Roar, page 11
4
5
Once you’ve completed the entire chart, a question will come up: How much of each ingredient should you add to get what you want? It’s time to start writing the recipe. Usually a recipe takes more of some ingredients than others, hence the seasoning. A simple way to start figuring out how to assign measurements is to divide 100 percent by your number of criteria. In our case, there are five, so the balance would be 20 percent. Obviously, if we assign this measurement to all ingredients equally, none will outweigh the other, which is not impossible, but quite unlikely in practice. This isn’t bad, but it will rarely work. The idea is to give a higher percentage to the most important things, while making sure the total is always 100 percent.
The assignment of the percentage values is subjective, so the result may vary from one person to another—exactly what we’re looking for. For this example, I will use these measurements for the different criteria:
Dollars
Brand
5%
Price
30%
Monitor Size
15%
Processor
40%
Memory
10%
The next step is to multiply each criterion’s rating by the assigned measurement, so we can assign measurements to the attributes. Let’s use the brand as an example. As we saw, option 1 had a score of 5 points for this criterion. Given that the measurement we assigned that criterion was 5 percent, we multiply the score by the measurement (5 × 5 percent), and get a result of 0.25 percent.
I’M NOT ALWAYS SURE WHERE I’M GOING, BUT I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I DON’T WANT TO RETURN.
Repeat this exercise for each of the elements you’re going to review and record the results in a chart like the following one, which, as you can see, has a total of the results per option in the last row.
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Option 5
Brand
0.25
0.2
0.2
0.15
0.15
Price
1.2
1.2
0.6
1.2
1.5
Monitor Size
0.6
0.75
0.75
0.45
0.3
Processor
2
1.2
1.2
1.6
1.2
Memory
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.4
0.5
TOTAL
4.25
3.65
3.15
3.8
3.65
As you can see, the most qualified computer is the one in option 1. Using the same inputs, but with another recipe, the result would be different, but both would be perfectly valid. This method makes sure that variables you don’t control or that aren’t relevant don’t affect the result.
EQUIPMENT
If you find using decimals and percentages too complex, here’s another strategy for decision-making, which focuses on the criteria we use or discard when making a decision. Let’s go back to the previous exercise and eliminate the excessive calculations—we’ll cook with fewer containers.
This time, instead of assigning a percentage to each criterion, you will organize the list of criteria in order of importance. Once you have defined this, start with the most important criterion for you, review which options have the best rating for that criterion, and select only the options that have been rated as “good” or “very good” (if using the numerical scale, this would correspond to 4 or 5, respectively). Eliminate the rest.
SUCCESS IS TRUSTING SOMEONE AND BEING RIGHT.
Continue with the second most important criterion and review the scores of those options. Once again, eliminate the options that have the lowest scores. Continue doing this exercise with the remaining criteria until you have only one option left: the chosen one.
This way you’ll get an answer without doing any calculations. Just prioritize your list and eliminate the options that were poorly scored, in order of importance. The advantage of following this method is that you advance faster; however, you may move away from the “best” solution in some cases, the one that we build with the most metrics. I suggest you choose the first method for decisions that require more reflection and the second, faster one for simpler options.
Now let’s move away from the amount of each ingredient in the recipe and explore the second essential component of decision-making: the climate.
CLIMATE/CONTEXT ANALYSIS
The preparation of our decisions is also affected by external conditions. The daily situations we experience shift our perception of certain elements. In the computer example, specific events, such as a bad report on the economy, can change the importance we give to a certain criterion and lead us to make a totally different decision. News, stories, everyday occurrences that we have never related to the subject can trigger or modify our decision.
As I write this book, for example, the world is experiencing an energy crisis. If you were to buy a car right now, perhaps “performance” would become an important criterion you had never thought about.
The climate also has a bearing on social decisions. A clear example can be found in politics: Your rating of a problem like insecurity will increase if you’re the victim of a mugging or a shocking public event takes place days before an election. Knowing this is important because your decision will be largely influenced by the disproportionate value placed on that aspect.
