Avoiding Common Persuasion Mistakes: Insights from Carlos A. Alvarenga

I'll change the metaphor and I'll say think of Persuasion as a ship with three masts, right? But only one sail open. And it's called Argument. Most people I talk with have been taught incorrectly, you shouldn't be part of the story, and they either have failed with the motion or don't understand it so they don't use it. So here we have this ship. Two shiny new sails are tightly wound up. The one that's called Argument is tattered because it's been doing all the work. So all I want to do is I want to lower that. I want to open character, I want to open emotion a little bit and watch the ship move faster, then give you example after example.

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Carlos. Thanks for joining us today, Kwame.

Thank you, Hermione. It's a pleasure to be on your show with you and your listeners.

Yes, it is a pleasure to have you, my friend. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Yeah, sure. So I'm Carlos. I'm based just out of D.C. in Maryland. And I am a couple of things. I'm an independent researcher and writer. And by that I mean that I research and write, but not for an institution. I'm also a doctoral student right now at the University of Maryland, doing my PhD in language and rhetoric. And I came to this after a long career as a managing consultant, partner, and executive Advisor for over 20 years. So I business for 20 years, decided it was time to wrap it up and to do what I always wanted to do, which is to research and write, which is what I do today.

Incredible. So you're living the dream.

I. I'm living a dream.

I like it. Well, Carlos, this is great because listeners, we are going to talk about persuasion and this is a term thrown around all the time, but we have an expert in this topic now. So how about we just start off with a definition of persuasion. We'll start off with what it is and then how to do it will be the rest of the conversation. So let's, let's start with the definition.

Sure. And it's great that you start there because it's the very first question I ask whenever I coach anyone and I, I always say finish the sentence, persuasionist. And I tell you I've never had anyone who can answer the question with confidence. And I say to them, the reason I ask the question is that it's very hard to be good at something that you can't define with confidence, right? And so it has to start there. So persuasion for me is the definition that I built on in my book, which goes back to Aristotle, the philosopher, and he says in his treatise on persuasion perspective, persuasion is a demonstration that something is true, parentheses or appears to be true. That's it. So this is a very interesting statement because it has many implications that I work on in my book, but that's really it. I'd say the most important one is that I don't persuade you in this schema, truth or its appearance persuades. So what I need to do is get you to believe something is true. After that, if the audience is rational, persuasion follows automatically.

There is so much to explore here, because for me now this begs another truth. What does truth mean within this infrastructure that we're creating here, Right?

So let's say that ultimately there is a truth, at least to me, underneath every message, right? That we're trying to get to accept. For example, I am a good negotiation partner in your world. I will do what I say I'm going to do. This is a fair deal or it's the best deal you're going to get, right? In that kind of context, another context is vote for me. Selecting me as your president is a good thing. This is what I mean by truth, right? There is something that, that you want me to accept as true, whether it's buy this car, vote for this person. Follow me. Right? If you want to live in the movies, right? So that is the goal. And in his remarkable book, he says only three things can persuade us. And I call these modes. And it is the character of the person speaking to us or the communicating. Because it could be a person, it could be a school, it could be an institution, a government. It is the arguments presented, things like, you're a lawyer, I know. So it's facts, evidence, witnesses, right laws and standards, et cetera. And then the last thing is the emotion felt by the audience as you communicate. That's it. Now here comes the problem. Well, I'll say this. I know that lots of people have heard these called ethos, pathos and logos and articles. And you notice the articles usually just quote that sentence, don't say much more. And you know why? Because Aristotle was an interesting guy. He had a habit of that the more obvious something was, the less he would explain it. And so for him, he doesn't really explain what this means. Also, the rhetoric, which is this is pulled from was not a book to be read by us. It was A notebook. He was a teacher. He had. He ran his school, the lyceum. And so for 20 years. So the best theory is that it was his private teaching notes. So why would he go on and on if it was your own private notes? So that's why I wrote the book, because I had two questions for Aristotle. The first is, what do you mean by character? What do you mean by argument? And what do you mean by emotion? And then what exactly is persuasion? And I couldn't find that in the books that I bought. In fact, most of the books I bought said they were about persuasion, but they really weren't. They were about influence or about psychology or negotiation or sales, which are all great topics, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted a book about one word and I couldn't find it. And so the book tries to answer two questions. What did Aristotle mean when he said character, argument and emotion and harness persuasion really work. And hopefully that's what I do in the book. Explain that.

