- Good morning Believe Nation.
Today we're going to talk about
how you can be more persuasive.
Rule number two is my personal favorite
and I'm curious to figure out which one
you guys like the best,
and as always guys, as you're listening,
if you hear something
that really, really resonates with you,
please leave it in the comments below,
and put quotes around it
so other people can be inspired
and also as you write things down,
you're much more likely to keep it in here as well.
Enjoy.
(bright music)
- What I want you to get
is the single most important skill in life,
we hate the word selling,
so I'll give you a word that it really is,
that doesn't have the negative connotation.
It's the word that all leaders have.
What would that word be?
Influence.
What changes companies
is leaders.
The only way to change a company is leadership.
If I want to change a company that I own,
and I want to make a shift in that company,
the number one thing I want to do is shifting leadership.
That might be taking leaders to a different level
that might be bringing new leaders in,
that might be new leaders with new voices,
with new perspectives,
with new skills sets, new directions.
But we need to take things to another level.
Leaders solve problems
and leaders maximize resources.
If you're going to solve problems,
you can't do it yourself
or it would have already been solved.
You have to get others to help you to do it.
That requires influence.
True?
If you're going to get people to maximize resources
that requires influence.
If you're going to get people to partner with you,
provide you resources, capital,
suppliers, anything,
that requires influence.
If you're going to have an impact on your kids
or your community or the world,
that requires influence.
There is no more important skill
of leadership than influence.
And yet most of us think of it like selling.
And as a result we don't master influence.
'Cause I know if you can't influence,
you can't lead.
But if you can influence powerfully,
intelligently, with integrity,
there is no limit to whatever you can envision
and what you can make real.
And if you're influence becomes not just use the influence
but you're able to influence systems, people,
company, culture,
if you can turn other people into influencers,
now whatever you vision about can be made into reality.
- So let me give you a hypothetical
suppose that you're a parent
and you have a daughter,
say a teenage daughter
who's room is an absolute mess.
It just looks like a bomb went off in there
and you want your daughter to clean her room.
You're trying to sell her on the idea
of cleaning her room.
What do you do?
Well, you could try to bribe her,
and that might work in the short term.
You could try to threaten her,
that might work in the short term.
You can try to exhort her,
you can try to, you know,
tell her about the meaning of clean rooms,
but there's actually a technique
from actually the counseling literature,
really crystallized by a fellow named
Mike Pantalon of Yale University
called Motivational Interviewing,
and what you can do, more effectively
is ask two irrational questions.
So, let's say you have a daughter named Maria
and Maria has a messy room
and you want Maria to clean her room.
The two questions you could ask Maria are this,
Maria, on a scale of one to 10,
one meaning I'm not ready at all,
10 meaning I'm ready to do it right now,
ow ready are you Maria, to clean your room?
Now, Maria's room is a pigsty,
so she's not going to give you a 10 or a nine,
or even a five.
Maybe she'll give you a two, okay.
So she says, "Dad, I'm a two."
Well here's where the second question comes in
and it's a really interesting counter intuitive question.
You say to Maria, "Okay Maria, you're a two.
Why don't you pick a lower number?"
Now our instincts as parents is to say,
as a parent of three kids,
I have this instinct very strongly.
If my kid were to say to me, "I'm a two,"
I would say, "What, why are you a two,
you should be a nine."
But you say, "Why don't you pick a lower number, Maria?"
So here's what happens,
Maria has to explain why she isn't a one, okay?
And so she says, "Well, you know,
I am 15 and I probably should get my act together,
you know if I had my room cleaner,
I'd be able to get to school on time,
faster and maybe see my friends a little bit more.
You know you and mom never know where anything is anyway,
so I'm kind of wasting my time
asking you to help me."
What happens, with that second question,
why did you pick a lower number,
Maria begins articulating her own reasons
for doing something.
And this is really axiomatic in sales and persuasion.
When people have their own reasons for doing something,
not yours, their own reasons for doing something,
they believe those reasons more deeply
and adhere to the behavior more strongly.
Now suppose Maria says,
"Dad, on a scale on one to 10, I'm a one."
That makes things a little more complicated.
But it's actually really, really important
to understand this.
If you say to Maria,
if Maria says, "Dad, I'm a one."
Here's what you say to Maria.
"Maria, what can we do to make you a two?"
And what often that does is this,
Maria will say, "Well maybe if you and mom help me
for 15 minutes to get this started.
Maybe if you, maybe not set the table
and take out the trash tonight,
that would free up some time for me."
'Cause usually when people are a one,
it's often not because they're purely obstinate,
it's because there is some kind of environmental obstacle
in front of them
and if someone says they're a one,
find out what that obstacle is,
try to make them a two,
and that might give you some more momentum.
The example I just gave
had to do with parenting,
but you can use this more universally.
Now you can't whip it out
at every single persuasive encounter.
