I first began to understand this system of persuasion through the research and writing of Professor Charles Cialdini (Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion) and Scott Adams (Win Bigly) whose books have become for me two more don’t-leave-the-house-before-you-read-it musts.
Related Quotes
Weirdness is not weird if it is announced ahead of time and grounded in the ‘why’ of itself.
Particularly elegant is the research by Riana Barnard presented in her dissertation, ‘The notions of “attention” and “belief” in coaching for change – a conceptual study’ (University of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa, 2019).
I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.
We do need to accept that the power of persuasion at its worst lies in its design to interrupt. It is supposed to interrupt us, our independent, cogent, thinking selves. And it does.
We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.