[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein.

Welcome to "Side by Side."

My guest today is a leading expert in communication and a master of influence.

He's known for his ability to help people unlock their potential through the power of persuasion.

Join me as we explore exactly what to say with Phil Jones.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side with Nido Qubein" is made possible by.

- [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Announcer] Truist, We are here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our team makes makes the difference every day.

Truist, leaders in banking, unwavering in care.

[upbeat orchestral music] - Phil, welcome to "Side by Side."

I read your famous book titled "Exactly What to Say" from cover to cover twice.

It is loaded with information that's applicable, practical, useful to everyone.

Tell us why did you write the book, and what are the strongest points in the book, if you will.

- Sure, sure, well, firstly, thank you for having me here on the show.

It's a delight to be here.

And the book has been a journey.

It's been really the embodiment of my life's work since I've been training non-sales people to be able to sell with more confidence and more competence in all areas of their life.

And the tiny massive book is what we've learned to call it.

You can read it cover to cover in 72 minutes.

So I'm delighted you've read it twice.

It is a book full of what we call my magic words.

And what magic words are are words that talk straight to towards the subconscious brain that allow people to be more pulley and persuasive in conversations without coming across overbearing.

And the key ideas in the book, really, are about how to be strategically more curious.

I'm gonna let you into a secret is I position the book as magic words, the words aren't magic, they're not.

What they are is 23 sequences of words that are examples of principles of influence and persuasion.

See, if I wrote a massive book full of principles, there'd be a strong possibility people couldn't read it and people would struggle to find examples.

Whereas if I can do a tiny book full of examples, people trip over principles.

And my passion behind this has come from seeing people who are remarkably good at what they do, who fail to get the levels of success they're capable of because they don't know how to ask for it.

I believe that your success is in direct correlation to the quantity of quality asks that you make in your life.

Full stop.

And people are wishing, waiting, hoping, and praying for change when they could be asking for it.

So I wanted to empower people with skills and tools that would almost be an assistant or an aid to give them confidence.

They could borrow confidence in my work so they could make bolder asks, they can have more confidence when showing up in life's high stakes moments.

And the book has been a joy.

I first published it in 2017.

It's a rewrite of a book I wrote in 2012 called "Magic Words."

This has lived in my body of work since 2008, but when I republished the book in 2017, we've now gone on to what almost 3 million copies translated into 29 different languages.

It's taken me all around the world to work with people from archeologists through to zookeepers and everybody in between.

And it's been a ton of fun, it's been a ton of fun, Nido.

- And you travel the world now and the stages of the world.

- 100%.

- Speaking to large audiences.

What do you say to them?

- What do I say to them when?

- I guess my question is how can you, in an hour, teach someone, enable someone to be persuasive using those magic words?

- I think when you are gifted the platform to an audience for 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, whatever it might be, that's a huge, huge gift.

And the overarching responsibility in that moment is to help people that there is something different that's possible in their life than they believed before they started.

And if you can stretch a belief to a point that somebody now sees there's a new version of possible that they didn't believe previously, they are forever changed for that.

So in a short period of time, rarely are you delivering people's skills.

More often than not, what you're doing is you're shifting their belief of what's possible.

From there they can then put things into practice.

If you can shift what they believe is possible and then give them some tools they can try, and they can start to try to utilize those skills as early as tomorrow, then their belief gets amplified and they will progress.

- So give me an example of a belief and then what happens with the shift.

- Well, I'll give a real simple example is, how many times have you found yourself in a situation where you wanted to tell somebody what to do without them feeling like they're being told what to do?

because you know- - Every day.

- They want to know what to do, right, but they don't wanna feel pushed or pressured.

It's this situation that shows up on repeat.

And what people often find themselves saying in those examples is they say, "What I think you should do," or, "What I'd like you to do," or, "Please can you do this for me?"

And they hit resistance and friction.

See, people think that no is the enemy of yes when it comes to influence and persuasion.

It isn't.

Friction and any form of indecision is what stands in the way of momentum.

So if you can free up momentum, people will travel quicker and often travel further.

So instead of telling somebody what to do, all you do is you borrow a piece of basic psychology that human beings are a lot like sheep.

We're very happy to follow a crowd.

