Know your audience - Winning people over

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Know your audience
Winning people over

If you want to persuade people to listen to you, you need to listen to them first.

You can’t possibly influence them if you don’t know how they feel and where they might be vulnerable to change. But as a culture, we are listening challenged. We don’t know how to listen, or we’re not willing to, or both. It has always been hard to get out of our own obsessions and preoccupations, but it is even harder now, in this age of selfies and Instagram and Facebook, when it’s all about me and sculpting the image of my life while paying little attention to yours.

Listening is hard. Tell me that you actively pay attention to people when they talk. I bet you don’t. I admit I’m obsessed with this. I’m the annoying person who takes a phone off the dinner table and moves it out of reach. If I run a meeting, I ban laptops. Sure, you might need them to take notes, so exceptions can be made. But I’ve sat next to people who were “taking notes” and then watched as they stopped listening to the meeting and started checking and answering email. It’s like taking a drug into a meeting. Distracting. Your senses are no longer sharp.

If you’re focused on creating your own brand, you can’t pay attention to your audience. You have to know them, whether you’re trying to reach just one person or a large group. You have to know who they are; what they will respond to; what they think about; what their fears and biases are.

Sometimes people appear to be listening, but they are just trying to figure out where to jump in. They are just waiting to talk. I often fail to listen, so I know how hard it is. What about you? Do you let someone finish a sentence? I had to confront my faults as a listener when someone harshly and continually criticized me for interrupting him. I thought that he was just being mean and difficult. But over time, watching myself, I had to admit that I was frequently interrupting. I had lived in New York for years, where many people are quick and aggressive, jumping in and out of conversations. Sometimes it’s lively and exciting. But sometimes that speedy conversation leaves out people who are more thoughtful and don’t want to fight to be heard.

I tried to change. I worked at it. I beat myself up when I thought I had interrupted—and yet I found it hard to stop. I would obsess about it. And still I interrupted.

Try this experiment. When someone is still talking and you want to finish his sentence, because you’re sure you know what he is going to say—don’t. Don’t finish the sentence. Does it slow things down? Make conversation feel a little boring? Maybe at first. But none of us knows what the other will say. Maybe if you let people finish their sentences, you’ll be surprised by what you learn.

Shutting off the conversation in your brain and actually listening takes a lot of effort, and it’s an effort that most of us don’t want to make. We are flaunting our egos. We are impatient. We are showing off—jumping in quickly to show how much we know, like doing a cannonball off the high dive. Hey, look at me!

Here are some tips on how to listen:

✵ Don’t shake your head while people talk or express any kind of negativity.

✵ Don’t give advice; that shuts down conversations.

✵ Don’t cut people off in the middle of a sentence. Press your top teeth onto your tongue if that’s the only way to keep words from escaping. Don’t abruptly change the subject.

✵ Don’t look at your phone while you’re talking to someone. Stop the chatter in your brain so you can actually hear. Don’t start wondering what you might cook for dinner.

✵ Think about what the person is saying.

✵ Use eye contact—but don’t stare.

✵ Make appropriate comments and noises to show you have heard, and encourage the person to go on.

Few people listen well, but it’s a central tool in communication.

One day I ran into my friend Bob Morris, a writer, at a cafe and told him what I was working on. He smiled, but sort of enigmatically.

“What? What?” I asked. He told me something I hadn’t known—that although he is a writer, he was also studying conflict resolution. The secret to bringing people together, he said, isn’t to put forward ideas. It isn’t to argue or try to convince them of something. It’s to listen and to listen and to listen, and when you see a middle ground—go there!

How do you do that?

Stop the multitasking. Twenty years ago, few of us used that word or thought about that concept, and now it’s an ever-present concern. New Yorkers used to make fun of tourists who would stop abruptly and look up at the tall buildings, ruining the flow of foot traffic. Now New Yorkers and tourists alike are looking down at their phones on subway stairs, in the middle of intersections, and while paying for a cup of coffee. Multitasking blocks those around you from doing what they need to do. If you multitask in conversation, the person or people you are talking to will feel that they are unimportant. Recently in a store, as I was explaining to the woman there what I wanted, she briefly answered my question and then started looking at her phone. That didn’t make me feel that I should support that store ever again. Looking at the phone, taking a call, texting—it’s a way of being judgmental and dismissive, a way of saying, I have something in my life that is much more important than you.

