How to influence
Your Audience
5 Steps To Influence Like Barack Obama
Sharing buttons:
What's up everybody? This is Charlie from Charisma on Command and today I want to show
you a video on how to be persuasive when you need people to change, because the truth is,
there are situations in our lives, like our social lives, where you don't have to be persuasive.
If you don't get along with someone, guess what? You can just filter them out of your
life and keep the people that are positive that lift you up.
But in certain situations, particularly the working world, if you're in a large organization
or you just have some people beneath you, where you're trying to get some team to do
something that you want, you are going to have to work with people who disagree with
you, and you can't just filter them out. So you need to know how to be persuasive against
obstinacy. So this video is going to show you Barack Obama speaking on one of the more recent shootings
that happened just a few days ago at the time of this. And he follows these steps very,
very well, regardless of where your politics fall on this issue, there is a lot to learn
from this, so let's dive in.
But, as I said, just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said
each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough.
So what you see right here, this is the first step, is you need to introduce the problem
that you have in your organization, wherever you need people to change, whatever you're
doing is not working. And the first step is going to be to show that to people and associate
pain to the status quo. So just watch what he does here.
It's not enough.
It does not capture the heartache, and grief, and anger that we should feel,
and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted some place else in America.
So there you go, there's the problem, there's the current pain. He said, "This is going
to happen again and it's gonna suck, and we should all feel terrible about it." Now, I
wanna bounce around here a little bit because I want to show you as he continues this point
right here to elicit further pain with the status quo.
Somehow this has become routine.
The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium
ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it, we've become numb to this.
And you see the emotion that he's eliciting is like almost shame or embarrassment at how
frequently this occurs, and he's gonna go running into all these negative cultural feelings
that we have associated with the different times this happened, and _ this right now.
We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora,
after Charleston.
It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other
people to get his or her hands on a gun.
So there you go. That is step 1. This sucks, what we are living in right now is terrible.
When people don't want to change, the first step is not to tell them how wonderful it
will be when they change or start to do anything else. The first step is to get them moving,
and to do that, you have to make them associate the status quo, the current action or inaction
that they are taking with serious pain. And he does that very well in the opening of this speech.
I am gonna bounce around and go back because I want to make this very clear. He does sort
of go back and forth between some of these steps, but, moving now, I want to show you
the second step, which is going to be handling objections before people actually bring them
up. You do not want to have to wait until after you talk for people to say, "Well, you
didn't cover this or you didn't cover that," or "How are we supposed to do this?" You need
to preemptively handle any objections, and like two-thirds or three-quarters of this speech
is just him handling the objections that he knows he's going to get, so let's check it out.
And it's fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless
of what they think their motivations may be, but we are not the only country on earth that
has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced
country on earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.
So, boom, there's your first objection. He goes to like six or seven of these. I'm going
to show you a couple of them as he bounces around. What you need to know, you need to
put yourself into the shoes of the people you're trying to convince. Why did they think
it is impossible for them to change? Why did they think it isn't a good idea for them to
change? And you need to cover that and deal with those objections first.
It shouldn't be a dialogue where you go and they go, "Oh, yeah, what about this?" Because,
now, they are dug into their position. The more you can preemptively address the
objection, the less strong the objection becomes. So I wanted to show you a couple more examples
at the risk of being _ of this objection handling.
And what's become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind
of common sense gun legislation. Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked
up. We need more guns, they'll argue; fewer gun safety laws.
The way to think about objections, oddly enough, what it reminds me of is the movie 8 Mile,
the very last scene where Eminem is rapping against the guy. He has rapped, that is the
best scene in the entire movie, is where he says everything that could be said negatively
about him before his opposition. That's how to think about presenting these objections.
You don't want to do it in a way where you just say it. You need to come up with a reason
why those objections are not valid, but if you do that, you will leave the people who
are naysayers, who do not want to change, with nothing to hold on to, so it's so important.
Get in their shoes and think of the other objections that they might come up with.
There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country. They know that's not true.
So, now, we're moving into the third step which is going to be consistency, right? We've
associated the problem with pain. We dealt with objections. Now, what we need to do is
convince people that the course of action that we want them to take is actually consistent
with their current identity. You do not want to be convincing people that they need to
make massive changes, even if the changes are really massive changes, because people
naturally resist change.
What they will move towards, though, is seeing that, "Hey, maybe this thing that I didn't
realize is, like me, actually is," right? So that's why he says, "responsible gun owners."
