Page 70 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Way You Change Minds 59

for “boil” or any way of thinking about and measuring time in
minutes.
Verbal persuasion suffers in still another way. Instruction
methods almost always employ terse, shorthand statements that
strip much of the detail from what the messenger is actually
thinking. Unfortunately, when we’re trying to bring people
around to our view of the world, intellectual brevity rarely
works. In an effort to cut to the chase, we strip our own
thoughts of their rich and emotional detail—leaving behind
lifeless, cold, and sparse abstractions that don’t share the most
important elements of our thinking.
Effective stories and other vicarious experiences overcome
this flaw. A well-told narrative provides concrete and vivid detail
rather than terse summaries and unclear conclusions. It
changes people’s view of how the world works because it pre-
sents a plausible, touching, and memorable flow of cause and
effect that can alter people’s view of the consequences of vari-
ous actions or beliefs.

Believing

Very often, people become far less willing to believe what you
have to say the moment they realize that your goal is to con-
vince them of something—which, quite naturally, is precisely
what you’re trying to achieve through verbal persuasion.
This natural resistance always stems from the same two
reasons—both are based on trust. First, others might not have
confidence in your expertise. Why would anyone listen to a
moron? Parents experience this form of mistrust when their
children roll their eyes at their outdated and irrelevant guardian
who can’t figure out something as simple as how to store a
phone number in a cell phone. Since dad is incompetent in
all things technical, why should anyone trust his dating advice
or his constant warning about running up too much credit-card
debt?