8

How to Change Your Mind

Those who manipulate struggle with implementation, seeing the mastering of these skills as something they will revisit when it serves them.

Those who influence dedicate themselves to implementation, seeing the mastering of these skills as a way to help others in need of change.

Now that we have our process for changing minds clearly defined and on the table, it would appear that our job is done. We’ve touched all the bases. You have seen why people often avoid change and need assistance when it comes to modifying various habits. You have looked at the inside of the minds of those who struggle with change, and studied why they struggle, and even when they tend to struggle. You have examined a process to create trust, the blueprint for change, and a process to create urgency. You have learned how to begin the conversation, how to finish the conversation, and how to handle conflict within the conversation. But our work is still not done.

In my thirty-plus years of working with audiences, it has always puzzled me why so many people eagerly buy into concepts and processes, but in the end fail to implement them. Well, I think I know the answer, and I’d like to solve this mystery right now. In the words of Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

We must stop thinking that when a process is taught, it somehow becomes more of a straitjacket than a process. This can come from an overzealous teacher, or perhaps even an author with just a little too much passion. Your success in using these, or any processes you learn, is not dependent only on your ability to memorize them. In fact, just as important, if not more important, is your ability to apply these processes to each unique situation that arises. One size definitely does not fit all.

The ultimate test of any process to influence behavior is its ability to expand and contract to any persuasive situation.

I am not suggesting that processes aren’t critical to our success. I’m merely saying that these processes represent nothing more than a guide. These, and other processes like them, must be flexible and provide the user with the option to sift through what may be needed, and what is not. In the end we must remember that people make decisions, not processes. This is where what I refer to as strategic decision-making comes in.

A STRATEGIC CHECKLIST

Up to this point, you have been kind enough to let me methodically walk you through the steps necessary to change minds. Now let’s mess things up a bit, suspend disbelief, and pretend that not everyone to whom we are applying these skills follows the steps exactly as they have been laid out. Allow me take you through a checklist that will help guide you in determining how to apply this process to various situations. Each question has the potential to affect the strategies you will employ and to provide you with a better idea of how to let this process expand and contract around your unique situations.

Where is the Person You are Influencing in His or Her Decision Cycle? To me, no strategic decision can be made until you know where the other is in his or her decision cycle. This is the first domino that must fall before you can make any other decisions; therefore, it is more like a mantra than a step within a process. It all begins here. Listen for cues that would identify where the person you are communicating with may be in his or her decision cycle.

Does the person you are communicating with want to make a change or not? If you are going to make an error, I would suggest you err on the side of caution. In other words, when in doubt, move backward and not forward in the decision cycle and your choice of tactics.

What Steps Would Be Most Critical? If you want to change minds, you’re going to need a game plan. Within that game plan, you will call on various tactics. The obvious question then becomes, “What steps within this process will I need?”

Sometimes the clues are clear as to where another person is in his or her decision cycle, making the tactics clear as well. Other times it might require a few careful questions that will provide a temperature read into the minds of those you intend to change. Once the tactics have been chosen, another domino has fallen as well.

What Steps Would Be Least Critical? No steps within this, or any process, are cast in stone, but instead represent a series of conscious choices based on information at hand. I know you have heard these words from me often, but let’s say them one last time. The main tactics outlined in this book represent a process, and nothing more. They are not intended to constrict anyone’s behavior; instead, they are meant to be flexible. Once we determine where someone is in his or her decision cycle, certain steps within the process will be more important than others. In other words, despite how passionate I might be in explaining key tactics, sometimes key tactics just aren’t necessary.

Pause and consider these words again: “Sometimes key tactics just aren’t necessary.” These words are coming from this author straight to you. The author is telling you not to use all the steps he just taught you. That might make me a lousy author, but it makes for one heck of an honest one! I can assure you, I would not have created each and every step within this process if I didn’t think it was important. However, when we deal with the real world, we find that different steps become more or less critical based on many factors, including personality, geographic location, and where someone is in his or her decision cycle, to mention a few. And that means constructing a conversation that fits the scenario within which you are working.

