Increase Your Influence In A Day For Dummies

Elizabeth Kuhnke

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118380505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Many people want to gain trust or support in business and throughout life, but the true skill is doing so in a charming fashion! Whether you're convincing the boss about your much-deserved promotion or a busy restaurateur to offer a better table, the ability to influence those around you can help improve and increase your successes.

Increase Your Influence In a Day For Dummies is a cut-down version of Persuasion & Influence For Dummies. It covers:

• Laying the groundwork for persuasion and influence
• Getting things done with the help of others
• Quietly creating big change
• Online content:
• 10 Sure fire ways to influence anyone

Chapter 1

Laying the Groundwork for Persuasion and Influence

In This Chapter

Understanding influence and persuasion

Being clear about what you want to achieve

Taking on successful behaviours and attitudes

R egardless of how intuitive, experienced, powerful or educated you are, if you can’t build relationships with other people, if you can’t establish your credibility and demonstrate your trustworthiness, if you can’t convince others through your words and actions to follow your suggestions, you stand little chance of making a difference in your career or your life.

The relationship you have with yourself as well as your relationships with others serve as the foundation of all your life’s endeavours. Unless you are confined to a vacuum, the majority of your time is spent engaging with other people. You must work with other people in order to do anything and everything – including achieving satisfying, inspiring successes.

The days of ‘command and control’ leadership in the workplace and beyond are over. From my experiences with both personal and professional relationships, ‘connect and collaborate’ is the new and improved mantra. In most relationships, including those in the professions and industries, the 21st century brings a more educated workforce, flatter management structures and an emphasis on teamwork over individual accomplishment. All of which means that people can no longer play the ‘because I said so’ card in order to get others to change their behaviours and beliefs. In short, persuasion and influence has replaced force and coercion.

In this chapter you discover the mindset, characteristics and attributes of successful persuaders and influencers. You find ways of building effective behaviours into your own repertoire in order to persuade and influence others’ choices, and you explore the value of working with others for mutual benefit.

Defining Persuasion and Influence

Many people use the verbs to persuade and to influence interchangeably, and while the terms are similar, subtle differences also exist. The following sections tease out the differences between persuasion and influence and then find their commonalities and interlinked qualities.

Distinguishing between the two

Both persuasion and influence involve deliberate changes in attitudes and behaviour – but how the change happens differs. When you deliberately try to change another person’s behaviour through your own words and actions, you’re practising persuasion. If you can change another person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour based on your character, you’re practising influence.

Influence is about having a vision of the best outcome and motivating people to turn that vision into a reality. Some leaders, for example, can bring about change simply through the power of their personalities, without having to put into words what they want you to do. Over the course of time they have built up an arsenal of trust and credibility. By contrast, persuasion is a way of presenting a case that sways others’ opinions and makes them believe certain information.

Both influence and persuasion share the same objective of creating change in someone else’s behaviour or attitude. Persuasion requires that you communicate what you want, whereas influence works silently through example. When you sway someone’s opinion by presenting your case convincingly, you’re consciously practising persuasion. When people change their attitudes, feelings and behaviours based on your personality, you’re practising influence.

You can boil the definitions down to this: influence is a catch-all term based on a person’s character that defines a deliberate effort to direct or change someone’s attitudes, feelings or behaviour through example. Persuasion is about communicating through both your verbal and non-verbal channels in a way that purposely changes someone’s attitudes and behaviour.

Some say that persuasion is about winning hearts and minds, while others say that’s the job of influence. Others say that persuasion can spur people to take action without the persuader gaining their sincere buy-in, while influence, in which you take the time to develop rapport, is a prerequisite to getting someone to make a particular decision. I say that, without trust at the core of whatever approach you take, you struggle to either persuade or influence anyone over a long period of time. The sections ‘Utilising the power of persuasion’ and ‘Employing the impact of influence’, below, explore the strengths of both approaches in detail.

For this book, which primarily looks at persuasion and influence within business contexts, I’m working from a definition of persuasion as being a way of convincing others to take action without the persuader necessarily having garnered their sincere buy-in. By contrast, when you influence a person, I believe you do so more through your reputation than your actions; you’ve invested the time to demonstrate respect, build trust and establish rapport. However, I also use the two words interchangeably with the understanding you can use both appropriately in order to produce positive results.

Contrasting with manipulation

The difference between persuasion and influence and their distant cousin manipulation has to do with purpose and intention.

According to the Merriam–Webster dictionary, manipulation has several meanings, two of which I find particularly interesting for the purposes of this book.

Manipulation involves:

Controlling or playing upon by artful, unfair or insidious means – especially to one’s own advantage

Changing by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose

In the wrong hands, persuasion resembles manipulation. While you can gain short-term compliance through manipulation, you don’t gain trust and credibility, both of which serve you much better in the long run.

The ethical persuader and influencer works from a position of fairness, honesty and mutual benefit.

Ethics is a sub-set of philosophy that explores questions around moral conflicts, such as good/bad, right/wrong and virtue/vice. In my book Persuasion & Influence For Dummies (Wiley) I cover some ethical concerns related to persuasion and influence. For an entire book on the topic, pick up Ethics For Dummies by Christopher Panza and Adam ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Laying the Groundwork for Persuasion and Influence
• Chapter 2: Getting Things Done with the Help of Others
• Chapter 3: Leading by Example: Quietly Creating Big Change
• Chapter 4: Where to Go from Here
• About the Author
• More Dummies Products