Step Two: Inflame

In addition to the external climate, meaning the environment around you, there is also an internal climate created by the emotions you experience when making a decision. It’s very similar to what happens to Tita in Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, who imbued the food she prepared with the emotions she experienced while cooking.

We can have top-quality ingredients and the best techniques, but our emotions will have an incredibly relevant impact on the final dish we set on the table. We need to make up for this. Our grandmothers always said we should avoid making decisions with a “hot head.” If I’m sad, I may see things differently than if I’m happy, but the issue is much more complex than that, and we need to talk about it. Conventional wisdom suggests separating thoughts from feelings, when one is actually shaped by the chisel of the other. The only thing we can do to minimize the effect of those “hot” or “cold” heads is to understand that the decisions we make with extreme joy or sadness will never be the best examples.

Extreme emotions will tend to produce extreme decisions, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. An excessively cheerful person will tend to make mistakes similar to those who feel anger or seek revenge. Knowing the emotional states from which we operate is essential because they will creep into our decisions.

Once you’ve followed the recipe’s step-by-step process—picking top-quality ingredients, meticulously following the preparation instructions, and making sure there’s a favorable climate for everything to work—you still need to like the result of what you’ve prepared: The time has come to listen to yourself because that’s where you’ll find the missing data.

INVISIBLE FACTORS

We’ve done an exercise to reduce subjectivity in some decisions. Then we added the effects of the weight we give to information and analyzed how our emotions come into play. But we’ve left out other criteria that are related to what we can’t control ourselves, although we can look for ways to do so. Sometimes, no matter how much math we use, the key lies in knowing ourselves better, as we discussed in Step One.

TO BE LISTENED TO WITHOUT JUDGMENT IS BEAUTIFUL.

Doing these exercises helps us make more balanced decisions, but there’s another benefit that’s not always discussed: It forces us to be honest about what we want and why.

The following anecdote helped me understand this benefit. Shortly after studying these decision-making methods, and as if he’d wanted to test me, my brother told me he wanted to buy a car. I felt happy. It was as if I could try out a new toy. I convinced him to use a model like the one we reviewed a few pages earlier. After a fairly meticulous search for information, he chose eight criteria for four vehicle models and carefully reviewed them. When it came time to rate them, one of the cars was the clear winner. “No way,” he said. “Let’s do it again.” We did it again after adjusting the values. The winning car came out on top again, but my brother was still suspicious.

He wanted another result. His ego had already made a choice and he only needed the calculations to confirm it. This doesn’t mean the calculation model was wrong. My brother just never took into account the factors that were relevant to his personal configuration. He didn’t add them to the equation, and he didn’t reveal them either: prestige, design, affinity, and others that perhaps he was unable to recognize—or never wanted to admit—such as symbols of power in his social environment, nostalgia, or vanity. That’s why it’s important to know if what we’ve added to the equation responds to our most sincere desires. When buying a car, I don’t think many people add “I want everyone to notice me when I drive by” or “I want to look like Brad Pitt” to the equation, yet that doesn’t mean these things don’t have an impact when it comes to assessing the vehicles.

Tools such as these serve to minimize, never avoid, subjective bias, or at least give us the courage to admit to it. It’s even harder to isolate decision-making from personal issues, such as relationships, entrepreneurship, or your college major. These must also be accounted for.

It may be that our inability to draw conclusions has to do with our inability to accept the decisions we make. This may be related to the distance that exists between what we want and what we consider adequate. Can I pay the consequences of the decision model I have chosen? This is the big question we face when we must weigh our priorities. Weighing each criterion can be a struggle between what is desired and what is right, between what we expect of ourselves and what others expect of us. Resolving this struggle is a process that precedes any plan. Disregarding the importance of these aspects may lead to dissatisfaction with whatever results we get.

But not every important decision is ours to make. Sometimes we care about the decisions made by others whom we can influence. To roar, we need the echo of those who can hear us and will consider our ideas; hence the importance of knowing how to influence others.

RESONANCE

The need to persuade is innate. From a very early age, we use all available resources to persuade others to react in the way we want them to. Among our first acts are crying, moaning, or knocking things over to get a reaction from our parents. You have that ability, but you may have lost a little confidence to make it work.

Knowing how to persuade is not about going through life maliciously manipulating people to always act in your best interest. It has to do with maximizing the mechanisms that allow you to accentuate your voice. The value of influence in business and personal relationships will come to mind, but it’s also important in areas you may never have dared to enter, such as conceptual fields or spirituality.

We must abandon the idea that persuasion is getting others to do our bidding even when they don’t want to. It’s so much more than that. Rather than using these tactics to sell a used car, they can become a key to changing attitudes or achieving cohesion, because learning to influence others also allows us to learn more about their ideas and to increase our own tolerance and that of those around us.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT BUTTONS CERTAIN WORDS WILL PUSH.

Influencing is not a one-person job; it’s made possible through interaction. We have all the resources at our disposal to help our counterpart reach their conclusion. We will not always succeed in imposing our vision; it wouldn’t be good for anyone if that were to happen. Having resources to persuade improves the quality of our communication, allows our ideas to resonate, and increases the power they have to influence decisions. When your ideas are understood, valued, and considered, the benefits are immediate.

We’re often vulnerable to someone trying to sell us something. Fortunately, we don’t succumb to every detergent or coffee commercial we see. First, we are not the target of the vast majority of the products we are exposed to; only a few messages are geared to our profile or our way of thinking. But even when we’re the focus of certain products, some will get our consent and some will not. At the end of the day, we will only succumb to buying a certain number of the hundred products that try to seduce us.

In the face of effective influence, no one feels that they’ve lost control because everyone has been able to consider their options and come to a conclusion without unnecessary pressure. But manipulation is nearby—an inhospitable, oppressive, dictatorial territory. We know we are facing manipulation when there is only one clear winner. It may sneak in undetected, but it will not take long to be discovered: Manipulation always hides between two evil choices. It arises from the contamination of the soul. It is a raptorial, emotional plunder. It sows weeds that only serve to poison the soil.

Certain psychological techniques can convince young people to join hate groups, girls that their only asset is their body, pensioners to invest their life’s efforts in a hollow pyramid. The power of manipulation is immense. Likewise, it has been used for good, to call for peace and promote solidarity. Therefore, it’s important to know when we’re facing mind games that seek to alter our decisions. Nowhere has this been more skillfully played out than in sales tactics. These include transactions of products and services, and also the dissemination of ideologies and dogmatic thoughts.

When we try to influence others, there are several factors we must monitor. To better understand this, let’s simplify it as a model and look at its most relevant components. First, there are those who are trying to cause a reaction, that is, those who want to persuade. Let’s call the people they want to convince the target. Only a specific group of them will receive the message. Communication happens through a method, which produces responses. All these factors are enclosed within a set of circumstances that will affect the outcome. For example, messages of hate and violence elicit one response in times of prosperity and another entirely different one in times of economic and social crises, even when the messenger, their targets, and the method remain the same. As you can see, this is related to the decision recipe model: same ingredients but different climates during the preparation.

THANK YOU TO THOSE WHO TEACH ME WHAT I DON’T WANT FOR MYSELF.