Therefore, you should be aware of this reality and try to regulate the way in which the climate affects you when you have to make a decision, because the result may be influenced by an event that’s been blown out of proportion and reduced the weight you give to the really important elements. Being well informed minimizes the impact of isolated events on our assessment of reality.
The key is to continue working on building your own intelligent decision-making method. The way we obtain information to assess the situation is critical here, especially at a time when there is so much access to manipulated and inefficient data. Rarely have we been subjected to so much fraud, lies, and misrepresentation as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the outcome was not the best.
MY APOLOGIES TO INTUITION; I IGNORED IT.
In addition to the external climate, meaning the environment around you, there is also an internal climate created by the emotions you experience when making a decision. It’s very similar to what happens to Tita in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, who imbued the food she prepared with the emotions she experienced while cooking.
We can have top-quality ingredients and the best techniques, but our emotions will have an incredibly relevant impact on the final dish we set on the table. We need to make up for this. Our grandmothers always said we should avoid making decisions with a “hot head.” If I’m sad, I may see things differently than if I’m happy, but the issue is much more complex than that, and we need to talk about it. Conventional wisdom suggests separating thoughts from feelings, when one is actually shaped by the chisel of the other. The only thing we can do to minimize the effect of those “hot” or “cold” heads is to understand that the decisions we make with extreme joy or sadness will never be the best examples.
Extreme emotions will tend to produce extreme decisions, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. An excessively cheerful person will tend to make mistakes similar to those who feel anger or seek revenge. Knowing the emotional states from which we operate is essential because they will creep into our decisions.
Once you’ve followed the recipe’s step-by-step process—picking top-quality ingredients, meticulously following the preparation instructions, and making sure there’s a favorable climate for everything to work—you still need to like the result of what you’ve prepared: The time has come to listen to yourself because that’s where you’ll find the missing data.
INVISIBLE FACTORS
We’ve done an exercise to reduce subjectivity in some decisions. Then we added the effects of the weight we give to information and analyzed how our emotions come into play. But we’ve left out other criteria that are related to what we can’t control ourselves, although we can look for ways to do so. Sometimes, no matter how much math we use, the key lies in knowing ourselves better, as we discussed in Step One.
TO BE LISTENED TO WITHOUT JUDGMENT IS BEAUTIFUL.
Doing these exercises helps us make more balanced decisions, but there’s another benefit that’s not always discussed: It forces us to be honest about what we want and why.
The following anecdote helped me understand this benefit. Shortly after studying these decision-making methods, and as if he’d wanted to test me, my brother told me he wanted to buy a car. I felt happy. It was as if I could try out a new toy. I convinced him to use a model like the one we reviewed a few pages earlier. After a fairly meticulous search for information, he chose eight criteria for four vehicle models and carefully reviewed them. When it came time to rate them, one of the cars was the clear winner. “No way,” he said. “Let’s do it again.” We did it again after adjusting the values. The winning car came out on top again, but my brother was still suspicious.
He wanted another result. His ego had already made a choice and he only needed the calculations to confirm it. This doesn’t mean the calculation model was wrong. My brother just never took into account the factors that were relevant to his personal configuration. He didn’t add them to the equation, and he didn’t reveal them either: prestige, design, affinity, and others that perhaps he was unable to recognize—or never wanted to admit—such as symbols of power in his social environment, nostalgia, or vanity. That’s why it’s important to know if what we’ve added to the equation responds to our most sincere desires. When buying a car, I don’t think many people add “I want everyone to notice me when I drive by” or “I want to look like Brad Pitt” to the equation, yet that doesn’t mean these things don’t have an impact when it comes to assessing the vehicles.
Tools such as these serve to minimize, never avoid, subjective bias, or at least give us the courage to admit to it. It’s even harder to isolate decision-making from personal issues, such as relationships, entrepreneurship, or your college major. These must also be accounted for.
