3

Listen, listen, listen

3.1 An end to conversational narcissism

It’s not all about you

This is perhaps the most important section in the book.

Most people view conversation as an opportunity to talk about themselves. I had a friend who I used to see regularly and she spent the whole time telling me of her latest woes. I put up with it until once when I was going through a difficult period myself. In the space of a month, I left my job, my father died, I broke up with my girlfriend and then found out she was pregnant. When my talkative friend heard this, she said, ‘Oh wow, we have to meet up and talk’.

What she meant was, we have to meet up and talk about her. As we sat down at the café, I said ‘How’s things?’ in an off-hand way, as you do, and she spent the next 90 minutes telling me all about how terrible her life was.

She’s a friend I used to see regularly.

She’s not alone. Many people love the sound of their own voice and their favourite topic is themselves. At their most gracious, they say, ‘I’ve been talking way too long, your turn, what do you think, what do you think about me?’.

Charles Derber, in The Pursuit of Attention,1 makes the distinction between the Shift Response and the Support Response and he recommends we do more of the latter.

In the Shift Response, we move the topic from them to us:

Friend: I’ve just come back from a great holiday.

Us: Oh me too. I went to Magaluf, it was brilliant, I went to this great bar. . . 

At this point, our Friend is unlikely to feel especially friendly towards us. But if we chose the Support Response we would keep the focus on them:

Friend: I’ve just come back from a great holiday.

Us: Oh wow, where did you go?

Friend: I was in Magaluf for a week.

Us: Fabulous, what did you get up to?

Here, our Friend will feel more friendly.

It can be subtle. Sometimes, we want to add to their topic (Support Response), but we are so focused on what we are going to say that we stop listening to them. We simply don’t have the room in our brain to hear them and our own thoughts at the same time.

The fact of the matter is that if you want to change their mind, you will need them to listen to you. But how can you expect them to listen to you, if you never listen to them? You can’t.

If you want them to listen to you, you need to go first and listen to them.

The amygdala, an important piece of brainery

Amygdalum is Latin for almond and there are two small almond-shaped areas of the brain, called the amygdala, that play a tremendously important role in keeping you alive. Not only that; they played a tremendously important part in keeping your ancestors alive, all the way back through our evolutionary tree, all the way back to the duck.

Actually, we didn’t evolve from ducks, but you get what I mean.

The amygdala is the part of the brain that deals with danger. If a bear were to jump out from behind a tree, your amygdala would instantly be alerted and trigger your fight or flight or freeze response before you could say, ‘Oh look, there’s a bear’.*

It is also the part that triggers aggression – the fight response – and the part that, when it thinks it is being attacked or under stress, dampens down many other parts of the brain so it can focus single-handedly on saving your skin.

One part of the brain the amygdala disrupts is the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – a part of the brain heavily involved in listening. The PFC receives information from the auditory cortex as well as other sites in the brain and puts all of it together for the purpose of rational thinking and making decisions.

In other words, if you want the other person to hear you properly and fully understand what you are trying to say, and if you want them to be able to think rationally and make a good decision, you want their PFC to be fully mobilised, which means their amygdala needs to be quiet.

In other words, they must feel totally safe.

Interestingly, some studies have shown that challenges to our deeply held beliefs trigger the amygdala, exactly the same as a physical threat.2

Love and fear

‘There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It’s true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. . . There is no neutrality in this.’

This is a quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist, named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 thinkers of the twentieth century.

What she is saying is that if we don’t want the other person to be in a place of fear (and thereby trigger the amygdala and shut down their ability to listen and process), they need to be in a place of love.

Now, as above with listening, if you want them to be in a place of love, you need to go first and be in a place of love too.

For some of you, this is going to be an extraordinarily powerful learning and you will put the book down and go out into the world full of love and transform the results you get. That difficult neighbour, that annoying colleague, will become your best friend.

Others will be muttering about love and hippies and how it all went wrong in the 1960s and what on earth has this got to do with persuading the security guard to let me through even though I’ve forgotten my badge.

To be fair, love is quite a strong word here, so let us talk about affective primacy doctrine instead.3 Affect, quite simply, is whether we are drawn towards something or pushed away. In the same way that an amoeba moves towards or away from certain conditions that it detects, our brain, fundamentally, processes huge amounts of information from the outside world and does the same. It decides whether we should go towards it (nutrients, supportive conditions, reproduction) or away from it (harsh conditions, pathogens, predators). We’re really not that dissimilar to the amoeba.

