I grew up in a very wealthy environment but my family's personal finances were like pretty feast or famine so my dad had very big jobs and then also was and employed at times because his behavior was so erratic. So I think like I had a mentality of financial insecurity even though we were never actually lacking anything fundamental there was always like a lot of risk around money. It all comes from the same place of just like not wanting to and then conjuring a narrative for why not to. You have just hit on two of the big reasons that we have inequality between people who are asking and advocating themselves, its gender and socioeconomic class.
Being influential sounds great, even desirable. But doing influence? That’s when alarm bells go off in our brains—because we tend to imagine the act of influencing as manipulative, coercive, and 100% transactional. And sure, we’ve all had icky experiences with influence. But when we flatten its inherent complexity, we risk missing out on influence’s ability to instigate positive impact.
Yale School of Management professor and author Zoe Chance believes influence is an untapped superpower; that’s why she recently published the book, Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. And it’s why we asked her onto the show to help us break down some common misconceptions about influence, better harness its power to catalyze systemic change, and learn how to ask what she calls the “Magic Question.”
Our book is available now at bravenewwork.com
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