Margaret’s Persuasion Coach Blog

I love it when my trainees not only learn, but also contribute to others’ learning. In a recent training course, several participants made great suggestions for clarifying email…You’ll be amazed at how much better you like your written communications and how much better others understand them.

So if you want to see some science behind the Law of Attraction, there you have it. Scientifically designed studies at Harvard, plus a wealth of practical experience by people like me, my clients and trainees, show that gratuitous wrong making (negative focus) knocks the legs out from under any efforts to change people’s minds—about politics or anything else.

I wondered how to keep my financial consultant reading this article beyond the words “The Secret”…”Happily, I found that a Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Fred Small, had already done it for me…He writes, “I don’t want to deny or flee the negative, but I need not build my house on its sinkhole.”

The most important thing my mother (and my father, too) taught me was to think about how my actions might affect others…an essential element of my moral compass, my concepts of right and wrong…Acquiring this habit when I was young made it easier for me later to understand and successfully practice the consensus building skills I now teach, write and consult about.

From the logical left brain perspective, a wealth of study and experience show that wrong making is counterproductive. People who feel made wrong resist your message by denial, rationalization and projection…from The Book of Joy’s mystic perspective, producing fear or anger in any member of our interconnected web will ultimately increase unhappiness for all. Again, we see that it’s best to avoid wrong making as much as we can.

In the northern hemisphere, April naturally evokes feelings of hope. Snow has melted, and for the most part, stopped falling. Flowers bloom. Birds sing. April is a gentle month, rarely either very cold or very hot. No wonder so many northern cultures developed upbeat holidays for this time of year.

I love it when experts approaching a topic from different perspectives converge on the same conclusion. The Book of Joy[1] describes the Buddhist practice of mudita, or sympathetic joy…And here, it comes to the same conclusion as left-brained research, such as that from the Harvard Negotiation Project: most things in life don’t have to be a zero-sum game.

A few days ago, I came across this quote from Harmony by Karate by Sensei John, ” “Support others in the way they want to be supported.” I posted it in a Facebook group I administer, arousing curiosity about what it meant. So I promised to blog about it this week. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 3 of my book Bridges to Consensus.

Good news! I’ve made enough progress planning my next book to give you all a little preview…I tested the waters with my “Bridges Across Politics” series of blog articles. The analytics…convinced me to write my next book on how to communicate about politics.