Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen By Zoe Chance

 

“Real influence isn’t about transactions; it’s about transformation.”

 

The bedrock principle of influencing behavior is this: People tend to take the path of least resistance. Ease is the single best predictor of behavior. Better than motivation, intentions, price, quality, or satisfaction. 

 

If you’re trying to influence someone to do something that feels really big, it can help to start small. Every journey starts with a baby step. How can you make the first step as close as possible to effortless for everyone— including you? How do you do the same for the next step, and the next, and the next one after that? 

 

This approach to influence is about connecting to the powers of persuasion you were born with and strengthening them in order to make life better for everyone, starting with you. It isn’t rocket science, but it is a science. 

 

Rather than try to teach you everything about influence (which would be impossible), I’m going to focus on the low hanging fruit—surprising insights, small changes, and manageable actions that have an outsize impact. As you practice it might feel awkward at first, like learning a second language, or a third. In the beginning it takes a lot of conscious effort and isn’t graceful. But eventually the new language becomes a habit, firmly rooted in your subconscious. As your skill at influencing others grows, you’ll create your own strategies and eventually be able to deploy them without thinking. To get there, you’ll need a solid grasp of the psychology of influence, so I’ll be sharing some key research in social psychology, behavioral economics, law, public health, marketing, and neuroscience that explains how decisions are really made and what invisible forces truly drive behavior. 

 

The practice of influence is fueled by desire. 

So the first question is: Do you know what you want?


 

Here are ten misperceptions we’ll explore. 

1. Pushy = influential. 

• Actually, the opposite is true. Being influential requires being influenceable. And making people comfortable saying no makes them inclined to say yes. 

 

2. If they understand the facts, they’ll make the right decision. 


• Because the mind doesn’t work the way we think it does, facts are far less persuasive than we think they are. We’ll explore how decisions are really made and you’ll learn more effective ways to encourage other people to make good choices. 


 

3. People act on their values and their conscious decisions. 


• We all want to act on our values and conscious decisions, but the gap between our intentions and our behavior is a vast abyss. Changing someone’s mind doesn’t necessarily mean you’re influencing their behavior (which is the goal). 


 

4. Becoming influential involves persuading disbelievers and bending resistant people to your will.


• No, the success of your great idea depends on enthusiastic allies. Your efforts to find, empower, and motivate them will go much farther than your efforts to overcome people’s resistance. 


 

5. Negotiation is a battle. 


• You might assume negotiations are adversarial, but most people are just trying not to be suckers. The more experienced a negotiator is, the more likely they are to be collaborative—which makes them more successful. 


 

6. Asking for more will make people like you less. 


• How they feel about you depends more on how you ask than how much you ask for. And when both parties (including you) are happy with how things work out, they’re much more likely to follow through. 

 

7. The most influential people can get anyone to do anything. 


• This isn’t how it works, which is a good thing, both for them and for you. 


 

8. You’re a good judge of character and can spot a con a mile away. 


• Unfortunately, we’re all terrible at lie detection. But I’ll show you some red flags to watch for so you can protect yourself and others from people who would use influence to harm you. 


 

9. People don’t listen to people like you. 


• A voice might be telling you that to get other people’s attention, you’d have to be more extroverted, or older, or younger, or more attractive, better-educated, more experienced, the right race, or a native speaker. In this book, you’ll learn to speak so other people listen—and listen so they’ll speak. 


 

10. You don’t deserve to have power, money, or love—or whatever you secretly wish for.

• 
I won’t try to persuade you that you deserve to be influential; I don’t even know what that would mean. What I do know is that influence doesn’t flow to those who deserve it but to those who understand and practice it. And soon, that will be you. 
Being bad at something you care about—and having to study and practice, and work hard at it—might not seem like a gift. But when your skills improve, you’ll know exactly how you developed them, and you can replicate the process and even teach it to other people. I know this from personal experience. 

