Influencing family members towards good health will create benefits for the both of you.

Influencing family is important for your overall health success.  It can be difficult to improve your life when the people closest to you prefer the old ways of living.  This becomes obvious when you are eating healthier and no one supports your goal.  It can be especially difficult when the people closest to you try to undermine your efforts.

In this article you’re going to learn how influencing family members can be easy.  You’re going to learn a “question approach” to influence that’s subtle and non-intrusive.  At the bottom of this article is a powerful 30 minute live call we recorded on influencing family members with this powerful “question approach”.

You can’t make anyone do stuff against their will.  That old saying is actually right, yet the word “will” is a profoundly flexible idea.  The key to influencing family members is to learn how to bend and modify their will over time.

One of the great things about influencing family is that you have a captured audience.  You see your subjects almost every day, multiple times a day.  This opens up the realm of long-term behavioral adjustment.  When combined with a natural rapport you get the ability to deeply influence a person’s values and will.

Influence a family member’s will by having them identify with some small part of the behavior you want.  Once they’re established the identification, you can then feed it back to them, amplify it, and eventually challenge them to defend it.

Your first goal in influencing family is to get a small agreement.

Start with a small agreement

An example could be that you want your teenage son to eat more vegetables.  Your first main is to get him to agree, even slightly, to “eating vegetables is good”.  You can do this by asking him about his must athletic friends or role models.  You can get him talking about other family members who you know eats vegetables.  Once you build his train of thought towards their eating habits, ask the question “What do you think makes that person eat vegetables?”

If you are having an extremely hard time, polarize the conversation by asking about people who are in extremely poor health.  Get him talking about all the BAD things that person is doing and then ask him what may be able to help him.  If you don’t get the answer you want, keep probing and directing the conversation until you do.

Your second goal in influencing family members is to feed and grow the agreement.

Once you’ve established the idea that “eating vegetables is good”, it’s time to expand on the idea within his mind.  Do that by asking questions that make him think more specifically about vegetables.

• “Why would a person want to eat vegetables?”  – A: Because of the fiber.
• “What makes you want to have more fiber?”  – A: Probably because it keeps me pooping!
• “Why would you want to keep pooping?”  – A: Because it keeps me healthy.
• And other questions that feed back his answers and get him more specific about the benefits of vegetables.

By asking these questions, you’re making your son expand on that area of thought, literally feeding and growing the idea in his mind.

When you are influencing family members, growing familiarity will help them move TOWARDS.

Just a review, the number one thing that directs a person towards or away from an action/idea/object is familiarity.  Additionally, the second most important factor is the internal representation of the action/idea/object in their mind.  Influencing family members’ internal representational systems often require more participation on their part and will be covered another time.

Your third goal in influencing family is to have them personally identify with the agreement.

Once you have directed your son’s train of thought towards agreeing that vegetables are good, the next step in influencing family is to have them personally identify with the agreement.  In our example, the easiest way to do this is to make you son defend his agreement!  Start to challenge his statements.

• “You said you want to be healthy for when you have kids.  Haha, are you sure?  Why would you are about that?”
• “You said you don’t want to be fat.  Do you really not want to be a fatty?”
• “Yeah right (sarcastically), you don’t like vegetables!”

With these subtle challenges to his statements, he defends them and becomes more attached to them.  He will want to prove to you that he is right, naturally, and do so with story and example.

Few more tips for influencing family members towards good health.

When influencing family members, keep a long term mindset for success.

Take your time, if you don’t achieve the results you want this time there will always be a next time.  Your family members are a captured audience.  It might seem disparaging at times when someone you love talks about or does something you know is harmful.  Remember that the victory is in the war, not the battle.

While influencing family members, keep in conversational.

Set up the conversation with a personal story, or talking about something that happened in the news.  While asking questions, agree and fill in with a personal story.  Change the subject of the conversation and then bring it back.  The key to influencing family is to just be yourself, but with a strategy and an outcome in mind.

When influencing family, it’s all about them, not you.

They key is not to insert YOUR opinions, but to instead pull out from within THEM the thoughts and actions you want more of.  By simply asking “What are your favorite foods?” and LISTENING, you can pull out and ask questions about the foods that are on the healthier side of the scale.  Asking the right questions and feeding the answers back is the number one subtle way towards influencing family.

Recoding:

Wednesday: 6/22/2011: