 Hello, Zoe, and welcome to the show. It is good to have you, and we love your new book, and today we're going to dive into influence. How are you today? I'm just really excited to be here and to meet you, Johnny and AJ. Wonderful, we would love just to hear what was the epitome of this book. What got you interested in doing the research and putting this out? I've been fascinated by understanding interpersonal influence since being a young person who was as uninfluential and shy as one could possibly imagine. And I was so nerdy that my theory about why people always talked over me was that my voice was the same frequency as the ambient sounds of the universe. So that gives you an idea of how bad it was. So it's been a lifelong journey. I teach this class at Yale. It's the most popular class at the School of Business called Mastering Influence and Persuasion, because everyone wants to be influential. You basically do the same thing that I do. And this is stuff people crave. So to get the word out and the ideas out to more people, I needed to and wanted to write a book. Now, why do you believe influence is our superpower? I don't just believe it. I know that influences our superpower, because our relationships with and our communication with other people are the only way that we get shit done. Anything it is that we're looking to do, whether it's romantically, whether it's professionally, whether it's civically out there in the world, we're activists, the secret ingredient what it takes is having other people want to say yes to us. Absolutely agree. And one of the areas of focus with our clients is developing your charisma. And I know many in our audience feel the same way that you felt early on in your career that, well, some people are born with it and I just don't have it. But in actuality, charisma is something that we can build and develop in ourselves. We talk about it being presence, enthusiasm and confidence. And in your book, you introduce a few of the paradoxes around charisma. And I'd love to unpack those for our audience, because I'm sure some are struggling with their charisma. Sure. And just to introduce it quickly, brief story of what had me deeply understand that charisma is something that you do and not something you are, is when I got to go to a Prince concert and this was obviously number of years ago, but it was a dream come true. I had loved Prince's music since I was a kid. And I'm sitting there and I'm waiting, standing there at Club 2121 in Las Vegas that he owns. And when he walks out finally onto the stage, this man blasts so much charisma as he stares into my eyes. I'm absolutely sure. And his first line is something like, and I just catch my breath and I put my hand in my friend's arm and I say, oh my God, I'm thinking about to faint. And then the woman next to me on the other side, total stranger, drops in a dead faint to the floor. The paramedics come in and load her onto a stretcher. And I ask them, has this ever happened before? And they said, actually, it's not the first time. This level of laser focused, blasting charisma to the degree of making people lose consciousness. Like we've heard about the Beatles or some people have heard about Clinton. I thought it's this natural thing, but Prince was one of the least charismatic people when he was first getting started. And actually he sucked so much as a performer, not a musician, but as a performer that when Warner Brothers first signed him and they saw him perform, he's slowly turning his back to the audience and he's facing the back of the stage and he's speaking to them only in a whisper. So they wouldn't even put him on the road. He has a number one hit single, I wanna be your lover. And it's Rick James who says, hey, would you like to come and be the warm up act on my super freak tour? Prince still sucks at the beginning of it. He's getting booed and he's wearing women's underwear and like that's not quite a thing then and gender fluidity and all that. But he's getting booed at the beginning of the tour but he's practicing emulating Rick James' charisma until by the end, Rick James says that he was jealous of that level of charisma Prince had. So paradox of charisma, first of all, is that by trying to be charismatic, you short circuit yourself because you're trying to be the center of attention and we all know that is super, super annoying. And I've heard you talk about it as a low value behavior. So trying to be the center of attention makes you anti-charismatic. Another paradox of charisma is that when you want to get attention, we can best do that by giving our own attention to other people. And this is actually exactly what Prince was doing and learned how to do in a big stage but what we can do one-on-one as well. There was so many points that I wanted to bring up in reading that story. Being a performer, it meant a lot to me in reading that and of course I'm 48. So I grew up and watching Prince's career and I also know they had many hits before he went mainstream as well. His records were on the R&B charts, were on the top for many years before he had crossed over. And if you watch some of those early videos, yes, the clothes were certainly outrageous but in the book, you discuss that moment where you felt that he was looking at you and you're like, even to this day, you're like, I'm sure he was. That focus is incredibly difficult and that tour that he had went on was an opportunity to learn to redirect that focus. As you have everyone look at you, it's going to be easy to turn inward and get self-conscious. I've been there. There was, as a young kid playing out, I had to watch audiences leave within the first 10 minutes of our set just the dude of being new and being terrible on stage and being self-conscious. And now at 48, when I think about being on stage, when we're planning shows, for what we're doing is engaging with the audience and I want the members to be