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Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them. —PAUL HAWKEN, AUTHOR, NATURAL CAPITALISM
Most people upshift when they want to get through to other people. They persuade. They encourage. They argue. They push. And in the process, they create resistance. When you use the techniques I offer, you’ll do exactly the opposite—you’ll listen, ask, mirror, and reflect back to people what you’ve heard. When you do, they will feel seen, understood, and felt—and that unexpected downshift will draw them to you.
All persuasion moves through the steps of this cycle. To take people from the beginning to the end of the Persuasion Cycle, you need to speak with them in a manner that moves them: ■ From resisting to listening ■ From listening to considering ■ From considering to willing to do ■ From willing to do to doing ■ From doing to glad they did and continuing to do.
The focus, central tenet, and promise of this book, “the secret of getting through to absolutely anyone,” is that you get through to people by having them “buy in.” “Buy-in” occurs when people move from “resisting” to “listening” to “considering” what you’re saying.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place. —MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, THE TIPPING POINT
■ The lower reptilian brain is the “fight-or-flight” part of your brain. This region of your brain is all about acting and reacting, without a lot of thinking going on. It can also leave you frozen in a perceived crisis—the “deer-in-the-headlights” response. ■ The middle mammal brain is the seat of your emotions. (Call it your inner drama queen.) It’s where powerful feelings—love, joy, sadness, anger, grief, jealousy, pleasure—arise. ■ The upper or primate brain is like Star Trek’s Mr. Spock: It’s the part that weighs a situation logically and rationally and generates a conscious plan of
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My theory, which my clinical findings support, is that we constantly mirror the world, conforming to its needs, trying to win its love and approval. And each time we mirror the world, it creates a little reciprocal hunger to be mirrored back. If that hunger isn’t filled, we develop what I refer to as “mirror neuron receptor deficit.”
The key to winning is poise under stress. —PAUL BROWN, THE LATE COACH OF THE CLEVELAND BROWNS AND CINCINNATI BENGALS
In a stressful encounter, to keep from blowing a chance to reach another person, you need to get your thoughts and emotions under control in minutes—not hours. In short, you need to move almost instantly from your reptile to your mammal to your human brain. That sounds impossible, but it’s not. In fact, with practice, you can do it in about two minutes. And when you do you’ll have the advantage over everyone else in the room, because you’ll be the only person who’s actually thinking straight.
“Oh F#@&” (The Reaction Phase): This is a disaster, I’m screwed, what the hell just happened, I can’t fix this, it’s all over. “Oh God” (The Release Phase): Oh my God, this is a huge mess and I’m going to get stuck with cleaning it up. Sh#%—this stuff always happens to me. “Oh Jeez” (The Recenter Phase): Alright, I can fix this. But it’s not going to be fun. “Oh Well” (The Refocus Stage): I’m not going to let this ruin my life/my career/my day/this relationship, and here is what I need to do right now to make it better. “OK” (The Reengage Phase): I’m ready to fix this.
One absolutely crucial element in moving your brain from panic to logic is to put words to what you’re feeling at each stage.
■ THE “OH F#@& TO OK” SPEED DRILL ■ “Oh F#@&” (The Reaction Phase): Do NOT deny that you’re upset and afraid. Instead, identify your feelings and acknowledge them, silently using words to describe your feelings. (“I’m really scared. I’m so afraid I could lose my job over this.”) Say this out loud if you’re alone, because the physical act of exhaling as you speak will help to calm you. If you’re in a position where you can get away for a minute or two, do so. If not, do not talk to anyone else during these first few seconds. You need to focus entirely on acknowledging and working up from your
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Life is mostly a matter of perception and more often misperception. —DAVE LOGAN, COAUTHOR, TRIBAL LEADERSHIP AND THE THREE LAWS OF PERFORMANCE
Get rid of the filter. The stuff you think you already know about someone—“lazy,” “loser,” “whiny,” “hostile,” “impossible”—is, in reality, blocking out what you need to know. Remove that mental block, and you’re ready to start reaching people you thought were unreachable.
