A challenge currently facing many people in the world is how to persuade others to come around to their way of thinking. Many people who attend Stitt Feld Handy Group online conflict resolution training ask about effective ways to change someone’s mind.  In our virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training, we offer many pieces of advice on how to persuade others and below are four tips that you can use.

One important way to persuade others is to listen. We often hear from participants in our online conflict resolution training that they talk to other people but the other people don’t listen to them. When people aren’t listened to, it is bothersome to the person speaking. There is a reason they are talking and generally a talker wants someone to listen to them. This is certainly the case when we are running our virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training and speaking to our participants. When we speak, we feel a lot better when people are listening. The real goal is to get the other person to listen to you and the number one way to get someone to listen to you is to listen to them.

We strive to implement different things from our mediation and negotiation teachings into our online conflict resolution training, and we implement the listening strategy to get participants to listen to us. In the virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training the interactive nature of the workshops allows us, as teachers, to listen to what the participants have to share. We have found that by demonstrating to the group that we are listening to them, our participants are happy to listen to us and to what we have to say.

A second method used to persuade others is demonstrating that you are open to being persuaded. In our online conflict resolution training we are often asked for quick and easy tricks to use to persuade others and this is the one that I give. We often go into a difficult conversation or a negotiation with a desired outcome in mind and are unwilling to be persuaded that we are wrong by the other person. As we discuss in our virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training, this creates problems with the other person because when we demonstrate that we aren’t likely to be persuaded by them, they are likely to demonstrate the same thing back to us and show that they are unlikely to be persuaded by us.

This unwillingness to be persuaded can be harmful to anyone attempting to persuade another person. The online conflict resolution training therefore gets to the issue and offers the idea that when we show the other person that we are willing to be persuaded by them, they are more likely to follow suit and demonstrate that they are willing to be persuaded by us. This is also why in our virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training we are open to hearing different thoughts from different people in our workshop. We are open to be persuaded by participants and it seems that the openness makes participants more willing to be persuaded by us.

The third way to persuade someone, as discussed in our online conflict resolution training is to use objective criteria. This involves taking factual information from outside the dispute or negotiation and using it to demonstrate that what you are proposing is in line with the norm. In our virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training we demonstrate the importance of having real factual information to stand behind, because that will be much more effective in persuading others rather than trying to persuade them subjectively.

To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.

To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.

To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.