staring down each and every individual member in that audience because once there is that connection, they're drawn to stay there rather than shoot their gates towards you but now to absorb what is happening from the stage. So not only is Prince redirecting it, but if he's successful, the audience will be redirecting that energy as well. And I thought that story was probably one of the best examples that I have seen articulated on paper about that. So I appreciated that. Thank you. And thank you for also sharing that you felt that experience of just the painfulness of sucking on stage and not shining. I work with a lot of people who aren't comfortable speaking on stage right just like you do and when I teach them this shining exercise, anyone who's in a group can practice this. You don't have to be a pro and I'll break down very briefly how it goes. But this is the thing that Johnny is talking about that he and his band members are doing and this is the thing that Prince was doing where you are shining your energy and your attention on a human being and then another human being, but it's just one at a time. And what happens is this vicarious electrification where I don't really know of course if Prince was looking at me, right? Probably the stage lights are in his eyes and he can't even see anyone. But I feel that he's looking at me and I can also feel that electric sense though if I feel him connecting with another human being. And all you have to do to practice this in a group is have the audience members put their hand up, keep their hand up until the speaker has actually connected with them. So the speaker is just gonna talk one by one to one person in the group and then another person in the group but sticking with that one person until they put their hand down. And for the speaker, it usually takes a lot longer than they expected and that time actually is even stretched because there's this time warp that goes on where time passes faster on stage than it does in the audience. But even with a new speaker who absolutely hates this, like I was doing this in a workshop on Friday and the person who volunteered for this exercise with me saying, this is one of the most difficult things that any public speaker can do. Most professionals haven't mastered it and I want a newbie who hates public speaking. So the woman who volunteers, she's so scared she can hardly calm down her body just to keep it still. And cause, you know, we get nervous and we move around. So first we work on just calming down her body until she can keep it still. But then she's still so quiet and she's the opposite of what we think of stereotypically and definitely not flamboyant like Prince. But when she manages to quiet down her body and then quietly speak to individual members of the audience one on one, you could hear a pin drop and she gets a standing ovation at the end of this. And I love experiences like that to show people that charisma doesn't have to be loud. Charisma is just present. Absolutely agree. And we were just in Las Vegas doing a boot camp seminar with our clients. And this is something that Johnny and I practice every time we're in front of the room of speaking to each individual member of that audience. Many of us when we're on stage we think we have to hold everyone's attention at once. So we speak to the large group and we don't shine that energy on to each individual. And of course they lose interest. They get in their head, they start daydreaming thinking about what time's lunch or what's gonna happen in the afternoon. But when you really focus on just engaging one person everyone else starts to pick up on that and you're putting your energy outward. It's just such a beautiful moment for everyone to experience. Yeah, it feels magic. And then the next level of that is that you are focusing on the people who are spacing out, not paying attention, falling asleep on their phone, whatever. If it's difficult to connect with someone from where you're standing then you approach them when you're doing the hand raising exercise and the closer you get the more charged the connection is between the two of you. And at some point they just can't deny it and they will put their hand down. When I'm on stage I like to think of my style that I'm using is confrontational. Which is you will come with me on this trip and if I do see you dozing off or looking out the window or perhaps just spacing out for that moment that's exactly what I do. I step towards that person and zap start attention right back. And one of the most amazing moments in going to concerts for myself there's all this energy in the air and it just keeps building and building and building. And you know the band is feeling that and they wanna fly. And there are some bands that harness that energy but my favorites are the ones who are able to shake that off and slow everything down. And you realize that it's there in control at that moment. It's wonderful and I certainly for myself I live for those moments because that is true skill. That's so interesting cause this is also true for professional speaking where when you're building up energy or you're getting going on your big idea the way to get everyone's attention attuned keenly to you in that moment is to pause, right? Yeah. And I've never thought of this cause I'm not a musician and I haven't thought of it from that same perspective but just the incredible connection of the intimacy that comes from the quietness or the quiet song after the big loud experience. We film our clients and one of my biggest frustrations is they label that silence as awkward. Awkward. And just that labeling of awkward diminishes the power in silence, in the pause, changing your cadence and just allowing them to slow down because many of us when we're feeling that attention on us we tend to speed up and that internal gauge then forces us to speak faster we muffle our words we don't get the