 

Thin Slices

• Nalini Ambady and her colleague Robert Rosenthal. They used the term “thin slices” to describe the surprisingly narrow windows of experience we use to form personal impressions—sometimes just fractions of a second. 
• The first thing that’s striking about the research on thin slices is how accurately these rapid Gator impressions can predict social judgments and the meaningful outcomes that result from them. When college students were asked to evaluate a professor’s competence based on a silent, six-second clip of the professor teaching, those results strongly predicted how professors fared in end-of-year evaluations. Undergraduate students were able to identify the most highly rated salespeople from a sample of regional sales managers using three twenty-second clips of just their voices. When Ambady gave participants incomprehensibly garbled ten-second audio clips of surgeons conversing with their patients, they were able to predict from merely the sound of the surgeons’ voices which ones had been sued for malpractice. Whether the thin slices were of body language, tone of voice, or faces, they all conveyed valuable information and yielded remarkable predictive accuracy. 
• Neuroscientist Alexander Todorov sliced the exposure even thinner. He showed study participants pairs of unfamiliar faces for only a second, then asked them to pick out the more competent person in the pair. Participants didn’t know it, but these were the faces of candidates who had run for Congress, and their snap judgments predicted with astonishing 70 percent accuracy which candidates had gone on to win their races. Incumbency and political party? Didn’t matter. 

 

Selective attention 

• Detailed visual processing is costly. Neuroscientists Stephen Macknick and Susana Martinez-Conde write, “Your eyes can make out fine detail only in a keyhole-sized circle at the very center of your gaze covering one-tenth of one percent of your retina; the vast majority of the surrounding visual field is of shockingly poor quality.” So why does so much of the world look like it’s in focus? The Gator is guessing at it, filling the gaps with high-probability images. The Gator guesses at the rest of the world in a similar way, letting everyday, unremarkable responses rely on hunches, instincts, and habits. To conserve resources, the Judge’s perceptions are saved for the unexpected: unexpected threats (a police siren behind you), unexpected opportunities (an attractive stranger), and even the unexpectedly familiar (Subaru Outbacks showing up everywhere now that you’ve bought one). 
• The Gator filters information by influencing the way we seek it. The most important way this happens is through confirmation bias. We unconsciously search for information that supports what we believe, what we want to believe, or what we expect to find. Internet searches mirror the way we seek information in the rest of the world. While we tend to seek out information confirming that we’re right, we also tend to avoid information that might prove us wrong or make us unhappy. 
• I have found that when you give people a reason and an opportunity to fool themselves, they do, for as long as they can. 

 

Most of us, for most of our lives, with most of the people we know, have been approaching influence backward. We’ve been imagining that influencing people’s behaviors requires changing their minds. This is only sometimes true and rarely enough. 

 

Bedrock Principle of INFLUENCE

• The bedrock principle of influencing behavior is this: People tend to take the path of least resistance. Ease is the single best predictor of behavior. Better than motivation, intentions, price, quality, or satisfaction. There’s a little-known marketing metric for measuring ease called the Customer Effort Score that comes down to a simple question: How easy was it? 
• How customers answer that one question explains one-third of their willingness to buy again, to increase their business with the company, or to rave about it to other people. While one-third may not sound like much, it’s actually huge; the Customer Effort Score is 12 percent more predictive of customer loyalty than customer satisfaction is. 
• Ease makes people happy, and effort can really piss people off. In a study of seventy-five thousand customer service calls, researchers found that 81 percent of customers who reported having a difficult experience said they intended to complain to friends or post negative reviews, while only 1 percent of customers who reported having an easy experience said they would do the same. 
• One of the cheapest and most effective nudges is the simple appointment reminder. Text-message reminders increase showup rates for doctor’s appointments, speed up loan repayments, improve medication adherence, increase vaccination rates, and help students turn assignments in on time. They also reduce failures to appear in court; these no-shows happen often and trigger punitive charges as well as arrest warrants. 