Oh, my goodness, the nerd inside of me is so excited about this. Carlos, this is great because we have the historical exploration. And let me say this, I know there are a lot of people who are sales trainers, negotiation trainers, listening to this, experts in the field. And for me, I'll just. I'll be vulnerable and honest here too, because we talk about the persuasive triad all the time. We quote that and then move on. And I recognize that as you've gone through this, there is a limited amount of depth that we have with this. And I think people can twist the terminology to mean what they want it to mean at the given time. So it's great to have an expert who has really dedicated a substantial portion of your career to exploring this. And I think also when you understand the nuances of persuasion and how it is distinct from all of these other terms, I think it gives us a higher level of appreciation, but also a greater ability to utilize it when it's appropriate. And so when you think about the distinction between persuasion, that term as compared to influence or sales or negotiation, what is the value of understanding it as its own distinct concept?

Yeah, it's important for that. To answer that question, I'll take a step back and give you the core thesis of the book. Right. So what it says is if we take Aristotle's argument or comment about character, we can take the character of a communicator and parse it into seven pieces. Things like origin, style, language, status, history, etc. We can then take argument and divide that into seven pieces. Logic, proofs, evidence, witnesses. And then we can take emotion and divide those into seven kinds of emotions. Positive, negative, exhortative, inspirational, religious, mystical. Now you got 7, 7, 7, 21 elements. And this, what I say in my book, is the best way to comprehend these 21 elements is to go back to high school chemistry class and think of this as the periodic table of persuasion. Any message I've ever looked at, and I've looked at thousands, person to person, person to gods, gods to gods, gods to people, people to machines, whatever it is, right, in literature, social media, art, music, theater, you name it, is some combination of these 21 elements. So chemist persuasion is chemistry with language. This is what I argue in the book. And because it is predictable, it works by rules. It can be understood and dissected. So I really argue to erase the idea that persuasion is some sort of soft skill or some amorphous thing that you're either born with or not. It is chemistry. And the book has countless examples of various formulas at work. And so that's, to me, what persuasion is. Now back to your question about negotiation. Right? And somebody said to me, well, how do you relate your book to, like, Cialdini's book on influence or others like that? I said, it's not that hard. We had medicine long before we had chemistry. We knew this plant cured a rash. We didn't know why. So my book isn't the medicine. My book is the chemistry. It explains why a book on negotiation is a good book. It explains, in part why a sales book is effective if you take the chemistry behind that medicine. It can all be explained by the techniques that I present in my book. It's one step behind all those other works, as I see it.

Unbelievable. Okay, so essentially what you're saying, Carlos, tell me if this is a fair synopsis of this. Essentially, when we think about things like influence, sales, negotiation, these types of communicative endeavors to try to change minds, really, each of these schools of thoughts lay on the foundation of persuasion. And good communicators and persuaders can almost utilize this intuitively from their different schools of thought. But now this is something you didn't say, but I'm assuming you tell me if I'm wrong on this. If people who are trying to engage in a persuasive endeavor, if they can then understand the chemistry of this, then it will amplify their persuasion skills exponentially.

It's a perfect recap. And there are chemists who make medicine and some who make tires and some who make, right, polymers of different kinds, clothing. The chemistry is used for lots of different things. But in the end, the same table of elements is making tires, is making medicine, is making whatever, Right? So to me, the idea of the book is to show people, like I said, this is the chemistry that underlies human communication. Right. And then the second part, which was what does it mean to be persuaded? And so which is also builds on a chemistry metaphor. So that's. You're exactly right. This is the textbook that explains why somebody was good or is good or why this ad worked, that one didn't. This case, you know, fell apart when it did. This other person, one I've written in the past about, you know, things in the headlines, and I go, this person is going to lose this case because they're not persuading the jury of anything. And then it turns out that they lose the case. So it's funny how people are surprised when I make this and I say, it's not that difficult to predict, right? A chemist knows, hey, you put this into that, it's going to blow up. They're not surprised when this happens. And so a great communications chemist has the same ability. And all I'm doing is giving people a framework to explain what a lot of people already know intuitively. Right. They're already good at this, but they don't know why or the specifics. This explains the why.

