Ethical Persuasion: How You Can Influence Decisions in Business and Build Meaningful Relationships

0:00If you're telling people what your dream is and asking for help, people will help. They actually do. Natalie Nahai, human behavior expert. Go persuade someone who is up for it, because you'll end up with a much better long-term outcome, with an advocate, someone who's loyal, which is essentially what creates long-term sustainable business. She runs her own podcast. When I'm giving the talk, people have something that they can apply to their own lives, that explains some of their behaviors. So I'm constantly trying to find points of connection between them and the people that they're impacting.

0:29Natalie, how do we succeed at influence? The first thing I would say is that it has to be reciprocal. If you have to persuade someone of something, so the first thing to do is to make sure you're attentive to what that person's goals are and whether it aligns with yours. If it doesn't, then you have no business trying to persuade them. Go persuade someone who is up for it because you'll end up with a much better long-term outcome with an advocate, someone who's loyal, which is essentially what creates long-term sustainable business. So the first point is about orienting yourself so that you are meeting people whose goals align with your own.

1:02Then there's all sorts of ways that you can make things more fun. So if you're listening to someone or speaking with them, be attentive to what they say, how they say things. Mirror it. I'm not talking about like parroting stuff back. But make sure you paraphrase and you understand. It starts with being attentive to the other person and then seeing where you can join forces to create something together. And if you take it from that perspective, that's more in sort of line with influence for good ethical persuasion. So the five principles, the four C's framework, take us through that because I think it's pretty amazing what you've created.

1:33So these four C's start with the first, which is an explicit commitment to certain moral principles or values. So what do you stand for as a person, as a business, as an organization? The second is about having congruence. So being clear and congruent in word and deed. You know, your actions match what you say. And so to make sure that you're actually able to demonstrate that you're walking the talk. The third C is about consistency. So building a track record of action and words over time to make sure that when a third party looks at you or you mess up, you've built a track record so people can say, okay, well, Brad's company is one that has actually walked the talk.

2:10We're giving them the benefit of the doubt. And the fourth one is about coherence between intention and behavior, which sounds a bit tricky. It's basically doing the right thing for the right reason. So it's a sense of internal coherence, even when or especially when you're doing it at some cost yourself. So those things, committing to certain values, being congruent in word and deed, consistent over time and coherent, doing the right things for the right reason. That is a really great place to start. And if you apply it to yourself, because they're all hypocrites in some ways because, you know, humans are messy.

2:42But if you apply it to yourself, you go, OK, which are the areas that maybe I don't live into my potential and which are the ones that I find easier? And where can we adjust to make sure that we're living with greater integrity? And it feels better to do that. So, yeah, it's another way to kind of live in greater harmony with oneself and with others. How do we communicate our values to the market as a business? How do we live that or how do we succeed at that, I guess? So the first thing, obviously, is identifying what the values are. So sometimes it's easier to start by talking about the stories that you care about or people that you look up to.

3:16What is it that they do? How do they live? What are the choices they make? And then taking it through that external lens, it can be easy to figure out what it is that you care about. How do we succeed at building trust with customers? So I think one of the key things is giving people back their agency, especially in the tech world. People talk about customers as users when they're using tech, which, yeah, they are using the piece of technology, you, but it's a whole person at the other end of the device. And so if you're going to create a situation of trust, you have to give them the agency to be able to interact with you with some control.

3:46Experiences where people get stripped out of their control is when you get hyper personalized ads from brands that you've not interacted with before based on your history. And it's like, well, why are you targeting me? So that's a really bad way of creating trust because people are going to say, you've got information I haven't given you. I don't know you are back off. The flip side to that is to personalize in a way that you give people the choice as to what they opt in and out of. So for instance, Bloomin' Wild, which is an amazing company florist in the UK, Digital First, they let people opt in and out of Mother's Day messaging or Father's Day messaging, whatever it is.

4:17And so as a company, you can build trust and also get personalized information and data that's rich simply by giving people control. And so we forget that actually if you give people a bit of respect, you give them greater agency, they'll be much more likely to want to do business with you and then to have that possibility to form a deeper attachment. So that's one of the biggest things with trust is agency. Natalie, some of your clients, you work with phenomenal names, the Harvard Reviews, Accentures, Google. How do you teach people to go from good to great? I think a lot of it comes down to giving people a sense of possibility because I think when you're in a business and you kind of get locked into a role, it can be very easy to kind of forget the bigger picture or see how things connect in your role and outside in the bigger world.

5:03So one of the things I hope to do that I endeavor to do in my talks, because obviously it's about psychology and human behavior, is to make sure that when I'm giving the talk, people have something that they can apply to their own lives that explains some of their behaviors. So I'm constantly trying to find points of connection between them and the people that they're impacting and between the principles and ways that they can understand themselves better to unlock something in them. So there's this kind of sense of how can I create something in the space of 30 minutes or 40 minutes? Because mostly what I do is keynotes as well as advisory.

5:34How can I unlock something for someone? So they come away thinking, oh my God, I didn't know that. That makes total sense. I'm going to apply it or I'm going to try it myself or with my kids, or I'm going to do it with a customer and see what happens. So it's about that kind of unlocking and connecting. What's the psychology of going from the small dreams to big dreams, I guess? Carol Dweck is a very interesting researcher psychologist who has been famous for talking about the growth mindset. If you teach young children that intelligence is something that one can work out, that's malleable, that can grow, then when they come across challenging questions, tasks, etc., when they get a wrong answer, rather than feeling like a failure, they go, oh, hang on, there's an opportunity to grow here.

6:16So there's a sense of taking the fear out of not knowing or getting things wrong and getting them to think, well, actually, I'm contributing towards growth. I'm contributing towards intelligence and full functioning and flourishing. So that's one thing from a psychological perspective, stripping the fear out. Within teams, it means getting greater psychological safety so you can speak up and not feel like you're going to get shamed or admonished for looking ignorant or whatever it might be. So that's really important. And then in terms of the other side of things is to make sure that if you have a big dream, break it down into smaller steps.

6:48Like I'm painting in the studio almost every day and I want to get my art in front of a specific group of people. And so I'm applying to competitions. I've got a spreadsheet. I've got all of the ones I'm interested in, the names of artists that I aspire to have my work in the galleries with. So it's that. It's kind of what are some of the actionable things that you can do in order to start stepping in that direction? and I think the other thing which I learned really weirdly when I was writing the first book in my 20s if you tell people what you're doing you're like I'm writing a book it's going to be a business bestseller it's on this subject it's really exciting put me in touch with people that could be interested in this if you're telling people what your dream is and asking for help people will help yeah they actually do it's extraordinary what doors can open up if you're genuine and you are kind to people so that's something else I think has been really powerful and actually is quite undervalued.

7:38And that's the Big Success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today. Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, Share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success.

8:09I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast.