THE ART OF PERSUASION
Luiz Augusto Araujo
The art of persuation
Communicate effectively
and create more opportunities in life!
Goiânia 2015
Araujo, Luiz Augusto
A658a A arte de conVENCER! / Luiz Augusto Araujo. – Goiânia : Editora Interativa, 2010.
122 p. ; 20 cm.
Translation Jean Cláudio Fiusa, Ana Cláudia Fiusa e Kamyla Marques Fius
CDUD 37.064
Copyright © 2013 Luiz Augusto Araujo
Reprodução digital da 1ª edição publicada em 2010
Cover
Pawllyn
Cover Adaptation
Lara Vieira
To God, for the opportunity to accomplish this Project.
To my wife Karinne, for so much love and dedication.
To my parents, siblings and friends, for the encouragement.
To the Master Business School (ESUP/FGV).
And to all the professionals who participated directly or indirectly in the production of this work.
COMMUNICATE WELL AND BE SUCCESSFUL!
“Good conduct is the root of professional success and personal fulfillment.”
Carlos Rossini
Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.”
Samuel Johnson
With strength, it is possible to coerce people to do what you want. If you use hierarchical power, the only alternative left will be subservience. However, they will be persuaded in none of these cases. The use of instruments of oppression is limited and fragile. The best weapon of all is undoubtedly the argument. The real power is in the words, because only with their proper use will you be able to influence people, cultivate good relationships and get the cooperation and commitment of those around you.
The art of persuasion is thus the exercise of effective communication. With it, you open the doors to opportunities and take the steps to reach your goals.
Remember: those who relate to others easily and master the power of the argument usually occupy the top positions and create more chances in life. It shortens the paths to achievements, both personal and professional. If success is a gradually built structure, then good communication is its foundation.
To enhance this capacity is a constant challenge and a daily task for everyone. While there are people who seem to be born communicators, this competence is not genetic, but acquired with time, experience, and training. Given these findings, this book has one goal: to address the importance of the development of interpersonal communication in its various aspects and at the same time shows its relevance in the socialization process and in the pursuit of knowledge.
As it is almost impossible to develop communication without evoking some emotional qualities - such as self-esteem, courage, and determination -, this book can not fail to highlight the importance of managing and developing these competencies, as they intervene in the communication process.
Some people make the mistake of thinking that good communication is summarized in the art of public speaking. Although it is an important tool to be developed, it alone has little value. The improvement of interpersonal communication is a broader process: incorporating behavioural aspects, emotional issues, body posture, and essential skills such as how to listen, talk and write as correctly as possible.
Effective communication is a skill which is increasingly demanded in the workplace. The skill of persuasion, whether in writing or in speech, has become a competitive differentiator. Today, it’s not enough to be gifted with vast technical knowledge if you are not an expert in the art of dealing with people, especially those who love to disagree with the ideas of others. In light of this, companies want to have employees who are also sellers of conduct which transmits optimism, administrators of conflicts and especially promoters of a healthy environment and productive work.
For Argentinian writer and philosopher Albert Camus, "greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way”. The development of interpersonal communication is the shortest path to success and a major means to become great and strong in the face of challenges and obstacles that often arise in our lives.
This work is not intended to provide a recipe of how to get along in life; this is neither here nor in any other book. However, here you will find tips and information that will lead you to discover the hidden power within yourself, to value your determination and power and, above all, reflect on the need to enhance interpersonal communication. People who express themselves properly are more likely to be successful in everything they do. Those who have problems - for different reasons - cannot sit still, but should seek progress urgently. So from now on, have as a goal, the improvement of your daily interpersonal communication, because you will depend on it to find new opportunities.
THE TREE OF ACHIEVEMENTS IS WATERED WITH CONFIDENCE IN OURSELVES AND FERTILIZED WITH GOOD COMMUNICATION.
BE CONVINCING WHEN COMMUNICATING!
“We may convince others with our arguments; but we can only persuade them with their own.”
Joseph Joubert
“Communication is not what you say, but how it is understood.”
Cláudia Belucci
Maybe I should start this chapter by asking what is not communication. An equally difficult question. Somehow in almost everything we do, we are communicating. Actions, gestures, looks, speech and even silence often convey certain messages. The concept becomes wider when we insert new technological devices that shorten distances, facilitating and increasing the opportunities for the interconnection of information.
The word "communication", from Latin, means making it common to all, exchanging information, experience and knowledge. The rhythm of modern life makes people more isolated and lonely, and at the same time requires that they have a high degree of social interaction. The act of expressing oneself is accomplished through a system of codes - called signs - that enables communication itself, performed by properly arranged signals. We practise verbal communication daily with more intensity. More often, we resort to colloquial language, which, unlike formal speech is characterized by informality in phonetics, morphology, vocabulary and syntax. Both in speech and in writing, we use denotation (the real sense of words) and connotation (the figurative sense of words).
The communication process can be configured in the following equation:
Sender + message + receiver
To make information exchange possible, there must be a sender, who transmits the message through one or more channels, and a receiver, who decodes and unfolds it. However, this basic scheme does not guarantee an efficient nor effective communication.
DON'T CONFUSE APPLES WITH ORANGES!
Imagine a common situation: you tell a joke and realize that one of the group members did not understand anything. Somebody else decides to tell it again, and the result is a loud laugh among all. It happens, because the same message may not have the same meaning for different receivers. Or even worse, it can be misunderstood, causing mistakes. In other words, the person listens to something and understands something completely different. In order to make the real meaning understood; an appropriate communication channel should transmit the information for different occasions
The communication must be suitable to the profile of the listener. According to neurolinguistics, some people are auditory, as they assimilate the message just by hearing it; others are visual, as they also need to see to better understand the subject. There are also those people who are kinesthetic, as they need to feel it. You must know many people that when talking, need to touch their interlocutor. When purchasing a book, for example, they don’t just need to read the title. They need to touch it and feel the object, before being convinced. Whatever the type of listener, the transparency and focus are fundamental in the process of interpersonal communication. In practice, the simpler your speech is, the more efficient it will be. The controversial Irish playwright Bernard Shaw said that "there are several ways to be understood, to be clear is one of them." No doubt, clarity and objectivity are universal rules.
THE FEEDBACK OF COMMUNICATION
The same words can have different interpretations. To avoid this from happening, or have it occur in smaller proportions, there must be a feedback. But, what is this? This is just an English word, which was mainly adopted by the corporate world, as a need to obtain the quality of the information that has been transmitted
To better understand this situation, you can imagine a Ping-Pong game, in which you receive a message and give it back to your interlocutor. This “ball” exchange allows the conversation to continue and may eliminate or reduce the noise in the communication. You make more scores in this game of information when you stimulate the return of the information back to your interlocutor.
Therefore, feedback is when you feed the information with your interpretation and show your interlocutor that you understood it. This development is essential to providing the unfolding of the issues involved, which allows effective understanding of the main aspects, thus avoiding misunderstandings and misconceptions in communication
COMMUNICATION IS A NEGOTIATION
Is communication like negotiation? When using arguments (written or verbal), you are always "selling" or "buying" something, not necessarily products or services of any company. I’m referring to the negotiation of yourself, I mean, your personal or professional image. A good communicator will find it easier to do good business when "selling" his ideas and points of view.