It may be that our inability to draw conclusions has to do with our inability to accept the decisions we make. This may be related to the distance that exists between what we want and what we consider adequate. Can I pay the consequences of the decision model I have chosen? This is the big question we face when we must weigh our priorities. Weighing each criterion can be a struggle between what is desired and what is right, between what we expect of ourselves and what others expect of us. Resolving this struggle is a process that precedes any plan. Disregarding the importance of these aspects may lead to dissatisfaction with whatever results we get.
But not every important decision is ours to make. Sometimes we care about the decisions made by others whom we can influence. To roar, we need the echo of those who can hear us and will consider our ideas; hence the importance of knowing how to influence others.
RESONANCE
The need to persuade is innate. From a very early age, we use all available resources to persuade others to react in the way we want them to. Among our first acts are crying, moaning, or knocking things over to get a reaction from our parents. You have that ability, but you may have lost a little confidence to make it work.
Knowing how to persuade is not about going through life maliciously manipulating people to always act in your best interest. It has to do with maximizing the mechanisms that allow you to accentuate your voice. The value of influence in business and personal relationships will come to mind, but it’s also important in areas you may never have dared to enter, such as conceptual fields or spirituality.
We must abandon the idea that persuasion is getting others to do our bidding even when they don’t want to. It’s so much more than that. Rather than using these tactics to sell a used car, they can become a key to changing attitudes or achieving cohesion, because learning to influence others also allows us to learn more about their ideas and to increase our own tolerance and that of those around us.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT BUTTONS CERTAIN WORDS WILL PUSH.
Influencing is not a one-person job; it’s made possible through interaction. We have all the resources at our disposal to help our counterpart reach their conclusion. We will not always succeed in imposing our vision; it wouldn’t be good for anyone if that were to happen. Having resources to persuade improves the quality of our communication, allows our ideas to resonate, and increases the power they have to influence decisions. When your ideas are understood, valued, and considered, the benefits are immediate.
We’re often vulnerable to someone trying to sell us something. Fortunately, we don’t succumb to every detergent or coffee commercial we see. First, we are not the target of the vast majority of the products we are exposed to; only a few messages are geared to our profile or our way of thinking. But even when we’re the focus of certain products, some will get our consent and some will not. At the end of the day, we will only succumb to buying a certain number of the hundred products that try to seduce us.
In the face of effective influence, no one feels that they’ve lost control because everyone has been able to consider their options and come to a conclusion without unnecessary pressure. But manipulation is nearby—an inhospitable, oppressive, dictatorial territory. We know we are facing manipulation when there is only one clear winner. It may sneak in undetected, but it will not take long to be discovered: Manipulation always hides between two evil choices. It arises from the contamination of the soul. It is a raptorial, emotional plunder. It sows weeds that only serve to poison the soil.
Certain psychological techniques can convince young people to join hate groups, girls that their only asset is their body, pensioners to invest their life’s efforts in a hollow pyramid. The power of manipulation is immense. Likewise, it has been used for good, to call for peace and promote solidarity. Therefore, it’s important to know when we’re facing mind games that seek to alter our decisions. Nowhere has this been more skillfully played out than in sales tactics. These include transactions of products and services, and also the dissemination of ideologies and dogmatic thoughts.
When we try to influence others, there are several factors we must monitor. To better understand this, let’s simplify it as a model and look at its most relevant components. First, there are those who are trying to cause a reaction, that is, those who want to persuade. Let’s call the people they want to convince the target. Only a specific group of them will receive the message. Communication happens through a method, which produces responses. All these factors are enclosed within a set of circumstances that will affect the outcome. For example, messages of hate and violence elicit one response in times of prosperity and another entirely different one in times of economic and social crises, even when the messenger, their targets, and the method remain the same. As you can see, this is related to the decision recipe model: same ingredients but different climates during the preparation.
THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO TEACH ME WHAT I DON’T WANT FOR MYSELF.
