Winning People Over: Persuasion & Influence (1 of 4) by Darren Hardy

Eat or be eaten. Influence or be influenced. Someone is always selling and someone is always buying (consciously or not).

If you open up your medicine cabinet, your dresser drawers, your pantry or your garage… or just look around the room you are standing in right now, each item you see is a war trophy, representing somebody’s or some company’s victory—who got you to trade your hard-earned money for their product.

How did they do that? What tools did they use?

That is what I will teach you in this four-part blog series—the all-important skill of influence and persuasion.

Make no mistake. There are legions of influence agents operating around you everywhere, all day. Sometimes it’s in the form of a TV commercial, or a phone solicitation, or grocery store announcement, bus bench or billboard, and other times it’s in the form of a solicitation or request by a child, spouse, employer, priest, friend or co-worker.

A friend of mine once tried to count the number of direct attempts to control his thoughts and behavior that he encountered in a single day. This included people requesting him to do things, forcing him to do things, asking him to buy things, telling him to pay for things, showing him where to stop and when to go, suggesting how he should think about things, offering him slogans to repeat, songs to remember, attitudes to change, and ideologies to believe. He doesn’t even read the newspaper, listen to radio or watch TV! He gave up by 10:30 a.m., as he lost count somewhere around 500.

Research calculates that the average person receives more than 30,000 persuasion attempts—every day!

This isn’t just happening in news and commercial marketing; it is happening in most every conversation you have.

For instance it’s estimated that 80 percent of your time at work is spent in verbal communication—most of it consumed with fellow employees, customers or vendors trying to get you to do something. Then when you go home you have to watch out for your spouse, your children, your neighbors, strangers and countless others you meet in the course of an average day angling you for something they need.

Really you could say society is simply a mass of people influencing, persuading, requesting, demanding, guilting, pleading, cajoling, inducing, and otherwise manipulating each other to further their individual needs and agendas.

Let’s face it: If you want to navigate the sea of society successfully you will need to learn how to become more positively influential and persuasive yourself.

In this series I will give you the insights on the topic from one of the most influential and persuasive people in history: Aristotle himself and his famous dialectic on the three levels of persuasion. I will use that as the framework to give you some of my own tips on influence and persuasion so you too can become even more persuasive and influential in your marketplace, community and household.