Marketing and sales boil down to changing what someone else thinks, feels, or does… a skill all powerful people possess. The ability to influence others is what makes CEOs compelling, politicians persuasive, and entrepreneurs effective. But while certain people seem to develop this ability naturally, anyone can become more persuasive with a little effort, a nuanced change in mindset, and some focus on 3 human qualities worth focusing on anyway.

The first of these qualities is empathy.

The first step toward getting someone else to do what you want them to do is developing a deep, personal understanding of what they want.

Sometimes a superficial want will do. My 5 year-old wants to watch Doc McStuffins tomorrow morning, and I want her to go to bed with as little effort as possible on my part. I tell here she can watch Doc McStuffins if she gets her jammies on, brushes her teeth, and is waiting for me in bed with a story when I come upstairs. The first time, she doesn’t do that, and there’s no Doc McStuffins the next morning, no matter how much acting out there is as a result. The second time, she does, and the next day begins with the good Doctor (this is about 80% of parenting, by the way.)

Jedi mastery of this quality is really just a function of depth, of how empathetic you can be. Do you understand what someone truly wants, in the most intimate corners of their soul and psyche? Most people crave what’s been withheld from them at some point… approval, validation, love, sex, money. And those deep-seated, lizard brain wants often differ from what people say they want. Most of us most of the time have no idea what we really want. But persuasive people understand others well enough to deduce what they want through observation and inference, and this is the foundation of their persuasive power.

The second persuasive quality is intelligence.

Once you know what someone wants, you have a puzzle to solve: How does what I want help them toward what they want?

Before we go over to the dark side here… lying is a shortcut that won’t work in solving this puzzle. You need to find a way to connect the dots — genuinely — between whatever it is they seek and whatever it is you want. You need to spot a pattern in the connections between the levers you control and those required to press someone else in the direction of your choosing. This is not an easy thing, even for the most seasoned Jedi master.

Lyndon Johnson was such a man, being generally regarded among our most effective Presidents even among those who disagree with certain of his policy decisions. Johnson was instrumental in moving the nation forward on civil rights, for example, and the story of how he did it is told in the second volume of Robrert Caro’s epic 3-volume biography, “Master of the Senate.” From the New York Times review of that book:

Johnson made the impossible happen. Caro’s description of how he did it is masterly; I was there and followed the course of the legislation closely, but I did not know the half of it. Johnson’s own fate was tied to that of the bill. His basic support as majority leader came from the Southerners. Northern liberals did not trust him, and without the South he would be powerless. His two predecessors as majority leader had looked feckless and been beaten for re-election to the Senate. But Johnson bet his all on getting a civil rights bill passed.

His strategy was to persuade the Southerners — which meant persuading Dick Russell — that it was in their interest to let something labeled civil rights go through: a weak, token something. Americans outside the South, most of whom had neither known nor cared much about its brutal treatment of blacks, were beginning to learn, thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others. The Southern senators would do better, Johnson advised, to yield a little.

Johnson knew what the South wanted, and despite it seeming to be the very opposite of what he wanted, he was able to uncover an aligned interest. His strategy worked, and eventually moved the nation forward on an issue that had divided it for nearly 200 years.

Intelligence is also a matter of information gathering, doing the work to understand the angles of power in a given situation. From the same LBJ bio:

How did Johnson get senators, those proud individualists, to follow him? One way, Caro says, was by knowing more about everything. Ask him about a minor bill, and he would tell you its contents and its number on the calendar. And he left nothing to chance. When John F. Kennedy was narrowly elected to the Senate in 1952, sure of the result only at dawn the next day, he got a telephone call at that early hour from Lyndon Johnson in Texas, where it was an hour earlier. ‘’He said he just wanted to congratulate me,’’ Kennedy said when he put down the phone. ‘’The guy must never sleep.’’ A few hours later Kennedy learned that the Democratic leader, Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona, had been defeated for re-election. Kennedy realized that when he called, Johnson had just heard that result and was working to succeed McFarland.

Intelligence is the second human quality that powers persuasion because it illuminates common ground, specifically the ground between your objective and that of your subject as revealed through empathy. But more than the heart and head are required to drive change. Effective people know the world resists change, reflexively. Changing it requires the application of sustained effort, pointing the way to our next requirement.

The third human quality required to influence others is resolve.

No one wants to be manipulated. The resolve I’m talking about here isn’t stronger obstinance in a clash of wills. Once that dynamic is established with the person you’re trying to influence, you’ve already failed.

Everyone, though, wants to feel empowered to act in their own self interest, in any given situation. Jedi-like power of persuasion accrues to those able to change others perception of their own self interest.

Again, this is not easy. Perceived self interest runs deep, and altering it requires not only the emotional insight to uncover true wants and the intellectual horsepower to find common ground, but the sheer force of will to stand up to resistance.

All of human history is an account of those who would not yield in the face of sustained, life-threatening resistance. Columbus, Washington, Geronimo, Lincoln, Barton, Ghandi, Roosevelt, Churchill, Meir, Mandela — what these people have in common is an inner strength that sustained them through lengthy periods of intense conflict, and in some cases that held them on course in the face of arguments that would have been reasonable and compelling enough to pull others off course. George Bernard Shaw framed this best:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

The “dark side” danger here lies on the slippery slope of ends justifying means. Some measure of restraint is required to avoid digging your heels in so deeply on a course of action that you become inured to reason, and the interests of the common good. Here again, though, bad action limits effectiveness. The most effective people I’ve known are always listening, always exploring and absorbing the arguments against the behavior they’re driving toward. It’s not their closed-mindedness that sets them apart, but their ability to remain steadfast in addressing reasoned objections with reasoned arguments, again and again.

We all sense this resolve when we encounter it. And most people, most often, respond to it with deference.