Thank Your for Arguing - Jay Heinrichs

Summary:

Thank You for Arguing is your master class in the art of persuasion, taught by professors ranging from Bart Simpson to Winston Churchill. 

The time-tested secrets this book discloses include Cicero’s three-step strategy for moving an audience to action—as well as Honest Abe’s Shameless Trick of lowering an audience’s expectations by pretending to be unpolished. But it’s also replete with contemporary techniques such as politicians’ use of “code” language to appeal to specific groups and an eye-opening assortment of popular-culture dodges—including The Yoda Technique, The Belushi Paradigm, and The Eddie Haskell Ploy. 

Summary from goodreads.com

My Review:

What a great book!

Although I am a super fan of everything self-help and love most anything that has a lesson to be learned, I found this book to be not only instructional but very entertaining. Heinrichs’ method of teaching through story telling had me feeling the same excitement as though I were reading a great work of non-fiction, which I also love.

Throughout the book, Heinrich provides tools for many different situations in which persuasion would be necessary. Although it is not always forthright, we are constantly trying to convince someone to see things our way, aren’t we? And just when we start to argue our point of view, our “victim” attempts to prove us wrong while trying to convince us that they, in fact, are right. And here is where Heinrich provides some sneaky tactics to get what we want and make our victim feel as though it was their idea all along! Pure genius! Did you know that you can win many arguments simply by conceding? The words, “You’re right” go a long way. During an argument, folks would rather win the fight than to really get what they want. If it’s a heated one, they may even forget what the argument was about in the first place. This is the key. The words, “you’re right” almost immediately drops their guard and opens the door wide open to sweetly get what you are asking for.

The most important and useful tactic that I found in the book, Heinrichs calls The Political Uncle. I guess I can appreciate this one because, as an accountant, I love black and white, and this tactic is all about facts. Many people state their opinions with zero facts to back it up. So how do you combat such a person? Ask questions. Ask for details backing up their craziness. Jay calls it Aggressive Interest. I call it…Shut Your Ass Down and it works wonders.

I will definitely look to Jay’s book as a reference source when I need to, politely, get my way.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review