How to Coach Yourself and Others How to Influence, Persuade and Motivate | Page 408

military instruction. No soldier would ever again hold vaguely defined
beliefs or be unable to defend America verbally or militarily.
How did the military train their soldiers to withstand the potential verbal
attacks as had been perpetrated against them in the Korean War? What
would keep them strong in the face of such adversity, preventing them
from crumbling? It is a method called "inoculation." The term
"inoculation" comes from the medical field: Injecting a weak dose of a
virus into a patient inoculates or prevents the patient from actually getting
the disease. The body's immune system fights off this weak form of the
disease and then is prepared when the full disease attacks.
Likewise, when you are presenting and you know that there is an
opposing viewpoint standing in the wing, you have to "inoculate" the
audience with a weakened form of the other side's argument. If you know
someone is going to attack your viewpoint, you prepare your audience in
advance.
The idea is to address the issues that your opponent will bring up and then
directly refute them. The point to understand is that the inoculation must
be a weak form of the "virus." If you inoculated a human body with the
strong strain of a disease, it could become sick or even die. The dose must
be weak enough to prepare the body for the stronger virus but not so
strong that it overpowers the body. In persuasion, you don't want to give
strong doses. You don't want to give your prospects all the ammunition
from the other side of the persuasive message. On the other hand, if you
don't prepare your audience for what they are about to hear, the sting of
your opponent's words, logic, or testimony might be too much for them to
handle and they could switch sides.
We are surrounded by countless examples of inoculation, many of which
can be seen used in the courtroom. The attorney stands up and says, "The
prosecution will call my client mean, evil, a terrible husband, and a poor
member of society, but this is not true, as I will show you over the next
couple of weeks.. . ." So, when the prosecutor stands up and states
anything close to what the defense attorney has claimed she will, the jury
is prepared, thinking she is acting exactly the way the defense said she
would. This gives the jurors a way to ignore or even discount the
prosecutor's arguments.

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