Influence
How To Get Moving Toward Your Goals
Many people believe knowledge is power but in reality, knowledge by itself is useless. It only becomes powerful when it’s combined with inspired action.
The action part is usually the toughest part for most people. They have an idea, buy a product, do the research, study the material but never actually take action.
This is what we call procrastination. I know it’s an ugly word and no one likes to admit they procrastinate but EVERYONE does. It’s when you decide that you will no longer do it that the positive changes start happening.
The first step in making that decision become a reality is to figure out what your goals are based on what’s important to you and then committing them to writing.
The easiest way to do this is to think of where you want to be in one year from now.
Think about what you want your life to look like spiritually, emotionally, physically, financially and mentally in one year from now.
Be specific when answering all of these questions.
What kind of income do you want?
What kind of relationships do you want?
What level of health will you be at?
What will you be doing to earn the income you desire?
Now once you can answer those questions, write them down immediately! (Yes, you REALLY have to do this part).
One Harvard study revealed that 3 % of students earn incomes ten times those that make up the other 97%.
What’s the difference between the groups? The 3% who make more had clear, written goals.
So take out a piece of paper and a pen and write down these goals right now.
Now that you’ve got those goals written down, think carefully about why these goals are important to you and write that down next to each of them.
Here are the three questions you should answer about each?
What will I feel like once I achieve this goal?
How will my life better when I achieve this goal?
What do I have to lose if I do not achieve this goal?
Once you understand what this goal means to you and why it’s important, ask yourself why you haven’t achieved this goal in the past?
Perhaps you never thought about it or you did think about it but didn’t think you had the resources needed to achieve it?
Whatever your reason for not achieving the goal was, write it down.
Now ask yourself, what’s different this time? What will you do differently to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
Take a look at the answers to your questions.
The purpose of this exercise was to consciously determine why these goals are important to you, what has stopped you in the past from achieving them and what you will do differently this time around.
Now that last part can get a little tricky because you might not necessarily know what’s going to be different this time around. You may know that this time you want to get things done but you probably don’t have specific plan on how you’re actually going to do it just yet.
That’s what the next step is all about. It’s time to figure out what you need to do to get where you want to be.
The easiest way to do this is to work backwards. In his bestselling book, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey talks about habit #2, “Begin With The End In Mind”.
Well, now that we know what the goal at the end of the year looks like and why it’s important, let’s break it down.
What needs to happen each month for your goal to come to fruition at the end of the year? Then think about what needs to happen each week and then each day.
Once you have an idea of what needs to happen each day, begin scheduling the time needed to get these things done.
If you’re not 100 percent sure of what needs to be done, it’s ok. Just write down what you think you would need to do. Use your imagination. It’s one of the greatest gifts you have.
Aside from that, think about who you need to get help from in order to achieve your goal.
This is where your ability to influence will begin to serve you.
If you don’t know exactly what you should be doing each day to get closer to your goals, think about a person that DOES have the answer and begin putting a plan together to get in contact with them.
When you do finally reach out to them, you must be ready to do it tactfully. Don’t just ask how they can help you. Instead, ask how you can help them or (even better) determine that first and outline a plan that shows them how you can help them.
People often forget that the reciprocity trigger only works when you do something for someone else FIRST.
Now once you’ve started thinking about what you need to do and who can help you, you will see that your planning process will become more effective.
This exercise serves 2 purposes: First, it begins the process of you using your mind to discover what opportunities and resources are available to you and secondly, it enables you to create structure in your plan.
Procrastination often comes from overwhelm. Overwhelm is the result of chaos. Structure prevents chaos.
Therefore, your ability to create structure will have a direct effect on your ability to stop procrastinating.
Perhaps without even realizing it, you have already begun to end your procrastination habits.
You have already begun taking action. The mere act of writing down your goals, why they are important to you and what you think you need to do to achieve them each year, month, week and day means that you are no longer thinking about taking action; you’re actually doing something that will move you closer.
They key now is to remain consistent and begin developing habits that support your success.
The dictionary defines a habit as an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary. It’s not hard to see how much of an impact something like this can have on one’s life.
Now that type of impact is up to you. Positive habits will bring your life to levels you never thought possible while negative ones can destroy you.
The First Critical Component In Influence
Most of the time people make decisions based on their memories of past experiences. Therefore, it would make sense to begin the influence process based on that data.
What’s interesting though is most people don’t remember events the way they actually happened; they formulate their own memory and accept is as fact.
For example, do you know why companies spend so much money on brand awareness? It’s because they know that once a person subconsciously accepts their brand, nothing else really matters.
You see, once a person develops an acceptance of a certain brand, they will invest (on average) less than 5 seconds of thought into purchasing it. This means the decision to buy is done completely on a subconscious level; there is no conscious thought whatsoever.
