About the authors

Stephen C. Young is, foremost, an entrepreneur and, today, a leading trainer and founder of Proactive Persuasion, a UK consultancy delivering unique immersion-style training seminars about persuasion.

He grew up and was educated in Newcastle upon Tyne. After leaving school, he spent a short time as an electrical engineer. His sales career started in 1978 when he joined the city’s principle daily newspaper, The Evening Chronicle. For two years, he worked in the challenging world of advertising sales before, in 1980, relocating to London to take up an appointment at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO).

Experiencing first-hand the high cost of living in the Capital, and with three weeks to wait before taking up his new post, he investigated more lucrative, alternative opportunities. Within a week, he was offered and accepted a business development role selling high-value recruitment services at more than triple the salary offered by the FCO.

In 1993, he established Stephen St James & Associates, an executive search and selection consultancy, specialising in information technology and telecommunications recruitment, located in Central London’s prestigious Bedford Square. He managed and grew this business, employing and training a team of specialists over the next 13 years.

In 2010, having reviewed numerous technical volumes on the subject of persuasion and influence, he discovered that, throughout most of his career, he naturally, without conscious awareness, applied in everyday conversations linguistic techniques known as language patterns. He believes passionately that everyone can be more persuasive in their daily lives once they also become aware of the particular nuances of persuasive linguistics.

In the same way that everyone can play random notes on a piano and only some can play a tune, everyone can talk, but only those skilled in the art of persuasion understand the importance of arranging words in the right order! A compilation of simple linguistic techniques used by the most capable sales professionals in the world, Brilliant Persuasion will reveal that order.

Stephen lives in West London and, some would say, is a coffee, red wine and gym addict. He divides his time between the United Kingdom and Latin America with occasional visits catching up with friends and family in Newcastle upon Tyne.