By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy
Here’s an idea to help you become even more influential. Reading time: 3:01.
You are the subject-matter expert in your company, the sharpest saw in the shed in your field. Yet every time you try saw through a concept with a customer, those BLOCKHEADS seem to get thicker and thicker. What can you do to help your audience’s soak up your message more fully?
Hoover Dam
Stop sawing. Start watering.
Turn your faucet of information on slowly, watering only when the customer says they are thirsty. Yet too often over-zealous experts are too quick to flood their audiences with information.
And audiences are even quicker to build a dam to protect them from those flood waters.
But a particular audience will open its dam if it believes the speaker’s water (i.e. message) will flow into its own stream.
Audiences will open their dams if they think your water will fill – and more significantly FULFILL—their own personal pipelines — without polluting their values, beliefs and concerns already flowing in their personal streams of consciousness.
You can influence your audience to soak up your message when you recognize that the meaning of the word “influence” stems from the the Latin to “flow into.”
When you influence others, you flow into their feelings so fully that they can be move to purposeful action, as James MacGregor Burns notes in his Pulitzer-Prize winning book on Leadership.
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ROSE is an acrostic for four distinct initiatives you can use to strengthen your persuasive skills.
LEADERSHIP MINTS PUBLISHING 