Now even though this decision happened in less than 5 seconds, most people don’t remember it that way. In fact, when asked they will truly convince themselves that the decision was the result of conscious thought and weighing of options.
In other words, people often remember behaviors and actions that never actually took place in real life.
They make a subconscious decision to buy something before they even leave their house, enter the store and make the purchase. But when asked about why they did so, most people will recall thinking long and hard about their decision and weighing their options to see which the best course of action is.
So how does this subconscious wiring to accept certain brands come about in the first place? It’s called trust.
Trust is an extremely powerful thing which also breeds loyalty. When you trust someone or something, you have become mentally and emotionally vested in them and it places a huge amount of stress on the mind to begin thinking they are not trustworthy. Therefore, once someone or something earns our trust, it’s actually easier to just keep trusting them then to think otherwise.
This is often why people who discover that their partners are cheating will deny it initially. They don’t want to think about having to retract all of that vested energy.
Trust is the first critical component in true influence. You see, influence mastery is when you have such an influential impact on people that they will comply with you often just because of who you are.
Oprah Winfrey is the classic example of this. Oprah is an extremely influential person which is why each year, tens of thousands of companies send samples of their product to her show with the hope that she will mention it. They realize how powerful even a 30 second endorsement from her can be.
And the best part is, it doesn’t even matter what the product is. Oprah doesn’t even have to be a recognized expert in that market niche. That’s how influential she is. The fact that she is merely related to the product makes the product seem valuable.
This is because of the trust that Oprah has earned from her viewers over the past 25 years.
Because trust in the first critical component in the influence process, it’s vital that you begin “branding” yourself in a way that represents you as trustworthy to others.
There are 2 simple ways to do this. The first is through referrals. If you can get people who - already trust you - to recommend you to those who don’t know you yet, your chances and time frame for building trust will drastically increase for 2 reasons: The first is because connections with others make up 80 percent of the opportunities that you will have access to in life and secondly, because social validation is very powerful. What’s even more powerful is social validation from personal sources.
The second way that you can brand yourself is by creating more awareness about who you are and what you do. You can do this to the extent of trying to publish your own book or by simply getting your own website set up and frequently blogging about your area of knowledge.
That’s exactly what I am doing on this very site. I’m sharing free information with people that they find valuable and in turn, building trust.
Once trust has been established, people listen to and value your message.
The Role of Logic In Influence
In a world where people are driven primarily by emotions, logic does have its place.
I've read tons of books on sales and dedicated most of my life to mastering the art of selling. Many sales experts or guru's claim that every decision that we make is primarily an emotional one and that logic is used later to justify that decision. This is true. Even the most logical decisions are driven by emotion. Take the decision to not stand in front of a truck going 60 mph. While it may appear that this is a logical decision because you don’t want to get hurt or even die, it is the emotion of fear that is ultimately driving that decision.
Here is what most of the gurus don’t talk about…. Some people like to think they make decisions logically like “thinkers” for example. These people are not strayed by emotional arguments. They like hard data and facts that support a particular point of view. But this desire to make decisions logically is still driven by the emotion to want to be logical. Therefore, when persuading these types of people, it’s important to appear to appeal to the logical side of their brains but keep in mind that you are still triggering emotions within them.
Emotions are essentially what fuel the world. Emotions are what create love, hate, war, life, death and just about everything else that we do but make no mistake, logic does play a role in the emotional experience. And therefore, you must always remember to balance tapping into logic and emotion when influencing certain people.
People are definitely more likely to believe what you say, based on logic, but ultimately it is their emotion that will move them to take action. Many different studies have shown that more than 90% of the decisions that we make are emotionally driven. Yes, we use logic afterwards to justify our actions and why we did certain things, but ultimately it is emotion that prompts us to first take action.
When using emotion to guide behaviors or thought processes, you can sometimes first engage people using logic, and then tap into the emotion to get them to take action. For example, if I wanted to persuade you to buy a car- but it was a $250,000 Ferrari -which you know logically you cannot afford, the fact is that we will never even get to the influence process, because you've already made a logical decision that it would not even be worth it to speak with me.
Back to my point, human beings like logic in some cases. And in those cases, it’s extremely valuable. For example, when we are trying to draw conclusions based on evidence that's been given to others, we use logic. In fact, for an argument to even make sense or to even be worth speaking about it has to be true and valid which means there has to be some level of logic involved.
Once all of that has been established, then we can move into the emotional part of how this works. There are various types of logic that you can use to influence someone and one of my favorites is analogies. Basically, an analogy is when you reconstruct your point using an example of how your point makes sense, but it's done using a completely different situation. The reason why I like analogies so much is because they enable me to get to the point fast and it opens up a new perspective for the person to understand what I'm talking about.
