Here are excerpts I gave for an interview about persuasion last month.
Edited for easier reading.
DM: Thank you for this. I think this will be invaluable for our readers - influencing is such a vital consulting skill.
I will open with a statement on you, your writing and your work around the world. So if there is anything in particular that you would like to come to the attention of others let me know.
DMQ1: Good influencing skills can be a game changer for managers, marketers and salespeople. Like a close up magician most of them find themselves speaking, pitching and negotiating with small groups.
What specific skill or technique separates people who can do this successfully?
KH: When you combine the Pygmalion Effect with Certainty you have a good start.
The Pygmalion Effect is a scientifically proven phenomenon. Your expectations of another person or group shape and mold that person or group. So if we are talking and I think you are an idiot, as we communicate you will come to behave more in that direction. On the other hand, if I think you are brilliant, you will begin to behave more in that fashion. This is pretty amazing stuff that not very many people know or think about.
If you are seen as a driving force, as a "leader," you are, on average, going to behave more like a leader; all of this while NOT being told what these people are thinking.
People often become the label that is attached to them. When told their "diagnosis" of a mental or emotional problem, the symptoms often become more pronounced. Sadly if there was a misdiagnosis originally, there will be real indicators now. We mold people in our image.
You're angry with your spouse so you pick up a book about Borderline Personality or Bipolar, for example. Regardless of whether the spouses' "diagnosis" (if any) is right or wrong, people see what they want in other people and as they behave as if the person has that diagnosis, they help shape that diagnosis.
The same is true for all aspects of psychological and social psychological experience.
If I am absolutely certain that you will behave in a certain way, the probability that you will do so is increased significantly and, indeed, if you weren't going to behave that way originally, you very well might now.
DMQ1A: Always? This sounds like magic.
KH: There are preconditions.
You must be seen as important or as credible, an authority, significant; or your attitudes and behaviors will not be influential.
It's socio-neurobiology, not magic.
Certainty is defined as what I have coined: "grocery store certainty."
If you are certain to the degree that you are certain you have the ability to go grocery shopping, that you are capable of pushing a cart and don't require affirmations to get home and put the groceries away....that is the level of offhanded certainty that is persuasive. When people say, "I'm going grocery shopping," you believe it, you don't question it, you assume there will be food in the cupboard in a couple of hours.
That is the certainty that persuades.
Is persuasion best practiced as a contact sport? Turn the page...
Certainty is defined as what I have coined: "grocery store certainty."