point across but the best orators are those who slow their cadence pause, let the audience catch up to what they just shared. That actually soaks in their attention and it's not awkward. So we use the power of video to play it back for our clients and then they realized that wasn't awkward at all. I was feeling it because I labeled it as an awkward silence and that awkward silence term is just so pervasive and I hate it because I love the pause. I love slowing down. Yeah, we should absolutely drop that frame of awkward pause because it prevents us from pausing but I never thought about that until you shared this in that moment. And I guess we can also just acknowledge where the awkwardness comes from is that pauses are vulnerable and it is because the attention zings right toward us and we do feel very vulnerable but that's actually what we wanted. If we call it the awkward pause then we're not allowing ourselves to get that thing that we were aiming for. What I also really enjoyed was the concept of diminishing statements in the way that we're using pronouns. So obviously pronouns are a hot topic in today's world but there are specific pronouns that we use that actually diminish our charisma in the eyes of someone else and I'd love to discuss that because I thought that was so insightful in the book. This is very cool research by a guy at the University of Texas named James Pennebaker. Others have built on it but he did the seminal work on these aren't gender pronouns, it's first person pronouns and he was interested in studying the relationship between pronouns and power. So he did textual analyses of all of these conversations, emails, speeches, all of these formal and informal things that people said to each other and just counted the number of times that a person said I or me or mine. And what he found was a very strong relationship and if you're listening, see if you can guess the relationship between pronouns and power. And maybe because you're a listener of this show you already can guess it. But a lot of people have it the opposite that they believe that powerful people are talking about themselves because they're self-centered and it's actually the opposite. That when we feel empowered or when we at least don't feel disempowered then we don't need to focus on ourselves because we're not self-conscious. So pronouns are a cue of self-consciousness which is anti-charisma. The thing that's hard about practicing eliminating some and obviously it's not that you're never gonna talk about yourself or say I, me or mine but the practice of eliminating some of these first person statements and other diminishes I'll talk about in a sec is that if you are monitoring your conversation for self-consciousness you are having to be self-conscious while you're self-monitoring. So I encourage people if there's anything you're trying to eliminate from your language that you do it just with an email and just anytime you feel like it or have a regular practice of scanning your emails and that way you're not having to try to be self-monitoring but not self-conscious. So this idea that we're using these I, me, mine kind of statements a lot when we feel self-conscious because we're using them very often as diminishers and diminishers are any statements that make us smaller in order to not be threatening to other people statements like I just thought like I was wondering I could be wrong but and we use all kinds of hedges like actually maybe kind of sort of a lot of these diminishers are introductory preambles to the thing that we wanted to say that are just so incredibly hard to listen to and so the other person has tuned out by the time we got to the actual thing. There are gender effects here so women use diminishers and these kinds of preambles more than men do but this is more a result of power differences than gender differences at least in my opinion and the opinions of some other researchers who study this stuff what's interesting is that you don't have this fixed place in a hierarchy, right? In your life it's all contextual so there will be some contexts in which you have more situational power and some context in which you have less situational power and that researcher I mentioned, James Pennebaker did a textual analysis of his own emails writing to a higher status person and a lower status person about the same topic and he found that he had exactly the same pattern that other people do when he's writing to the lower status person he just says the thing he says would you be willing to move your office talking to a grad student when he's talking to this esteemed professor far more famous than he is he's like, well, I hope it's not gonna come to this but I think that it's possible that I'm gonna have to ask you that have spaces that are and like you don't even know what he's talking about so solutions to diminishers are just say the thing and also shifting the focus off of yourself by asking questions of the other person it's not you need to talk about them but asking their opinion or their advice. What I've noticed in filming our clients for the last 15 years is many times we take this frame to relate so we'll say I love that too or I'm into that too and this subtle shift that I teach our clients to speak from a we perspective so instead of saying I like that too I'd be like, oh, we should go to the Prince concert together it says the same thing but it doesn't put the focus on yourself and it sets the frame of we when we speak in terms of we the assumption is we're already in a relationship we're already friends, we're already connected and oftentimes when we feel the social anxiety we do feel like we have to be the most interesting and we have to offer up all of this information about ourselves if we all feel that way then we all feel unheard and that's where that second paradox comes in where if all we're thinking about is ourselves and all we're doing is sharing