All you want to do is cancel your cable service. You pick up the phone, dial the number, and brace yourself for the inevitable. The customer service representative answers, and upon hearing your request, switches into high gear. They start pitching every imaginable package, deal, and special offer. It’s a relentless barrage of benefits, each more extravagant than the last.
“What if I tell you we can throw in premium channels at no extra cost for three months?” they offer with a hint of desperation.
You decline.
“How about a special bundle with Internet and phone?”
Still no.
The offers keep coming, each sounding like the deal of a lifetime. But no matter how much they “benefit bomb” you or how shiny or tempting the packages, they all miss one crucial point: you understand their offers perfectly. You just don’t want them.
Once the representative made their case clear, their ability to influence your decision was over—if, that is, they ever had a chance at all.
Likely you’ve been in both positions. You’ve been the customer, nodding along with no intention of buying (if you were feeling nice that day). You’ve also been the overeager salesperson bombarding someone with benefits or repeating the same case for change (but louder!) to no effect. While you can and should make sure your stakeholders understand your case for change, your job is over once they do.
It’s one of the hardest lessons of inspiring change, but one of the most important: you can’t want a change more than the person you’re presenting it to.
Change is all about alignment.
It happens only when someone believes that a change will give them something they want via a set of means they believe in. Only by outlining how and why a change achieves an outcome that someone already wants can you determine whether they’re ever likely to change at all.
For example, if they care about convenience and you’re focused on innovation, your job is to show how your innovation can enhance their convenience—in a way that aligns with what they want and believe about themselves.
If you can’t make a legitimate connection between the change you want and an outcome someone truly cares about—and I can’t emphasize this enough—they will not make the change on their own. You can lay out your best arguments, present the most compelling evidence, and appeal to their highest ideals, but if the other person’s desire doesn’t naturally align with what you’re offering, the change won’t last—if it ever happens at all.
This misalignment isn’t merely ineffective; it’s counterproductive. It builds resistance, not rapport. You can’t make someone agree with your argument. If, despite your best efforts, your case doesn’t resonate with someone or they remain neutral to it, accepting that decision doesn’t mean that you accept defeat. Your acceptance of their decision is your acknowledgment of both their agency and their smart, capable, and good self-identity.
When you accept and step back, you offer them space and time to reconsider, on their own terms, what they’ve heard and what they can’t unhear—all free from the pressure that might otherwise trigger reactance. Stepping back also gives you the space and time to determine if and how it’s worth trying again.
IN OTHER WORDS…Desire can overcome any objection, but yours is no substitute for theirs. You can only influence understanding.
To say something people can’t unhear, anchor it in something they won’t unwant—that is, something they are unlikely to ignore or reject later.
Because people are already interested in and internally motivated to act on what they want, they are constantly attuned to any information that will successfully fill in the missing chapters and tell them what they need to do to get there.
That’s why it’s so important to clearly link a change to something someone actively and knowingly seeks. When you don’t, the change stops before it ever starts.