators, like Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, just seem to have the "natural ability" to communicate well with anybody, anywhere, anytime. They didn't have to learn how to communicate from a book or a course--they just picked it up along the way in life, or it was wired into them at birth. The vast majority of us, on the other hand, are unconscious about how to communicate, and when it comes to effective communication, we're babes in the wood.

Our lack of training leaves us vulnerable to professional message makers like Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich, who have been working for decades to convince average working Americans that their interests correspond with those of the mega-wealthy and multinational corporations. To a large degree since 1980, they've succeeded. But Americans everywhere are starting to see that the policies put into place supposedly on behalf of working people are actually harming working people-not to mention the planet and the prospect of our handing over to our children a world at peace with a bright and positive future.

Luntz, Gingrich, and the manipulators of Madison Avenue and Wall Street didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging or find it under a rock. They learned these techniques, from the ground up, and their efforts to apply what they know to political debate are conscious, intentional, and systematic. You can do the same-and help your fellow Americans take our country back for the people.

Cracking the Code shows how. It breaks down the science and technology of effective communication and helps you apply it to your own efforts to build a better world. Hartmann shows you, tells you, and hands you the tools to become conscious about how people think, sort, understand the world, and how you communicate with others. Throughout the book, Hartmann shares exercises and steps you can practice to master this technology, and he shows how hypnotic language actually "installs" learning without requiring practice.

As you read deeply into this book, you'll find yourself seeing things you hadn't realized were there-in everything from advertising to political rants, seizing the power to be an agent of change in your own life and in the world. You'll discover resources and personal abilities you didn't even realize you had. You'll become an agent of change, in the finest tradition of those brilliant communications geniuses Paine, Jefferson, and the cousins Roosevelt.

And whether you're a politician, an activist, a volunteer, or a voting and concerned citizen, you'll reach into that part of the collective human psyche where we truly do have the power to create a new world.