How to Coach Yourself and Others Influencing, Inter Personal and Leadership Skills | Page 13

12. Where You Start From
Whether you succeed in influencing someone to change their view - say, to yours or
someone you are lobbying for - depends on where they are at the start of your attempts
to influence them. There are five key stages on the spectrum.
1. diametrically opposite your point of view
2. more against your point of view than in favour of it
3. neutral
4. more for your point of view than against it
5. in agreement with your point of view.
The best you can usually hope for is to move people by two notches on the scale. So you
would be succeeding if you managed to influence someone to move from diametrically
opposite your point of view to a neutral position or from neutral to total agreement with
you.

13. Liking
The link between influencing someone and liking them is well-established: Dale Carnegie
wrote a best-selling book exploring this link called "How to win friends and influence
people".
You can't, of course, force people to like you; but one of the surest ways to get others to
like you is to make up your mind to unconditionally like them first. You will also find
others start to like you if you concentrate on the things you have in common rather than
the things that make you different.
Liking, or sociability, was found to be a key influencing skill by Kipnis. In his research he
found that the seven most important influencing skills were:
-

liking,
assertiveness,
forming coalitions,
using reason,
using authority,
bargaining
threatening sanctions.

14. Their Intelligence
Research has found that people at the higher and lower ends of the Intelligence Quotient
(IQ) scale are harder to influence than those in the middle.
The reason for this may be that those at the lower end of the IQ scale are less likely to
understand strong arguments or be aware of the need for personal change. Equally, it
may be hard to influence those at the upper end of the IQ scale because these are likely
to be people who have worked things out for themselves. They may not be intellectually
ready to accept that they should change their minds by someone else.
If you need to influence people with closed minds, you may need to abandon the use of
rational arguments and rely on another approach such as the needs approach.