Six Sources of Influence — Source 1 Personal Motivation

The Six Sources of Influence is a framework developed by Joseph Grenny and his colleagues in the book “Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change.” These six sources — personal motivation, personal ability, social motivation, social ability, structural motivation, and structural ability — help identify key areas that can be leveraged to bring about rapid, profound, sustainable behavioral change in individuals and organizations.

This article focuses on the first source of influence.

Personal Motivation: help them love what they hate.

Make pain pleasurable:

Many changes involve things that people hate to do. We need to overcome our proclivity to employ nag, guilt, or threat to make people embrace such changes, and discard the assumption that people are not motivated simply because of some moral defect or character flaw, like “They’re just selfish.” Influencers understand that forcing people to face their demons doesn’t work — for example, studies show that confrontation actually increases alcoholic bingeing — so they make pain pleasurable to provide…