I feel like I have been harping for a good long time on the importance of working well with other people. But looking back, I find I haven’t gone into much detail about persuading others to come along with you on your journey toward completing your tasks, projects, and/or goals.
Obviously, it’s beneficial to be able to add people to your posse, above and beyond those who show up easily or naturally without you having to ask.
There are a great many techniques for persuading people to do what you want them to do: buy, sell, join, quit, vote, donate, volunteer, lay down, stand up, or whatever. But they almost all come down to four general strategies.
They are:
Appeals
One of the most common strategies for persuading people to do what you want them to do is to get them to “buy in” to your task, project, or goal. You do this mostly by getting them to accept the importance of whatever you’re trying to accomplish, and you do that by making appeals.
Basically, you can appeal to people three different ways: logically, emotionally, or affinitively.
With logic, you try to get them to accept that your task, project, or goal makes sense according their values, priorities, and/or beliefs. The idea is to convince them what you’re trying to accomplish aligns with how they believe the world is, or should be.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve taken a giant step toward successful persuasion.
With emotions, you try to get other people to feel good about doing whatever you want to accomplish, or bad about seeing it remain undone. You can harness a wide variety of emotions, such as: joy, grief, loneliness, camaraderie, hope, gratitude, pride, altruism, and so many more.
Tom Sawyer famously got other people to whitewash that fence for him using appeals to various emotions.
With affinity, you aim to trigger people’s innate desire to be part of a group – in this case, the group working to complete your task, project, or goal. You can do this in many ways, including by establishing yourself as an authority they’ll want to follow, or by setting up the group to provide copious amounts of satisfaction and good fellowship.
If you do this well enough, people may want to join your group even though they’re not fully wedded to your task, project, or goal.
Discrepancies
Another way to persuade people to join you in completing your task, project, or goal is to heighten their awareness of the gap between how things are now, and how they’d like them to be in the future – a gap they can help you close.
You can do this by pointing out facts and figures, in many cases, but sometimes by calling attention to feelings: of dissatisfaction, disappointment, frustration, and so forth.
The basic strategy is to increase their motivation to help you by triggering their wish to improve something specific they already care about.
Inquiries
The old style of bombastic salesmanship has faded, largely because it stopped working well. In place of heavy-handed statements about the benefits of helping you with your task, project, or goal, you can often gain support from other people just by asking them the right questions.
Asking questions not only helps you zero in on the “hot buttons” you can press by pointing out discrepancies or making desirable appeals, as I suggested above, questions also help you get people thinking and thereby motivating themselves.
For example, in a “productivity and success” setting – like I’m usually presenting in this space – you can ask about how a person is spending their time, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how well they’re applying their time and energy to those ends.
In my experience, most people have a lot of room for improvement in these areas, but I never tell anyone they’re far less productive and successful than they could be. I only ask questions, like these:
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- How well is that going?
- What’s your next best step in that direction?
- What did you do today to get closer to your goals?
- What else did you work on today that’s less important?
- What have you been neglecting, or procrastinating, or ignoring?
I don’t even need to hear the answers. The point of my questions is to stimulate people to think more deeply along those lines. When they do, they usually realize for themselves where they can improve and where they need to start making some changes.
Compromises
Persuading people to help you in your work or your life is easier when you’re willing to take less than a 100% commitment. Whatever you want a person to do, they may be more willing to do it if you ask for less: less time, less effort, less responsibility, less self-motivation, a shorter time-frame, and so forth.
The strategy here is to understand that getting half of what you want from a person is better than getting none. Once you deploy your strategies and your ask, it’s helpful to be ready with a less-than-ideal fallback position for how they can help, but less.
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