Real tools for persuasion? (Part Three)

To fine tune our persuasion strategy, we need to get into that elusive "sweet spot", the missing component I was looking for in asking my initial question. Here are the boundaries that we must pay close attention to. With too little assertiveness we accommodate, but with too much demand we create resistance.

If there’s too much emotion in our tone we might lose strategic clarity. With too much dry logic, we won’t connect with the person. Same thing with talking, when we can’t keep our mouth shut, we give the other person more opportunities to object. Conversely, the same holds true when we listen excessively, we often miss the chance to clearly state what we want. 

The sweet spot might therefore fall somewhere in between, like by successively moving from clarity to empathy, to confidence, flexibility and to detachment. That very last trait, detachment, may very well be the hardest one to acquire, but the most powerful. When we are in my late seventies, just like me, we may actually have an advantage that we didn't have decades ago. 

We’ve accumulated thousands of experiences of attempted influence—successful ones, botched ones, negotiations, disagreements, misunderstandings, compromises and moments that makes us suddenly realize, "Ah, that's exactly what made that person say yes." We have in fact accumulated a remarkable personal laboratory that can be treated as a lifetime of persuasion attempts as a dataset. 

Now, instead of asking "Why didn't I get what I wanted?" we should wonder "What was happening in the other person's mind at the moment I succeeded—or failed—to influence them?" 

This is how, given enough time, we might discover our own personal theory of influence, and perhaps that is the elusive element I was looking for—not a magic formula for controlling other people, but a progressively refined ability to recognize when to push, when to listen, when to offer, when to withdraw, and when to let the other person feel that the decision is entirely theirs. 

That, in my view, brings the whole process much closer to mastering influence than mastering persuasion. If I had more of this when I was younger, I would have sold more ski lessons and far more ski equipment and retired even early!