But you can use it to persuade your boss,
you can use it, maybe, to persuade a reluctant prospect
in an actual sales encounter.
You can use it with someone, your neighbor,
who is resisting moving his garbage cans,
or something like that.
The key here, and again,
you got to go back to first principles here.
The key here is that we tend to think that persuasion
or motivation is something that one person does to another
and what the social science tells us very clearly,
is that it's really something that people do
for themselves,
and your job as a persuader, as a motivator,
is to reset the context
and surface people's own reasons for doing something
because it works a lot better.
- Every phone call you make is recorded.
There's no single phone call
that goes in and out in North America
that they don't have a recording of
and they can search by word, by tone,
by tempo, they can even recognize voices now.
There's no thinking of such thing as privacy.
Everything you've ever put on the Internet
is there forever, and people know it,
they can search it.
The way you write is searchable now.
You cannot sign your email,
you can put it on somebody else's email
and the structure of your language
and the way you influence things
can be studied at this level.
So, the good news about that is
manipulation as an ongoing tool for success is over,
but, adding value, will never go out of style.
Truth will never go out of style.
So influencing with integrity is the secret.
But what really influences people?
Do facts and figures,
if we're giving you facts and figures
out of a core story,
is that going to influence people?
No.
It's the weaving of that story together in a way
that produces what shifts people.
And that's human emotion.
Ultimately, the big game here is emotion.
You have to influence emotion.
You have to influence the emotion of your people.
If you're going to maximize resources,
and if we all agree, as we talked about the other day,
it's not a lack of resources,
it's a lack of, what?
Resourcefulness.
If you're creative enough, if you're playful enough,
if you're determined enough,
if you're focused enough,
you can find a way.
If you're giving enough,
if you're generous enough, if you're honest enough,
if you're courageous enough,
you will get people to help you,
you will find the way,
you will make that thing happen.
You'll access the resource.
You'll get someone to coach you, teach you,
loan it to you, let you try it, drive it,
experience it.
So it's the ability to influence emotion,
because that's what affects our intellect.
That's the bottom line.
A core story is only there
to give you a set of facts to educate someone,
that will make them emotional enough to make a decision.
And what they do is they go through a series of things
that you have emotions about.
They may say them in a non emotional way
but the only reason the work is 'cause
you know they're going to open a person's emotion.
How many agree with me on this, say I.
- [Audience] I.
- So as leaders, we can never forget,
that humans are emotional creatures including ourselves.
And to influence other people,
we have to know what already influences them.
And we can't ever forget what truly influences them.
It's going to come down to our ability to connect with them
at a deep, emotional level,
or get others to do the same.
- Men and women with charisma
and personal magnetism,
almost invariably have a clear vision of who they are
and where they're going,
and what they're trying to achieve.
And you can develop this as well.
Leaders in sales and management
have a vision of what they're trying to create
and why they're doing what they're doing.
They're focused on accomplishing some great purpose
with their lives and their work.
They're decisive about every aspect of their lives.
They know exactly what they want
and what they have to do to get it.
They plan their work and then they work their plan.
You can increase your charisma
and the magnetism of your personality
by setting clear goals for yourself.
Making plans to achieve them
and then working on your plans with discipline
and determination every day.
The whole world seems to move aside
for the person who knows exactly where he's going.
In fact, the clearer you are about your purposes and goals,
the more likely people will be to attribute
other positive qualities to you.
When you're clear about your goals,
people will see you or perceive you
as being a better and more admirable human being.
And when you have clear goals,
you begin attracting to yourself
the people and opportunities necessary
to make those goals a reality.
- In Robert Cialdini's book, Influence,
he says, "A well-known principle of human behavior
says that when we ask someone to do us a favor,
we will be more successful if we provide a reason."
Here's an example from that book,
listen to this,
A woman was standing in line for a copy machine
and she said, "Excuse me, I have five pages,
may I go ahead of you and make my copies?"
60% of people said yes.
Now listen to this.
She tried asking a slightly different way.
She gave a reason why.
This time she said, "Excuse me,
I have five pages, may I use the copy machine
because I'm in a rush?"
And this time, 94% of the people said yes,
that's one and a half times as many.
That is a lot of persuasion.
Now there's more to that study
and you can check it out in Cialdini's book.
But the point here is
that when you give people a reason why
you're asking for something,
They're more inclined to give it to you.
- How do I add more value
so that I can get paid more?
So that I can have more influence.
So that I can make more of a difference where I'm at.
You always hear it all the time, right?
Add more value.
Well how?
How do you add more value
so you can get paid more and have more influence?
Part of adding value is helping people reconnect
with some emotional side of their lives.
I know that sounds so simple in some ways
but also philosophical.
That a lot of what we experience today in this world
is just so cheap and so commoditized,
and so technically driven
that it's our job, if we want to add a lot of value,
to bring back in humanity.
To bring back in the emotion,
to bring back in the color, the flare,
the joy, the vibrancy,
the real hues of human emotion
that are often missing from everything.
