How to change someone’s mind

[00:00:00] If you’re a leader, it’s likely that not everyone you work with will agree with your decisions. And that is okay. In fact, if everyone agrees with your decisions, I would challenge you to consider that you might have a bit of people pleaser in you. Or wanting to make everyone happy and not rock the boat.

[00:00:20] This is not what leadership is about. Leadership is about being respected, not liked.

[00:00:27] Leadership involves making unpopular decisions, navigating complex situations and relationships with your team, stakeholders, clients. Even if they don’t agree with you or like your decisions, you still need to get their buy-in. Which means, you’ll need to convince them to change their mind, or convince them that you should be trusted with your proposed solution, even if they don’t like it.

[00:00:54] So, how do you do that? I think everyone would like a magic wand that we can wave that makes everyone agree with us. Wouldn’t that just make life easier?!

[00:01:04] Imagine one of these scenarios: you want to hire a new team member to take the load off you so you can do more business development; or, you need your client to see that their requests are out of scope and need a variation; or, you and your partner disagree with what’s fair about the split of chores at home.

[00:01:24] This is how the situation goes.

[00:01:27] You start to put forward your case. The other person argues their case. And the thought pops up “if only the other person would just listen to what I have to say, surely they would agree with me!” While the other person is thinking,” oh, if only they would just listen to what I had to say, surely they would agree with me!”

[00:01:48] So you’ve got two people talking AT each other, not listening, wanting the other person to listen, so they can agree with you. We have all been there.

[00:01:59] Today’s podcast takes a lesson from the book “Edge: turning adversity into advantage” by Laura Huang and award-winning Harvard Business School Professor.

[00:02:09] In the book, they observed then interviewed more than 60 leaders who are trying to convince business associates and other people to change their minds on a course of action they initially disagreed with. The leaders who were the most successful in overcoming other people’s skepticisms had one thing in common.

[00:02:29] And this is the key to how to change someone’s mind.

[00:02:33] The thing that they did different, is they diagnosed the root of the fundamental disagreement before trying to persuade the other person. They first asked themselves “what is driving their resistance?” Those leaders often pinpointed which aspects of that argument elicited the most pushback and the most emotional reaction.

[00:02:54] In essence “seek first to understand, before seeking to be understood”.

[00:03:01] If you’re familiar with Stephen Covey’s book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, this is Habit Number Five, seek first to understand before seeking to be understood. And this takes courage because first we love to state at our case. Because we (almost) always believe we’re right.

[00:03:20] And if we could just get the other person to see how I got to this decision, surely they would agree with me. But unfortunately, when you have two people trying to get the other person to understand and not listening to the other person’s point of view, you end up with a stalemate.

[00:03:36] So what’s 1% you can take from today’s podcast and apply straight away about how to change someone’s mind?

[00:03:43] Firstly seek to understand before seeking to be understood. And that means, instead of stating your case, listen first, understand the other person’s point of view. Once you’ve diagnosed the root of the reason that you disagree, you’ll then be able to work out what the action is to move forward.

[00:04:05] It seems so small when I say it like this. But this small change can make a fundamental difference on how you interact with other people and how you can change somebody’s mind. You can change somebody. Nobody mind by understanding it first.

[00:04:22] Each week I send tips like this and a summary of the podcast to my email list.

[00:04:27] If you’d like to hear first about new podcast episodes, make sure you jump on the show notes and click on the link and jump onto that email list. Thanks for listening today.