To listen, and hear, we need to be fully present and suspend judgment. It can be hard to listen to people who aren’t in whatever group we feel drawn to or attracted to, whether it be tall or short, dark or light, fat or thin, young or old. But if you try to overcome that instinct to judge, you will listen better. If you can’t suspend judgment, at least suspend the signs of judgment—the frowns, the looking away. You have to seem like you have an open mind. When you make an effort to be quiet and listen, you’ll begin to hear differently. Try to feel the emotions behind the words, and show that you hear and that you understand. Don’t disagree. Don’t comment. Just listen and make noises here and there to make it clear that you’re present. To make the other person feel heard, repeat parts of what they have said, and ask questions so they know you are interested and listening. Not questions that are destined for a yes or no answer or one-word answers—real questions. Don’t tell people how to feel, or not feel, or whoever you’re talking to will stop talking. Start by giving people a chance to explain their ideas and feelings, and you will seem agreeable and willing to listen. Cut them off, and you will never persuade them of anything.

Initially you might see the need to listen as merely a tactic. But you will soon find that the more you listen, the more genuinely curious you will become. Most people do not feel listened to. Maybe that’s why they spend so much time on Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat, desperately searching to fulfill that need we all have. That’s why they talk to reporters, and therapists, and comment constantly on the web. They want to be heard.

For a number of years, I was a freelance journalist, and one of my regular duties was writing a weekly column on real estate for The New York Times. The work involved meeting someone at home and talking about how they happened to end up there and how they felt about it. That reporting could have taken me an hour or so. But I always spent much more time, sometimes three or four hours, eliciting intimate details of these people’s lives that had nothing to do with their real estate situations—parents they were estranged from, jobs they hated, siblings who had drug problems. They had never met me and had no idea how unfortunate it might have been if I had published these intensely personal details. I didn’t, mostly because those notes weren’t relevant to the story at hand. But I liked stories. Once we had established a rapport, they forgot I was a reporter. I had put people at ease. I had become a friend, and they trusted me.

Here are some ideas on how to interview someone:

✵ Find out everything you can about the person online.

✵ Find out everything you can about his employer.

✵ Think of some questions to ask at the beginning to get it going—unthreatening ones like “Where did you grow up?” or “Where did you get that great shirt?”

✵ Think of some questions to ask if things suddenly slow down. These should be provocative and elicit more than yes or no answers.

✵ Save your most personal or threatening questions for last.

People are almost always dying to talk, if only people will listen.

Connection is sometimes instant, like a chemical reaction, and effortless. But more often, you need to ask questions, and listen, and show that you’re listening so the speaker knows you get it.

It’s hard work. I always wanted those real estate interviews to feel like casual conversations between friends, so people would openly share their experiences, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t prepare.

Before arriving, I learned what I could about the neighborhood and the building, and I made a list of questions that I thought would lead to a friendly conversation and avoid that stilted interview feeling. Simple questions, like “Why did you move here?” But also more complicated ones, like “Is there anything in the apartment that makes you feel especially good, or bad? And why?” I wanted them to feel comfortable talking about how a location influenced their lives and reflected their personalities.

The social value of listening has been well established in academic research. People like people who focus on them and ask questions. In a study published in 2017, Harvard researchers found a consistent relationship between question asking and liking. People who asked more questions were better liked by the people they were talking with, especially if they asked follow-up questions that showed they were listening. Question asking, which shows interest, also led to more dating success in the speed-dating situation that the researchers studied. In one-on-one situations, when two people listen to each other, they become more open to the other’s politics and point of view. The personal and political are always melding like that. Long conversations are more likely to show both sides that they are similar in one way or another, and that’s when bonding, and agreement, and change begin to occur.

It’s interesting to play with the concepts of listening on a personal level. But how do you apply these lessons when you are trying to reach not just one person, but a large audience? It’s more difficult, but the same principles apply.

If you are aiming to reach readers of a certain publication—perhaps The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Guardian—you need to understand who is most likely to read that publication. You must always think about the audience you are trying to reach. You can do that by looking at what is published, at the kinds of stories that are most popular, at the comments people write. Think about your intended readers, and consider what their biases might be.

What liberals should read and watch to understand the other viewpoint:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page

The National Review

The Federalist

Drudge

Fox News

What conservatives should read to understand the other viewpoint:

The New Yorker

Slate

The New York Times

Politico

The Washington Post

You need to listen so you know how to meet objections, and to determine what argument will be most persuasive. To understand the likely biases of your audiences and to craft a strong argument, research other points of view by going to sources you might not regularly read. People get stuck in their reading habits. If they’re liberals, they might read the Times and The New Yorker. If they’re conservatives, they might read the Journal and the National Review. Don’t read only websites that confirm what you already believe. Read publications that represent a wide range of views. It’s fun and fascinating to compare their world views. It’s not a big commitment; just sign up for the email newsletters. If you are researching a particular issue you want to write about, look at sites with an opposing viewpoint and study their rationale and their evidence. (You might find that you agree with them!)