ourselves the other person doesn't feel engaged at all doesn't feel any charisma from that experience. Yeah, and this brings up a question that I wanted to ask you because both of you because I get asked this a lot about where is the line between genuine connection and manipulation especially when we're talking about tactical things like this like obviously all of us are interested in and we is an example of exactly what you said and it's also an example of a red flag for manipulators who are trying to pretend that we are on a team that we're friends it can be used in both ways but this is like so many principles of influence what is your take on that? I'm glad you brought this up because a lot of our clients do ask this question because when we're discussing a lot of the influence and persuasion tactics and conversation and connecting with people it can seem that somebody who's using these things to manipulate would grab onto these things and if they're using them they can look the same however it is the intention behind all of those strategies. So if your intent is to manipulate to cause harm to lead somebody into doing something they don't want to be doing well now we're talking about manipulation influence in itself is you're supposed to be helping somebody towards a over a hurdle that they're looking for answers for you should be helping them or giving value into their lives if it is for you or how you're gonna extract value for yourself well now we're getting into manipulation territory. Yeah we view it through the lens of cooperation we're gonna talk about this in next one's toolbox so we talked about low value behaviors and Adam Grant's book give and take is great research on this that cooperation with boundaries is how we actually get ahead and is how both parties end up in a winning situation. Now of course if you just give with no boundaries you also end up the victim far behind plaintiff in lawsuits taking advantage of and that's the delicate balance that a lot of our clients have is that they haven't built up a repertoire of boundaries they don't know what their needs are so they just seek out valuing the needs of others fulfilling the needs of others and of course that's a very slippery slope we only have so much that we can give the intent behind all of these actions we say it could be just like a Jedi for good or a Sith for bad and that's the power with the language the words we use in the way we communicate. This is the power of the force. Exactly. Well there is a section in your book where you were discussing the dark arts and that a lot of these strategies can be co-opted for not some righteous purposes and to do good. Especially these very specifically tactical things like we're talking about and my main recommendation for people on the receiving side like is this person trying to manipulate me is to not consider these as smoking guns but as red flags and you look for others so if you see someone perceive that they're trying to tactically influence you and this happens in transactional sales and things like that it's not like they're the worst person in the world but their objective is to get your money and they're pretending to be your friend and all of this stuff to just look for other signs but in yourself what I find that I think is really interesting as I coach people over time and I'm curious if you find this too is that because we haven't been trained in this stuff before and we should have been trained since babyhood but essentially we were trained to play small by our parents and our teachers because we haven't been trained in this stuff it feels awkward and it's like learning a second language or a third language or whatever where you have to be very conscious and think before you speak and you feel self-conscious doesn't feel authentic but then over time as you practice it's not just that these particular behaviors become more habitual and they feel more authentic but that actually eventually you don't need to use too many tactics at all because you've become someone people want to say yes to and you open your mouth and you have a big smile and your eyes are sparkling and before you even say what your idea is the other person is ready to persuade themself that they want to go along with this Yeah, persuasion and one of the things that we focus so much on is the nonverbal component and I think many of us get lost in the tactical and the verbal and the words and almost scripting out which does feel really inauthentic doesn't feel genuine and we had your colleague Barry on talking about splitting the pie and looking at negotiation as well how do we grow the pie first if we're going to split the pie how do we grow it for both sides and I think that's such a great lens when we're talking about influence and persuasion because if both sides are winning if both sides are getting value out of this relationship then it's not manipulation then it's not used in a negative manner Yeah, and if we're shifting from a transactional mindset to a relationship mindset where you don't have to figure out who's getting what in every single transaction but you can be more generous and you can be more audacious I love by the way the frame that you had for Adam Grant what he calls disagreeable givers and that's such an awkward frame because disagreeable sounds not nice and givers sounds like suckers kind of but to say cooperation with boundaries then it makes it really clear what we're trying to do and also where the weakness lies on one area or the other like am I not cooperating enough or am I not drawing enough boundaries and I do a lot of work helping people draw boundaries too because it doesn't matter what influence skills you have if all of your time and attention and everything is getting drained away by people coming and influencing you and asking you for stuff Well, one of the first chapters in a book was titled Just Ask and you cite Vanessa