 

Just as ease explains a vast number of things you do, effort explains a lot of the things you don’t do. If you’re expecting to exercise when you’re busy and tired, 

• Our understanding of the Gator also tells us that our chances of success could be much greater if we just made it easier to follow through, or harder not to. You commit to exercising with a buddy, knowing you won’t want to let her down. You store the cookies in an opaque container. 
• The Customer Effort Score doesn’t measure actual effort; it measures perceived effort, which matters at least as much. When researchers wanted to help people follow through on their intentions to work out more often, they stocked the gym with cliffhanger audiobooks on devices gym members couldn’t take home with them. In order to find out what happened, they had to go back to the gym. Getting there and working out didn’t really require less effort, but it felt easier when the Gator was nudging them forward instead of tugging them back. 

 

If you’re trying to influence someone to do something that feels really big, it can help to start small. Every journey starts with a baby step. How can you make the first step as close as possible to effortless for everyone— including you? How do you do the same for the next step, and the next, and the next one after that? 

 

Naomi Eisenberger had a theory that we process rejection as physical pain, so she conducted a slightly mean experiment to see what happens in people’s heads when they get left out. 

the fMRI scanner would show that your brain was registering this feeling in the same areas that register physical pain, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the right ventral prefrontal cortex. As far as your brain was concerned, being cut out of the game literally felt like a slap in the face. Rejection is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to generate a neurobiological stress response: a spike in cortisol levels, pulse rates, and blood pressure. Our bodies respond to rejection like physical danger because rejection has put our species in physical danger. 

 

No matter how often I see it happen, I’m still surprised by the lengths to which strangers will go to be helpful just because they are asked. 

 

We possess a kind of “stress immune system,” so facing fears repeatedly without serious harm can inoculate us against stress. 

 

One of the simplest and most surprising influence hacks is that if you ask people how to influence them, they will often tell you. 

• Most of us are reluctant to ask because we fundamentally misunderstand both the psychology of asking and we underestimate our likelihood of success. In one series of experiments, employees were more likely to turn in mediocre work than to ask for deadline extensions, fearing their supervisor would think them incompetent if they asked for extra time. But they had it backward: Managers saw extension requests as a good sign of capability and motivation. 
• In another series of experiments, Frank Flynn and Vanessa Bohns directed participants to go up to strangers and ask for a variety of favors—everything from filling out a ten-page questionnaire to escorting them across campus to a building that was hard to find. Before making the request, participants were asked to predict how many people they would have to ask before one said yes. Again and again Flynn and Bohns found strangers were surprisingly willing to help. On average, they were two to three times more likely to grant favors than participants had expected. 
• Neuroscientists have discovered that generosity can stimulate the brain’s reward circuitry, triggering the dopamine rush of a helper’s high. You know that feeling. You help somebody out, they’re grateful, and you feel great. Multiple studies show that volunteers are happier and healthier than non-volunteers, and people tend to feel better about spending money on others than on themselves. 
• This link between generosity and happiness runs deep and starts early. In one cute experiment, researchers coded the expressions of joy among toddlers receiving Goldfish crackers or giving them away. They were glad to receive the tasty treats, even happier to give away Goldfish from the researchers’ supply, and most delighted of all to give away their own Goldfish. 
• There are two reasons that people are more likely to say yes to a smaller request after having said no to a larger one: relative size and reciprocity. 
  • Chaperoning a group of troubled teenagers on a trip to the zoo might be a pretty serious commitment, but it’s nothing compared to spending two hours a week with them for the next two years. So, that’s relative size. When you step down from an outrageous ask to something smaller, the other person sees this move as a concession on your part and feels inclined to reciprocate. Research on negotiations shows that people feel better about the outcome if they have gained a concession from the other party: They like you more for having made the concession, and they feel better about themselves for having negotiated it. 

• The best reason of all for asking (and for making you ask big or outrageous) is that you’ll never know what people will agree to if you don’t ask. You could go for a huge ask in order to create room for a future concession only to find that the other person says yes right away. Even when my students are trying to get rejected, they get what they ask for about a third of the time. 