We're very happy to follow safety in numbers, which is why, we're far happier believe the restaurant recommendations of 47 strangers on a Google review than we will the single recommendation from our mother-in-law.

We're way happier to be able to believe that.

So if you're trying to be able to influence with safety in numbers and knowing that people like to be told what to do without feeling like they're being told what to do, you simply share with them here's what most people would do in your scenario.

And when you say, "Here's what most people would do in your scenario," a little voice goes off in the head and says, "Aha, I'm most people.

So if that's what most people would do, there's a good chance I'd do that too."

And I know what like three of you at home are thinking right now, you're like, "That would never work on me because I'm not most people."

Yet the same words can work, 'cause you simply say, "Look, don't be like most people."

- Mm-hmm.

Yes.

- Right?

And instantly they're like, "Oh, I could utilize that tomorrow.

I could start putting that into practice now."

And it's joyful because every day I get a stranger write to me to be like, "I borrowed something in the book, I put it into practice, it allowed me to ask for more, and this is the result I got."

So it's been fun.

- So share with me some of these magic words and how they get placed in conversations to have the greatest impact.

- Well let's look at the number one reason that people don't ask for the things that they want in their life.

And the number one reason that people don't ask for what they want in their life is because they are fearful of rejection.

They are concerned that this is gonna make them look bad or somebody's gonna push back.

So we develop sequences of words that allow people to ask for just about anything of just about anybody and it be completely rejection-free.

See, if I wanted you to consider an idea of mine, instead of me asking you directly to consider the idea, I'd position it to the left of you or to the right of you with the preface of the words, "I'm not sure if it's for you."

If I preface and ask with the words, "I'm not sure if it's for you," your little voice inside your head is gonna think, "Well, firstly, I'll be the judge of that."

You take responsibility for the decision.

And second, and probably more importantly, curiosity is piqued.

You want to wonder what it is.

If I put a three-letter word on the end of that, the word but, what I can now do is shift the focus.

So if I was to say to you, "I'm not sure if it's for you, but," your little voice hears, "I'll be the judge of that.

What is it?

Can't stop looking at it."

How do people use that in the real world?

Well, I'm sure there are people at home today have got an ask that they'd like to make of somebody important in their life.

And instead of saying, "I want you to, I think you could, please can you," why not say, "I'm not sure if it's for you, but how open minded would you be to going to this restaurant on Thursday night?"

And we don't get rejection because the worst that happens is a conversation.

Somebody might say, "Well, why that?"

Somebody might push back and ask a question or two about it, but they're not saying heck no.

Right?

There's not this immediate pushback.

And the second example of rejection-free opening words in there is borrowing some more basic psychology.

If I asked a room of a thousand people who in this room would see themselves as open-minded, we'd get a thousand hands shoot to the sky, or at least 900, right?

The others don't raise their hands, regardless of what you ask.

- They're not listening.

The others are not listening, yeah.

- So if you take the fact that the whole world likes to see themselves as open-minded and you also apply it to a principle that the person who's asking the questions is in control of the conversation, we get another rejection-free opening formula: We could ask people how open-minded would they be to blank?

Like, "How open-minded would you be to looking at an alternative option?

How open-minded would you be to exploring a different point of view?

How open-minded would you be to learning how my experience is related to this?

How open-minded would you be to listening so you could understand at a greater level.

I mean, how open-minded would you be to asking more how open-minded questions?"

This is easy to do, and I think what people often get confused about is they think influence and persuasions then steps closely into the area of manipulation.

When done right, using language to influence is something you do for somebody, not something you do to somebody.

That's a big, big difference.

And it shows up in every area of leadership, whether you're leading a business, whether you're leading your team, whether you're leading your family, whether you're leading your church group, whether you're leading a group of friends, we are all in the business of influencing moments.

And you don't push people through moments.

You pull people through moments.

And language is the one tool that we have to do that more than anything else, at least in my book.

- So content and context.

- [Phil] 100%.

- Where, so you look at the context of the event.

And then you use the right content to get people to buy in.

Is that what you're saying, effectively?

- Well, we have a simple belief that the worst time to think about the thing you're going to say is in the moment where you're saying it.

How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you're looking back on what you said and thought, "Who on earth was that idiot?"

