Win Trust and Agreement by Staying Calm, Listening and Speaking Clearly

Influence is a set of skills you can practise on one real conversation you care about. People agree more readily when you arrive steady, ask about what matters to them, show up with presence and make a clear request. Used together and with integrity, these skills earn a yes that people are glad to keep.

Ways to Reach a Willing Yes in a Conversation That Matters

• Change your state on purpose before you speak, using your breath, your posture and the picture in your mind.
• Ask questions that invite people to say what matters to them, then use their exact words.
• Slow down, pause after important sentences and state your recommendation plainly.
• Turn any idea into three sentences covering what you recommend, why it matters to them and what happens next.
• Test every request by asking whether it works for you, for them and for the situation.

Prepare Your State Before You Say a Word

A listener feels your state before processing your words. From the wrong state, the best sentence in the world arrives damaged. From the right one, even an ordinary sentence can land. Under pressure, most people react automatically. The voice tightens, speech speeds up, and they start to defend themselves and over-explain.

A state can be changed deliberately, and a reset takes about a minute. Picture the person you need to speak with and rate your tension from one to ten. Sit up tall with your feet on the floor. Breathe in through the mouth, then let a longer breath out through the nose so the shoulders drop. Recall a time when you were at your best, and notice how the tension has shifted.

A second tool works on the picture you make of the conversation, because feelings follow that picture. Shrink the worst version to the size of a coin, push it far away and drain its colour and sound. Then make the best version bigger, closer and brighter, and hear your own voice speaking. The qualities you changed are called submodalities (features of a mental picture, such as size, distance and brightness).

Ask Better Questions and Listen for What Matters

People are rarely moved by your reasons, because they act on their own. So influence starts with what you ask. Compare two questions about one deadline. "Could you get it done by Friday?" invites a yes or no, and a no can quickly become an argument. "What would make Friday a realistic deadline for you?" shows you what is really in the way and starts the other person solving it.

When people talk, they also tell you how to influence them. Their values show up in words such as need, should and important. Their worries appear in "what if" and "the problem is". Their way of deciding comes through in phrases such as "as long as" and "only if".

The next move is to echo the words you hear. If someone says they need something to be fair, say fair, not balanced. Their own word carries their meaning, so using it meets them where they are. A home buyer feels the opposite when they call a house too small and hear it described as cozy, because they never used that word. Short phrases can help as well. Asking "what makes you say that?" brings out the real concern behind an objection, and you never have to argue with it.

Two more phrases show how small the changes can be. "I'm not sure if this is for you, but" brings in a new idea with no pressure, because it gives permission to say no. "What questions do you have for me?" replaces the usual "do you have any questions?" and presumes that some exist.

Build Presence Through Pace, Listening and Ownership

Presence is a skill you practise, and it has little to do with personality or volume. It matters because people sometimes judge your steadiness before they judge your ideas. Compare a rambling request full of maybes with "I recommend we move the launch two weeks", followed by a pause. The second version is slower and shorter, and it sounds owned.

Listening is the other half. When you think you know what someone will say, let them finish anyway. Your body matters too, because people believe a speaker whose words and body tell the same story. This match is called congruence. Try your opening line aloud with open hands and a pause, then again rushed with your arms crossed, and notice which one you would believe.

Presence also starts long before a meeting, in a hallway or in yesterday's email. Appreciation, recognition and encouragement cost nothing and change how people experience you. One leader at Walt Disney World (a resort with well over 200 restaurants) showed how far clear direction can go. He brought the chefs of all the restaurants into one room to agree on three types of French fries from one supplier, saving one point eight million dollars a year.

Make a Clear Ask People Can Act On

A good idea moves forward once people can see what to do with it. Three sentences give them that. The first says what you recommend, with no hedging. The second says why it matters to the listener, in their own words. The third says what happens next. For a delayed launch, that means recommending two more weeks, naming the testing time the team asked for, and asking whether the new date can be confirmed by Thursday.

Before any request, apply a test called the three-way win. Does it work for me, does it work for them, and does it make sense for the situation? A request that passes all three is influence. A request that fails any of them is adding pressure, which may win a yes and cost the relationship.

Winning an argument is rarely the goal. A leader who keeps pushing often finds the team digs in further, and even after a win the employee may have one foot out of the door. Asking what the person would need to make this succeed for them makes the talk much less pushy.

Use Persuasion Principles Only Where They Are True

Decades of research into why people say yes produced seven principles. They are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, likability, authority, scarcity and unity, and each can be used honestly. Giving something useful before you ask is reciprocity. Sharing what people like them have already done is social proof. Showing your credibility ahead of a recommendation is authority.

The ethical line is simple. If a principle is true of your situation, show it, and if it is not, leave it out. A sales countdown clock that simply restarts when you reload is manufactured scarcity. Genuine scarcity is what is truly unique about your offer, or what is truly at risk if they decline. Agreement built this way also lasts longer, because someone who trusts you has a reason to follow through.

Timeshare presentations show the opposite. A long run of easy questions builds a pattern of saying yes, so momentum carries the listener through the big buying question. An entire industry of lawyers helps people leave those contracts, because regret follows a yes they never really wanted.

Practise Until the Skills Hold Under Pressure

Consider a team leader whose colleague has missed two deadlines. A strong approach states the topic, pauses, acknowledges that the colleague is stretched and asks what makes the project so hard to fit in. After listening, the leader recommends agreeing a realistic date and sitting down for 15 minutes tomorrow.

Your own conversation can follow the same shape in a short written plan. Note how you will set your state, what you need to understand, which question you will ask, how you will show up and which next step you will invite. Then add what the conversation is worth to you, whether that is a deal, time or peace at home.

Understanding this is only the beginning, because choosing it consistently takes practice and feedback. One marketing officer could recite all seven principles and still froze when someone in a meeting folded their arms. Quiet people can do this as well as anyone. Some of the most influential people are quiet, because they listen well, pause naturally and ask better questions.

Go deeper with what matters to you

The source works through each exercise step by step. It covers the full state reset and the two-picture exercise in the order they are guided. It gives five short phrases that lower resistance, with the reason each one works. It also rebuilds the missed-deadline conversation line by line and answers questions from people in real estate and sales.

If you have a specific conversation coming up, bring it to the chat. It might be a colleague who agrees to everything and then never delivers. You could ask how to open that talk and which words to listen for. You could also ask how to phrase your three sentences for that person. The chat will draw the relevant parts of the source into an answer shaped around your situation.

Where these ideas come from

These ideas come from The Art of Influence Webinar, a live workshop recorded in October 2026 and available through the Madanes Institute, presented by Keith Leonard. He is the institute's chief learning officer. He trained with Dr. Cloé Madanes and with Dr. Richard Bandler and John Grinder (the co-founders of NLP). He draws on more than 20 years of training leaders and coaches. He also credits Lee Cockerell (who ran operations at Walt Disney World) and Jan Hargrave (a body language expert). Phil M. Jones (an author on what to say) and Dr. Robert Cialdini (a researcher of persuasion) shaped his work too. If you would like to experience that original work in full, it is well worth seeking out directly.

What you read here is our own source, an independent work built from those ideas. Every concept has been studied and then rewritten from scratch and reshaped so it can answer your questions alongside other refined sources. The knowledge has been transformed, not reproduced, and the reference is named clearly because the ideas deserve proper credit and because it stands on its own merits.