The reason for this analysis is to discover the factors that can help us become more persuasive while simultaneously protecting ourselves when we’re on the receiving end of persuasion. Throughout this process, we will always have absolute control over one of these criteria: the messenger, because that person is us and how others perceive us.
INFLUENCE MODEL
As we’ve seen, two people can get different results from a similar target, even when using the same method. Several factors can affect these results. A significant one is the person’s likability. We’re more inclined to follow people we find attractive. The teachings of the Koran say, “God is beautiful and loves the beautiful.” Although God loves everything, we sometimes use His name to describe behaviors that are entirely human. This beauty that Islam mentions largely describes patterns of how we, not God, have a predilection for the beautiful. This refers not only to physical attractiveness, but also to charm, position, and any other criteria that enhance the message bearer’s appeal. Our species is inclined to please the people it likes the most.
There are two fundamental conditions for increasing this attractiveness: first, looking like the kind of person the target wants to be, and second, being someone they can relate to through shared similarities. The chances of getting a positive response increase if the request comes from a person with whom we have developed an affinity. In short, you should always seek that genuine connection with those you wish to conquer, a method that modern tyrants and coercive cult leaders have unfortunately learned quite well.
The idea is to establish a relevant starting point, such as musical taste, a name, or a hometown. Then it would be helpful to pay attention to other things you have in common and highlight them. One way of increasing this sense of similarity is through imitation, carefully repeating the words, gestures, or actions of the person with whom we are interacting. This exercise increases affinity levels, which in turn increases sincere likability and the chances of succeeding.
It should also be noted that a positive image is strengthened by demonstrating facts, credibility, authority, and knowledge. And this is something that can’t be built without effort and can’t be imitated. Our suggestion must also respond to the interests of those we wish to persuade; there must be something for them to gain. It’s not about offering a bribe or igniting a smoke bomb, it’s about allowing the decision to happen naturally, without coercion. Sometimes the benefit to the target isn’t too clear. That’s when indecision sets in, which often leads to a mental block. In this case, the best thing to do is to find support from people who have the same perspective you want to promote.
5
Once you’ve completed the entire chart, a question will come up: How much of each ingredient should you add to get what you want? It’s time to start writing the recipe. Usually a recipe takes more of some ingredients than others, hence the seasoning. A simple way to start figuring out how to assign measurements is to divide 100 percent by your number of criteria. In our case, there are five, so the balance would be 20 percent. Obviously, if we assign this measurement to all ingredients equally, none will outweigh the other, which is not impossible, but quite unlikely in practice. This isn’t bad, but it will rarely work. The idea is to give a higher percentage to the most important things, while making sure the total is always 100 percent.
The assignment of the percentage values is subjective, so the result may vary from one person to another—exactly what we’re looking for. For this example, I will use these measurements for the different criteria:
Dollars
Brand
5%
Price
30%
Monitor Size
15%
Processor
40%
Memory
10%
The next step is to multiply each criterion’s rating by the assigned measurement, so we can assign measurements to the attributes. Let’s use the brand as an example. As we saw, option 1 had a score of 5 points for this criterion. Given that the measurement we assigned that criterion was 5 percent, we multiply the score by the measurement (5 × 5 percent), and get a result of 0.25 percent.
I’M NOT ALWAYS SURE WHERE I’M GOING, BUT I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I DON’T WANT TO RETURN.
Repeat this exercise for each of the elements you’re going to review and record the results in a chart like the following one, which, as you can see, has a total of the results per option in the last row.
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Option 5
Brand
0.25
0.2
0.2
0.15
0.15
Price
1.2
1.2
0.6
1.2
1.5
Monitor Size
0.6
0.75
0.75
0.45
0.3
Processor
2
1.2
1.2
1.6
1.2
Memory
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.4
0.5
TOTAL
4.25
3.65
3.15
3.8
3.65
As you can see, the most qualified computer is the one in option 1. Using the same inputs, but with another recipe, the result would be different, but both would be perfectly valid. This method makes sure that variables you don’t control or that aren’t relevant don’t affect the result.