Bonds and some of the work that she had done and she has been on the show and for a lot of our exercises that we have with our clients they're put in positions where they're just that and they're gonna ask and what everyone learns is that people want to be helpful we function as a society as being trustworthy and building cooperation and because of that if you do not put boundaries up and hold them and adhere to them you will be taken advantage of because we do want to help people and if you don't have boundaries a lot of times you don't even realize that you're being taken advantage of until it's too late putting up boundaries allows you to know hey, you might want to start questioning the ask now because now we're at the boundaries but if you don't have those by the time you realize what's going on you realize I should have seen this coming a mile ago Yeah, it's so true that most of us don't realize that we're people pleasers and almost all of us are people pleasers I do in my MBA class at 24 hours of no challenge and this is actually our very first challenge for the class and it's scary and it's fun and I encourage anyone who's listening who thinks that this might be helpful for you to play this game where for 24 hours you say no to every single person who asks you for something you can do whatever you want but I recommend that you practice saying no as simply as possible and also to be warm when you say no and we think that people are not gonna like us because we're saying no to them but they're not liking us if we're treating them coldly and you have so much leeway to say no if you do this by saying no to the offer or invitation without saying no to the actual person And when we talk to Nedger Tawab about boundaries the problem that many of us find ourselves in if we're just establishing them for the first time is we'll qualify so we'll say no and then we'll start to trip over on words because I have this thing and I can't do it now and we try to soften the no and in actuality someone who's really good at influence and persuasion can talk us back into the yes or we can really lose value in the other person's eyes because now we're showcasing to them that we don't value them as much as our work or their friendship or our dog or whatever the excuse is that we're using to soften that no and that's why I love that exercise of just with warmth, with grace express a no and realize that people will respond okay to that and your relationships are intact and actually many of them will thrive because people will have more respect for you because you respect yourself when you become more comfortable saying no you actually become more comfortable with hearing no so it's rejection therapy but in the inverse so many exercises will be like go out there and get a thousand no's that sounds exhausting that's really tough and it's brutal and unless you're an actor and you're used to getting rejected constantly or a salesperson that's tough for most but a simpler way is to actually practice saying no be in the presence of that no absorb it and then you realize no is not a big deal to express it or to hear it and it's way more fun to practice saying no than it is to practice hearing no although I do believe that that part is important too what's cool when you're comfortable hearing no is that it changes the way you ask and your requests lose this edge of neediness that can be repulsive for other people now you've mentioned a word numerous times so far frame and Johnny and I throw it around a lot and I feel like we understand it greatly but it's one word that a lot of our listeners will reach out to us in question what do you mean by frame what is going on with frame and I thought in the book you did such a great job of discussing and really illuminating what we mean by frame and then going through just how powerful it is when you understand it so let's unpack frame for our audience thank you I think the complicated thing when we talk about framing is that we use it in two different ways and we mean the perspective on a situation and we also mean the label or the name of the thing and these are connected because the name or label for something influences the perspective that somebody has on this but just a concrete frame that has been in the media and news a lot lately is what do we call what's going on in Ukraine right now and so at the beginning of February the dominant frame was the conflict in Ukraine and even in trending topics on Twitter was called conflict in Ukraine and when you think of a conflict that's something that your parents can have and you can sit back and observe not necessarily a big deal nobody's good nobody's bad just an argument and so that frame was saying not your business not that important everyday situation so some of the media companies newspapers in Ukraine and other people like me who cared about this issue were putting a lot of effort into shifting the frame and alternative frames that then came up and were used a lot were invasion and now the dominant one is war but since the photos in Bucha got published there's now another big push to shift the frame to genocide and this question of are we gonna call it a genocide or not some people are saying listen let's just stop the killing who cares what we're gonna call it and I totally understand that but the frame genocide is so powerful because it says we absolutely have to intervene and we have to do as much as we can to intervene in this situation so this is framing in the big picture broad politics but let me share another very concrete example one of the most influential charismatic business leaders has been Steve Jobs right and people have mixed feelings that I have mixed feelings about him but he was a master framer and when he wanted to recruit John Scully from being CEO of PepsiCo which was a billion dollar company when Apple was still a baby and had been recently founded in a garage he