How to Influence Others Without Manipulation
While there aren’t any tricks to influencing people, a consistent pattern is evident in those who are influential. This pattern is applicable to business relationships as well as to personal ones, and to online ones as well as to person ones.
Four characteristics define those who motivate others without manipulating them — authenticity, sincerity, servanthood, and passion.
Authenticity, a trait common to all successful people, is your ability to feel comfortable in your own skin and to project that confidence onto others around you. This trait is often confused with impropriety — flouting societal conventions, breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules, and generally doing whatever you want to for the sake of “being authentic.” Authenticity, however, recognizes the place of laws, structure, and boundaries without fighting them. Walking within an ordered life gives you the freedom to expand your dreams and ideas.
Authenticity is also often mistaken for another trait — spontaneity — but it is different. While spontaneity may not be as destructive as impropriety, it is also undisciplined and often childish. The manager who decides on a whim to live stream a work party may be “being himself”, but is admittedly being unprofessional. The common characteristic of both impropriety and spontaneity is actually the person’s…
