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To Learn How to Influence Well, Assume Everything That Goes Wrong Is Your Fault

This advice may sound strange, but it will serve you well. The overall logic for this observation is quite simple. If you believe in the idea that your main goal is to proactively influence outcomes, then by definition any undesired outcome means that you weren’t “smart” enough to “avoid” it through influence. Thus, the blame rests with you.

This is true not only for what you unsuccessfully tried to influence, but can be expanded to undesired situations in general, even including things that happen to you without your doing anything, or that were outside of your own control. This may sound like stretching it a bit, but my logic here is that you weren’t smart enough to anticipate, recognize, or avoid it, so it is your fault as well.

Now, I’m not suggesting that indeed you are always at fault. You may not be, and you will not be able to influence everything around you. What I’m suggesting is that if you want to develop the art of influencing, you must start with the assumption that you are always at fault for any undesired outcome, regardless. Only when you start with this assumption will you reevaluate every situation and ask yourself how you might have been able to avoid a poor outcome. Did you anticipate everything? Should you have? Did you read all the signs properly? Over time, these introspective analyses will train your mind to anticipate much more and look at many more possible scenarios, beforehand. You will actually be amazed at how much better you will become at proactively influencing outcomes around you. I have experienced it myself.

When I was younger, I first noticed that practically everybody’s first instinct for all undesirable outcomes that involved themselves, both in business and personal life, was to blame other people or circumstances. Somehow, it always ended up being the fault of others and never theirs. I’m sure you have seen it yourself, to one degree or another, many times. The next thing I observed, and which took time for me to notice, was that because of blaming others, people learned very little from their mistakes. Clearly, if something is not your fault to begin with, it is not your mistake, thus there is no need for retrospection and reevaluation. I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself, over and over again. With time and perspective, I also began to see just how damaging this behavior was to a person’s own personal growth and career progression. What I didn’t see for the longest time was that I, too, was guilty of externalizing blame.

I actually believed that I was different and didn’t do what everybody else did. I believed I was much smarter (in terms of being more “right”) than the average person I interacted with. So, whenever we reached a disagreement of sorts, it was indeed the other person’s fault. They were the “stupid” ones, so it wasn’t my mistake, and therefore there was nothing to learn from. It was even worse—I was amazed, bewildered, and just couldn’t understand how they never cared to learn from their own mistakes, even after I explained so logically to them where they were wrong in their thought processes.

Truth be told, oftentimes logic may have been on my side. But that is not the point. What I didn’t understand at the time was that by focusing on right and wrong, logical or illogical, I was completely blind to the art of influencing. Only when that changed and when I stopped evaluating everything from the perspective of logically right and wrong did I recognize that the issue was not right versus wrong. The issue was that an outcome wasn’t achieved, regardless of fault. When the outcome takes precedence over fault or right versus wrong, only then did I put myself in a position to ask the most basic question of them all: Could I have achieved the desired outcome in any other way? That’s when and how the art of influencing began for me.

It began first by dissecting outcomes I desired and was unable to achieve. The questions I started asking were, What could I have done better, or differently? Then it followed with anticipating potential conflict situations and proactively trying to influence the outcome. With time, I became better and better at it. However, only much later in life did I expand the definition to assume responsibility for all undesirable situations, including those I had little, if any, control over. I assumed full responsibility and adopted for myself the same advice I am giving you in this chapter. That was the last stage of my learning and becoming more effective at influencing.

There were some extra side benefits to this philosophy of never blaming anybody else but yourself for all undesirable outcomes. Whenever a person believes that they are not at fault, they also tend to become more defensive and confrontational with the people they perceive to be at fault. This brings about two potential problems. First, it is almost impossible to effectively influence when portraying a defensive and confrontational attitude. So, the situation at hand may not get corrected and the desired outcome not likely to be achieved. Second, defensiveness and confrontational attitudes are rarely viewed favorably in the business world. A person developing such a reputation will most likely slow down or even damage their career progression. Assume responsibility, per my recommendation, and you not only significantly increase the opportunity after the fact to correct an undesirable outcome, but you will also likely help your career progression.