The Skill of Persuasive Speaking

Persuasion is the conscious use of communication with the end goal being the introduction of change. Your very words can in fact be used to introduce change so that you will accomplish specific outcomes. This is where we begin our own exploration of the topic persuasive speech.

When you are just learning about persuasive speech, you have to keep in mind that persuasiveness is achieved by mastering the skill of persuasive speaking itself. So if you want to be a master of persuasion, you must hone your skills by practicing, practicing, and then practicing some more. There are simply no shortcuts in the world of persuasion and therefore the earlier you start, the better off you will be in the end.

Categories of thoughts

Before you can persuade someone to agree with something or to do something for you, you have to understand how human thoughts are arranged. Understanding this will allow you to better sort through all the different information that you have in front of you in an effort to formulate better arguments. Formulating better arguments will only help you when you need to persuade another person because human thoughts are thought to be generally divided into the following categories:

-          Long standing beliefs

-          Core beliefs

-          Hard facts

-          Valuation systems

Long standing beliefs would include a person’s beliefs regarding subjects like science, religion, and politics just to name a few. These beliefs are closely held because an argument was made for each belief in the past. A person will often accumulate these beliefs through various ways such as social contact, reading books and watching television.

Core beliefs, on the other hand, are the essential beliefs that people hold on to no matter what.

Hard facts are bits of information accumulated from life experiences.

Valuation systems are categories that most people use for people, places, and situations (i.e. computer geniuses are all good with programming computers). As you can see, each category of thought has a different nature and none of these categories of thought are easy to bend or modify.

For example, it would be really hard to convince people that they should not vote anymore because the structure of voting is not really democratic. If you tried to make that argument you would be met with so much resistance that you most likely would not be able to persuade anyone.

The secret to persuasion

One myth that simply is not true is the thought you can effectively persuade anyone by just changing what they know. If this were true, convincing anyone to believe in anything would be a challenge because our arguments would have to change what people know and that is not realistic.

Here is a little known secret to the art of persuasion. You don’t have to change what people know but rather, just have to change how they view the world. By changing a person’s perspective and their valuation of a subject becomes easier than trying to change what he or she already knows.

So if you are trying to persuade someone, make sure that focus on changing their point of view, rather than the information that they know. You can’t try to replace Fact A with Fact B. What you want to do is tell the person that Fact B is more desirable than Fact A because of Reason A, B, C and so on.