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Mastering the Art of Sales and Persuasion: Use Attunement to Uncover Others’ Interests, with Dan Pink, Author, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Forget coercion
Attunement is very simple. Attunement is getting out of your own head into someone else’s head. Attunement is seeing the world from someone else’s perspective. Now this is incredibly important in any kind of sales or persuasion because we don’t have much coercive power. It’s hard as a boss, as an employee, as a seller and a marketplace to force people to do things. And so when you lack that coercive power, you need almost the flipside of that which is the ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view, understand their interests and find common ground. That’s what attunement is.
It’s OK to ape
One of the ways that we can enhance our powers of attunement is through some form of mimicry. Now mimicry sounds very duplicitous but it’s not, it’s how human beings behave. I encourage you if you’re skeptical of this to watch a gathering of people who know each other and like each other. And watch it through the wide angle lens of a wildlife photographer. And what you’ll see is you’ll see people who are in an actually somewhat beautifully choreo – seemingly choreographed way mirroring each other’s gestures. Standing the way other people are standing. One way I can understand your position is by actually standing the way you’re standing, by gesturing the way you’re gesturing. It’s something that we do naturally and if we become a little bit more aware of what’s going on we can become more adept at it. Again, not as a form of duplicity, but as a way of truly understanding someone else’s perspective.
Watch, wait, and wane
So one thing that you can do if you want to sort of build up the muscles to do this more effectively is a strategy that I call watch, wait and wane. Watch, wait and wane. So what you do is you watch how someone is behaving, okay. You wait a little bit so you don’t immediately jump in to try to mimic what they’re doing. So you watch, beat – that’s the wait, mirror the activity and then let it slide. Try another version of it. Watch what people are doing, wait a little bit, beat, beat, mimic what they’re doing, let it dissipate just a little bit. Now, the truth of the matter is that as this might seem superficially a little bit odd or forced but chances are you’re doing this already. And what I’m hoping that you do based on this social science evidence is just be a little bit more conscious of it and enhance your skills at it a little bit more– not to try to trick people, but to actually understand their perspective a little more deeply.