Influence
The way we influence….
Last week I said, your influencing ability depends on what system you’re in and what resources you have available to you.
Don’t just think of your resources in terms of money, how much you earn or how far you can stretch your paycheck…. There are other resources available: Time, energy, health, talents, causes you have access to, technology available to you, introversion vs. extroversion, interests and many more items.
All these things determine how much energy you have to face the challenges and climb the mountains set before you. The stories of society are often different than what people believe and many public figures are often limited in what they can say, or choose to say based on popular opinion and what their own cultures dictate them to say for the preservation of their influence and careers.
How to make a difference…
Start with you.
Examine the stories you tell yourself and work to reframe your mind, heart and body to tell better stories.
As you adopt these stories, you’ll end up watching them influence your life and those around you. These people include your family, work, who your interact with in the grocery store, religious or volunteer organizations, all the way up to public influencing, such as political causes or internet spaces which have a global audience (if they can find your resources above the millions of others).
Other ways of influence:
Communication: what you say vs. what you do
Reach of influence: celebrities surround us, yet do very little to change the world for the better. A caring adult or other person who is in someone’s life can still have more influence than a celebrity, because that caring adult can be present vs. the celebrity who is self or career focused.
Decisions to change: How much control do you have? Can you make other people change?
For instance, you can make a teenager change their clothes - but the real reason you had to make them change was that their clothing wasn’t appropriate for the situation they were going to be facing. Communicating the reason, so the teen can make informed non-fear based decisions is much better than communicating fear, anger and failure to the teen.
Crowd/herd dynamics: Sometimes our voices aren’t loud enough or popular enough to make the crowds swirling around us stop and stare. This shouldn’t dictate our value or undermine the value of our messages.
Instructions vs persuasion: This is an important difference.
Instructions are a set of steps or directions to perform a task. The end result should always be the same. The best example I can give is getting from one place to another. There may be a few variations on a map, but you still want to get to an end destination that was the goal at the beginning of your trip.
Persuasion is when someone inserts their opinion into the trip, as in, “Take this way, its less confusing. I like it better.”
Those are opinions. And while they’re not wrong - the opinion holder is not the person reading or listening. They are trying to persuade you to also like their directions better. Which isn’t bad, if you’re a local - but its unhelpful if their directions take you past businesses and sections of town that you’re not comfortable with.
Final note:
As a writer, I could persuade you to feel a certain way, or I could endorse a certain person telling you that I stand behind them or their product because I use it… but I don’t want do that, because I want people to do their own healing work and come to their own beliefs. I’ll give you things to think about - but if I’ve done my job correctly, you won’t be able to tell much about my beliefs. This is because I want everyone who drops by to get something out of it. I want what I write to be useful for everyone no matter their background, culture, biology, gender, age or beliefs.
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