How to Persuade and Influence People to Achieve Personal Power

Written By Brian Tracy | Personal Success | May 14th, 2012 | 9 Comments »

Your ability to persuade and influence people to help you get the things you want in life is one of the most important skills you can develop. By learning how to persuade and influence people, you can achieve greater personal power and get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Learning how to persuade people will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, co-workers, colleagues and friends. The ability to influence others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.

Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of your problems. All truly effective people have mastered the art of getting lots of other people to work with and for them in the accomplishment of their objectives. You can learn this skill set to achieve personal power and master the art of influencing others.

How Human Interaction Affects Your Ability to Influence People

The opposite of being influential is having little or no influence at all on the behaviors of other people. It is the difference between being powerful and being powerless. You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are influencing people to help them.

All successful people with personal power are persuasion experts. They give a lot of thought to how they can get other people to help them. They plan and strategize before they act. They define their goals clearly and then they choose the people whose cooperation they will need to achieve those goals. They then think about what they will have to do in return to get the other people to help them.  They achieve their goals of persuasion and influence indirectly.

The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. In order to learn how to persuade others, you must find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain, and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness.

Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf and achieve greater personal power.

How to Persuade Others Through Leverage

You can learn how to persuade others by using leverage. Leverage means that you learn how to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.

You leverage yourself through other people’s efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won’t work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher value work.

The definition of management is “Getting things done through others.” To be a manager you must improve your personal power and know how to persuade and influence people to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things, instead, they influence people to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines, and agreed upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he has a vested interest in doing a job well, he accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.

Achieve Personal Power by Becoming an Expert

You can learn how to persuade others and can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life, you can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge and other people’s money. The development of your personal power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. By learning how to persuade and influence people, it will open up doors for you in every area of your life.

I hope you enjoyed this post on how to achieve personal power by learning how to persuade and influence people. Do you think that the ability to influence people is useful in your line of work? Please comment with your answer below!

Tags: how to persuade, influence people, personal power

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Personal Success.