Three Principles of Influence
Successful Strategies for Changing Lifelong Habits and Creating Sustainable Results
1. VITAL BEHAVIORS
Target vital behaviors. Focus on modifying the few vital behaviors of an issue and create a cascade of change no matter how big the problem might be.
2. CHANGE HOW YOU CHANGE MINDS
If you want to change people’s behavior you have to first change their minds. Influence masters engage people’s hearts and minds by creating poignant personal experience or vibrant vicarious experience rather than serving up one more lecture about the need for change.
3. APPLY SIX SOURCES OF INFLUENCE
Source 1: Personal Motivation
o Tap into personal motivations to make change inevitable. Reframe reality to align with a person’s moral imperatives and learn how to transform the feelings behind certain behaviors to overcome resistance.
Source 2: Personal Ability
o Over-invest in the right skills to increase your chances of success. Follow deliberate practice, seek feedback, set a series of smaller goals, and build in strategies for resilience to increase personal ability.
Source 3: Social Motivation
o Harness the power of peer pressure to build a receptive audience. Enlist respected opinion leaders in your cause to help motivate others to change & encourage dialogue from all sides when behaviors are especially challenging.
Source 4: Social Ability
o Turn a me problem into a we problem. Build social capital and call on individual strengths to bolster the team in order to change persistent and resistant behaviors.
Source 5: Structural Motivation
o Don’t de-motivate – reward (and punish) with caution! Rewards must be clearly tied to vital behaviors and specific actions in order to ensure success. When rewards are used to compensate for a lack of personal motivation and social support, they always backfire!
Source 6: Structural Ability
o Make the invisible visible – consider changing things to change behaviors. Build cues and enablers into the environment to make the right behaviors inevitable.
