Tag - persuasion

For More Influence, Try Grounded Cognition

What does your brain do when you hear the word 'pepper'? What about 'grasp'? Or 'hat'? All these words fire up not just your language circuits, but different senses through other relevant brain circuitry. 'Pepper' activates your taste circuits. 'Grasp', your motor movement circuits. 'Hat' - visual circuits. Whatever you see as a hat from past experience fires up the 'seeing' part of your brain. To influence more effectively, we can improve our chances of motivating our audiences by using language that's: Concrete Specific We'll come back to examples of these in a moment. By being concrete and specific, we build a richer, more powerful experience for...

To Be More Persuasive, Think About Power

Persuasion is a crucial part of our everyday communication, whether at work or socially. And have you ever considered that to be more persuasive, you need to think about power dynamics? How does feeling powerful play out, both for speaker and audience? To Persuade, Think about Power To uncover more about this, let's look at persuasion and power and how these interact with another key factor in our communication style: warmth and competence.  Psychologists consider warmth and competence to be universal principles. In social perception terms, they're key ways we evaluate people, particularly when we first meet them. So how does considering power alongside...

Easy Persuasion Technique to Try

Want to increase your persuasiveness? A large 2012 review* of 42 studies involving 22,000 people worldwide showed that when you use the easy persuasion technique I'm about to give you, it doubles the chances of someone saying yes to your request. Doubles! And I believe it can also apply to some public speaking scenarios, as well as support your influencing goals. The easy persuasion technique: Tell your listener that they're free to choose: they can accept or refuse your request or idea. It's known as BYAF - But You Are Free. Easy persuasion technique Why do you think this works? For me, its success at persuading...