And it makes this decision to approach or avoid in a tenth of a second. A tenth of a second.

Affective primacy doctrine says this comes first and impacts all subsequent brain processing, including reasoning. That is, if we like something (positive affect), we will come up with reasons to support it; if we don’t like it (negative affect), we will come up with reasons against it. The reasoning is a post-hoc rationalisation of the affect.

For example, we judge good-looking people to be smarter than average and they are more likely to be acquitted by juries; our evaluation and reasoning are a result of the positive affect we have for them.

In other words, if we think love is too strong a word, we still want them to have positive affect towards us if we want them to change their mind.

Unconditional positive regard

According to Dr Will Schutz, the inventor of FIRO theory (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation), all people:

• ■want to feel significant and are afraid of being ignored
• ■want to feel competent and are afraid of being humiliated
• ■want to feel likeable and are afraid of being rejected.

This lies behind so much human behaviour so perhaps your simplest way to change anyone’s mind is to show them that, to you, they are significant, they are competent, they are liked.

Along similar lines, Carl Rogers introduced the idea of unconditional positive regard. Rogers, inventor of humanistic psychology and considered by many to be one of the most eminent clinical psychologists of the twentieth century, believed that therapeutic change can only occur if there is unconditional positive regard – a genuine caring for them, not contingent on any specific behaviour.

All of these approaches – love, positive affect, unconditional positive regard and helping them feel significant, competent and liked – are ultimately just different flavours of the same dish, they are all saying the same thing.

Why, if they don’t deserve it?

Now, you may be thinking the person you are trying to persuade doesn’t deserve this: their behaviour has been too far out of order. Maybe they’re an alcoholic and it’s caused too many problems; maybe they’re a gambler and they have lost too much of the family’s money; maybe their political opinions are anathema.

Well, remember in Chapter 1 we said know your outcome then always stay focused on it? So, let’s check. Has what you’ve been doing to date worked?

With the alcoholic and the gambler, has the nagging worked? Has telling them what a waste of space they are worked? With your political foe, has your irrefutable logic and splendid set of supporting evidence ever persuaded them of the error of their ways? Unlikely. So, to achieve your outcome you will need to try something different.

Why hasn’t your approach to date worked? Probably because you haven’t addressed this element of their need for psychological safety, so they shut down and don’t hear anything you are saying and they certainly don’t change their mind.

But let’s see what happens when you do address this need. In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle, a multi-year study of performance across all the teams within the organisation in order to identify which teams were the most successful and what were the key factors that lay behind that success. They found that the biggest factor by far was psychological safety.4

So, for purely pragmatic reasons it’s worth a try: this could be the thing that will work for you. It has a great track record working with exactly such difficult cases as alcoholics, gamblers, indeed addicts of any kind. It works in the hardest of cases, it works with criminals, with repeat offenders, with police interrogations, with terrorism interrogations.

A genuine caring for them, for a suspected terrorist? Why would you do this? For the simple reason that it works. For the purely practical purpose of getting your outcome.

And ultimately that is what you want.

Whether you call it love or positive affect or unconditional positive regard or lowering the excitation levels of the amygdala, if it gets you your result, it’s worth doing.

And the simplest way we can achieve all this is through listening, really listening.

I got my Dad back

3.2 Listen to understand, not refute

Look, even if you don’t buy into that yucky love or positive affect stuff and even if you can’t tell your amygdala from your elbow and don’t want to, there’re lots of other reasons why you should focus on listening if you want to change the other person’s mind.

Mind you, listening is difficult. We’ve got other things on our mind, there are distractions, we’re planning tonight’s dinner, the other person doesn’t help by talking in a monotone voice. We haven’t even evolved to listen well, we’ve evolved for our attention to jump around, scanning the world for danger: Is there a predator ahead or behind us? Is there a shark in those bushes or a tiger hiding behind the curtains? Staying focused on one specific channel for an extended period of time goes against our wiring.

So how do we listen well?

The most important thing is your intention. If you get your intention right, what you need to do will follow. And even if your listening is clumsy, you will be forgiven as long as your intention is clear.