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Carlos, one of the things that you mentioned just in passing, but I want to give you an opportunity to speak to it is the element of status. This is something that in all of my books that I've, I've read on the topic of persuasion, influence, negotiation, and mind you, full disclaimer, I've written two of Them I did not talk about it, and it was an oversight. Is the power of status as it relates to persuasion. And I think we understand that colloquially, but there is a rich abundance of research that goes into the psychology of status. So can you talk a little bit about status as it relates to persuasion?

Sure. So status is one of the seven elements of character, right? So status refers to the power of the speaker relative to the audience relative to a topic. Parentheses. Okay, so imagine I'm going to talk to you about. I'm giving you a performance review, right? And I want to persuade you to take a new job. Obviously, we don't have equal status. I'm your employer, so our status is different. So why is status interesting? It's interesting because status is one of a few elements that works bidirectionally. What does that mean? It means that I can persuade by affirming status. Right. I went to a fancy law school. I've won a million cases. I have a podcast. Trust me when I give you advice, right? That's an FMH status, but it also works by negation. Yesterday was Easter. What did the Pope do yesterday? The Pope washed the feats of prisoners. Why? It is persuasive act of humility. Right? It speaks to his role. Likewise, when you see, completely unrelated, a show called Undercover Boss and the Boss, some big shot CEO puts on an apron and goes work at the fry desk or whatever, right? Making French fries for a week and supposedly learns something. Why are we persuaded that she learned something? Because she negated her status as CEO to become a line worker. And so status is really interesting because people make mistakes here all the time. They don't understand who has the status. They overplay their hand. They should have reversed when they augmented or the opposite. Right? So status is a really interesting phenomenon. In my book, I talk about Chadwick Boseman's commencement speech at Howard. I think it was 2015 and its impact on people. If you watch the speech, technically, Chadwick Boseman was having a hard time because of one thing. The monitor, the prompter, where he had speech was not in front of him. Like usually it was to his left, right? And so he had to keep looking left for the text. And his audience was to the front. So he had this very technical issue of not quite seeing. And so you see him pause and his eyes go left, right? So there are technical issues. But of course, nobody remembers that because it's Chaz expose when talking to Howard. Right? And here we have this phenomenal moment of his status as a Howard alum at that moment, maybe one of the most famous stars in the world, maybe the most at that moment. Right. It overcomes all other technical issues. Right. And it becomes this beloved moment and a speech that was remarked and commented over and over and over again when it went, quote, unquote, viral. And that's another example of the status as a speaker becomes the primary persuasive factor. Right. In the chemistry of that particular moment.

That's powerful. And one of the things that's great about the way that you broke this down is that you demonstrated that authority can be a part of status. But when you think about the other books that have gone into it, like Cialdini's, which is an incredible book.

Right.

Talks. Yeah, exactly. He talks about authority, which is one element. But again, there's such richness to that. Research of status comes in different ways.

For me, it comes under argument. Right. So one of the arguments, you have this. You have authority. So this is a very traditional rhetorical concept called call to authority. And it's simply an argumentative point where you say, listen, don't listen to me. Listen to this scientist. Right. Or to the Supreme Court judge, whoever happens to be right, that is, I call someone else's words into the conversation. I repurpose them. Right. For my particular effort. It's just one other of the 21 elements of chemistry that people will use all the time. Sometimes. Well, sometimes not so well. But, yeah, that's a. It's a pretty common. It's element in many formulations. Right? You see that all the time. Yeah, yeah.

Now, this is. I think for a lot of people, this could almost instantly become overwhelming. As much as it is intriguing because you're saying we have 21 elements, and I'm not going to do the calculation, but that seems like approximately a lot of different combinations.

Right.

And so in the moment, let's say we read the book and I encourage everybody to read this book. Let's say we read the book and then we say, all right, now I have this combination. Now a unique person comes in front of me. How do I make the read in the moment to figure out what combination works for this person?

