'Tis a politic means to your end... It is a weighty piece of dissimulation, for the foreseen advantages serve as a lure to influence the other's will. His affair seems to be in train when it is really only leading the way for another's... Likewise with persons who always say No at first, it is useful to ward off this blow.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
This is the most common persuasion technique in professional life, and the passage is unusually candid about its double nature, calling it a weighty piece of dissimulation. Framing your proposal in terms of the other person's interest is either good communication or manipulation, and the test is whether the interest you lead with is real. If your proposal genuinely serves them and you have simply chosen to say that part first, this is competence. If the benefit is manufactured to move them toward something that costs them, this is a lie with better manners. Same words, different act, and the difference is invisible in the moment and obvious in a year.
Practice
- Find the honest overlap before the meeting: what does this genuinely do for them? Lead with that, and if there is nothing, do not manufacture one.
- With habitual refusers, present their side of the matter first so the reflexive No has nothing to attach to.
- Keep a record of how these persuasions aged; if the people you moved would still say yes today, your technique is clean.
Use this when
- Use this to move genuinely good proposals through people whose default is refusal.
- Use it defensively: when someone opens with your interest, ask what they are ending with; the technique is being run on you weekly (maxim 193 watches for it).
Ignore this when
- Don't use it where the benefit to them is invented. That is the line between influence and exploitation, and this maxim sits directly on it.
- Don't use it on people who trust you completely; with them, say the thing directly. Technique where trust exists is a small betrayal of it.
A picture of it
The new software would cut the accounts team's month-end by two days and add work for the sales team, which is why sales had blocked it twice. The third attempt opened differently: the sales head was shown, first, the commission disputes that this system would settle automatically, a problem he had complained about for a year. The benefit was real, checked, and delivered. He approved it in one meeting. The same pitch, had the benefit been invented, would have bought approval once and cost every future conversation.
Open with their interest. Just be sure it survives contact with the truth.