 

The Twin Paradoxes of Charisma 

• The first paradox of charisma is that trying to be charismatic has the opposite effect. 
• The second paradox of charisma is the inverse of the first: You attract other people’s attention by giving them yours. 
• James Pennebaker, a social psychologist describes his work in a delightfully nerdy book called The Secret Life of Pronouns. He found that people who feel they have less power or lower status tend to use more self-referential language. Sometimes the gap has a basis in reality—followers must take orders from leaders, and the poor are less powerful than the rich. But unconscious linguistic patterns derive more precisely from feelings of personal power—or lack thereof. 
• An analysis of Academy Award acceptance speeches showed that actors used first-person pronouns more frequently than directors did. If you’re an Academy Award-winning actor you’re not exactly low-status, but directors are still the boss of you.
• When Pennebaker and his colleagues analyzed pronoun choices in essays written by depressed college students, they found that these students used “I” a lot. Their self-referential language didn’t spring from some fixed personality trait; it merely reflected their mental state, which, of course, is subject to change. In this same study, Pennebaker found that students who had been depressed but no longer were used “I” less often. The bottom line here is when you are feeling vulnerable, physically or emotionally, it’s difficult to get out of your own head. This makes it hard to be fully present with someone else. 
• You might assume that when someone’s attention is self-focused, they’re talking in a narcissistic or self-aggrandizing way. But often it’s the opposite. Consistent self-focus usually arises from feelings of insecurity. When you feel vulnerable, you can’t help directing your attention inward. What’s more, you’re probably unaware that your frequent use of first-person pronouns is a tell for your mental state. 

 

The second paradox of charisma is the inverse of the first: You attract other people’s attention by giving them yours. 

• When you focus your attention on someone else, they feel seen or understood. You’re fully present with them, and they can tell. It makes a palpable difference. Spiritual teachings on being present focus on the dissolution of the ego, or escape from the entrapment of your own mind. Great teachers of stage presence use the same principle. I learned this lesson from Martin Berman, a professional actor who could perform what felt like a miracle. He could wring an Oscar-worthy performance out of anyone simply by reading a scene with them. The secret he taught his students was simple: Always remember that the most important person on the stage is the other actor. 
• It has been said of many highly charismatic individuals that they can make you feel like you’re the most important person in the world in that moment. One visitor described his one-on- one meeting in San Quentin with Charles Manson in similar terms: “When you meet people who are highly persuasive, oftentimes they take a tremendous interest in you.” He said Manson made him feel as though he were the only other person in the room (which he was, but you know what I mean). 
• We all know that people like to talk about themselves, but did you know we like to talk about ourselves so much that we’ll actually pay money to share inconsequential information with strangers? Neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who studies the pleasure of self-disclosure, finds that talking about ourselves activates the same areas of the brain as money, sex, and chocolate, which explains why we like people who ask us questions. In a series of studies, people could choose to answer questions about other people for pay, or answer questions about themselves for free. 
• Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues have found that when people are getting to know each other, those who ask more questions are better liked, and speed daters who ask more questions are more likely to get second dates. Question askers were liked even more when some of those questions were follow-up questions, which were perceived as expressing deep interest. 
• Various studies have shown listeners judge people with lower-pitched voices as stronger, more competent, more attractive, more dominant, and more likely to be good leaders. 
• Have you noticed that when you’re tense and self-conscious, your shoulders slump and you might cross your arms protectively over your chest? This affects how you’re coming across visually, of course, making you look less than confident, but just as important from an influence perspective, it affects how you sound. When we’re nervous, we tend to do things that constrict our throats, making our voices rise in pitch, or creating the creaky vocal fry that so annoys some people. If high, constricted voices are associated with fear or tension, it should be no surprise that they’re less persuasive. Speaking in your natural low register has the opposite effect: It’s a display of confidence. It requires relaxing your diaphragm and throat, which you simply cannot do under threat. Your natural low register is the comfortable, confident voice that makes you sound more present and makes it easier for people to pay attention to you. This applies regardless of your gender. 

