Your ability to influence and persuade others to help you get the things you want in life is one of the most important skills you can develop. Developing your persuasion skills will help you get more things you want faster than anything else you can do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Your ability to persuade others will earn you the support and respect of your friends, colleagues, and co-workers.

Fortunately, persuasion is a skill, like riding a bicycle, that you can learn through study and practice. To achieve any measure of success you must become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of problems. All successful people have mastered the art of getting other people to work with and for them in the accomplishment of their objectives. And so can you.

You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware the every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence.

The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. If you want to persuade others you must find out what motivates them and then provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain and the fear of loss.

The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, better health, more influence, more respect, more love, and more happiness. Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act on your behalf.

People are also motivated to act by the fear of loss. This fear, in all its various forms, is often stronger than the desire for gain. People fear financial loss, loss of health, and the loss of anything they have worked hard to accomplish. They fear change, risk, and uncertainty because these threaten them with potential losses. Whenever you can show a person that, by doing what you want them to do, they can avoid a loss of some kind, you can influence them to take a particular action. The very best acts of persuasion are those where you offer an opportunity to gain and an opportunity to avoid loss at the same time.

The most powerful word in persuasion and influence, is the word,