If you bring that back in to everything
that you're contributing,
you'll go to a level of adding value
that most people will never understand.
And people won't just follow you because
you're the person who asks the best questions,
people won't just follow you because
you're the person who knows the most people.
People will follow you because you're an inspirer
and you're a leader.
Because they can see that within you
you have true energy, true engagement,
true human emotion
with everything that you're contributing
and because of that, they know that you're somebody
they want to follow.
- So my take on this,
is if you want to be more persuasive,
then you need to care more.
You need to care more,
and the care comes from two sides.
First it's you caring more about it yourself,
having more passion in it.
When you have passion,
when you're excited about something,
people want to join you,
people want to be around people
who are passionate about something.
You can gear somebody towards something
because you have the passion for it.
Sam Walton from Walmart used to say
that passion is so important
and that people will catch it like a fever.
If you have a fever, other people will catch it.
If you have a cold, other people will catch it.
If you have a passion, other people will catch it.
So if you want to be more persuasive,
when you're saying these words
that it's really going to help somebody,
whatever it is, your product or service
you're trying to promote,
your book, your YouTube channel,
whatever it is, if you are excited,
and it comes through in every word
that comes out of your mouth,
it's going to be much more persuasive
to the people listening,
than if you're really boring,
and saying, "Yeah, I have a YouTube channel,
you should check it out.
There's some good stuff on there."
It's just a different vibe.
You don't want to go check that thing out.
When somebodies excited,
like I want to piece of that.
I want more excitement and passion in my life
and so I'm going to go check it out.
So that happens when you care more.
So care more and tie in to the why,
and remember before going in to every conversation,
why this is so important.
To you and to them.
The second part of care
is caring about them.
Caring about their best interests,
caring about what they want to do in their life,
in their business
and the result that they are trying to achieve
and how you can potentially help them.
If you have a product or service
that can help somebody solve a critical problem,
then it's your responsibility to show you care to them.
If they can feel that you actually care about them,
that you're not just trying to sell them
your product or service,
that you actually deep down care about their success,
they're going to be much more receptive to it.
You're going to be much more persuasive to them.
I think with all of this,
it's not just about trying to convince somebody
to do something that they don't really want to do,
I think the ultimate persuasion comes from
helping them realize that this is something
that they want to do.
That your product or service will actually help them.
If you look at my YouTube videos,
I don't care if your guys watch every video,
I'd actually prefer that you don't
watch every video.
I want you to watch the video
that has the most meaning and impact to you
and then go take some kind of action.
The best thing from YouTube's perspective
is spend all day long on YouTube watching my videos.
I don't want that to happen.
I want you to watch the videos
and then go take action.
Stop watching and go do something in your life
or your business.
And if you need to watch these videos
as a way to get more inspiration,
to get more motivation,
to get more strategies and tactics and ideas
to do something, that's great.
Make that part of your daily routine.
Amazing.
And then go take some action.
And hopefully you feel that care that I have
for you guys.
I deeply want you to be successful.
I want, more than I want you to be on my YouTube channel,
I want you to have success with your plan.
I want this year to be amazing for you.
I want you to get this thing out of your head
and out into the world,
having a big impact, making a lot of money,
having the life that you want to live,
and reaching your potential.
This is what fuels me.
And so when I speak like that,
when I connect with people in that way,
they feel the care that I have for them
and that makes a huge, huge, huge difference.
So, my tip to be more persuasive is to care.
Care more for yourself,
care more about the passion you have
for the product or service, the industry that you're in,
and then care more about the customer.
Help them achieve the objective that they want to achieve
and show them that you're not just trying to make sale,
you're trying to help them live a better life,
or have a better business.
Care more.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I made this video because Sushmita Ojha asked me to.
So if there's a topic you'd like me to cover
in the next edition of Believe Life,
leave it down in the comments below
and I'll see what I can do.
I'd also love to know,
what did you learn from this video?
What was your favorite clip and why?
How are you going to be more persuasive,
or do you have a tip that you'd like to share as well?
Please leave it down in the comments below.
I'm excited to see what you guys have to say.
Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Fabian.
Fabian, thank you so much for the interview
and for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word.
It really, really, really means a lot to me
and I hope you're enjoying the read.
Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is.
Much love, have an amazing day
and I'll see you soon.
- If you do not know how to persuade people,
it is virtually impossible,
unless you want to hit lotto.
If you get lucky, you can hit lotto.
Or if you remember the lucky sperm club,
you inherit it from your parents.
Right, well maybe yeah,
you can circumvent that process.
But it's really about seeing the world
as it is right now accurately.
Not worse than it is,
but seeing the world accurately.
Then seeing the world better than it is,
and then developing a strategy to get there.
And one of the cornerstones strategies for that
is being able to persuade.
To influence, to make your thoughts known
in a way that empowers people
and gets you want you want too.