 

Charisma isn’t something you are. It’s something you do.

• Which places it within your control; you can become more charismatic by adjusting the way you interact with people. 
• Prince refused to give up. He had earned his musical chops by practicing his instruments for hours and hours a day, and he approached stagecraft the same way. Prince studied Rick James and other performers he admired, paying close attention to every word and gesture. He changed the way he moved and, most important, he learned to focus his attention on the audience. He did these things repeatedly, until they became habitual. He told stories and asked questions, engaging the fans with calls and responses. By the end of the tour, Prince was transformed and the audience was transfixed. Rick James admitted feeling jealous. 

 

Public Speaking 

• When you feel like you belong on stage, then you do. Here are a few ideas and tools that can help you get there. 
• Pauses are moments to connect with the audience, to focus attention on listeners while their thoughts are catching up to the present moment. Pausing not only conveys confidence, it requires it. 
• Full-body pauses—moments when you’re not walking, fidgeting or making any dramatic hand movements, but you are breathing easily, your hands comfortably by your side—are especially helpful. Not just during your presentation but also before and after.
• This key to charisma is so simple that almost no one teaches or practices it, yet it works for speakers and performers of all kinds. 
• When you finish your turn in the spotlight, take a moment to thank the audience before you leave. If there is applause, pause to bask in it for at least one breath, letting the audience’s attention restfully on you. You have been focused on everyone else, charisma blazing, and they felt it. Now, humbly and gratefully, you receive. We tend to imagine that rushing offstage shows humility, but it conveys a tacit apology—I’m sorry I wasted your time. Instead, take a moment to appreciate your audience with a pause that says, Thank you for your time. I’m grateful for it, and I enjoyed being with you, too. 

The second one is shining. 

• This secret is based on the third paradox of charisma. To connect with many people, connect with one. 
• When Prince made eye contact with me, I don’t know if he was really focusing on me, or the woman who fainted, or the man next to her, or someone else entirely. It didn’t matter. The individual connection was so powerful that we were all transfixed. This technique—connecting with many by connecting with one—is shining. 
• Shining is the electric connection that gives someone the feeling of being the only other person in the room. 
• Shining differs from every other public speaking strategy because it requires the willing participation of another person. You can’t shine alone; you can’t shine with someone who’s looking down at their phone; you’re only shining if they feel you shine. And they want to feel you shine because it makes them feel more alive. 
• This is how you do it. Lock your gaze on one person in the audience and open your heart as you speak to them and only them. Offer this person the gift of your focused energy until they feel the connection between you. The message you’re sending is Here I am. Here you are. Here we are, together. Hello. The energy being exchanged is something like love. Or maybe that’s exactly what it is. 

 

Timing- Moments of Truth 

• You know the rules of party etiquette. But when you want to capture someone else’s attention in everyday situations, it’s easy to forget that their life is a party that’s already in full swing. Whether or not they choose to pay attention to you—and how they respond if they do—depends on your timing. When you ask can sometimes matter more than how you ask or even what you’re asking for. Moments of truth are situations in which someone is particularly likely to be open to your influence. Since the Judge’s conscious attention is always already focused on something, it helps to ask yourself what it’s focused on and to see if you can reach out when your idea is going to be relevant. 
• We’ll discuss the importance of framing in the next chapter, but it turns out that the best frames often depend on timing. Researchers have found that we make decisions differently depending on whether an opportunity is coming up soon or is in the distant future. Decisions about the near term tend to be based on concrete considerations like process and feasibility. How could I make it work? Do I have time? What else would I miss? Considerations about the distant future tend to be more abstract, focusing on desirability. Why would I do this? How much would I enjoy it? What would it contribute to my life or someone else’s? When inviting someone to do something for you, you might focus on logistics and concrete details when talking about the near future and focus on impact when talking about the distant future. If you’re asking your CEO to give a talk next week, explain how you’ll minimize the hassle—because that’s what they care about then. If the talk is next month, describe what a big difference it could make—because that’s what they care about then. 

