Stevea Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

If you work in an office or have a husband, wife, significant other, spousal equivalent

polyamorous family unit, or teenagers, do you notice that everyone around you doesn't do what

you want when you want it? How much of your time is spent trying to persuade them

to do what you want? Because, obviously, you're right and your ideas are best. Would you like to

make it easier to persuade people? Good. Listen on. Most of us make an honest mistake. We believe that the

best way to persuade people is to tell them why they

should agree with us. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. First of all,

people generally aren't persuaded by logic. They're persuaded by vivid emotional stories,

and puppies, cute puppies. In a professional environment, though, everyone's afraid to be caught

looking at daily puppy.

To cover our embarrassment, we pretend to be convinced by logic, especially when that logic is our bosses, or our own.

And therein lies the magic.

When you tell someone something, they think the idea is coming from you.

And it is, but because they secretly hate you and want you to fail,

they come up with a logical sounding reason why your idea sucks and theirs is better.

If only their idea were the same as yours, you'd be able to get your way.

So the key to persuasion is in letting them get your way and thanking you for it.

How? By asking questions. Tip number one is to imitate Socrates. I started this episode by asking, do you notice that often people don't do what you want? What did you think when I asked that?

What are you thinking now? If you're like most people, your attention is on answering the

question, not arguing with it. It takes an extreme question, such as, have you stopped beating

your polyamorous family unit yet, to get you to argue with the question itself instead of

...