How to Persuade People
How do we become more persuasive?
Persuasion is an important skill.
Whether you’re a parent trying to persuade a child, or you’re a leader trying to persuade someone on your team, or you’re an administrator trying to persuade a project, or whether you’re a salesperson, trying to persuade a prospect, persuasion is an important part of our life.
I believe there are two different methods of persuasion.
There is what I call the pushy persuasion.
And then there is the permission persuasion.
Now, pushy persuasion is typically the one that we think of when we think of persuasion. It’s pressuring people. It’s applying a suggestive force or direction. It’s pushing them along.
However, what I have found to be a much more effective type of persuasion, not necessarily in the short term, but in the long-term when it comes to building your reputation, the better type of persuasion is permission-based persuasion.
How do you get permission-based persuasion? And what is it?
Very simply, permission-based persuasion is, instead of you having to force me to move in a direction, I invite you in to allow you to move me in a certain direction which is representative of the dynamic, right?
Pushy persuasion is, if I push against you, your natural response is to push back on me.
But permission-based persuasion is different. That’s where I say come on in, tell me what you think, and advise me in the way that you think I should go.
Permission-based persuasion is fabulous.
The question is how do you do it? How do you get this permission? How do you apply permission-based persuasion?
It’s very, very simple.
The way you earn the right to permission-based persuasion is to be completely obsessed with helping the other person succeed.
That’s it.
You need to become completely obsessed with helping the other person succeed.
Helping Others to Succeed
Pushy persuasion is about my wanting to succeed and my having to force you to bend to my will so that I can succeed.
That creates natural friction, conflict, and resistance.
Sometimes we get to the same place and sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes we get there because I pressured you into doing it and sometimes I don’t get you there.
And even though you didn’t bend to my will, you still kind of feel horrible.
What permission-based persuasion is, is totally different. You allow me to guide you.
That is because if you believe that I have your best interest at heart, if you trust that the advice and the counsel that I’m giving you is to help you and not to help me, then you invite me in. You open the door, and you receive me.
And I become more of a friend, a counselor, an advisor, not a pushy, manipulative pressuring salesperson.
And that changes everything.
So again, how do you do it?
It’s so simple. You must become obsessed with helping the other person succeed.
If your focus is on helping the other person succeed, then you will give good counsel.
You will give wise counsel; you will become trusted.
You will become an advisor.
And as you earn that trust and as you demonstrate that desire, willingness, and ability to help the other person succeed, they will become more and more receptive to what you have to say.
But if you continue to be focused only on your own wants and desires, and helping yourself succeed, the more the time goes on, the more it becomes obvious to the other person that that’s really what’s happening here.
And they’re going to become more resistant. They’re going to have more walls. There are going to be more blocks. There’s going to be less trust, less relationship, and less permission.
To recap, there are two types of persuasion.
There is pushy persuasion and then there is permission-based persuasion.
It’s up to you.
Both ways you can end up getting what you want.
There are different ways of going about it, but the experience of the other person is very different.
And in long term, the results for you are very different.
My advice, my encouragement, my challenge, my hope, and my invitation to you would be to become completely focused on helping the other person succeed.