So what should that intention be? Well, as above, the most powerful intention is based on love. And I appreciate this is difficult at times, when that person who nearly ran you over is now swearing obscenities about your mother out of the window. However, the more you can get to that place, the better outcome you will get.

If it helps, love them for selfish reasons, love them simply because it works.

At the very least, your purpose should be to understand. This is not the norm. In an argument, we typically listen to refute. We wait for something they say that we can pounce on with a rebuttal. And they do the same to us and the argument gets nowhere.

You can see this in social media. You see ‘Yeah but. . .’ comments all the way down and zero success rate in changing minds.

But if you are open about your intention, that you are trying to understand or help, and if the conversation gets difficult, you re-share that intention – they will be much more likely to open up.

After intention comes attention

All forms of listening involve full attention. Mentally decide that you’re not going to think about anything else: not about your to-do list, not about your next meeting. Stop multi-tasking, put the phone down, switch off the tv and look at them. Sitting alongside, or at a slight angle, is often better positioning than directly opposite because there is less pressure on the speaker and it creates more of a sense of ‘us’.

As you’re listening, do what hostage negotiators call ‘minimal encouragers’ – those unobtrusive behaviours that show you are listening. People have a deep need to feel listened to, so it is not enough to listen: the other person needs to feel fully listened to. Short words like ‘Yes’, ‘Ok’, ‘I see’, ‘Got it’, ‘Uh-uh’ and nods of the head will help.

Allow silence: silence is thinking time. Some people have to do their thinking by talking it through, so allow them that space.

Reflect back some of the things they say. This can be a simple repetition of a couple of key words or it could be a larger summarising.

And as you listen, try to go deeper and connect some dots. You aren’t just taking it in, you are processing too. What must be true for them to say that? What are its implications? How does it fit with other things they’ve said? What is going on for them to say what they’re saying? How would I be thinking/feeling/behaving if my world were such that I said this? More importantly, given what else I know about them (and dropping what I know about me), how must they be thinking/feeling/behaving in this situation?

And at the same time, do none of this but just sit there being with them in their experience. Processing gets in the way of listening. So how much of one and how much of the other should you do? It depends on the outcome. The Samaritans would say just be there with them; but if you need to understand a complicated argument, you might need to be more active in your questioning. Finding that skilful balance of active or passive engagement at the right time for each comes with time.

And, with any processing you do, remember it’s a guess. If you joined three dots to make a triangle, maybe that triangle only exists in your mind and not in the real world. There’s only one way to find out – ask! ‘One thing that comes across to me is. . . ’ or ‘I’m getting a sense that. . . ’. And then they can tell you whether you’re right or not.

She had to change her mind before she could change his

3.3 Listen with your ears

In my introduction, I said people tell you how to influence them – you just have to listen. But what do you listen for?

• ■You listen for their drivers: what is it that they want and don’t want, their hopes and their fears. Because if you can put your message in terms of those, they will be more likely to agree.

  If you want your husband to mow the lawn and you know he wants to watch the football later, you could suggest, ‘How about you mow the lawn this afternoon, then I’ll cook a nice dinner while you watch the football later?’ You’re linking your request to their drivers.

• ■You listen for other emotions: emotions are indicators of their responses to situations and stimuli so if you understand their emotions, it will help you predict their likely response to your proposition. From this you can tailor your proposition accordingly and they will be more likely to agree.
• ■You listen for their criteria: the specific attributes they are looking for in their goal. For example, they tell you they want to eat out this evening and they think they have communicated clearly. But what do they actually mean? You could suggest McDonald’s and be off by a mile.

  Some might want haute cuisine, others cheap and cheerful; some might want healthy, others just want to go to their old favourite; for others, atmosphere is important and they look for an exclusive or a vibrant or a family friendly place.

  When we communicate, we think we are being clear, but our words can hide very different interpretations: so if you want to understand the other person fully, you need to dig deeper to find out exactly what they mean.

• ■You listen for their values: values are the things we live our lives by, they are the things we stand for, they are the things we are prepared to make a stand for. They are things we consider good or bad, right or wrong, important or unimportant. As such, they are benchmarks against which we make our decisions.

  So link your message to their values and they will be much more likely to buy into it. They will see it in the light of something that they consider good, right or important.