 

Frames

• If I asked you to come up with a list of things that are white, that would be easy, right? But what if I framed the experiment a little differently by adding, “like milk and snow”? Try it. There are countless white things on earth, yet once you have milk and snow at the center of your attention, it’s a lot harder to come up with other white things, like clouds and coconut flakes. Milk and snow are so iconically white and create such a strong frame that they inhibit alternatives. To put it another way, effective frames can be so sticky that it becomes hard to see things from a different perspective. 
• There exist an infinite number of possible frames, but the three most useful are 
  • Monumental
  • Manageable
  • Mysterious

 

Monumental frames 

• A monumental frame tells the Gator, “Pay attention, this is a big freaking deal!” It motivates people through importance, size, scope, the fear of missing out, or all of the above. Monumental frames inspire enthusiasm and commitment. 

 

Manageable 

• A monumental frame can motivate people and inspire them to action, but some problems already feel too big, too daunting. In these cases, you might frame them as manageable instead. A monumental frame emphasizes why (It’s important!), and a  manageable frame emphasizes how (It’s not that hard). You’ve already learned that ease is the best predictor of behavior; that’s why a manageable frame is so powerful. Frames like “just pennies a day” work by making the prospect of a sizable contribution to your local public radio station, for instance, feel manageable. You’ve got this. Cheaper than a cup of coffee. Baby steps. 
• A manageable frame can be particularly effective when you want to help people who are facing fears, grief, or doubts. -let them know that they’re not alone and that their feelings are totally normal—which can make them feel more manageable. 
• This kind of frame is particularly helpful when you’re in a position of power or even just older and more experienced. I’m in a unique position to be able to normalize my students’ fears because I was a student myself for a long time and because I’ve known so many students who have been in similar situations. Graduation is coming and you have no job? That’s normal. Panicked on the PhD job market? It’s normal. Lots of crying? Normal. It sucks, it’s awful, and it’s normal. You can’t solve these problems, but you can help people live with them. You can normalize by sharing your own problems and experiences, and again, this helps even more when you have authority or status. 

 

Mysterious 

• Try reading the following sentence: The mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Strangely easy, isn’t it? That’s your visual processing system making guesses. The third powerful frame, mysterious, is effective because it disrupts this guessing process and the expectations that go with it. Mysterious frames speak directly to the Gator by introducing change or uncertainty—exactly what the Gator is attuned to. New threats. New opportunities. Intrigue. 
• Words and phrases like “new,” “suddenly,” or “breaking news” are mysterious frames that spark curiosity about what has changed. Words like “mystery,” “secret,” or “reveal” or topics framed as questions spark that same underlying uncertainty that piques our curiosity. Mysterious frames attract the Gator’s attention. When it can’t fill in the missing details, it alerts the Judge to take on the case. But this requires mental resources. So, the flip side of this phenomenon is that once a cognitive process has been completed, we don’t need to focus on it anymore, and it’s no longer top of mind. 

 

Zeigarnik Effect

• When Zeigarnik decided to investigate this phenomenon in lab experiments, she found that participants were able to recall more details of incomplete tasks than completed ones. Subsequent researchers dubbed this need for completion the “Zeigarnik effect” and confirmed it repeatedly. Incomplete tasks or unresolved questions engage—and sometimes hijack—our attention. Once the uncertainty is resolved, however, working memory clears the decks to make room for new information. The Zeigarnik effect explains why you forge ahead to finish a dumb movie or a boring article, why you obsess over trying to remember the name of that actor even though it doesn’t matter, and why I fall for clickbait like “Did Neanderthals die because they didn’t have jackets?” (Apparently not.) 
• Relatedly, progress toward a goal feels rewarding—and even more rewarding as you get closer to completion. It’s one of the reasons coffee shops offer punch cards to track your progress toward a free coffee, videogames have a series of levels to complete, and it’s hard to stop reading a listicle like “10 Big Financial Mistakes” at number four. 

