Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance
Zoe Chance’s Influence is Your Superpower hooked me in the first few pages. I figured if she knew how to craft such a good opening, she might have something to teach me about influence.
What did she do?
She pointed out that we were all influential as babies when we needed to be in order to get our needs met. This reframe gently touched on so many areas of reluctance around reading a book on influence. I’m not the type of person who can be influential. Isn’t it bad to have too much influence? Is influence only for businesspeople?
I’ve seen similar books struggle head-on, inelegantly, with these potential concerns. Chance deftly sidesteps, then surprises and delights with this reframe. I noticed a deft application of several of the ideas in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick and wanted to see what she would do next.
A key idea from the book is to think about creating value. Chance offers the three value creation questions:
The questions to ask yourself, and to discuss with the other party when that makes sense, are:
- How could this be even better for me?
- How could it be even better for them?
- Who else could benefit?
She provides a compelling example of using these questions in a situation in which she had agreed to give a conference talk that she didn’t really want to give, which ultimately led to a series of actions and decisions that created a deeply exciting professional partnership.
This outcome was all because she had taken the time to clarify what she wanted and to think about how she could make this happen.
She writes:
You’ll rarely get what you don’t ask for and you can’t ask for something that didn’t occur to you, so it’s worth spending time on this creative phase.
I love that she characterizes thinking about what you want as a “creative phase” in a negotiation.
It is deeply creative, deeply important work.
A few other favorite takeaways:
In almost any negotiated agreement the key ingredients will be similar: dreams and data.
One of the simplest ways to inspire collaboration is to give the other person choices.
Saying no without getting angry can almost be a spiritual practice.
There are many books on negotiation that don’t resonate for me. The author spends half the time arguing the importance of learning negotiation skills, half the time breathlessly recounting “high stakes” negotiations from their own career, with a few tidbits of advice thrown in for the reader alert enough to sift them out.
Chance’s book, by contrast, feels purpose-built to help. Material is presented clearly. Examples illustrate.
She makes change feel possible through her choices in presenting the material. She guides the reader to themself and their world differently. To see the potential for different choices.
Some say negotiation is change management, and Chance shows herself to be an expert at managing change by walking the reader through a change in how they understand negotiation. Which is really a change in how one sees oneself in relation to others. No small thing.
I’ll give Chance the last words here:
How grown-ups play together is often called “work,” although we don’t always see it that way. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes our hearts break open. Sometimes inspiration strikes, our timing is perfect, luck is on our side, and the gates of heaven part for us. And all the time, the seeds of our influence are floating off like the tufts of a dandelion, carried on the wind to places beyond where we can see. Whether we mean to or not, we are planting seeds.