EQUIPMENT
If you find using decimals and percentages too complex, here’s another strategy for decision-making, which focuses on the criteria we use or discard when making a decision. Let’s go back to the previous exercise and eliminate the excessive calculations—we’ll cook with fewer containers.
This time, instead of assigning a percentage to each criterion, you will organize the list of criteria in order of importance. Once you have defined this, start with the most important criterion for you, review which options have the best rating for that criterion, and select only the options that have been rated as “good” or “very good” (if using the numerical scale, this would correspond to 4 or 5, respectively). Eliminate the rest.
SUCCESS IS TRUSTING SOMEONE AND BEING RIGHT.
Continue with the second most important criterion and review the scores of those options. Once again, eliminate the options that have the lowest scores. Continue doing this exercise with the remaining criteria until you have only one option left: the chosen one.
This way you’ll get an answer without doing any calculations. Just prioritize your list and eliminate the options that were poorly scored, in order of importance. The advantage of following this method is that you advance faster; however, you may move away from the “best” solution in some cases, the one that we build with the most metrics. I suggest you choose the first method for decisions that require more reflection and the second, faster one for simpler options.
Now let’s move away from the amount of each ingredient in the recipe and explore the second essential component of decision-making: the climate.
CLIMATE/CONTEXT ANALYSIS
The preparation of our decisions is also affected by external conditions. The daily situations we experience shift our perception of certain elements. In the computer example, specific events, such as a bad report on the economy, can change the importance we give to a certain criterion and lead us to make a totally different decision. News, stories, everyday occurrences that we have never related to the subject can trigger or modify our decision.
As I write this book, for example, the world is experiencing an energy crisis. If you were to buy a car right now, perhaps “performance” would become an important criterion you had never thought about.
The climate also has a bearing on social decisions. A clear example can be found in politics: Your rating of a problem like insecurity will increase if you’re the victim of a mugging or a shocking public event takes place days before an election. Knowing this is important because your decision will be largely influenced by the disproportionate value placed on that aspect.
Therefore, you should be aware of this reality and try to regulate the way in which the climate affects you when you have to make a decision, because the result may be influenced by an event that’s been blown out of proportion and reduced the weight you give to the really important elements. Being well informed minimizes the impact of isolated events on our assessment of reality.
The key is to continue working on building your own intelligent decision-making method. The way we obtain information to assess the situation is critical here, especially at a time when there is so much access to manipulated and inefficient data. Rarely have we been subjected to so much fraud, lies, and misrepresentation as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the outcome was not the best.
MY APOLOGIES TO INTUITION; I IGNORED IT.
In addition to the external climate, meaning the environment around you, there is also an internal climate created by the emotions you experience when making a decision. It’s very similar to what happens to Tita in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, who imbued the food she prepared with the emotions she experienced while cooking.
We can have top-quality ingredients and the best techniques, but our emotions will have an incredibly relevant impact on the final dish we set on the table. We need to make up for this. Our grandmothers always said we should avoid making decisions with a “hot head.” If I’m sad, I may see things differently than if I’m happy, but the issue is much more complex than that, and we need to talk about it. Conventional wisdom suggests separating thoughts from feelings, when one is actually shaped by the chisel of the other. The only thing we can do to minimize the effect of those “hot” or “cold” heads is to understand that the decisions we make with extreme joy or sadness will never be the best examples.
Extreme emotions will tend to produce extreme decisions, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. An excessively cheerful person will tend to make mistakes similar to those who feel anger or seek revenge. Knowing the emotional states from which we operate is essential because they will creep into our decisions.
Once you’ve followed the recipe’s step-by-step process—picking top-quality ingredients, meticulously following the preparation instructions, and making sure there’s a favorable climate for everything to work—you still need to like the result of what you’ve prepared: The time has come to listen to yourself because that’s where you’ll find the missing data.
