Page 269 - The Power to Change Anything

258 INFLUENCER

you may have realized that if you simply build deliberate prac-
tice into your attempt to help your children love reading, you
could make enormous strides. You may have been struck with
the insanity of sending people off to corporate training pro-
grams and then dropping them back into a social climate where
no one reinforces the concepts they were taught. So you’ve
added social and structural reinforcement into the mix. Perhaps
you have carted your treadmill from the basement up to your
bedroom where you don’t have to fight the deadly power of
propinquity. In the odd event that your previous influence strat-
egy was short one or two horsepower of what was needed to cre-
ate change, picking and choosing from the influence concepts
we’ve outlined could put you over the top.

DIAGNOSE BEFORE YOU PRESCRIBE

Be warned: If you’re facing a more daunting challenge than
those mentioned above, you’d do well to do what influence
masters do. Diagnose before you prescribe. Figure out which
sources of influence are behind the behavior you’re trying to
change. Most leaders fail to take this step and simply throw
together an influence strategy they believe should work under
any circumstances.
Skilled influencers do otherwise. For example, consider Dr.
Warren Warwick of Fairview University Children’s Hospital.
He realized that his medicine was no better than his influence
strategy. In one rather intriguing case, an 18-year-old cystic
fibrosis patient he was treating wasn’t conforming to her treat-
ment plan. Rather than launch into a lecture about how she
would suffocate in a few years if she continued to slack off, Dr.
Warwick stopped and diagnosed the underlying cause. Rather
than asking, “What the heck is wrong with her?” Dr. Warwick
tried to understand why she would fail to do something that
would save her life. As he probed and listened, he learned that
there were several reasons behind the lapse.