He's not trying to tell people "give up all your guns." He's saying, the responsible thing
to do because you're a responsible person, aren't you? Is to follow my course of action.
We know because of the polling that says that majority of Americans understand that we should
changing these laws, including the majority of responsible law-abiding gun owners.
The objection to what Obama says a lot of the times regarding guns is that if you follow
the law and you're responsible, there's not a problem. He has grouped those people into
his side and made them consistent with his beliefs by saying, "Look at the thing, look
at the social proof. We got all these polls that say this is what people like you want
to do," very, very powerful. And we're gonna continue now with more and more handling of
this consistency.
News organizations, because I won't put these facts forward, have news organizations tally
up the number of Americans who've been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade
and the number of Americans who've been killed by gun violence. And post those side by side
on your news reports. This won't be information coming from me. It will be coming from you.
I think this is the most brilliant part of the entire speech and it's the part, a few
days later, that he's getting the most coverage because the news organizations did, in fact,
do what he said. This is still Step 3: Consistency. You need to make people feel like it is part
of their identity to change. And the way that you do this is not by preaching at them, showing
them stats and statistics. You give them ownership of the argument and that's what he's done here.
He says, "I'm not gonna put this in front of you, you should go out, look at these numbers,
do it on your own," and guess what happens when that occurs? The news stations, the people
that are looking for these numbers, they retain personal ownership of this fact, and it begins
to move them more than if Obama stood up there with a chart and said, "Look at this. You
need to accept this." In that case, they'd be resisting, but because they're going and
doing it on their own, there is implicit ownership there; so, so, so huge.
We spend over a trillion dollars and pass countless laws and devote entire agencies
to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so.
So what's he doing here? He's comparing something that people already are supportive of and
are already do, which is spending money to prevent terrorist attacks, right? A lot of
money, and he says that's a great idea. He's on your side. And what he's about to do is
take that preexisting action and say why it's like what he wants you to do in the future.
Again, if you need people to change, it is far, far easier to convince them that the
thing that you want them to do is basically what they've been doing in the past with a
shift. It's not this whole new thing. They don't have to become a brand new type of person.
They don't have to give up their most deeply held values and beliefs. They just need to
see things in a slightly different perspective and when they do that, what they'll see is that
this is actually the type of person they are--a responsible gun owning, law abiding citizen
is gonna be someone who is in favor of this.
When Americans are killed in mine disasters, we work to make mines safer. When Americans
are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer.
Again, you can see where he's going here, still Step 3. He's saying, look at all these
things that we already do, how we already handle this. This is a logical extension.
Gun safety is a logical extension of the way that we help protect people from weather and
mines and all these kinds of things.
The last thing that he is going to do here is going to be to make and ask. It's kind
of a humbling ask right here, and he just says that he needs help.
I'd ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change
these laws, and this is not something that I can do by myself. I got to have Congress
and I got to have state legislatures
So right here, Obama goes through and just lists all the people that he needs, but this
is what you have to do at the end of any of these speeches that you're giving. If you're
trying to get people on board, you cannot drag them. You need to say, "I need your help,"
and ask at the end, because it is an ask.
At the end of the day, you cannot make anyone do anything, that is not what persuasion is.
It is getting them to want to do things, to take ownership over an idea that maybe started
in your head, but that you helped cultivate in theirs, so those are the 5 steps. Actually,
there's one that Barack Obama missed that I like to do whenever I'm trying to persuade
people, which is the fourth step, from people that you ask is to detail, an explicit detail,
what it would look like if things went well with your new plan, so that you don't just
have people running away from a status quo of pain, but you have them running towards
something that is really exciting.
So if you add those together, what you have is, first, illustrate the problem and associate
pain to it. Second, preemptively deal with any objections that you have researched and
you know that your audience has. Three, convince them that your plan of action is actually
consistent with the type of person that they are and the type of person that they want
to be. It's a logical extension of their current value system, not a deviation from it. And
then, fourth, which is not seen here, paint the heaven that happens if they go in the
direction that you like them to. And, fifth, end with an "ask." You cannot force them to.
You need to just ask.
So, hope that has been helpful.
If you like this and you want to get more of them on YouTube, please subscribe to the
channel, thumbs up it, and, of course, what is most helpful to me is if you write a comment
with a specific video of a charisma breakdown that you'd like me to do, that helps so, so
much. This is Charlie Houpert and I hope you found this helpful.
