What to Watch Out For

• When you make a mistake or hurt someone’s feelings (and you will; with your need to move people to act, it is inevitable), learn to apologize. What’s wonderful about you is that mistakes and hurt feelings rarely derail you— you chalk it up to experience and then move on. What’s not so great is that you’ve moved on so quickly that you’ve forgotten to be contrite. What feels like momentum to you, feels like disrespect to others. You may never do this naturally—stopping to apologize feels like stalling—so learn a couple of phrases you can say when it’s clear you’ve pushed too hard or too fast. “How can I make this right for you?” is a good one, as is the classic, “I’m sorry.”

• We live in a digital, data-based world where virtually every action and consequence can be measured. Many of the people you seek to persuade are comforted by data and are prepared to make a decision only when supplied with the data that “prove” a particular action will lead to a particular consequence. Learn to become proficient in the language of data. Learn how to marshal the facts so that others with a lower tolerance for ambiguity can lean on these facts and find the certainty they need.

• Your persuasive instinct needs to be focused on the decision maker. There’s nothing worse than going all out to win someone over and persuade him to act, only to discover that he has neither the authority nor the budget to make the decision. So before you flex your influencing muscles, take the time to identify the “decider.”

• Because you are energized by resistance you may sometimes, albeit unconsciously, seek out resistance simply because it is more fun to turn around a no than to get a yes right away. While it may indeed be more fun it will, of course, slow down momentum. Whenever you feel yourself being lured by the thrill of the push-back, yank your attention back to the bigger prize of decision, action, movement, and, ultimately, impact.