 

Combining Frames 

• These three powerful frames—monumental, manageable, and mysterious—can also combine forces. There’s no need to limit yourself to one. 
• One of my favorite examples of combining all three powerful frames comes from a book about how to organize your house. Personally, I can’t imagine a less appealing topic. But when I saw a small volume by an author I had never heard of named Marie Kondo, titled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I was drawn to it. Life-Changing = Monumental! Magic = Mysterious! Tidying Up = Manageable! All three frames in just six words. 

 

Danny Meyer’s hospitality frame prompted me to ask myself, What would it look like to be hosting the class rather than teaching it? 

• This new frame changed everything. I was able to genuinely shift my attention from myself to the students; at a party, it’s the guests who are important. It shifted the course’s power dynamics; a host isn’t in charge of her guests, she’s serving them. And a host isn’t telling anyone what to do, she’s just inviting people to take part in something wonderful. 
• The frame also released me from my own exacting standards. A Jedi master is supposed to be perfect, but a host can burn the pie or have cat hair on the sofa. A student is supposed to please the teacher by attending every session and completing each assignment, but a guest can show up late, leave early, or spill wine on the carpet without the host taking it personally. Grading still had to happen, but we didn’t need all those rigid rules. 
• Even as the new frame helped me focus better on the students’ experiences, it freed me from feeling responsible for them. A host can’t guarantee that every guest will have the time of their lives; that’s out of her control. But she can light the candles, turn on the music, and try to make sure nobody drives home drunk. She can say, “It’s wonderful to see you. I’m so happy you’re here.” And she can mean it. 

 

Behaviorist B. F. Skinner observed that people don’t mind giving money to the government in the form of lottery tickets because it’s a matter of choice. Being forced to pay taxes, however, makes a lot of us angry even though we depend on the roads, schools, and other services they fund. Having to pay taxes is like being forced to wear a mask during a pandemic—a win for the common good that comes at the risk of provoking a backlash. 

 

Handling Objections Like an Aikido Master 

• The core principle of aikido is to respond to an attack by redirecting your opponent’s momentum while trying to protect both of you from injury. Aikido means “the way of harmonious spirit.” It is in this spirit that I offer you the following strategies for handling another person’s objections, which you might otherwise experience as a mild form of attack. If you respond with your own attack, they’re likely to fight back, becoming more committed to their own views and decisions. 

 

Witness and explore their resistance 

• A master salesperson might return many times after hearing no. What makes them welcome (instead of annoying) is that they’ve asked for and received permission and they’ve learned to be present with other people’s resistance. If the other person isn’t ready to say yes, they don’t take it personally. Instead, they’re receptive and curious. They don’t push back or give up; they lean in and listen even if what’s being expressed isn’t pleasant or easy to hear. 
• Bearing witness to resistance means observing it without judgment. By not pushing back or jumping in or making the situation about you—by simply focusing your attention on the other person, listening, and expressing what you observe or intuit—you create space for them to say what they’re feeling and get it off their chest. 
• Taking a step further, you can gently explore the nature of their resistance. Getting curious about it, rather than defensive, encourages them to let their guard down. You might say, “Could you tell me more about that?” Or “And then what happened?” Or “I think I know what you mean but say more.” This open-minded approach can be disarming as well as informative. 
• If “tell me more about that” isn’t appropriate, you can invite the other person to open up by reflecting back on their statement as a question. If they say they just don’t feel like it, you can reply, “You don’t feel like it?” This aikido move says, “I want to be sure I understand you.” B 

 