It's almost impossible to debrief a conversation and change it, but you could pre-brief it, and then chances are you can create massive change.

So with that in mind, what I look at in every situation is, yes, how do you understand the context first.

I give the simplest example in the planet.

We've all experienced a young family member that we care about, say somebody under the age of five, that finds themselves upset for one reason or another, they have tears streaming down their face.

If you see a child that you care about that you love that's upset, what do you think the typical question is that somebody asks of that child in that given moment?

What do you think people ask typically, - Why are you sad?

- Right.

A version of what's wrong: why are you sad?

That's an example of asking a question that captures no context.

So when you ask somebody what's wrong, why are you sad?

You're asking a five-year-old to give consideration to the feelings they're struggling to be able to deal with, to understand and explore their nervous system at the greatest of scale and provide you back a solution for the pain that they're feeling in that given moment.

It's ridiculous to think that somebody could do that.

Instead, if you asked a curious question that earned you context, you'd both start to learn together.

And an example of a curious question in that same scenario is, what happened?

See their voice says, "I know this one," it creates a safe space.

"My sister did this, my friend did this, I heard this.

I was thinking that."

They can tell the truth quickly.

And it's the mistake that many people make is when you're trying to create change, you're talking about present and the future.

Yet the starting place should always be the past, because the past is a safe place.

And we do this in our conversations with our spouses.

We ask 'em to judge the day, like, "How was your day?"

Wouldn't we be better to say, "Well, what did you do with your day?"

'Cause we need context first.

No context.

Your content has nothing to stick to.

And we'll share that content without context is really noise.

- So one is more fact-based, the other one is more emotion-based?

- Oh they both exist, you need both.

To influence anybody, it's both an emotive decision and a logical decision.

We need both.

But one always comes before the other.

Something has to feel right in here before we ask you to make sense up here.

- So the familiar to me feels better than the unfamiliar to me.

- We start to create a feeling that creates an area of safety that then says the movement that we can travel forward on from here is important.

And if we're in any doubt about this logic and emotion piece is when you think about the person that you chose to marry, is it because that person met your multi-point inspection checklist for everything you were looking for in a spouse?

Or was there an overwhelming feeling that came first that said, "I can't quite describe this, but this feels like the direction of travel I want to go in," and then, "Oh, I think we can make this work long-term."

But it has to feel right first.

And one of the things that people struggle to feel, particularly in a moment of change, is safe.

So what happens when you add chaos to a feeling of chaos?

We create more chaos.

The way I try to make people see this simply is change is moving from order to new order.

If you are gonna move from order to new order, the only way to get from order to new order is through chaos.

So if you are good at influencing people, you're good at organizing chaos.

That's the job, really, is how do you organize the chaos inside somebody's mind so they can make decisions more clearly.

And if you want people to see yes as the only option, you don't have to make yes sound better.

What you're better to be able to do is to destroy all the options of, no: it's a process of deductions.

It isn't 100 good reasons to choose you.

It's no good reason not to.

And that creates a very different puzzle inside your mind.

- Does that work in politics?

I mean do politicians, there must be a reason why we have a society that polarizes when it comes to politics.

- 100%.

- The people don't agree.

They come from both sides of an issue.

I can see how in sales one can learn the techniques to do that, the methodology, if you will, which is really what you're teaching.

You're teaching a methodology to take someone from this position to this position with safety and with agreement.

Where does it fail in politics?

- I mean, in political environments, what you're looking to be able to do is to create movement and buy-in and to align other people's existing beliefs to the beliefs that you'd like them to be able to amplify more.

So what I see many a politician do very skillfully, when done right, is they will create chaos on purpose that pushes people further towards a belief of some extremity.

Because what that does is that stretches the middle further out, particularly when there are two opposing forces.

The hardest thing for humans to do, and I believe this very, very strongly, is that politics is very often about creating sides and right and wrong, but humanity is far more about saying, "Well, where are the areas that it is that we look to be able to agree on?"

And I remember a really detailed conversation.

I grew up in England.

We have some very different controls around carrying firearms.

Simple example, my best friend in the whole world lives in Tennessee and has grown up with firearms his entire life, when we first started our friendship is I would try to convince him he was wrong to have his belief, and he would think I was a fool for the belief that I would have.