One of the first rules of influence is that the audience must understand what you're saying. And often times, just repeating your point over and over again doesn't do the job. If you can create a different scenario with a similar meaning, chances are your audience will be able to see things in a different way and ultimately agree with you.
Statistics are another great way to use logic to persuade someone. People love statistics. Statistics prove that a general number of people believe, act or behave in a certain way and what that leads to is one of the mental triggers that will talk a little talk about in a little while called social validation. When people see that a majority of other people are thinking or acting in a certain way, they assume first that it must be right or it must be correct and secondly, it supports your case.
If you are referencing a statistic which indicates that a certain event has taken place numerous times, it brings the logic to the table which you can use as evidence in your presentation. Haven't you ever seen the book cover that says “number one bestseller” or “over one million copies sold”? This tells the customer that many other people have bought this book and subconsciously sends a message that says the product must be good if so many people purchased it.
When using logic to influence, there a couple of different rules that I like to follow:
Rule #1 – Third Party Evidence Is A Must - First, whenever you use evidence, use it from a third-party expert rather than presenting it from yourself. Using a third-party expert or third-party opinion shows the person you're trying to influence that it's not just you that believes what you're saying, but someone with knowledge and expertise feels the same way. This is why testimonials from others (particularly experts) are so powerful.
Rule # 2 – Use Up To Date Information - Always use information that is updated, new and relevant to the times. I can’t tell you how many books I've read where the author is trying to make a point and he or she will bring up a study of something that took place 10 years ago. It automatically turns me off and makes me that he or she is probably not using the newer studies because the consensus has changed since then, and they don't want to counteract the point that they're trying to make.
Rule # 3 – Use Evidence That Your Audience Can Relate To - Always make sure that whatever evidence you're going to use is congruent to your audience’s belief system. This goes back to one of the very first rules which is knowing your audience. You don't ever want to make a presentation using evidence that is not in line with your target’s beliefs because doing so may offend them or completely turn them away to the point where they will no longer be receptive to your presentation. Logic is how we persuade people on a conscious level, but emotion it is the method which we persuade people on a subconscious level. It takes place in ways that people don't even realize are happening. Human beings formulate emotions based on how we feel about certain things. We generate these feelings based on a number of different factors. Most of it has to do with past experiences, upbringing and society.
Those three things contribute to how we feel about certain things and how we develop morals, beliefs and values. When something is in line with our morals beliefs and values, it positively impacts us, strikes our emotion and moves us to take action. When something is opposite to our beliefs or morals, we will take action, but in a different way; usually in the opposite direction to avoid whatever is being presented.
Three Simple Steps To Gain Repeat Compliance
The human brain is wired in such a way that a person comes with decisions instantaneously and then finds reasons to justify that decision. These reasons could be fact or fiction; it doesn’t matter.
If the person has to come up with a lot of reasons, they will regret the decision later. In fact, the 2 are directly related to one another meaning the more reasons they have to come up with, the more regrets they will l experience later.
And if they wind up openly discussing these reasons, then the regret is even worse.
That’s why it’s extremely important to remember that when you gain the decision to comply from someone, immediately shut up and move on to the next step. Never encourage your target to think about what a great decision they made because it will backfire on you.
If you begin asking them for reasons why they decided to comply, they’ll wind up backing out a few days later.
Once you gain compliance, the next step is to set yourself up to gain it again. So if you do business with someone, the key is to be able to do repeat business over and over again.
One way to ensure that is to limit the amount of choices of what you have to offer. Choices confuse people and give them reasons to procrastinate. Instead, find the driving need (or at most the top 3 needs) and fill them for your customer.
Anything that does not fill an immediate need will just cloud their judgment and when they do finally decide, will cause them to be unhappy with the choice they made.
You must also be sure that you don’t present what you have to offer in a way that resembles anything that may have burned them in the past.
I came across this a lot when I was selling fitness. The truth of the matter is that most people who join a gym don’t stick with it. So unless it was their first time joining a club or they work out regularly and were choosing my location simply for convenience, the odds were that they joined a gym in the past and didn’t stick with it; hence wasting their money.
When performing my needs analysis to determine what brought them in, I would always find out if they did in fact join a club in the past only to not go. And if they did, I had to structure my presentation very tactfully as I know that past regret was still lingering in their mind; as it will be for some clients of yours.
Regret can also work in your favor if the regret stems from them not taking action the last time and wondering what could have been.
The key here is to discover how they feel about previous decisions as they relate to what you’re offering.
Do they regret acting or not acting?
Whatever you do, never make them feel stupid about past decisions. Let them know that any intelligent person probably would have done the same thing if the situation presented itself in a similar manner.
If you show even the slightest inkling that you think they made a foolish mistake they will not only NOT give you their business but they may go out of their way to give it to a competitor or co-worker just to avoid giving it to you.