Affirm their freedom of choice 

• Technically, people always have the freedom to choose. Even if you hold a gun to someone’s head when you ask for their wallet, they still have to choose to hand it over. But people won’t feel free to choose if you’re pushing your agenda on them. And if they feel coerced, they’ll resist—either in the moment or later, by looking for a way out. 
• When I’m hoping to influence someone, I like them to know that they’re in control, free to choose either way. My motive here is both generous and selfish. It’s generous because feeling in control makes people happier. It’s also selfish because, as we’ve discussed, making it more comfortable for people to say no makes them more willing to say yes. This doesn’t mean they’ll always comply, but it means that if they don’t, they probably have a good reason. Furthermore, if they do say yes without coercion, they’ll feel responsible for their choice. This makes them feel better about the decision they’ve made and helps that decision stick. Research shows that after complying with a gentle nudge to lie, for instance, people become more receptive to believing the lie. (This isn’t how we want to influence people, but it’s interesting, isn’t it?) 

 

Softening resistance with a soft ask 

• After someone refuses your request, it’s difficult to get them to change their mind. (This is related to the psychological wrinkle we discussed a little earlier: People tend to give additional weight to their own decisions once they’ve made them.) A better approach would be to gauge how they’re feeling by asking a hypothetical question that doesn’t lock them in. I call it a soft ask.* 
• A soft ask sounds like this: “Is this the kind of thing you might be interested in?” Or “If I were to ask you ______ , what would you think?” Or “How comfortable would you feel doing ______?” Or “I’m not trying to push you to decide, but where would you say we are right now between one and ten if ten is all in and one is never going to happen?” 

 

Deep Listening 

• This phenomenon is known as the false polarization bias, and researchers have documented it in all kinds of domains. Members of religious and ethnic groups believe other people’s perceptions of them are more negative than they actually are. People miscalculate how much members of the opposing side disagree with them on many hot-button issues like gun control, racism, and religion. And the more vehement our own views are, the more extreme we imagine views on the other side to be. 
• The key to bridging this gap is listening, and the underappreciated first step in listening is actually hearing another 
• But how do you listen to another person when disagreement motivates you to turn inward? When I ask students to listen while a partner speaks just for one minute, they report all the usual distractions, which mostly boil down to What am I going to say when it’s my turn to speak? But you can shift your focus to the other person by making your listening goals more specific. 
• The simplest goal is to listen to what they’re thinking. Try to hear the other person’s conscious thoughts instead of just your own. You’re not a mind reader, but you can make inferences based on the other person’s words. 
• To go deeper, you can listen for what they’re feeling, tuning in to their Gator responses. You can do this consciously, labeling their emotions “angry,” “worried,” “proud,” or whatever you sense. Putting someone else’s feelings into words has a stress-relieving effect on your own brain and can help you stay focused. Or you can try to let your Gator experience their emotions, making you feel closer to that person even if what you feel isn’t the same as what they’re feeling. (We’ll get to accuracy in a bit.) 
• To go even deeper, you can listen to the thoughts that are being left unsaid. You’re unlocking your inner Sherlock Holmes, using both reasoning and intuition. 
• To go deeper still, you can listen to the other person’s unspoken values. 
• After you’ve finished listening, reflect back to the other person what you heard or intuited, to see how well you understood and to gain a more accurate understanding. Putting someone’s feelings into words helps them feel seen and understood and calms down activation in their amygdala, where the brain processes fear and stress. In this case you aren’t just parroting back what they’ve said, you’re adding your own interpretation—something they didn’t say. This serves as an invitation to go even deeper in the conversation, so you can understand each other even better. 

 

The root of the word “influence” is the Latin influence, “to flow in.” As a river. A current. Your influence flows from other people, and to other people, and from them to others, and on and on. Sometimes you’re aware of those who lifted you up or helped inspire your great ideas, sometimes not. Sometimes you’re aware of your own ripple effects, sometimes not. Small nudges here and there, sacrifices by brave and committed individuals, kind acts by not-so-committed individuals, accidents and acts of fate: They all connect us. 

Awakening to this web is like embarking on a choose-your-own-adventure book. You can step up to be the hero, play a supporting role as the sidekick, stand your ground as the ally, or sit this one out. You can also change your mind along the way. Not every great idea will be right for you. But when you do choose to step forward, now you can do it bigger and better.