And later when you start to get into more meaningful conversations, he could ask me like, "Well, what is my experience of living on a 10-acre farm and being away on a business trip and your wife being at home calling you with headlights coming up the drive?"

I'm like, "I got nothing."

And I could ask him, "Well, what is your experience of being in a built-up metropolitan area like New York City or London and being concerned about somebody carrying a weapon in that environment?

Even when our police force in the UK only certain divisions carry weapons."

He's like, "I got nothing."

And what would happen is we could find ourselves in a detailed conversation for a period of time with two people who had polarizing different beliefs that if you've got the skill to stay in conversation for long enough, we got to be able to agree on something really important.

He thinks guns are a good idea 'cause he'd like to keep his family safe.

I believe that guns weren't such a good idea because I'd like to keep my family safe.

So we have a remarkably rich conversation about the fact that we both would love to keep our families safe.

And what starts to happen is we start to grow empathetic viewpoints for the other side of a decision and humanity moves forward, instead of this all the time.

- How does that work when someone is, let's say someone is a realtor or someone is an automobile salesperson, Give us an example where I'm coming in just to look and take me to the point of where you're gonna close the sale.

- I do a huge amount of work within the real estate space, and I think that the greatest awareness that people should understand is what is standing in their way is indecision.

It isn't the people that need to be persuaded into buying the house or to sell with them, it's the people who are sat around a coffee table today saying, "What shall we do?"

- Is that because they're afraid of something, or what would cause the indecision?

- Well, most people, and people don't walk into showrooms anymore in the same way.

People are browsing online.

I would imagine that there are hundreds of people watching this discussion right now that are thinking about making a move on their next house.

For example, they could be in a low interest rate that they secured in 2021 and their existing house isn't fit for their current circumstances.

And they're having an internal debate around the family table about shall we or shouldn't we move?

And what's the right thing and what's the wrong thing to do?

The mistake that most real estate professionals are making is they're not in that conversation.

They're waiting for the person to be able to make their mind up to say, "Hey, can you now help me?"

What smart professionals do is they get to the mess earlier and then put themselves in a marketplace of one.

And the same I would say is true for students in an academic environment is don't put yourself in the shop window with a hundred other students with a similar set of qualifications to you to say, "I want the job."

Is get to the conversation three months or six months earlier with the employer you'd like to work for, offer something of value, find out what puzzles they're trying to solve and show them why you are uniquely positioned to be able to help them.

The safest place to stay in a conversation is the gray space.

Everybody wants things to be black and white, but if you can be a helper in the gray space, we're in trouble.

How would that show up in a conversation in an auto dealership?

When people try to sell their car, what they'd be better to be able to do is to help somebody realize they don't wanna be driving the car they're currently driving.

See, if you walked into my auto dealership, I would say, "Well, so what are you driving right now Nido?"

And you're like, "I know this one."

I'd be like, "Well, how long have you had it?"

You'd be like, "I know this one too."

I'd be, "Well, what is it about that car that attracted it to you in the first place?"

You are like, "I know this one too."

I'd say, "What three things do you like best about it?"

You'd say, "I know this one."

I'd say, "If there was one thing you could change about it, well, what would the one thing be?"

And you'd tell me that too.

What I've now got is an angle.

- You've got information out of me.

- [Phil] I've got a huge amount of information.

- That's research right there.

- Well, I found out what you value in the decision-making of buying any car by asking you about your existing decision-making process.

I could then say, "So you've walked into my car dealership today.

I guess you did that for a purpose?"

And you'd be like, "Yeah, sure, well, I'm thinking about changing."

I could then say, "Well, what is it that's made you think about changing?"

I could say, "Well, what is it that made you choose to come here as opposed to anywhere else?"

And you're doing all the work, but what many people think they need to do is like, "I'm so glad you came in today.

Let me tell you about our fantastic new dealership.

Take a sit in it.

You can choose any color.

I mean, the blue looks great on you.

I mean, can you smell the leather?"

Like imagine what your friends and family are gonna think of you driving this.

You see, I could say that, and I could say imagine what your friends and family are gonna think of you driving this.

And your inside voice could be like, "Oh man, they're gonna think I'm bragging.

