Are you working in an organization where leaders are good at persuading others? Do the leaders in your organization put more emphasis on emotion than logic when attempting to influence others?
One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself is “Am I attempting to influence others by appealing more to logic than emotion?” Emotionally intelligent leaders influence others by appealing to emotion.
Are you effective at influencing people? Do you focus on appealing to people’s emotions? Are you inspiring people to achieve goals by emotionally engaging your people?
The Brain’s Trigger Center
If we had to evaluate every decision before acting, we’d be exhausted. Instead, we rely on the limbic system and our brain’s center for emotions and memories, the amygdala. This part of the brain acts as our personal navigation system, with an internal data bank of triggers.
The more complicated and sophisticated our lives become, the more we rely on simple ways to make decisions and get through each day — a key concept in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Smart managers, leaders and marketers understand this need.
This doesn’t mean you can skip logical arguments, but it does place less emphasis on reason and more on emotion. When you understand that people want to make rapid, automatic and accelerated decisions, you can make it easier on those you’re trying to influence and increase your success at persuasion.
How do we generate automatic influence? With triggers. Everybody has them. A trigger is any stimulus that will help us make a non-thinking decision or action. A trigger activates a person’s immediate compliance to an attempt to influence.
We are preprogrammed to comply with requests when a trigger is activated. It’s simply a shortcut to avoid the pain and effort of mental activity.
Each of us has infinite triggers, and some are universal. Research has identified seven super triggers. Once you understand them, you’ll see them everywhere — in every request you make, email you write and TV commercial you watch.
Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a transformational leader who persuades people by appealing to emotion. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.
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