Sunday, June 9, 2013

How to Convince Someone to Believe in Anything


Convincing someone to believe what you say is no more than simply convincing this someone to either accept a new idea or update his knowledge or belief about an existing idea. Not all people will accept your ideas with the same degree, however there are still rules that every person is subject to and if used correctly, will increase your chance of convincing other people to believe what you say.
 
If the person you want to convince already has prior knowledge or experience of what you're trying to convince him with, then your primary goal is to shake his beliefs and proving him false and only then present him with your own idea. If the person does not have a previous idea about that thing, you can just start by presenting your own view right away.

Why Can't I Convince Other People?

Before learning how to convince someone to believe in something or to accept your idea, you should first know the reasons that generally make people oppose ideas:

* Belief Conflict:
If one of your friends told you that the earth does not in fact orbit the sun, what would be your There would be no way you could believe him since you already know that all eight planets orbit the sun, something which you have seen proven time and time again. You already have an opposing belief so the first obstacle facing your friend when trying to convince you is your own belief system.

* Knowledge:
The greater a person's knowledge about something, the harder will it be to convince him of something different. What do you think will happen if you tried to convince an astronomy professor that the sun is only 1000 km away from the earth? He'll never believe you because he already has deep knowledge of the subject and might have proven it scientifically himself. Thus the second obstacle to convincing people are their level of knowledge about what you're going to say. As you may have already noticed, the first two obstacles (prior belief and knowledge) can be grouped under one thing: having another belief that is contradicting with yours.

* Skeptics:
Skeptics are people who doubt almost everything and everyone. They just never accept anything unless they are truly sure of it. If you are dealing with a skeptic person then this will add further difficulties.

How to Convince Someone to Believe in Something

Based on the previous obstacles we can come up with counter techniques that can highly increase the probability of success when convincing someone.

Those techniques are:

* Shaking His Existing Belief:
The more assertive and confident you are while talking about your idea, the higher the possibility of shaking the other person's belief about that thing (given that he does not have much knowledge about it). Speak in a confident way, use confident body language and gestures and use a confident voice tone and you will find that the other person may start to doubt his own idea.

* Undermine His Knowledge Base:
Even if you were confident while talking, the other person's knowledge base could act as a barrier to your ideas. That's why convincing him that you know more than him is more important than trying to convince him of your idea itself because if you manage to convince him that you know more than he does, you will become a trusted source for his subconscious mind and it will become much easier to program him (see subconscious mind programming for more information on this). You don't need magic to do this, you just have to be ready with proper documentation and clues. The more clear your evidence is, the more you will be able to undermine his own knowledge base and so convince him to see your point of view.(See the power of knowledge in negotiations).

* Provide Proof for the Skeptic:
Contrary to common belief, skeptics can be made to believe in something new provided you have clear evidence to prove your idea. The more clues you can provide to strengthen your argument, the less skeptic the other person will be and so the easier he will be convinced.

* Program His Subconscious Mind:
The subconscious mind can be programmed by repetition: the more a command is repeated, the more it can shake an already existing belief provided that either the conscious mind is absent or that the source of the idea is trusted. For more information on programming someone's mind check out this guide. You can even program someone into falling in love with you, in my book, how to make someone fall in love with you I pointed out how can repeating certain words or phrases result in making someone fall in love with you. Its no magic, beliefs are formed by repetition and if you managed to repeat a certain belief enough times, the other person may actually start to believe in it too

* Believing in Your Idea:
Do you notice that when a person really believes in an idea he usually takes it to the light? The entrepreneur who always believed that his idea is worthy usually succeeds in building a very good business. The more you believe in your idea the more confident and, most importantly, convincing you will be when talking about it.

* Repetition and the Law of Attraction:
You can make the process of programming someone's mind distributed over time, that is each time you meet him you talk a little about your idea then leave him. The phrases you have said to him will not be removed by his subconscious mind, instead they will be stored until something enforces them. For example, if you kept telling your friend that he is a poor driver, he may not believe you until he happens to have an accident. When this happens, he will remember all of your comments about his driving skills and will be convinced that you are right.

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I think this is immoral.

Programming, manipulating, controlling people, and for what?

"Criticism and the law of attraction"?

Why would you want to convince your friends of that they are bad at something? I would want to convince my friends of that they are good at something!

There're websites about how to change other people's minds! I'm horrified and appalled.

Yeah... Stupid me...

I remind me of Pratchett's Leonardo of Quirm. "But no-one would actually USE them!"

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