They're gonna think I'm showing off.

They're gonna think, they're gonna think, they're gonna think."

So it could have negative consequences.

The belief to get to work on in your communications anywhere is if you say it might not be true, if they say it has to be true to them.

- They believe it.

Yeah.

- So whatever you are looking for somebody to believe, help them say it from their own mouth, and then they can't argue with themselves.

- This is very helpful information, by the way.

I can see why you're successful at what you're doing.

We talk about fact, logic, and emotion.

Are these equal 50/50 in your mind?

Do they shift based on the environment and the occasion?

- They're always moving.

They could be 99/1.

They could be 50/50.

They could be any ratio in between.

I think it depends upon the stakes of the situation.

And think about what you've spent money on.

There are many sets of circumstances that you've overspent on something that makes absolutely zero sense.

I'll give one example, right, is I spent $25 for an hour's worth of wifi on my flight from New York to the Carolinas.

That's a ridiculous sum of money.

There is no logical argument to that being the right thing to be able to do.

If I'd have planned my time differently, I could have done something different with an hour on the plane.

I could have used that $25 for difference.

But I felt like I needed it.

I was working on something that I was in a flow state with.

So what I then do is the feeling says, "No, I want wifi."

I then justify it with logic and say, well, look how much more productive I can be with the time.

It's this tension between logic and emotion that never stops going away, and battling that tension is what makes sense.

- So what happens when you're dealing not with an individual, but you're dealing with a body of people.

- [Phil] Yes.

- So we'll say sort of like.

- [Phil] Like a board or a committee.

- Well, when people come to hear you speak, they they're already sold on the fact he's a good speaker, we've heard about him and so on.

But if someone, if a mayor in a city or a governor in a state, or trying to do that with a community that has a variety of points of view, variety of backgrounds, a variety of needs, variety of mores and folk ways.

How do you do that with a body that's larger than an individual?

- There's a button that lives inside the mind of every decision-maker on the planet.

And it's a button I've learned to call the show-me-that-you-know-me button The minute you can- - Show-me-that-you-know-me button?

- Show-me-that-you-know-me button.

If you can trigger the show-me-that-you-know-me button inside the mind of the people that you're looking to work with.

- In other words, identifying and acknowledging their wishes and needs and hopes and so on.

- Yeah, it's just having people felt seen.

I speak in front of a number of big audiences and people are saying like, "What does it feel like to speak to an audience of 1,000 people?"

I say, "I'm not speaking to an audience of 1,000 people.

I'm having a one-on-one conversation that happens to exist with 1,000 people at exactly the same time," and.

- But that's nice to say.

You don't know the thousand people.

How can you determine what they are?

- Well, you can do enough to know about them.

You can do a huge amount of work before the work to be able to understand as to what are the challenges, obstacles, passions, beliefs, et cetera that exist in the primary stakeholders inside that group.

You can do that and that work ahead of time can differentiate.

If I'm speaking to an audience of a thousand people, it isn't an audience of a thousand people.

It's 37 brand new employees that started in the last four weeks.

It's an established member of the C-suite that is scared about their job.

It's an event planner that hopes they don't get fired for hiring me.

It's some experienced professionals that are there with their arms folded saying, "What's this kid gonna teach me today?"

It's some hungry people that are like, "Well, I can't wait till it gets to lunch."

It's an awareness of what was laid down ahead of time, of what the speaker shared before where you think, "Well, if there's an open loop where your material hits their material, that loop needs to be closed."

And this is a joyful puzzle to serve because the job's never done.

And any act of influence, persuasion, or leadership is a huge responsibility.

And if we talk about committees, we talk about large audiences, the quality that's often missing is the emotional intelligence to be humble enough to know that it has nothing to do with you.

Your job is to serve the moment.

And once you can let go of that, you can find new levels of confidence.

- [Nido] That things happen.

Yeah.

- Because you've just decided it's not about you.

It's about that.

- Phil, we thank you for all the good that you do, and I thank you for being with me on "Side By Side."

- A huge pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

[bright orchestral music] [bright orchestral music continues] - [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side with Nido Qubein" is made possible by.- - [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- [Announcer] Truist, We are here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our team makes makes the difference every day.

Truist, leaders in banking unwavering in care.