Want to be more persuasive? Then stop trying.

I often tell my clients that if they want to be more persuasive, they should stop trying to be more persuasive. Instead, they should focus on creating relationships in which persuasion isn’t necessary. The reason is that persuasion techniques are often the most powerful when they’re not techniques. They’re the most powerful when they’re spontaneous actions that arise within relationships.

I remembered this lesson recently as I watched one of my all-time favorite movies: The Big Kahuna with Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito.

If you’re a people-watcher like me and you haven’t seen this movie, see it. It is loaded with some of the most powerful lessons in human nature I’ve ever seen. And one of them directly relates to the ideas I mentioned above.

In this scene Danny DeVito attempts to straighten out a young man who has been using company time to “sell Jesus” when he should have been doing his job, which is to sell his company’s line of industrial lubricants. The young man doesn’t understand that he’s, in effect, stealing from his company by taking their money and not doing his job. And worse, he feels holier-than-thou as he sees his mission as more important than that of one of his co-workers named Larry. This is when Danny DeVito says…

You preaching Jesus is no different than Larry or anybody else preaching lubricants. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling Jesus, or Buddha, or Civil Rights, or How-to-Make-Money-in-Real-Estate-with-No-Money-Down. That doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a marketing rep.

If you want to talk to somebody honestly, as a human being, ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are. Just to find out. For no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it’s not a conversation anymore. It’s a pitch. And you’re not a human being. You’re a marketing rep.

I can’t think of a more poignant way to communicate the importance of treating people like human beings as opposed to a collection of buttons waiting to be pushed.

Yes, there will always be a time and a place for persuasion strategies and techniques. In fact, they can be essential to one’s success. But in the long run, it is impossible to create lasting, fulfilling, long-term relationships with “buttons”. And yet this is what most of us try to do.

When it comes to relationships that really matter, oftentimes the best way to be more persuasive is to stop being a marketing rep and start being a human being.

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P.S. Just after DeVito speaks these lines, he goes on to explain how a person attains character. This is one of the most powerful life lessons I’ve ever encountered. If you’re a young’un, you may miss the significance of it. But if you’re over 40 like I am, it’ll take your breath away.

Posted on Sunday, March 12, 2006 at 08:58 AM

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