That's a very good question because it goes back to chemistry again, right? Yeah. There are lots of elements. I lost count.112 or think that's the last time I checked. Maybe, probably. I know I'm wrong, but the point is most things don't use them. Right. We have a classical organic chemistry. It's about what. It's about one element, carbon. And so the Key thing is this. Most formulations are going to work with only a few of these elements, right? I map them because they're there. That doesn't mean you need to know all of them. I tell you what the most important thing you can do from having coached dozens and dozens of leaders, and that's this. Almost all of them have the same problem. The first time we meet, I'll change the metaphor and I'll say, think of precision as a ship with three masts, right? But only one sale open. And it's called Argument. Most people I talk with have been taught incorrectly. You shouldn't be part of the story. And they either have failed with emotion or don't understand it, so they don't use it. So here we have this ship. Two shiny new sales are tightly wound up. The one that's called argument is tattered because it's been doing all the work. So all I want to do is I want to lower that. I want to open character. I want to open emotion a little bit and watch the ship move faster. Then give you example after example. And in fact, I'll give you one from. Because I'm coaching someone who's a founder of a nonprofit, right? And very accomplished person, was Dr. Her whole life and retired young, moved to Hawaii and started a foundation that saves coral reefs. So she called me and said, I'm doing media, I'm on tv, I'm doing interviews, and it's not going well, and so could you help me? So we started talking and I said, tell me why you created this foundation. Give me the story. Well, I had retired. I was at home. My kids were. I was empty nester. My kids were gone. I always wanted to do something. So it was a very logical. A whole bunch of very logical reasons, none of which I found that interesting. I did personally, you know, as. As a coach, but not. You wouldn't care. I said to her, listen, I want you to try it again. Pause. Go back into your history. Something in your past about you will help me, want to help you, will persuade me to support you. I said, just pause and think about it and then tell me why you started this foundation, but talk to me about you. So she struggled for a minute or two, right? And then she said, when I was a little girl growing up in Puerto Rico, I used to watch a show called Jacques Cousteau was a French guy who went around the world in the ocean. And I used to watch this guy. And I. I was transfixed. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I wanted to be Jack Cousteau when I grew up. Right. And unfortunately, my family had other plans. I went to medical school. I became a doctor. But when I. When I left medicine, I immediately moved to Hawaii. I learned how to dive because I wanted to take fish photographs. So I would go to this same place of data, take fish photographs. But I'm the world's worst fish photographer. All my photos were just details. So I went back one day and to this place where I was. But there were no fish that day. It was empty. And I looked up, and I saw the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I saw a coral reef. And I realized I had to come back here again and again. Not for the fish, for the reef. And I said, I will spend the rest of my life protecting this place. And I said, that's it. You're done. That's it. Right? And I can't even tell it as well as she can. Right. And like, that's it. Why would you talk about anything else? Right? I want to help you now. And that story was sitting there the whole time. It just wasn't being used. The sale was tight now. I said, now, let's open that sale. And from now on, this foundation was born. The moment that little girl watched that show, that's origin, Right? And of the elements of character, the most powerful is Origin. I said, you now have the moment of creation, this effort. And why wouldn't anyone be persuaded that this is important? Wow.

First of all, chills, What a great story. Incredible. Second of all, great work, coach. I mean, that's a. That is a great testimony right there. And then third of all, I think it shows a challenge that a lot of people have because they say, I went to school and got all these fancy degrees. I go to these companies, and they have all this. This technical prowess and everything. And now you want me to persuade people by just talking about my childhood. It seems like it almost cheapens the experience that I have. And so for those people who are very technical, like lawyers, doctors, people who are in the technology, they often feel beholden to persuading in a specific way. What advice do you have for them to allow them to. To give themselves the permission to let go and utilize some of these other masts of persuasion.