• ■And you listen for their personality type: we saw in the last chapter the power of various profiling tools that can help understand how the other person thinks. Well, you don’t need computer software to do the analysis, you can just listen to how they speak. That’s just what the software does anyway.

If you listen out for these, you will learn exactly how to persuade the other person. If you know their drivers, their emotions, their values, their criteria and their personality type, you can then frame your message in terms of these and now they are more likely to say ‘yes’.

3.4 Listen with your eyes

People tell you how to influence them but, of course, they don’t say it explicitly.

They won’t give you a written list of their drivers or their values, not even a verbal one. Sometimes they are downright misleading: someone buying a car may say that ‘value for money’ is their main criterion but underneath they really prefer a sports car because it will impress their friends.

So if they don’t tell you, how do you find out?

You have to listen deeply, behind the words, between the words, to the things that are not said. You have to listen to the repetition, the emphasis, the pause.

Listen to the non-verbals

Human language has evolved over a few hundred thousand years but we have evolved non-verbal communication over hundreds of millions of years. We have very deep wiring for communicating in these channels, but unfortunately the verbal channel drowns out all the others.

We need to tune back in to them so we can understand the other person more fully: the non-verbals are as important as the verbals.

You could ask me if I like Donald Trump and I could say ‘Yeah!’ with a snort, a wry smile and a roll of the eyes or I could say the same word with an energy, looking up beaming ear to ear. One sarcastic, the other affirmative. Verbal content identical, meanings totally opposite. All of my communication is in the non-verbal channels.

So we have to listen to the facial expression, the tonality, the gesture, the scratch of the ear, the movement on the seat, the looking away and so many other things.

We leak our thoughts all the time

Imagine the most repulsive food you can. Maggots? Cow dung? Tomatoes? (It’s tomatoes for me.) If you now imagine eating that food, without doubt you will show something on your face. Even if it’s only a micro-movement, there will be some kind of scrunching up of the mouth or backing away movement of the head or tightening of the throat as you feel the disgust at the thought.

We leak our thoughts all the time and if we know this, we can work it.

So you are selling a house and their face lights up when you point out the railway station is within walking distance. You can now guess they are a commuter and reduced travel time is important. Tell them they are opening a new line with a fast connection and you have your sale.

You need to look as much as listen. Train yourself to pay attention to these leaks and you will learn a lot.

Poker players know this.

It’s like a poker player showing their cards

3.5 Listen with your body

Listening is a physical process. We saw earlier that people have a deep need to feel listened to and so it is not enough to listen, you need to show you are listening, and we saw that asking questions and using minimal encouragers will help with this. But the physical side helps too and actively looking at them, nodding our head and with attentive body language, all demonstrate you are listening and will go a long way in addressing their need to feel listened to. Now they will feel safer, they will be more likely to open up and they will be more willing to listen to you in return.

And there is more we can do physically. We have seen that reflecting back their words is part of showing you have understood them, well so is reflecting back their body language. Their body language is not random, it is part of their communication and reflecting back shows you’ve got it.

It is, as the word implies, a language – a surface structure expression communicating what is going on in the deeper parts of that person’s brain. A couple of years ago, my young nephew excitedly described the breakfast buffet at his hotel on holiday and did a sweeping gesture with his hand as he did so. That gesture wasn’t random, it expressed how the buffet was represented in his brain as a great spread of delicious food laid out in front of him. If I did something similar when I talked about the buffet, I would be showing him subconsciously that I fully understood.

So it is part of the expression of their meaning but it is more still, it is also an expression of their energy level or their mood even. We can often tell someone’s mood before they say anything, simply from their body language – ‘Uh-oh, they look angry’ – so if we reflect their body language back to them, we are also reflecting back their mood. We are saying (at a subconscious level), ‘I understand how you feel’. More than that we are saying ‘I feel the same’ and, even more still, we are saying ‘I’m like you’. And if your intention is to help them feel significant, competent and liked, doing this goes a long way in creating this safe space for them.

Plus, taking on their body language will help you understand them better because the link between physiology and emotion is two-way. If you have an emotion, typically that leads to a specific body language which is why we can make such comments as ‘they look angry’. But conversely, if you do a physiology, you will pick up that emotion. So, do their physiology – sit the way they sit or stand the way they stand – and you will pick up some of that mood.