Trust, for example, and the steps contained within that stage of the process, are critical. But what if the scenario you are working within brings you face to face with someone you know well? It would be annoying and clumsy to ask that person basic questions that you already know. Imagine beginning a conversation with one of your best clients, with whom you have worked for years, with a question like, “Can you tell me about yourself?”

The funny thing is, not only do I think it’s okay to dismiss certain steps within this or any process, I think it’s imperative. I’m such a believer in tailoring this approach to the real world that a few years ago I changed every program my company delivers to reflect this approach. Of course, I still have people role-play within the programs we teach, but we also have them participate in case studies and simulations that allow students to shuffle through the tactics to mimic the real world more accurately.

What Are Some Anticipated Strengths and Weaknesses of Your Position? Understanding the strengths of your position can provide a lot of help when determining what questions to ask, and where you might lead someone through your conversation. Understanding the weaknesses of your position can often be even more helpful.

Analyzing your potential weaknesses will give you a head start on issues that should not be avoided. Your frank and honest acceptance of the weaknesses in your position may help set an honest tone to the conversation, and even create the right atmosphere for potential compromise. It may also help prepare you for potential objections that you may be faced with, as well as strategies for how to deal with those objections.

When you learn how to change minds, you learn that no solution is a perfect solution. There are strengths and weaknesses to every position. Using the proper skills to draw another person to the strengths of your solution, and also accepting the weaknesses, can go a long way to influence, without manipulation.

Those who manipulate focus exclusively on the strengths of their position.

Those who influence focus and analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of their position.

What Objections Do You Anticipate Hearing? Sometimes it is hard to anticipate which objections you will hear, and other times these objections are no surprise at all. Rather than hoping you will not have to deal with an anticipated objection, why not prepare for it?

Study your position. Study the position of the person whose mind you are attempting to change through influence. What are the typical objections you can count on hearing? Is there a trust issue? Is there a fear of change issue? Is there an ego issue, an urgency issue, or an issue of denial?

You have already learned how to handle objections, so I will not restate the process here. Instead, I will suggest that you write out some clarification questions along with some well-worded responses. This should give you confidence and provide you with articulate, nondefensive responses to potential objections.

What Opening Adjustments Will You Make? The opening is another critical element of your strategic decision-making. Sometimes this opening represents the first words out of your mouth, and other times it represents a much-needed transition from a comfortable conversation to a potentially uncomfortable confrontation.

The key, once again, is preparation. Study your opening, and based on what you know about the person you are meeting, try to anticipate the adjustments you’ll have to make. If this represents an important conversation to you, I suggest you write out that opening in advance. I’ve always recommended creating a handful of openings so that you can mix and match key phrases on the fly. This will allow you to put your best foot forward even if you are forced on the spot to make strategic decisions regarding your opening. This preparation will position you strategically to win the first battle you face—those all-important first forty-five seconds.

What Personality Adjustments Will You Make? Everything you’ve read so far is a vital part of this handy checklist, but this final element will help provide a better sense of pace. When do you transition with that opening, and how long do you spend with those questions designed to establish trust? Just how hard do you hit someone with the more difficult questions that can create pain, and how long do you stay there? It often becomes a matter of personality.

I’m all for the intricate personality processes that exist, but in the world of fast-paced, on-the-spot interactions, these reads and adjustments must be lightning fast. In fact, I think it will all boil down to one of three personalities you will face when learning how to change minds—dominant, analytical, and social.

If a person is demonstrating dominant tendencies:

You’ll see it in her clothes, which are often somewhat conservative.

You’ll see it in her home, or office, which will be somewhat barren.

You’ll see it in her emails, which are short, and not particularly—well—friendly.

You’ll hear it in her speech, which will be somewhat—well—to the point.

Quite frankly, you’ll need to speed up and get to your point. The world of schmoozing is lost on this personality type. Get that opening going, get to your point, and move briskly through the tactics. Dominant people are potentially the most aggressive to work with. But they’ll also be the quickest to take action if the solution you are drawing them to makes sense. If you keep your ears open, and listen for signals that reflect a willingness to move forward, you’ll change the dominant personality’s mind.

If a person is demonstrating analytical tendencies:

You’ll see it in his clothes, which are also somewhat conservative.

You’ll see it in his home or office, which will be somewhat cluttered but orderly.

You’ll see it in his emails, which will be somewhat orderly and to the point.

You’ll hear it in his speech, which will be detailed and deliberate.

Now you’ll need to come armed with facts and figures, and not feelings. Sharing how you “feel” about an idea is lost on him; providing him real data to support your idea is not. Stick to the logic behind the conversation you are having by letting him know you want to understand things from his side of the issue, and understand more about the challenges of his situation. If you can “prove” your case, you’ll change the analytical personality’s mind.

If a person is demonstrating social tendencies:

You’ll see it in her clothes, which will be a little bit more colorful and adventurous.

You’ll see it in her home or office, which will be somewhat messy with a lot of pictures on the wall.

You’ll see it in her emails, which will be loaded with a LOT of social comments and creativity.

You’ll hear it in her speech, which you’ll have no trouble hearing because it will go on and on.

With these personality types, you’ll need to let them go on and possibly ramble a bit instead of rushing into your part of the conversation. Pushing them to the point too fast will be perceived as rude. The good news is these personalities will be the easiest to get to the table for a conversation. The bad news is they will typically be the most difficult influence. This isn’t because they won’t agree with most of the changes you suggest. It’s because they will avoid actually acting on the change they’ve agreed to. There is no personality that needs more discipline in following through on the tactics selected, particularly the tactics that create urgency. If you avoid taking the bait and rushing away from the questions that create pain, you’ll change the social personality’s mind.

That’s a rather quick jaunt through the world of personality, but it not only belongs on our checklist, it provides a little perspective to the speed of the tactics needed when you learn how to change minds as well. It may be logical, but it took me about a decade to accept personality as a criterion of influence.

IT’S NOT ABOUT ME; IT’S ABOUT YOU

It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I was never fond of the various personality processes that appeared over the years. These were the programs that identified various personality types and provided insight into the things about yourself that you never quite understood before.

For a period of time, it seemed as if every company I worked with was investing in these programs to help them sell more effectively. After all, once you went through this extensive, multipage assessment, you had a pretty accurate understanding of what motivates you, what demotivates you, how you want to be managed, strengths and weaknesses of selling, and much, much more.

Personally, I fought these programs for one stubborn reason: I felt the information I was gaining from these assessments was absolutely perfect, as long as I was selling to me for the rest of my life! I always felt the information was aimed at the wrong person. I’m as interested as the next guy to learn more about myself, and be a better person, but, quite frankly, I didn’t want this to be about me. I wanted it to be about the person sitting across from me.

So I treated these programs with disdain, often claiming: “Who needs them?” I can’t go to my clients and say, “Uh, pardon me, would you mind taking this assessment so I can figure out how to sell to you more effectively?” In my book, this conversation about personality had no business in the trenches with real sales training. It was insulting to me that these processes even dared to try to pass themselves off as sales processes!

And then I realized I was wrong. So often, when I fielded questions from audience members, I heard things like: “How long should I spend chitchatting with a client before I move into the business side of things?” Wouldn’t that depend on the personality of the client?

The fact is that I needed those personality processes, and I appreciated their attention to learning more about individual human behavior. But the personality processes needed more attention to skills that taught true selling techniques as well.

Full personality assessments are great as management tools, and wonderful to show family and friends at parties, but they won’t be a lot of help when you are training your eyes on someone else you are meeting for the first time. What will work is studying how someone dresses, how an office or home environment is set up, or even learning to read personality from emails and voicemails. These kinds of reads will give you a head start, and your early questions will allow you to fine-tune your assessment.

In the real world, many personality reads are made on the fly, so it’s extremely difficult to juggle the level of detail in multilevel assessments. You don’t need such in-depth assessments. The three personality types we’ve discussed—dominant, analytical, social will cover all the bases for you.

Our instinctive behavior is to try to communicate with people with whom we feel naturally comfortable: people who are like us. Unfortunately, when you are trying to persuade someone else, it’s his or her personality that matters, and that means communicating in the way that he or she would like to be communicated with.