has this conversation with John Scully where he asks and this is actually the third or fourth time he's asked and Scully had said no and said no but they became friends he asked him again and this time he says do you want to keep selling sugar water for the rest of your life or do you wanna come with me and change the world and Scully says I just gulped and I know I'd wonder for the rest of my life that frame of selling sugar water was powerful and it was sticky because that is literally exactly what Scully was doing at Pepsi and this is the power of the frame that if it feels accurate it can just stick so that it's hard to shift so if you agree that what's going on in Ukraine is a genocide then it's very hard to shift and it's very hard to say it doesn't matter other things are more important let's not intervene things like that those are some examples of framing I find that quite interesting because with social media and everyone understanding this and getting their ideas out there and being shared and being influential and persuasive everyone has at their fingertips the power to reframe things and frame things to their advantage or disadvantage bringing attention to whatever it is they need so we're seeing incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking frames being thrown everywhere for if you wanna look at that situation from that perspective you will have a very powerful frame there and for the other side of that argument you're gonna see incredibly powerful frames there and now what you see certainly in politics but even in marketing everyone is looking for people who are incredibly good at that because and they're paying top dollar for it because they see the power in public discourse now because of these public squares that we have for me as somebody who works in markets and AJ and I are always talking about framing so we're always looking at that lens and when we see buzzwords we're always trying to pick apart what's behind it and it's astonishing to see the power of this coming from so many places well even when you look at Putin's framing of denazification, right? Nazification is a very powerful frame you wanna look at why one country would invade another well, Nazism is justified in many eyes so that's the frame that he was using and we see it on both sides and when you actually start to understand the power of it you can start to navigate around this manipulation and persuasion that's being used for the wrong purposes so you will see and hear salesmen salespeople use framing and you will see marketers use framing and when you understand this concept that oh, they're shifting my perspective to sugar water or they're shifting my perspective to conflict well, let me dig a little deeper what's actually going on here what does this person want from me that they're putting this frame in the conversation right it's a powerful tactic for influence and persuasion it's also something that we want to consider when we are potentially being influenced or persuaded now, whenever we're trying to influence or persuade someone it's inevitable that there's gonna be resistance we've talked a little bit about this on the show in the past but I love this example of a keto and how we can utilize resistance actually to our advantage so when many people hear resistance they go oh no, I have to stop I have to change the frame I have to immediately appease the other person because resistance isn't going to be persuasive it's not gonna be used to my advantage where does the keto come in and how can we use that technique in our persuasion right, it's easy to go either to appeasement or to argument, right so someone's resisting us and we capitulate or we fight back but this ties back to what you were saying about not making excuses or explanations when we say no because master influencers will key in to those concerns or objections and that's exactly what can get them what they want and so in the Aikido school of handling resistance the idea is that you welcome their resistance rather than pushing back against it so you're meeting force with a welcome party and you do this first of all just by listening and second of all by asking questions to try to understand what is it behind their concern or what are the deeper values underlying this disagreement and then handling resistance when you wanna shift to asking them something a super simple Aikido move is just asking them permission to ask them so in a conversation like even just like can I ask you a question, right but if it's say you wanna have a big conversation where maybe you're gonna ask for say a raise or promotion at work giving somebody a heads up before you ask them helps diffuse their resistance because they didn't get caught off guard and then also they're gonna be prepared and a third thing that you can do to help diffuse resistance this one is so weird but it's just reminding them in whatever way makes sense for the situation that you're not the boss of them even if you are the boss of them and what you're doing is you're appeasing their inner two year old who wants to say to any influence attempt you're not the boss of me and you're just saying before they say that like listen I know I'm not the boss of you so if you were talking to someone in a higher status role let's say that it's at work you might be saying listen I have this idea to propose and I know you're super busy or I know you have a lot of priorities but if you have a few minutes I'd love to share this with you so it's just acknowledging you don't take their time and attention for granted maybe you're talking to a lower status person on the hierarchy at work and you're not gonna say listen I know you must be busy you have a lot of other priorities but you might say something like listen it's not up to me but or you might say the choice is yours and here's the situation you can always tell people what your preference is so it's not that