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You spent three hours refining your offer last week.
Nobody bought.
Most people treat influence as a performance.
The right words. The right tone. The right close. They rehearse the pitch and wonder why the answer keeps coming back no.
The pitch is not the problem.
By the time you open your mouth, the decision is already forming. Not consciously. The other person is not sitting there evaluating your words against a checklist. Their brain is doing something faster and older than that. It is reading the situation. Reading you. Deciding whether this is safe territory or not.
If the situation feels off, no pitch fixes it.
Chris Voss spent years negotiating with people who had every reason to say no. The first thing he learned was not a technique. It was this: the words matter less than the emotional state of the person hearing them. Get the state wrong and the words are irrelevant.
The same principle applies to every conversation where you need a yes. A client. A collaborator. A hiring manager. A potential subscriber. The state they are in when you start talking determines most of what happens next.
This week is about influence. Not manipulation. Not scripts. The mechanics of how people actually decide, and what you can control before the conversation starts.
Tuesday goes deeper on the full system. For now, one thing.
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Think about the last time someone tried to sell you something and it felt immediately wrong. Not because the offer was bad. Because something about the setup was off. The timing. The context. The energy in the room.
You made your decision in the first few seconds. The pitch did not change it.
That instinct works both ways.
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This week's micro-action:
Before your next pitch, ask, sale, or request, spend 60 seconds on this: what is the other person dealing with right now, before this conversation? What is already on their mind?
You do not need to know the answer perfectly. You need to ask the question at all.
Most people skip it entirely. They go straight to their ask. Then they wonder why the timing felt wrong.
Send your next pitch. Do it today. But ask the question first.
Tuesday I am breaking down the full influence system. The mechanics behind why people say yes, and what most people get completely backwards.
If you want to go deeper on the human skills that actually move people, the First Dollar Diagnostic will tell you exactly where your biggest leverage point is right now. Seven dollars. Done in 20 minutes. [Link to product]
High Stakes Human Skills publishes Monday through Friday. If this was forwarded to you, you can subscribe at highstakeshumanskills.com.
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