Did you ever have to persuade someone and make them change their opinion? If yes, kudos to you because persuasion is one of the most challenging tasks to complete. You will understand why in a moment. This article talks about why persuading can help you grow as a person and enhance your life.
Persuading happens all the time
First of all, the art of persuasion is a handy tool to better your interactions with others. As an adept persuader, you can easily influence others and improve your relationships. And because we interact with each other almost every wakeful moment in our lives, knowing how to persuade someone is a skill you can use almost everywhere.
It is easy to see how persuasion can help you in your relationships. However, it can be more difficult to understand how the art of persuading can improve your life journey. Thankfully, we can use everything for our growth, so why not persuasion? So here it is how persuasion can better our lives.
Every time we discuss a topic and submit an opinion, we subconsciously try to persuade the other. Sometimes, we are also conscious of the process. However, most of the time, we only want to share our opinion and do not necessarily seek to persuade the other.
At the same time, once you are in a conversation, you want your view to be the right one. Nobody likes to be wrong. Even more interestingly, at the start of a discussion, everyone thinks they are right. After all, this is why they have an opinion in the first place.
The art of persuasion as a doorway to grow
Once you start interacting with another and you learn more about the topic, your initial opinion may now look clearly wrong to everyone around. Yet, you unconsciously do not want to accept you were wrong. Hence, you keep arguing in the other direction.
Were you ever present in a discussion like the above? You can easily understand when someone supports a faulty argument, but you cannot easily see when that happens to yourself. After all, our mind tends to filter out information that opposes our current beliefs and opinions.
In learning how to persuade someone else or how others influence you, you also start to understand more about your own firm beliefs and conclusions. When you see how rigid others can often be, you wonder how frequently this applies to you. As a result, you start to become more flexible in changing opinions about a subject.
In other words, you are more willing to change. Change does not necessarily mean growth, but if you are to grow, you need to change. In sum, the art of persuasion can help you become more susceptible to change and hence to growth.
Takeaway
- Every time we discuss a topic and submit an opinion, we subconsciously try to persuade the other.
- Our mind tends to filter out information that opposes our current beliefs and opinions.
- In learning how to persuade someone else or how others influence you, you also start to understand more about your own firm beliefs and conclusions
