In my coaching sessions, I’m often asked by my clients about how to better communicate in order to influence others to adopt their ideas more quickly and with enthusiasm.
Effective communication and influence are crucial skills that open doors to building alignment, furthering opportunities, and achieving your mandate and goals. Whether you’re a professional leading a project, a team, an organization or a change initiative; or an entrepreneur seeking to build partnerships, products or services; or an individual looking to make a positive difference on a cause you care about, mastering the art of influence is a game-changer.
The Aspirin vs. Vitamin Model:
Vitamins and headache remedies are both billion dollar industries. People take vitamins with the desire for a better future state: more energy, more health, more longevity, and more vitality. Headache remedies are to solve an urgent, specific problem. People will drive to the store in the middle of the night to buy ibuprofen or some other headache remedy if they have a painful headache, but they wouldn’t do so to buy Vitamin B.
Using this analogy, when you’re influencing people, you have to give them both the ‘vitamin’ (the better version of the future this will provide) and the ‘aspirin’ (the urgent problem it solves that has the person’s attention at the moment) of whatever you’re trying to convince them of.
For instance, the vitamin you’re positioning with an account manager might be: “this new software I want you to acquire will save your team 20 hours a month when producing the monthly reports, will be more intuitive to serve complex multinational clients, and will offer our largest clients (and our target market clients) with these 3 specific options that are becoming standard with clients in that size category.” And while this does seem to solve a few problems, it’s still a vitamin because these are likely not urgent problems that are preoccupying the account manager nor are they keeping them up at night. The account manager probably agrees with the software change in theory, but it’s not enough yet for them to take action (also, think of the immediate disruption to the team when a new software is introduced while everyone gets trained, gets used to it, etc.) It’s not urgent enough and in this case, it causes more trouble in the short-term. Instead, the aspirin in this case might be to say to them: “your biggest client Company ABC has said they will leave us for our competitor by the end of next quarter if we don’t switch to a software that provides these 3 specific options”. With this message, you have the account manager’s attention and this might be the urgent, specific problem that is completely relevant to that account manager that propels them to put this at the top of their to-do list.
Sometimes we incorrectly guess what the urgent ‘aspirin’ problem is, and we have to dig deeper by asking the account manager questions like: What’s keeping you up at night? What’s is your biggest challenge at the moment? What are you worried about with your biggest client? These types of questions not only help you identify what might be the other person’s urgent need that they want to solve, but it also sometimes reminds them that this is a big issue that they need to solve right away.
Keep in mind that we all naturally gravitate towards either the vitamin or aspirin. While we’re all capable of holding space for both, some people are more inclined to focus on fixing a problem or paying attention to what is urgent rather than looking to the future. Others focus on the future and what they want to create for the better and sometimes aren’t paying as much attention to what is urgent and needs attention right now. (I often hear this discrepancy between parents: one gets caught up thinking about the long-term impacts of a decision they’ve made or what university they should be thinking about when their child is five years old; the other one is saying “can we just get her teeth brushed and get her into bed since it’s past her bedtime?”). The beauty is we need both types of people in the world and in businesses (and in households). It’s good to notice which one is your natural inclination and style because you likely communicate that way too.
Instead, when you’re influencing people, it’s always best to present both the vitamin and aspirin: what will this suggestion generate that’s better for the person you’re trying to influence and what do they need to hear that is relevant to them that will make them take action right away?
Let me know how this resonates with you.
