PART 2: THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX The Second Person (Relevant) Questions (Trust) Metaphors (Clarity) Shock and Laughter (Interest) Stories (Empathy, Drama, & Purpose

THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX PART TWO

Every single person who sees a movie brings a whole set of unique experiences, but through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to hopefully laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time .

~ Steven Spielberg

THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX PART TWO

There are lots of effective persuasion techniques, not all of which are stories. Here are five mighty tactics that can make you instantly more persuasive.

THE “Y” WORD

CURIOSITY

SHOCK & HUMOR

METAPHOR

STORIES

THE “Y” WORD THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX

Once upon a time, at a formative juncture in my development as a communicator, a well-meaning authority figure (Mrs. Rainey, my 10 th grade English teacher) admonished that under no circumstance whatsoever, no matter how tempting, was I or my classmates ever to use the second person (“you”) in formal writing.

And thus, for decades I labored, awkwardly at times, to expel and exclude the y-word from every piece of professional writing I produced or encountered.

But no longer! The reason is that over the years I observed that the most persuasive communicators (usually marketers) never hesitated to drop the y-bomb. They crafted their words to speak more to their customers than about themselves or their products. The hard truth is that few people care about your ideas, your products, your solutions, until they understand how these things will make their lives better.

A DEMONSTRATION THE “Y” WORD

Read the following comparisons, and ask yourselfwhich comes closer to moving your heart.

EX. 1: MRS. RAINEY SANCTIONED Guari Patal spends several hours a day carrying home a heavy jug of water just to ensure her five children have enough water to drink. Last year, after a prolonged drought, the town well dried up. Now, Ms. Patal must travel over 2 kilometers a day to fill a large plastic container full of water to meet her family’s daily needs.

EX. 2: ENHANCED FOR PERSUASIVE POWER Guari Patal is a lot like you. She loves her kids, and like you, would do almost anything to protect them. Which is why Guari spends hours a day beneath the back-breaking weight of a 10-liter jug of water, just to ensure her five children don’t go thirsty.

WHY YOU cont.

The word “you” may not improve objectivity, but it does instantly manifest relevance and a deeper audience connection with the message. Used strategically, it can also heighten empathy. And when it comes to persuasion, the science is clear: relevance and empathy almost always outperform objectivity.

YOU: A WORD OF CAUTION Deploy “you” and “we” only when relatively certain the information that follows actually describes your audience. Otherwise, you risk engaging negative responses that can jolt the listener out of a more receptive state. When you aren’t sure if your story describes your audience, shift your pronouns to the first-person (“I”). If you want to engage empathy, be sure to describe your own emotional responses to first-person stories.

CURIOSITY THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX

Does arguing make the world a better place? Put another way, is it ever easy to admit that you’re wrong, especially within the heat of an argument? Even when you know you are wrong you may have noticed how much better it feels to change your mind on your own, without someone else compelling you to do so? When was the last time you found common ground with someone else you thought disagreed with you? How did that feel? How did it feel to know that you helped contribute to a shared conclusion? If you could bypass argument altogether and build consensus from the ground up, would you?

As you may have observed, questions (especially ones that can be answered with a resounding “yes!”) can be powerful consensus magnets. That is because questions automatically place your audience in two emotional states that improve receptivity to new ideas: trust and mutual respect.

CURIOSITY cont.

Questions build trust by wrapping the questioner in an aura of curiosity, reducing the perception that she is trying to push an agenda. 1. 2.

Questions produce common purpose. When you invite others to uncover a mystery, your audience is more likely to agree with you about the conclusions you seemingly draw together.

As a political science instructor, I would tell my students on the first day of class that sometimes the greatest contributions to science aren’t new answers. Sometimes, they are new questions that have, up until that moment, never before been asked.

The same applies to the art of consensus-building. Wouldn’t you agree?

METAPHOR THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX

“The Big Bang” (Fred Hoyle), “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree” (Albert Einstein), “Dying is a wild night and a new road” (Emily Dickinson), “All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind” (Khalil Gibran).

Metaphors are verbal fishing nets that catch really big, unwieldy ideas in a single cast. Where explanations demand a lot of attention from your audience, metaphors are a gift. They offer the listener a refreshment, a respite from thinking too hard, bundling a lot of depth and clarity into a single, tidy sentence.

In the words of one of my favorite science fiction writers, Orson Scott Card, “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”

SHOCK & HUMOR THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve grown older, it is that no matter how wellintentioned, competent, and skilled you are, pleasing everyone is impossible. On the other hand, pissing everyone off is a piece of cake.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining to most communication breakdowns, and that silver lining is made up of the surprising, self-deprecating, and utterly hilarious life lessons such errors impart.

PERMISSION TO BE HUMAN

Shock and humor work because they are stimulants. They wake up your audience with an appeal that is both innate and irresistible. The more self-deprecating the humor, the better. Why? Because self-deprecation also stimulates empathy.

Oftentimes, your audience will identify with your embarrassment because they themselves have also experienced something similar. Your ability to expose yourself and laugh at the same time is reassuring permission for them to do the same.

STORIES THE PERSUASION TOOLBOX

The single most powerful tool in the persuasion toolbox is story, because stories have the power to manufacture multiple emotional states that enhance receptivity to new information.

The rest of this guidebook will discuss stories, what they are, how to identify them, and what you can do to maximize their impact.