you just give them the information you're like oh whatever you want you can say you know I think the best course of action is this one and here's why but you might disagree you can also be this is maybe even beyond Aikido it's being a ninja where you are yourself critiquing your own argument before they're critiquing your argument and that way you've diffused their reactants and you have addressed these objections in a way that says they're not critical they're not giant maybe they're important but they're completely and totally handleable and the closer you can get to addressing them as they're thinking it the easier it is in terms of that path to least resistance and this is one thing that a lot of beginner salespeople average salespeople when they encounter objections they're looking for all of these different tactics and strategies when in actuality the strongest salespeople will themselves put the objection out before the prospect can even say this is too expensive or this is too much time and address it so that emotionally they feel heard and it's like okay now exactly that I understand in a better way and you're diffusing it because if they come up with it they hold on to that objection and you might not be able to reason, persuade or influence your way out of it that's right and part of the reason this is a ninja thing is that if they're in this mode of reactance they're looking for reasons you're wrong and when you voice their concern they're looking for reasons you're wrong and it actually helps them persuade themselves yeah we love the ninja tactics here the Aikido idea of using that force that's coming at you to redirect it instead of meeting it with your own full force as we talked about in lower value episode around being combative being argumentative that's not persuasive yet we see this in politics we see this from some leaders and we often mislabel it as oh well that's what powerful people do they argue their way to the top they beat others into submission and it's just so great to hear that one that's not as effective and two by actually absorbing what the resistance is and laying a foundation of what potential future resistance might be before they get a chance to not only are you more persuasive but it's just a better conversation I don't think anyone wants to be locked in a frame battle or locked in a confrontation when it comes to sales when it comes to negotiating or even meeting and connecting with people right and you mentioned negotiating and that's of specific contexts that most people expect to be in some kind of battle or confrontation and I think this is because of Hollywood and what negotiations look like in movies we don't get involved in many high stakes negotiations in our lives so we're relying on these dramatic representations in my research when I've asked people how they feel about negotiations first of all when I ask which is more accurate? Are you trying to get everything you can or are you trying not to be a sucker? So anyone listening can predict what people say but the vast majority of people are just trying not to be a sucker that's all we want and so when you're meeting someone else you're expecting that they're gonna try to get everything that they can the reality is they're just trying not to be a sucker and if you can show them that you're not trying to make them a sucker it goes such a long way I've also found interestingly that even though we're afraid of negotiations and the majority of us either dislike it or hate it there's a big gender gap too there by the way the majority of all people but especially women dislike or hate negotiating when I ask them about their most recent negotiation and they describe it and then I ask how it went and how they felt most of us had a positive experience and we're just not coding those things as negotiations or we're not updating the reality is we're negotiating all the time we are collaborating figuring out agreements with one another these are negotiations but we just didn't code it that way we're great at it we're great at negotiating and we just need to not short circuit ourselves when we get to one of those capital N negotiations over money with strangers and things that scare us well it's never a zero sum your reputation is always a part of that negotiation so when you fiercely negotiate and get one over on someone whether it's in sales whether it's in negotiating your salary and the other person feels like they lost they're not gonna refer you they're not gonna be happy working with you after it's gonna affect future performance reviews and all of these cascade effects that you don't think of if you're looking at it as a confrontation now one of the skills that we tell all of our X Factor Accelerator members that we're gonna work on is listening but it's not one that lights up the marketing it's not one that many expect to join the program for but it actually is the single most impactful skill when it comes to influence persuasion and everything we've talked about today so much of what we seek is what to say how to do it what action can I take when in actuality the other person is gonna share all of the information that you need we will fully share with strangers and you talk about a great study of just how pervasive this is that we will share our deepest darkest secrets with strangers for 20 bucks it doesn't take much to get other people to share but we aren't listening at a deep enough level and you talk in the book about the levels of listening and I'd love to share those with the audience because I know when I'm in an anxious state my listening does not go that deep it stays focused on myself and what I'm about to say or do and of course then I can't make that connection I can't influence or persuade I also wanna just add to that that most people if you ask them on a scale of 1 to 10 how well they listen they're gonna overindex that one they always do absolutely