By listening at a body language level, you are listening much deeper. It’s a powerful way to listen to all those things that are felt but not actually said.

3.6 Listen with your HEART

People make decisions based on emotions, so listen out for these. Not only will it help you frame your message but it will also enable you to connect and empathise with them and identify any unsaid issues and motivations. You want to show you understand their experience and their emotions and that these are legitimate.

HEAR them

Forensic psychologists Laurence and Emily Alison have spent years studying the methods that work in such extreme contexts as interrogating suspect terrorists and repeat sex offenders. Their work is based on the approach called Motivational Interviewing, sometimes known as Behavioural Change Counselling.

They find the most effective approach to the interview is a structure they call ‘HEAR’,5 which stands for:

• ■Honesty
• ■Empathy
• ■Autonomy
• ■Reflection.

Honesty means your communication must come from a place of truth and authenticity. If the other person suspects even the smallest amount of deceit or manipulation, you have lost them. Be open, even with the difficult truths; any hiding, again, means they will not completely trust you and so they will not open up themselves.

Empathy is where you show to them you understand how they are feeling. One example they give is when your toddler wants to wear their favourite dinosaur t-shirt and you say they can’t because it’s in the wash. This just won’t cut it with the toddler, even if they put it in the washing machine themselves, and you will get a whole load of screaming in reply.

If, instead, you reply along the lines of ‘I know, you love that t-shirt, don’t you? That dinosaur is really scary, it’s a brilliant t-shirt. Let’s have a look, oh no, it’s in the wash right now. It’s ok, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll dry it today specially so you can wear it tomorrow. That will be exciting, won’t it? And today you can wear this other t-shirt you love’ (hopefully also with a dinosaur on!). You will probably get a much happier toddler and a more successful morning.

Emotional labelling, putting words to the feelings, is very powerful. It actually reduces activity in the amygdala, exactly the outcome we are after.6

Then autonomy: the other person needs to have a choice and to have control over that choice. If we try to pressure them into it, they will dig their heels in further. Giving them the choice and asking their opinions about the matter show you are respecting them.

SONAR reflection

And if you thought HEAR was a great acronym for listening, how about SONAR for reflection? More helpful guidelines from Laurence and Emily Alison:

• ■Simple reflection: Verbatim reflection of part of what was said (and the part you choose to reflect should be the part you want them to elaborate on).
• ■‘On the one hand’ reflection: Summarising two conflicting views the other person has (‘It seems that on the one hand you’re angry with them but on the other hand they’re a good friend’).
• ■No arguing: Instead explore (‘Can you tell me more about. . . ?’, ‘I’m not quite sure I understand. . . ’).
• ■Affirmations: Look for things you can agree with and build on (‘Without doubt, Thatcher had good intentions and wanted the best for the country’).
• ■Reframing: Reflecting back deeper feelings or values that you think might be there (‘I’m getting. . . is important to you’).

Listen with your HEART

I love HEAR and SONAR as acronyms; even better I love them as models. But I’m going to add one letter and turn HEAR into HEART because we need to hear with the heart. We need to bring compassion; we need to help them in their need for psychological safety.

And the T stands for Together.

We need to listen together. We need to listen to each other. We need to work hand-in-hand to solve the issue we are facing together. If it’s us working together to solve the challenge we are facing, they will work alongside us to solve it.

So you need to listen to understand how they see that situation and why they behave the way they do and the reasons, perhaps quite deep reasons, behind any resistance. And once you do that and acknowledge their perspective, you can now start to work together to find the solution that works for everyone.

To say it again: if you want to change their mind, you need them to listen to you properly and process what you are saying and they will only do this if you listen to them properly and process what they are saying first.

You need to listen together and that means you going first.

You do all of this already?

‘Yeah’, you say, ‘I’m honest. I’m empathetic. I let them decide for themselves. I never argue. I do all these things but I still can’t get through to them.’

And I’m sure you do all these things but sometimes, if you aren’t getting the outcomes you want, you have to do them a little bit more.

Maybe you think you’re not arguing but they think you are. Maybe you think you’re being honest, but perhaps you’re holding back a tiny piece of information and they’ve picked up on it. After all, everyone proclaims honesty but they’re happy to insist they can’t pay more than a thousand pounds for the car when they know full well they have fifteen hundred cash in their back pocket.