AND FINALLY

The system of influence that I teach is not a pamphlet with a few good ideas; it is a process. When you try to perfect any process, it requires a commitment to implement what has been learned. This means leaving the comfort confines of the status quo and venturing into new ideas and new tactics. For many, the challenge is to avoid slipping back into old, comfortable tactics, especially when faced with a live human being uncomfortably staring you down. But when you believe that change is necessary, are there any real alternatives?

When you don’t know where a person is in his or her decision cycle, or what repeatable steps would be necessary to change minds logically, the focus falls on one thing only: Did you convince him or her, or not? Did you win, or did you lose? To evaluate your performance solely on whether you influenced change or not falls somewhere between naive and ignorant. What about the peace of mind you gain knowing that you put together the most intelligent, structured approach to persuasion you could possibly have designed?

One of the biggest challenges is the temptation to push someone into a decision rather than take the time and effort necessary to change another person’s mind. However, an even bigger test will be to know when to dig in and fight, and when the fight is not in the best interest of those whose minds you seek to change. It doesn’t have to be about winning or losing.

Is Winning the Only Thing?

While I was growing up, I was a fan of the late Vince Lombardi. Not only was he one of the greatest coaches ever, but he also finished his career with my Washington Redskins. He is the man who is forever linked to the following words: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

There is an irony to this: Lombardi isn’t the one who came up with that quote, nor did he mean it when he said it. For the record, the quote was actually attributed to Henry “Red” Sanders, the football coach for the UCLA Bruins in 1950. In 1959, Lombardi used the line to open the Packers training camp. According to the late James Michener’s Sports in America, Lombardi claimed to have been misquoted. What he intended to say was this:”Winning isn’t everything. The will to win is the only thing.”

That certainly changes the intent of that quote, doesn’t it? It also gives you a little more insight into the nature of Lombardi. Look at that quote again. Lombardi, one of the most competitive and successful coaches in professional sports history, was really telling us something else: He was saying “effort is what ultimately defines success.” This is an important distinction because I think we often define our success by counting our victories.

Those who know me well consider me to be an intense person, both inside and out. You may be surprised to know, however, that throughout my professional career, my reaction to either winning or losing has never been that different. As a young salesman, when I made a nice sale, I would celebrate with a bag of barbecued potato chips. That bag of chips symbolized victory.

But that wasn’t the only time I rewarded myself with that bag of chips. When I worked hard on a sale by taking no shortcuts, by sticking to my process, and by giving it my all, I’d eat those chips even if I didn’t make the sale. It was a struggle at first because I never wanted to get into a habit of rewarding failure. But I wasn’t rewarding failure; I was rewarding effort. To this day, I can forgive a professional loss, but what I can’t forgive is a loss knowing I didn’t do all I could to be successful.

We learned this as children and were allowed to define success by our effort and our will to win. Much like Lombardi’s quote that took on a life of its own, so has the flawed concept that success should be defined solely by winning. Is it any wonder that so many people struggle in life with depression and the fear of failure? Personally, I believe this is a direct result of people elevating the act of winning to a life-and-death equation.

North Carolina’s Dean Smith, one of the most successful college basketball coaches in the history of the sport (coming from a Maryland Terrapin alumnus, that’s not easy for me to admit), said it best when he provided us with this thought: “If you make every game a life and death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.”

Let’s pay tribute to both Dean Smith and Vince Lombardi, and remember both men for the real messages they gave us. If we do, we can set goals and achieve results that are 100 percent controlled by our effort … just as we did when we were children. I think we would all be a lot happier with ourselves if we did this—don’t you?

Those who manipulate define victory solely by the change they create.

Those who influence define victory by the ethical effort they put forth in their attempts to bring about change.

I wish you well in your quest to change minds. It will require trial and error. It will involve success and failure. My hope is that through these pages you’ve found a simple, well-thought-out approach to maximizing your efforts to influence others ethically and empathetically. That also means defining success, not by the minds you change, but by your absolute best effort to understand and apply the tactics you’ve learned. At the end of the day, that’s all you can ask for.

Perfect your tactics, use your checklist, and trust your instincts. Before you know it, you’ll be able not only to change minds, but to do so by applying the art of influence without manipulation. Most important, never, ever question the importance of what you are doing for others when you guide them to change.