My friend Rick Middleton, founder of the Los Angeles-based communication company Executive Expression, uses the GGNEE model to describe how we put people in mental boxes before we even know them. Rick says that without realizing it, we categorize people instantly in the following sequence: Gender Generation (age) Nationality (or ethnicity) Education Level Emotion The sequence goes in this order because we see a person’s gender, generation, and nationality first, hear the person’s education level second, and feel the person’s level of emotionality third. Keep the GGNEE model in mind, and it’ll
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Perceiving is believing. Misperceiving is deceiving— And worse yet, prevents achieving.
Think about what you’re thinking. When you consciously analyze the ideas you’ve formed about a person and weigh these perceptions against reality, you can rewire your brain and build new, more accurate perceptions. Then you’ll be communicating with the person who’s really in front of you—not the fictitious character conjured up by your false perceptions.
If you want to open the lines of communication, open your own mind first.
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family. —ABRAHAM MASLOW, PSYCHOLOGIST
Making someone “feel felt” simply means putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. When you succeed, you can change the dynamics of a relationship in a heartbeat. At that instant, instead of trying to get the better of each other, you “get” each other and that breakthrough can lead to cooperation, collaboration, and effective communication.
How come? Something I know about seemingly confident people, and especially people who work in large companies, is that often they’re more afraid of making a mistake than they are of wanting to do something right.
When these people make a mistake and feel criticized or embarrassed from without and humiliated from within, they often promise themselves, “Never again will I put myself in a position to be beaten up like this.” This unconsciously holds them back when they have to make a new decision that might turn out to be a mistake.
1. Attach an emotion to what you think the other person is feeling, such as “frustrated,” “angry,” or “afraid.” 2. Say, “I’m trying to get a sense of what you’re feeling and I think it’s ————— . . .” and fill in an emotion. “Is that correct? If it’s not, then what are you feeling?” Wait for the person to agree or correct you. 3. Then say, “How frustrated (angry, upset, etc.) are you?” Give the person time to respond. Be prepared, at least initially, for a torrent of emotions—especially if the person you’re talking with is holding years of pent-up frustration, anger, or fear inside. This is not
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Inside every person—no matter how important or famous—is a real person who needs to “feel felt.” Satisfy that need, and you’ll transform yourself from a face in the crowd to a friend or an ally.
Boredom is what happens when I fail to make someone interesting. —WARREN BENNIS, FOUNDING CHAIRMAN, USC LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
You’re also held hostage to your own mistakes when you fail to break through to people who either (a) don’t know you at all or (b) don’t act like they care to know you well.
Jim Collins is also one of the most interesting people you could ever meet. He’s the author of Good to Great, one of the most successful business books of all time. He’s been published in 35 languages. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford, and he’s climbed El Capitan—which puts him in the major leagues of rock climbing. But in a December 1, 2005 Business 2.0 article entitled: “My Golden Rule,” Collins explained why his rule is not to tell these interesting facts to everyone he meets:
I learned this golden rule from the great civic leader John Gardner, who changed my life in 30 seconds. Gardner, founder of Common Cause, secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Johnson administration, and author of such classic books as “Self-Renewal,” spent the last few years of his life as a professor and mentor-at-large at Stanford University. One day early in my faculty teaching career—I think it was 1988 or 1989—Gardner sat me down. “It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting,” he said. “Why don’t you invest more time being interested?”
What wise men like Warren Bennis (and no doubt Dale Carnegie) instinctively know, and what “smarter than wise”“ younger, ambitious people like Jim Collins and yours truly are still learning, is that the way to truly win friends and influence the best people is to be more interested in listening to them than you are in impressing them. From a brain science standpoint, here’s why: The more interested you are in another person, the more you narrow the person’s mirror neuron receptor deficit—that biological hunger to have his or her feelings mirrored by the outside world (see Chapter 2). The more
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person. The more you try to convince people that you’re brilliant or charming or talented, the more they’re likely to consider you boring or self-centered. That’s especially true if you step on their stories in a rush to work in your own.