Listening with your heart can be difficult, but it really can be the thing that makes all the difference.

Imagine you work in a call-centre and you have an irate customer on the phone, ranting at you because of some bad experience they had with your company. You can take it personally and get angry yourself or you can get defensive on behalf of your company, but it is only likely to cause the customer to rant more. If, instead, you wait until they finish and then apologise on behalf of your company and say how you understand their feelings and you were furious yourself when something similar happened to you recently. If you do all this, now the customer will calm down and be ready to have a proper discussion.

Likewise, if you’re the person who is phoning the call-centre, you will get a much better result if you apologise for venting your feelings on them, say how you appreciate it is not their fault and you recognise it must be very difficult for them being shouted at all day.

How far should you go with it? The answer is a pragmatic one. If you’ve got your outcome, you did it perfectly right. If you haven’t got your outcome, you need to do it more.

I was once involved in migrating a core department of a major oil company to a shared services centre and I had a meeting with the head of a particular team about migrating their roles across. The meeting went very well – or so I thought until I got back to my desk to find she had sent an email to all staff about how outraged she was by my suggestions. So I went and had another meeting with her to clear the air and this time sorted it out – again, until back at my desk I received a similar email, again to all staff.

Now this particular person was quite a high-profile, politically important individual within the organisation and these emails were not good for my reputation, let alone the success of the project. But I tried one more time. And this time, I listened to her, I really listened. I thought I had listened before but I hadn’t properly. I had listened only as a pretence; I hadn’t taken on board what she was saying at all. Why would I? I knew the answers already.

But of course my answers weren’t going to work. So in this third meeting, I listened properly: listened out for the concerns behind what she was saying, and then changed my answers to show that I had taken them on board and I was going to protect them as well as she would have done herself.

When I got back to my desk this time, there was no email. A few weeks later, though, there was one, again to all staff. But by now she had become a champion for the project and her message told everyone what a great job we were doing and how everyone should get behind it to make it work.

HEAR and SONAR are cute acronyms, but they hold the secret to changing the other person’s mind, even in extreme circumstances.

But you do have to do it, even when it’s really difficult.

I do deserve better, don’t I?

3.7 Listen to the things that can’t be said

Daniel Shapiro, the founder of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, also talks about the importance of listening for emotions in his masterful book, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable.7 He points out we need to find a rational solution, but we can only do this if we have addressed any underlying emotional considerations first.

Greed, anger, ego, hate, resentment, jealousy, disgust, panic, grief will all impede finding a rational solution.

But it gets harder when the emotion is mired in a taboo, something that one or both sides are uncomfortable discussing: perhaps two siblings who get along except when the topic of their parents’ divorce comes up; perhaps two friends who get on except whenever the Israel–Palestine situation is mentioned.

These can be the most difficult situations to work with and, paradoxically, also where we most want to change their mind.

Shapiro encourages us to establish a safe zone to discuss it by clarifying and communicating the intention (‘Look, neither of us want to fall out here. . . ’) and ask permission to talk about the taboo topic, naming it, and exploring it without any commitment from either side.

If it’s too difficult confronting head on, he recommends chiselling away at it and weakening the power of the taboo.

3.8 Listening and asking questions

Listening is difficult; it goes against our wiring. But there is a simple trick that helps: the question.

Our natural tendency is to dive in with our opinions. Asking a question holds us back from that and we have to listen to their answer before we dive in.

Listening doesn’t have to mean staying silent, with an occasional ‘I see’ thrown in. We can bring curiosity; curiosity to understand:

• ■why they think the way they think
• ■why they say the things they say
• ■why they behave the way they behave
• ■why they feel the way they feel.

If you have earnt the right, the speaker will appreciate interaction and will open up. If they really get you are listening to understand and giving them the space to express what they want to express and perhaps even helping them express what might be a difficult thing to say, your part in the conversation does not have to be completely passive, you can ask questions and make suggestions too.

Ask, give space, listen, silence, listen, silence, ask again, is a good pattern.

Q: How do you hijack their brain?

A: Ask them a question.