INVISIBLE FACTORS
We’ve done an exercise to reduce subjectivity in some decisions. Then we added the effects of the weight we give to information and analyzed how our emotions come into play. But we’ve left out other criteria that are related to what we can’t control ourselves, although we can look for ways to do so. Sometimes, no matter how much math we use, the key lies in knowing ourselves better, as we discussed in Step One.
TO BE LISTENED TO WITHOUT JUDGMENT IS BEAUTIFUL.
Doing these exercises helps us make more balanced decisions, but there’s another benefit that’s not always discussed: It forces us to be honest about what we want and why.
The following anecdote helped me understand this benefit. Shortly after studying these decision-making methods, and as if he’d wanted to test me, my brother told me he wanted to buy a car. I felt happy. It was as if I could try out a new toy. I convinced him to use a model like the one we reviewed a few pages earlier. After a fairly meticulous search for information, he chose eight criteria for four vehicle models and carefully reviewed them. When it came time to rate them, one of the cars was the clear winner. “No way,” he said. “Let’s do it again.” We did it again after adjusting the values. The winning car came out on top again, but my brother was still suspicious.
He wanted another result. His ego had already made a choice and he only needed the calculations to confirm it. This doesn’t mean the calculation model was wrong. My brother just never took into account the factors that were relevant to his personal configuration. He didn’t add them to the equation, and he didn’t reveal them either: prestige, design, affinity, and others that perhaps he was unable to recognize—or never wanted to admit—such as symbols of power in his social environment, nostalgia, or vanity. That’s why it’s important to know if what we’ve added to the equation responds to our most sincere desires. When buying a car, I don’t think many people add “I want everyone to notice me when I drive by” or “I want to look like Brad Pitt” to the equation, yet that doesn’t mean these things don’t have an impact when it comes to assessing the vehicles.
Tools such as these serve to minimize, never avoid, subjective bias, or at least give us the courage to admit to it. It’s even harder to isolate decision-making from personal issues, such as relationships, entrepreneurship, or your college major. These must also be accounted for.
It may be that our inability to draw conclusions has to do with our inability to accept the decisions we make. This may be related to the distance that exists between what we want and what we consider adequate. Can I pay the consequences of the decision model I have chosen? This is the big question we face when we must weigh our priorities. Weighing each criterion can be a struggle between what is desired and what is right, between what we expect of ourselves and what others expect of us. Resolving this struggle is a process that precedes any plan. Disregarding the importance of these aspects may lead to dissatisfaction with whatever results we get.
But not every important decision is ours to make. Sometimes we care about the decisions made by others whom we can influence. To roar, we need the echo of those who can hear us and will consider our ideas; hence the importance of knowing how to influence others.
RESONANCE
The need to persuade is innate. From a very early age, we use all available resources to persuade others to react in the way we want them to. Among our first acts are crying, moaning, or knocking things over to get a reaction from our parents. You have that ability, but you may have lost a little confidence to make it work.
Knowing how to persuade is not about going through life maliciously manipulating people to always act in your best interest. It has to do with maximizing the mechanisms that allow you to accentuate your voice. The value of influence in business and personal relationships will come to mind, but it’s also important in areas you may never have dared to enter, such as conceptual fields or spirituality.
We must abandon the idea that persuasion is getting others to do our bidding even when they don’t want to. It’s so much more than that. Rather than using these tactics to sell a used car, they can become a key to changing attitudes or achieving cohesion, because learning to influence others also allows us to learn more about their ideas and to increase our own tolerance and that of those around us.
YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT BUTTONS CERTAIN WORDS WILL PUSH.
Influencing is not a one-person job; it’s made possible through interaction. We have all the resources at our disposal to help our counterpart reach their conclusion. We will not always succeed in imposing our vision; it wouldn’t be good for anyone if that were to happen. Having resources to persuade improves the quality of our communication, allows our ideas to resonate, and increases the power they have to influence decisions. When your ideas are understood, valued, and considered, the benefits are immediate.