Yeah. That. It works. Number one. Right. If you're. You're so rational and logical, why would you not use a thing? See, this is what. When they think of it as a soft skill, they doubt it. When they realize it's chemistry, that should give you the confidence to know that it works right? Just the way I just gave you in that example that was manufactured in the best sense of the term. It, like the coaching, uses the rules that work. And so I know that almost everyone I've ever worked, and I say everyone, that it just takes one or two questions and suddenly there's something there about who they were. Another person was a woman who I know really well, who PhD. She wanted to start a nonprofit that helps the black community with health care issues, right? And so she had been out of shape, and she told me the story about. I asked same questions. Tell me about. I know lots of reasons, lots of science, about why the community needs help, but I want to know why you're doing this. And she said, I was getting my PhD and I wasn't taking care of myself. And so I put on weight and I was out of shape. So I knew I had to do something. I had to start with me. So I went and I bought a pair of sneakers and I brought the sneakers home and I put them on and I just looked at my feet. I couldn't move. They had them on 15 minutes and I took them off. Next thing, I put them back on again. 20 minutes took them off. Next day, half an hour took them off. It took me a week. And all I did for the first week is just put shoes on and look at my feet. After a week, I walked for five minutes and so on and so forth. You can see how the story builds, right? And it's. It was this beautiful metaphor for you're not going to do it because you do one thing right, it's hard, and you're going to do it in little steps. But if you take those little steps, literally little steps, right, you can change your life. And she did. She transformed her life. She made herself healthy again, and she created this foundation, which she does outside of her academic job, right? And once again, that story was going untold. So I'd say two pieces of advice for anybody. The two best things you can do. One is find something in who you are, in your history and where you come from, in something about your character that will make me want to believe what you want me to believe. And the second thing is this, which is really interesting, right? You'll get this, because I was looking at some of the things that you've written. You talk about. I think it's compassionate. Curiosity is a phrase you turn use. And so I say, what do you want me to feel when you stop talking? I'm going to feel something, right? If you haven't designed it, then you're leaving it up to chance. Why would you do that? And it's remarkable how many otherwise fantastically accomplished people, when I asked the question, have no idea what deepest. And I say, you want me to feel excited, for me to feel motivated. You want me to feel inspired, nostalgic, right? Pick an emotion. What do you want me to feel? If you want an emotion, then you have to know how the emotion operates, how to generate it, how to control it. Right. Aristotle says to work with an emotion, you must know how to generate it. Right. How it, how it manifests itself, the dynamics is what I call it. And then its effect on the audience. Right. And so if I tell you I want you to generate nostalgia, and I do, I coach against the partner, said, I want you to generate nostalgia. I want you to generate inspiration. What is inspiration? Inspiration is the creation of desire. Convince somebody they lack something, that's what inspiration is. I convinced you that you're missing something. Right. I use film a lot in my work and I show them the clip of Densel Washington and he has this movie that he did where he's the coach of a. Becomes a coach of an all white football team. Go to the Spartans and famous thing called the perfection speech. He comes in and he says, from now on, the only thing I care about is perfection. By implication it means you don't have it, so I'm going to go get it for you. So the only reason why he was on my team is because they also want to be perfect. That's all that matters to me. So suddenly a team that thought they were okay realized they lacked something. That thing is called perfection, right? And that is what inspiration is. And so you want me to be inspired? Explain to me what you're going to convince me I'm missing when you're done talking. If you can't do that, you're not going to inspire anybody.

Wow. Okay, this is. I know I don't need to tell you this, but maybe it might seem nice to hear it for the millionth time. This is completely unique. This is incredibly unique. We're at over a thousand episodes. This is brand new to me. So kudos to you on this. And it's funny because you say before you talked about how people focus so heavily on argumentation and then you said, well, what do you want people to feel? And I think a lot of times people can create these really well reasoned arguments based in data and logic and then at the end of the argument, the other person just feels annoyed and then going back, what do you want me? You want to create a scenario where the person wants to say yes, wants to believe. And really, a lot of times we approach this in a way that we do the exact opposite. They are annoyed and they don't want you to be right.