The brain is wired such that when you ask a question, they can’t think of anything else as they try to answer it. It is a response called Instinctive Elaboration and it is an automatic reflex, beyond their control. For that moment, they can only think of your question. In fact, even to decide they aren’t going to answer it, they have to answer it internally.

This is powerful when it comes to influencing.

Salesperson: What do you think of this top?

Customer: Oh, it is quite nice, now you mention it.

Salesperson: Do you think it would look good on you?

Customer: {Imagines it looking good on them} Yes, I think it might, I’ll try it on.

A study of 40,000 participants found that simply asking if they were likely to buy a car in the following 6 months increased their chances of purchase by 35 per cent.8 Another study asking the participant’s intention to vote in an upcoming election produced a 25 per cent increase in voter turnout.9

Asking questions about a behaviour primes the neurons for that behaviour and so the behaviour is more likely to take place.

Salesperson: Great, so you’re going to take it?

Customer: {Still imagining it looking good on them} Yes, actually, I think I will!

In fact, asking questions about their opinion on something releases serotonin and dopamine in their brain – nice chemicals to have washing around. No wonder Karen Huang and Michael Yeomans of Harvard found that, quite simply, people who ask questions are more liked by their conversation partner.10

Moreover, if your questioning process means the other person comes to the conclusion themselves, they will be willing to defend that decision a lot more because they made it themselves. Autonomy.

What is a good question to ask?

Clearly, open questions will generally be more fruitful:

• ■‘What was your reasoning for. . . ?’
• ■‘What are your thoughts on. . . ?’
• ■‘Can you tell me more about. . . ?’

These are all great open questions which will allow the other person to answer in the way they would like to answer.

Probing questions, using the word ‘specifically’, are useful for avoiding misinterpretation:

• ■‘A small piece of land? How small specifically?’

And closed questions will remove any vagueness, the answer is yes or no, no room for wriggling:

• ■‘Just to be clear, did you actually get that in writing?’

You may read in some places that ‘Why?’ is not a good question because it triggers a defensive response. It can do but doesn’t have to. As with everything, a lot of it is in how you ask it. Ask in an accusatory tone and, sure, people will get defensive.

But ask with a tone of curiosity and if you have already built a positive, supportive relationship and it is clear that you are coming at it from a collaborative, problem-solving perspective, with their outcomes in mind, they will be fine. As with everything, so much is in the intent and as expressed through the non-verbals.

So what question should we ask? Well, that is a very open question in itself and as such quite often a great question to ask. We can ask it of ourselves or we can even ask them.

From another angle, we might ask ourselves, ‘Where do we want their mind to go?’ and then think of the question that takes their mind there.

Where do we want their mind to go? More focused on saving money

Question: What will happen when you hit your overdraft limit?

Where do we want their mind to go? Motivated to finish their homework

Question: What will you do after you’ve finished your homework?

Finding the right question isn’t easy, especially in sensitive situations. If you formulate the question slowly, pausing after each word, it allows the brain to race ahead and mentally try different versions and the likely responses, so you can shape the question even as it comes out of your mouth.

But ultimately we learn by trying and by sometimes getting it wrong and then adapting.

Back to Motivational Interviewing

We have seen Motivational Interviewing (MI) already; it is a field used extensively in challenging situations like addiction and repeat offenders. It’s a growing field and it’s a growing field because it gets very good results even in such tough situations.

And like hostage negotiation, working in equally tough situations, its approach is based on unconditional positive regard, listening and asking questions.

MI practitioners spend a lot of time exploring the discrepancy between the behaviour and their thoughts about the behaviour. Most addicts and repeat criminals will have at least some thought about stopping, but a suggestion that they give it up will likely be met with a response of ‘Love to but ain’t gonna happen’.

So the practitioner will explore this and, in doing so, increase the motivation to change. They will ask:

• ■Questions about the drawbacks of the current behaviour

  ‘If you don’t change, how is this going to impact your life?’

  ‘Well, I’m going to spend most of my life in jail.’

• ■Questions about the benefits of change

  ‘But if you were able to change, what would that help you do?’

  ‘I could live a normal life, I could see my kids, I could play football for my local team, I could go on holiday, just like everyone else can.’

• ■Questions about their motivation

  ‘What is the main reason for you to change?’

  ‘It’s my kids. I’ve hardly seen them grow up. I’ve let them down. I hate that.’

