#58 The Magic Question

The Magic Question

Do you ever wish you had more influence?

Professor Zoe Chance teaches the course, “Mastering Influence and Persuasion” at Yale, which inspired her book, Influence is Your Super Power: How to Get What you Want Without Compromising Who You Are.

As described in this podcast, Chance’s favorite strategy is “the magic question.”  She retells a story by Gloria Steinem, who visited a village in Zambia that had lost two women to sex-trafficking.  Steinem asked women there, “What would it take to keep that from happening again?”

They told her:  an electric fence.  Elephants kept trampling the villages’ crops, leaving families poor and vulnerable to exploitation.

Steinem raised the money, villagers erected the fence, and no more women were trafficked.

“What would it take?” may be “magical” because it empowers the respondent, elicits unexpected answers, and it can be asked to community members, a friend, a partner, or even your boss.