As the old joke goes, “You can’t fake sincerity.” You can’t fake interest, either, so don’t try. The more you want to influence and get through to discerning and successful people, the more sincere your interest in them needs to be.
how do you master the skill of being interested—and be sincere when you do it? The first key is to stop thinking of conversation as a tennis match. (He scored a point. Now I need to score a point.) Instead, think of it as a detective game, in which your goal is to learn as much about the other person as you can. Go into the conversation knowing that there is something very interesting about the person, and be determined to discover it.
The second key to being interested is to ask questions that demonstrate that you want to know more.
When I meet new people, I try to engage in conversations in which I ask questions that will cause them to say: “I feel x, I think y, I did or would do z” (what I call FTD Delivery).
Another way to show you’re interested is to summarize what the person is saying.
People love offering advice, because it makes them feel both interesting and wise.)
One of my business colleagues, Patrick Henry, a professor in the entrepreneurial school at USC and an expert in networking, says that one of the best ways to get through to a powerful person is to be the first one to ask a question after the person speaks to a large audience. As Patrick explains, the audience will appreciate your courage at being the one to break the ice—and the speaker will appreciate you for starting the ball rolling with a good question and for preventing the awkward pause that can occur when there’s a call for questions and nobody speaks out. The trick, however, is to ask
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Usable Insight The measure of self-assurance is how deeply and sincerely interested you are in others; the measure of insecurity is how much you try to impress them with you.
Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, “Make me feel important.” —MARY KAY ASH, FOUNDER, MARY KAY COSMETICS, INC.
know: People need to feel valuable. We need this almost as we need food, air, and water. It’s not good enough for us to know in our own hearts that we’re valuable; we need to see our worth reflected in the eyes of the people around us. Making people feel valuable is different from making them feel felt or feel interesting, because you touch them in an even deeper way. When you make someone feel valuable, you’re telling the person, “You have a reason for being here. You have a reason for getting out of bed every morning and doing everything you do. You have a reason for being a part of this
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In Chapter 2, I talked about how our brains “mirror” other people and how we want to be mirrored back. People who complain and cause problems typically have a serious mirror neuron receptor deficit, and the more other people avoid or ignore them, the worse it gets. Every day, they try to impress or overpower the people around them . . . and every day they fail to get the feedback they’re seeking. They’re starving for attention, and if they can’t find a good way to achieve the sense of importance they crave, they’ll look for a bad way. (Call it the Graffiti Rule.) In short, these people are
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I explained to Janet that many “problem people” who come in just to vent do so because they feel frustrated at not feeling important in the company.
Doing something so gracious, and also giving these people who feel so cheated by life the chance to feel important, is not only quite flattering—it’s also disarming.
Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths. —ETTY HILLESUM, IN HER POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED DIARY, ETTY
When you give a distressed person breathing room—a place and a space to exhale—you don’t just get the situation back to normal. You actually improve on it. That’s because in addition to getting a person to calm down, you build a mental bridge between the person and yourself. And when you build that bridge, you can communicate across it.
It was written all over him in body language: angry expression, rigid shoulders, crossed arms that said “get lost.” If you spot the same body language in someone you’re trying to reach, don’t try to get through with facts or reason. It won’t work, because you’re not going to get anywhere until the person exhales. Understand that you can’t make the person do this—but you can make him or her want to do it.
Get a person to uncross his arms physically, and you can get him to uncross his arms mentally.
The best thing to do when someone is venting, whining, or complaining is to avoid interrupting.
Sometimes you can help a person who’s venting to exhale by saying at some point, “Close your eyes, and just breathe.”
