Become a master of persuasion
The ability to persuade is perhaps the most significant skill that will give you a competitive edge professionally and make you successful.
Persuasion is not a "soft skill"; it is a fundamental skill that can help you attract investors, sell products, build brands, inspire teams, and trigger movements. Words and ideas created our world, and words and ideas have the potential to make you a star in your field, as long as you can persuade someone else to act on them.
To become a master of persuasion, use below five rhetorics that Aristotle identified two thousand years ago:
1) Character
If your actions don't back your words, you lose credibility, and ultimately, weaken your arguments.
2) Reason
You need to make a logical appeal to reason and tell people why they should care about your idea. Use data, evidence, and facts to form a rational argument.
3) Emotion
Persuasion cannot occur in the absence of emotion. People are moved to action by how you make them feel.
4) Metaphor
When you use a metaphor or analogy to compare a new idea to something familiar, it clarifies your concept by turning the abstract into something concrete.
5) Brevity
There are limits to the amount of information any human can absorb and retain. When it comes to persuasion, less is always more, and always start with your strongest point.
While the tools we use to communicate ideas have changed in the past two thousand years, the human brain has not. The same formula that worked then works now.