• ■Questions about how they will go about the change

  ‘So what do you think you could do this time that would be different to previous times?’

  ‘I suppose I could sign up for the support programme. I’ve never really bothered with that in the past, I didn’t think it worked. But I guess it’s down to me to make it work.’

• ■Questions about next actions

  ‘That’s great. So what do you think you’ll do to put this into action?’

  ‘I’ll sign up for the programme. I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ve got the paperwork already but haven’t done anything about it. I’ll do it this afternoon.’

They have to choose the solution. Without this, their change of mind won’t last – the offender will sign up for the programme but not attend; your neighbour will turn their music down this time but it will be just as loud next Friday; your child will do their homework today but tomorrow there will be even more resistance.

Now this raises the stakes – not only are we getting them to change their mind, but we’re getting them to do it out of choice – but it is the only outcome that will last.

3.9 Listening and the Vulcan Mind-Meld

So what goes on in the brain when you are listening? Lots! Who knew?

We’ve already seen how important the amygdala is in the process and something else that takes place when someone listens to a speaker is neural entrainment, sometimes called interpersonal synchrony.

This is the process by which two brains become synchronised and fire in the same way. For example, when two people’s movements are aligned, their motor neurons will fire similarly and this can be seen in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the two people’s brains. Likewise, when they sit or stand in the same way.

It turns out this synchrony increases trust, co-operation, helpfulness, empathy and other pro-social behaviours, and the kind of behaviours you would like to see when trying to change someone’s mind.11

But it is not just motor neurons. Any movement is likely to be related to other brain areas too – a facial expression might be expressing an emotional response, which itself might be linked to a specific belief. So, through entrainment, the other person’s neural gestalt is also likely to come into synch too, i.e., their emotion and their belief.

It goes further. Professor Uri Hasson at Princeton found that when people’s speech is correlated, so too are the parts of the brain governing speech and, indeed, many of the higher parts of the brain involved in what’s being said as well.12 Other studies have shown that emotions amplify this effect.13

Hasson also found that the more the brains were synchronised, the more successful the conversation was considered, as judged by those taking part in the conversation.

So you really do want to synch your brain with theirs.

Miles Davis said ‘If you understood everything I said, you’d be me’ and there’s a truth in this. The closer your brain is configured in the same way as the other person, the closer you are getting to being them. Is this the basis of the Vulcan Mind-Meld? Who knows?

And in persuasion, the more your brains are synchronised, the more you can then lead that dance of synchrony and bring them with you where you want them to go.

In summary

We need to listen more and better. Shift your attention to them – you’ve already persuaded yourself; you need to focus on them if you want to know how to persuade them.

• ■Whatever behaviour you want them to do, you have to go first

  If you want them to listen to you and engage with your ideas, it makes sense that you need to listen to them and engage with their ideas first.

• ■Come from a position of love. Or at least respect

  Their resistance to engage with your ideas largely comes from a lack of psychological safety. They have to feel psychologically safe with you. Always show respect, no matter who you are talking to. Even the ones you think don’t deserve it. And love is even better.

• ■Listen to understand, not refute

  Stop listening for the ‘Yeah, but. . .’ opportunity – that doesn’t work; it only gets ‘Yeah, but. . .’ back. Instead, listen to really understand them.

• ■Listen deeply

  Listen out for their drivers: what they want; what they don’t want. Listen out for other emotions. Listen for their values and their criteria. All of these will help you get your message across more successfully later on.

• ■Listen for the non-verbals

  Much of their communication is in the non-verbal channels so tune into these and you will learn a lot.

• ■Address any emotions

  They will only hear your great logic if you address the emotion first.

• ■Ask more questions

  Questions are great – they elicit useful information; they engage the other person and they help influence. What’s more, they help us listen.

• ■Synchronise your brains

  At a deep subconscious neural level, the more your brain is in synch with theirs, the more they will think you are ‘one of us’, the more psychologically safe they will feel in your presence, the more likely they will listen to you and agree with you.

Gary Noesner, one of the creators of the modern hostage negotiation approach, says listening is the cheapest concession we can make.

It helps give them the feeling of psychological safety which is critical for them being open to change their mind.

But to do this well, you have to feel psychologically safe yourself. So let’s look at that.

* Not including koala bears