Page 69 - The Power to Change Anything

58 INFLUENCER

Understanding

Every time you try to convince others through verbal persua-
sion, you suffer from your inability to select and share language
in a way that reproduces in the mind of the listener exactly the
same thoughts you are having. You say your words, but others
hear their words, which in turn stimulate their images, their past
histories, and their overall meaning—all of which may be very
different from what you intended.
For example, you excitedly tell a group of employees that
you have good news. Your company is going to merge with your
number-one competitor. When you say the word “merge,”
you’re thinking of new synergies, increased economies of scale,
and higher profits. It’ll be lovely. When the people you’re talk-
ing to hear the word “merge,” they think of expanding their
back-breaking workload, working with semihostile strangers,
and layoffs. It’ll be hell. Making matters worse, the inaccurate
images being conjured up by the employees you’re chatting
with are far more believable and vivid than the lifeless words
you used to stimulate their thinking in the first place.
Words fail in other ways. For example, we (the authors) met
with Dr. Arvind Singhal, a distinguished professor of com-
munication and social change at the University of Texas,
El Paso. One of his doctoral students, Elizabeth Rattine-
Flaherty, shared how verbal persuasion suffers from an even
simpler translation problem. Sometimes others simply can’t
comprehend your words—even when you think your verbi-
age is crystal clear. While working with locals in the Amazon
basin, Rattine-Flaherty learned that in the past, health-care
volunteers had explained to the locals that if they wanted to
reduce diseases, they needed to boil their water for 15 minutes.
None of the villagers complied despite the fact that the contam-
inated water was obviously harming their health. Why? Because
as volunteers learned later, the locals didn’t know what the vol-
unteers wanted them to do; they had no word in their language