Devoted to women of color in business

Thanks for mentioning our new book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. We were thinking of people like you when we wrote it—people who are tackling important problems in their lives and in the lives of others. Here are a few of the ideas we want to drive home.

Most of the global, national, corporate and personal problems we face can’t be solved without changing people’s behavior. If influence is the capacity to help ourselves and others change our behavior, then it is clearly one of the most vital and most unavailable capacities on the planet. We all want influence, but few know how to get it.

The key to successful influence lies in three powerful principles:
1. Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change.
2. Use personal and vicarious experience to change thoughts and actions.
3. Marshall multiple sources of influence to make change inevitable.

Identify high-leverage behaviors. The first step to any successful influence strategy is to decide what you’re trying to change. There are three big ideas here:

Focus on behaviors. Don’t even begin to develop your influence strategy until you’ve carefully identified the behaviors that need to change.

The right few behaviors can drive a lot of change. Successful change agents don’t spread their efforts across ten priorities. They understand that profound change requires a precise focus. They focus on two or three “vital” behaviors.

Validate these vital behaviors by setting short-term goals within a low-risk environment. Don’t assume you’ve found the right few behaviors without testing them out.

Use personal and vicarious experience to change thoughts and actions. Changing behavior requires changing minds. People base their actions on two critical beliefs: “Can I do it?” and “Will it be worth it?” Unless you can change these beliefs you won’t change much behavior.

The vast majority of attempts to influence rely on presentations of data, carefully reasoned arguments, and eloquent speeches—in short, on verbal persuasion. But the evidence is clear that verbal persuasion doesn’t work, at least not with the kinds of profound, persistent, and resistant problems we care about.

Personal experience is the gold standard for changing beliefs. Create a pilot, take the person on a field trip, or otherwise immerse them in a safe version of the experience.

It’s far more convincing to show than it is to tell. When personal experience isn’t possible, use vicarious experience. Give them a demonstration, have others share their experiences, or take them to location where they can see your ideas in action. Vicarious experience is convincing because it doesn’t rely on you. Others see and hear the results for themselves, so it takes “trust me” out of the equation.

Marshall multiple sources of influence to make change inevitable. When you’re trying to influence persistent and resistant behaviors, don’t ask, “What’s the least I can do to influence change?” Instead ask, “How do I over-determine the behavior with every possible source of influence?”

The key to this diagnosis is not looking for the one crucial barrier—even though there may be one that stands out. The key is to act on every single barrier, to over-determine and guarantee success.

Using these influence tools, you can solve any problem that can be affected through improved behavior—that of yourself or that of others. From the simplest aggravations to the most persistent, resistant, and profound problems you can imagine.