Then your task is to reevaluate your own claims in light of that research. Doing this can only strengthen your argument. In today’s polarized climate, too many people—and this tendency is always on display during political campaigns—believe that anyone who thinks differently from them is stupid or just doesn’t know the facts. That’s a devastatingly wrong point of view. You have to start by understanding that smart, rational people might disagree with you, and they have good reason to do so. If you disdain the opposition, you will never persuade them of anything. The stereotyping that goes on in the world is breathtaking. As someone who was born in a small town, I become hyperaware when I hear people talk disparagingly of rural people, of Midwesterners, of Southerners, as if those people had no brains. At that point I shut down and stop listening to anything that person says.

It’s tough to accept that people might endorse something that seems absurd to you. When Donald Trump was elected president, most people at the Times were shocked. Few in the newsroom actually thought it was possible, after the story appeared of Trump boasting of grabbing women’s genitals, for a man with that history ever to win, and yet a majority of the white women who voted chose him. When you think something is ridiculous, then it’s hard to actually listen, much less to realize that a woman might vote for Trump because she liked other things he had to say.

To reach my readers when I was the editor in charge of Op-Ed, I had to understand what their biases were likely to be. Although I liked finding articles that challenged the liberal readers and made them uncomfortable, whether from the right or the left, I knew that those articles would be useless if they didn’t find a way to address people in a way that would make them listen. Writers don’t have to agree with their audience, but they must understand what their readers’ viewpoints are likely to be.

I remember the day I was hanging around in the office of Frank Bruni, one of our columnists, wondering why so many men who transitioned to be women adopted an extremely feminine style. They seemed to embrace the strictures that women born as women had spent years trying to escape.

“Why do they have to turn into parodies of women?”

Frank laughed. “You have to talk to my friend Elinor,” he said. “We just got off the phone and she was saying exactly the same thing.”

The minute I started an email conversation with Elinor Burkett, an author and moviemaker who had once collaborated with Frank on a book, I knew she had a point of view I wanted to put out in the world. She agreed to write something, and if it worked out, I thought it would be a good Sunday cover.

I think she understood intuitively how to reach Times readers. She knew their likely prejudices. In an article titled “What Makes a Woman?” she started out with a story that was bound to resonate with them. “Do women and men have different brains?” she asked. After raising that question, she went on to recall the case of Lawrence H. Summers, who as the president of Harvard suggested that there were differences in the brains of men and women. He was denounced for being a sexist and for implying that women had lesser brains. Some alumni stopped giving. But then, Burkett went on to ask, why was it okay when Caitlyn Jenner, born Bruce, said pretty much the same thing in an interview with Diane Sawyer? Jenner said during the interview that “My brain is much more female than it is male,” which clearly implies a difference.

Liberals who had been so quick to chastise Summers praised Jenner for her bravery. Why? Because Jenner was transgender and liberals supported her, while they were more likely to find fault with a heterosexual man like Summers.

Starting with an apparent shared liberal understanding and then pointing out an example of how it was being contradicted was a smart way to go into a story. The newspaper had run so many editorials in favor of transgender rights that it seemed to be a core value of the readers, or at least of the institution. If Burkett had opened with an attack on the femininity of transgender women, she would have lost readers immediately. The way she structured her piece, she was more likely to carry them along.

That is a classic approach: If you think this, why do you also think something that appears to be the opposite? Pointing out a contradiction might make your audience look at an issue differently. Sometimes showing that you understand your audience is simple. Just start your essay by telling them that you know what sorts of things they worry about, because you worry about the same things. One of my clients, a lawyer, hoped to publish a piece he wrote in the Times. Although he is a very good writer, his first sentence was too technical and a bit off-putting for an audience of generalists. Here’s what he wrote:

Later this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in United States v. Microsoft, a long-running dispute between the federal government and technology community over digital privacy.

I thought he should get to the central point faster and also start with a broad question that would appeal to Times readers, who likely were worried about their digital security. So I suggested this:

Should the U.S. government be able to look at your emails if they are stored on a server in another country? Or does the government’s right to examine digital evidence stop at the U.S. border?

His piece was accepted and left mostly intact. To me, and apparently to his editor, that approach made sense because it opened with an idea that spoke to a large portion of the audience. Listening to your audience means you have some idea of what people will want to read. If you’re writing for different publications, read them carefully to understand their readers and the interests of the editors.

Whether you are addressing a group or an individual, listening is hard. I still catch myself interrupting more often than I would like. But now I understand that I’m getting in my own way, blocking my opportunity to know other people. If you actually listen, you might hear something that will change your life—or at least reveal surprising information that’s just fun to know.

At a party, my husband asked a man we had just met about his choice of orange sweater and orange shoes. “Is that a fashion statement?” my husband asked, knowing the man worked in the fashion business. Well, it turned out not to be a fashion statement at all. A thief had recently stolen all of his shoes except the orange pair. A simple question, an astonishing answer.