This is, in fact, I tell people, the more you are persuaded by argument, the farther away you are from persuading the average person. Argument is hard to create. They have schools for this. They're called philosophy PhDs and law schools. Right. If you haven't gone to either one of those, you're going to have to work hard to be good at this. And more importantly, though, it's hard to follow. Right? And so if you ever go to a scientific conference and you watch a talk, they call a talk, right. They're amazing because it lasts 15, 20 minutes, typically, and that it's 15 continuous minutes of science, chemistry, medicine, okay? The people in the audience can follow because on, on average they have about a year of training per minute of speech, right? So my boy, call this the five to one rule. It takes about five years of training to follow 60 seconds of continuous high level logic and argument. If you're going to give me 10 minutes and I don't have that training, you're going to lose me about two minutes too. And we've all seen this, right, where somebody tries to do this and then after a minute you're like, where are you going with this? The famous, where are you going with this? You don't know. They might even know. So this over dependence on argument is the single biggest thing that has to be corrected along with the addition of something personal, something about you, and then just clarifying what emotion you want the audience to feel. If you lower the argument, increase character and define emotion miles ahead of where you were when you started. Just those three things.

Incredible, Carlos. This tells me, I mean, four, yes, the audience will definitely get a benefit audience. I care about you. I'm thinking about you, Carlos. For me, I selfishly want you to come back on the podcast and continue down with this breakdown because this, like I said, it's unique. It's unique in terms of what's already been on our airwaves. And just in terms of my experience learning about negotiation, influence, sales, nobody has approached it in this way. And I think especially for those folks who are very logical, it's funny because we run into those people and then they tend to climb the ladder within their organization and then they run into this persuasive barrier that they can't overcome. And it's one of those things that they. They're like, I'm trying to bully my way through this with logic how. How I did with everything else in my career, and it's holding me back. So I think this is incredible. So I appreciate you coming on the show. And before you go, I want to give you an opportunity to remind folks about your work, the book, and then just any parting wisdom that you have for. For folks who are. Are new to this.

Yeah. So I'll come back that. Because I want to relate to what you just said. Well, you can find out more about me at CarlosAlvorenko. That's my author site, which has past and future publications. I also write a newsletter on culture and art music, which you can link to from my site. And you can also contact me@carlsonbringer.com with messages or if you want to find out about anything about my work. Back to your question. I talked to lawyer groups a lot about this. At least I have been since the book came out. For some reason, they. They like to hear more about this. And so I have a slide that I open with, and the slide is a blurry shot of a man on stage playing the piano. Okay? And I say, people, imagine if you wanted to become partner at a law firm or you wanted to become CEO and you had to go through all these interviews and all this selection process, and you nailed it. Everything was great. So you think, I'm good. They tell you, let's just come back one more time for the last step in the recruiting process. Then you've got the job, right? You come back and the firm is in an auditorium and there's a piano on station. They go, just walk up to the stage and play anything. You're like a little Brahms, little Mozart, little bachelor. We don't care. Just. Just play it. You go, wait a minute, I don't know. And it fit. All the partners play piano. All the ex. Every CEO we've had played the piano. Can't you play the piano? That's persuasion.

We can't end on that. No. That's great, because this is so interesting, because it's true. When people get to that level, it requires a completely different skill set. You got to this level because you're an exceptionally good lawyer, and you're great at logical and rational thinking. And now you need to be a rainmaker, and you have to persuade people, and you don't know how to do it.

You don't. So I go, okay, well, here's some help. Okay, here's a book about playing the piano. It's at least a book, right? And it gives you something. And that's the part that I find really interesting, is that this is so key, you know, And I was on a podcast for doctors, right? And I got doctors, I've done, I've talked to nurses, I talked to business people, journalists, attorneys, and every. And I had to go. It's key to your success and yet it's nowhere to be found. MBA school as an undergraduate, right? So hopefully my book is Step along that way. And the last thing I'll say is this, right? Those of you who already their wheels will be turning if chemistry language perception is chemistry with words. Chemistry is amoral. It makes medicine, but also makes poison, right? So there is a chapter in the book about the poisonous side of chemistry, right? Of this chemistry and how people can use language for corrupt purposes, which is the other side. So maybe help me back. We'll talk about the dangerous side of this chemistry at some future date.

Do you see how he's persuading me? You see what's happening, Carlos? This has been a masterclass. I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

It's been a pleasure to be here with you and your audience. Thank you for everyone for listening.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

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