and I completely agree that listening is the key and least valued skill of influence because everyone is the most important person to themselves right so you're the most important person to yourself so you're wanting to do the thing but they're the most important person to themselves and so it's figuring out how to put your attention on them first of all there's just everyday listening where we're waiting to speak and that's the majority of the time for all of us when anyone is speaking and then you can listen a little bit deeper to listen for what are they thinking and you're trying to take their perspective and you get some more insight there and this is better for a relationship going a little deeper you can practice listening for how are they feeling and this will help you start to develop some empathy although remind yourself that you could be wrong in either any of these cases right you don't know what they're thinking unless you're asking you don't know what they're feeling unless you're asking and sometimes you're feeling these heightened emotions that you imagine them to be feeling can be just distracting and unhelpful there's a level below this where you're listening kind of like Sherlock Holmes to what they're not saying this is a weird experience that can be exhilarating for you as the listener because you feel like you have this power Henry Kissinger said that this was the key to diplomacy is listening in this way because they do have tells and signals of what they're thinking what they're feeling what they're concerned about but this is another level at which definitely you can still be wrong and your ego can get in the way so watch out for it the level of listening that I encourage people to practice because it's the very most powerful is listening for the other person's values so you're trying to hear what are ultimately their deep, deep values and these are typically values so deep that they're one word values like freedom, like love, like justice what is it they care about at the deep level that's informing their opinion and then you reflect it back to them and you say it sounds like you care a lot about equity well that doesn't sound very sticky maybe you care a lot about justice the thing is it actually almost doesn't matter if you're right what matters is that you're trying they are so delighted that you are respecting them by listening so carefully to want to understand what it is they care about and if you're wrong they'll just tell you and you'll just have a conversation about it when they feel heard by you in this deep way then they're in the position to be able to consider also listening to you one of my favorite exercises for this and to get better with this is to do this with your friends where as you're listening to them you ask them if you may still man or summarize their statements and what you think they are saying now there's a win-win here because in one you're showing them that you're trying and that you're caring and if you nail it well you just you saw right through them and be very excited oh my God that's exactly the way I was feeling and if you miss it they will correct you and give you exactly what it is that they were feeling so you get that information in both ways the win there is as much as you do this you will always get better at it as well absolutely and you can have it happens so often that then because you have given them this keen directed generous attention that they will then reciprocate and they will be asking you so what do you think it's exactly what we teach the exact same levels really the technique or strategy that we bring in we listen with our eyes and our ears so the level of listening that you're talking about you have to be watching body language you have to be looking at nonverbal communication just as much as their words and that is often lost on us we're thinking okay I just have to clue in on the data some of our clients will get to the emotional level of like okay beyond why they're just sharing this information but so much of that emotion comes through the nonverbal communication so you have to use your eyes to listen which can be a bit challenging for some who don't feel comfortable with eye contact don't know exactly where to look or aren't as seasoned especially in a high stakes situation like a job interview, negotiation, etc. but your nonverbal communication and I'm sure Henry Kissinger would agree with those tells many times are expressed nonverbally because we can't hide those emotions with our body language we can deceive through our words much more readily I love that you're teaching, listening and charisma and influence in such an embodied way because our influence on one another is as human beings it's not as machines or automatons and so much of their physical presence and so much of our own physical presence play a role in this and but we just don't think about it that much that's the art of charm, right? and unfortunately many of our clients have become very adept at communicating and listening to machines which is why they end up working with us an X factor as engineers and analysts, etc. and we love asking every guest who stops by what their X factor is what is that unique skill set that makes you extraordinary? I really believe that my X factor is my ability to love which I got from my mom she's the most loving person I know and this is something that keeps me grounded and it keeps me humble it helps me be forgiving and I have so much vicarious satisfaction from the successes of other people that I love that I feel I have this boundless pool of possible happiness well we can tell you radiate it and it's a beautiful answer way to end the interview where can our audience find more about your book influence is your superpower and all the great work you're doing thank you come on over to my website it's zoechance.com and you can find lots of stuff there awesome thank you Zoe