What Persuasion Really Is
And what we often get wrong
In my latest live, I sat down with Josh, the author of How to Get What You Want, a book that takes the topic of persuasion seriously without dressing it up as a list of tricks. I had reviewed the book on The Art of Asking Questions in a previous post, and I wanted to talk to him about the ideas at the heart of it: why so many of us mistake winning for persuading, and what actually works when the stakes are high.
My review of Josh’s book, in case you’ve missed it!
Josh opens the book with the story of Daryl Davis, a black American blues musician who has persuaded more than two hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan to leave the organisation. He has done so largely by sitting down with them, asking one question: how can you hate me if you don’t even know me? This cuts against most of what we are taught about persuasion: the persuader, we tend to think, is the one with the cleverer argument or the sharper phrasing. Davis was doing something very different.
Josh frames the underlying question simply: in any encounter, do you want to be right, or do you want to make a difference?
The two are not the same thing, and most of the time they pull in opposite directions. The Latin root of “convince” actually means to vanquish or conquer, and if you treat a conversation as conquest, the best you can hope for is that the other person walks away feeling like they lost. Josh prefers to think of persuasion as shared action, something we choose to do with others, aimed at getting something done together.
We talked about why this is so hard in practice. Our wiring is not really built for persuasion, but for protection. We feel first and reason second; we tend towards negativity; and we lean instinctively on our own values rather than the other person’s. The fix is partly a matter of mindset and partly a matter of training. You have to flip the script away from yourself and onto your counterpart, and you have to practise that move in enough low-stakes conversations so it is available to you when the stakes are higher.
A large part of that practice is listening. Josh distinguishes between passive listening (letting the other person talk and feel heard), active listening (going deeper into what they have said) and proactive listening (asking about how they want to move forward).
Listening, Josh is careful to point out, is not the same as agreeing, and it is not the same as staying silent. The goal is to make your counterpart feel understood: this is rare enough that, when you achieve it, trust tends to follow.
We also covered the difference between persuasion and manipulation (your intentions are usually the giveaway, and people can sense them), how to think about stakeholder mapping in three dimensions rather than two, why Moral Foundations Theory matters when you are speaking to audiences who do not already share your values, and the surprising power of inviting a “no” rather than chasing a “yes”.
We ended on what Josh calls the granny test: if your grandmother cannot understand what you are saying, you have not communicated it well enough. And that is your problem, not hers!
The full conversation is in the video above. My review of How to Get What You Want is free to read on The Art of Asking Questions, and Josh’s book is available on Amazon.
Are you interested in learning more about persuasion? Check out some other articles on the subject, in collaboration with Adi and Claire Barrett:
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