The Most Common Persuasion Mistake You Don’t Realize You’re Making
One of the most essential skills anyone can develop in their lifetime is the ability to sell: whether an idea, a product or even themselves. Except that you can’t sell anything to anyone by force; you have to persuade people to buy on their own. For the ‘sell’ to truly matter, it must be the consumer’s personal choice to buy. Anything less, and you’ve already set yourself up for failure.
Yet, people working across all fields have a tendency to make one major faulty assumption when it comes to convincing someone.
They use the same arguments that would work best on themselves.
Each of us understands, at least on an intellectual level, that different people are swayed by different things. They have different religious, political or spiritual beliefs. They are influenced by different arguments, they have different tastes and an altogether different way of viewing the world. When spelled out like this, it seems sort of obvious.
The problem begins when people attempting to change someone’s mind cannot, or will not, make an argument that appeals to the other person’s alternative worldview.
Corporations and executives all over the world spend a fortune training sessions about selling and persuasion tactics. They hire multi-million dollar coaches and experts to give their employees an extra edge. Dress sharp, adopt the right body language, be aggressive when pursuing a lead, be wary of non-verbal cues, always move to close from the get-go. . . and yet the one thing no one thinks to tell others to try putting themselves in the other person’s shoes.
In their defense, most of the time this advice is overlooked because it seems so obvious that it doesn’t bear a special mention. And yet we see people everyday who, despite having an excellent argument about a course of action they want someone else to adopt or a great product they want them to buy, seemingly hesitate to make that argument with empathy. Instead, they default to talking about why they believe it and simply assume it’ll be enough to satisfy the person on the other end.
This is particularly common in the world of start-ups. The eager entrepreneur who is frustrated at his inability to convince investors of the potential behind his idea, the programmer who struggles to convey her ideas on the newest product to her peers. . . more often than not these people have the answers to their conundrum at the tips of their fingers. But their inability to (or outright unwillingness) to consider things from the other person’s perspective becomes an insurmountable roadblock to their goals.
This is something everyone (including myself) has done at some point or the other, however inadvertently. And different people have different reasons for behaving this way. To some people, trying to take the other person’s point of view when trying to advance an their own interest feels manipulative or insincere or even morally wrong. For others, it’s a matter of overconfidence. They believe that they don’t need to take this route because what’s good for them is good for everybody.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, ask yourself this: are you focusing on what would persuade people other than yourself? Are you working towards emotionally engaging the person in front of you? Are you seriously considering their desires, their hopes and dreams?
Go ahead and put aside the data for a second. Forget about the metrics. Instead, focus on telling an empathetic story. A story that resonates with the person hearing it, that reaches out to their heart, that stands up to their scrutiny. Empathetic persuasion is not about merely sharing what you believe. It’s about what the other person does.
“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” - Daniel H. Pink