We’re often vulnerable to someone trying to sell us something. Fortunately, we don’t succumb to every detergent or coffee commercial we see. First, we are not the target of the vast majority of the products we are exposed to; only a few messages are geared to our profile or our way of thinking. But even when we’re the focus of certain products, some will get our consent and some will not. At the end of the day, we will only succumb to buying a certain number of the hundred products that try to seduce us.
In the face of effective influence, no one feels that they’ve lost control because everyone has been able to consider their options and come to a conclusion without unnecessary pressure. But manipulation is nearby—an inhospitable, oppressive, dictatorial territory. We know we are facing manipulation when there is only one clear winner. It may sneak in undetected, but it will not take long to be discovered: Manipulation always hides between two evil choices. It arises from the contamination of the soul. It is a raptorial, emotional plunder. It sows weeds that only serve to poison the soil.
Certain psychological techniques can convince young people to join hate groups, girls that their only asset is their body, pensioners to invest their life’s efforts in a hollow pyramid. The power of manipulation is immense. Likewise, it has been used for good, to call for peace and promote solidarity. Therefore, it’s important to know when we’re facing mind games that seek to alter our decisions. Nowhere has this been more skillfully played out than in sales tactics. These include transactions of products and services, and also the dissemination of ideologies and dogmatic thoughts.
When we try to influence others, there are several factors we must monitor. To better understand this, let’s simplify it as a model and look at its most relevant components. First, there are those who are trying to cause a reaction, that is, those who want to persuade. Let’s call the people they want to convince the target. Only a specific group of them will receive the message. Communication happens through a method, which produces responses. All these factors are enclosed within a set of circumstances that will affect the outcome. For example, messages of hate and violence elicit one response in times of prosperity and another entirely different one in times of economic and social crises, even when the messenger, their targets, and the method remain the same. As you can see, this is related to the decision recipe model: same ingredients but different climates during the preparation.
THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO TEACH ME WHAT I DON’T WANT FOR MYSELF.
The reason for this analysis is to discover the factors that can help us become more persuasive while simultaneously protecting ourselves when we’re on the receiving end of persuasion. Throughout this process, we will always have absolute control over one of these criteria: the messenger, because that person is us and how others perceive us.
INFLUENCE MODEL
As we’ve seen, two people can get different results from a similar target, even when using the same method. Several factors can affect these results. A significant one is the person’s likability. We’re more inclined to follow people we find attractive. The teachings of the Koran say, “God is beautiful and loves the beautiful.” Although God loves everything, we sometimes use His name to describe behaviors that are entirely human. This beauty that Islam mentions largely describes patterns of how we, not God, have a predilection for the beautiful. This refers not only to physical attractiveness, but also to charm, position, and any other criteria that enhance the message bearer’s appeal. Our species is inclined to please the people it likes the most.
There are two fundamental conditions for increasing this attractiveness: first, looking like the kind of person the target wants to be, and second, being someone they can relate to through shared similarities. The chances of getting a positive response increase if the request comes from a person with whom we have developed an affinity. In short, you should always seek that genuine connection with those you wish to conquer, a method that modern tyrants and coercive cult leaders have unfortunately learned quite well.
The idea is to establish a relevant starting point, such as musical taste, a name, or a hometown. Then it would be helpful to pay attention to other things you have in common and highlight them. One way of increasing this sense of similarity is through imitation, carefully repeating the words, gestures, or actions of the person with whom we are interacting. This exercise increases affinity levels, which in turn increases sincere likability and the chances of succeeding.
It should also be noted that a positive image is strengthened by demonstrating facts, credibility, authority, and knowledge. And this is something that can’t be built without effort and can’t be imitated. Our suggestion must also respond to the interests of those we wish to persuade; there must be something for them to gain. It’s not about offering a bribe or igniting a smoke bomb, it’s about allowing the decision to happen naturally, without coercion. Sometimes the benefit to the target isn’t too clear. That’s when indecision sets in, which often leads to a mental block. In this case, the best thing to do is to find support from people who have the same perspective you want to promote.
