I hope you were able to take advantage of the discussion forum. I've seen some fascinating conversations about the difference between influence and manipulation. I'd like to understand and dive a little bit deeper into this question, difference between influence and manipulation. To begin, I went to the dictionary to see what the dictionary would have to say in terms of the definitions of each of these words, to influence or to manipulate. And here's what I found. Influence is formally defined as to affect or to change someone or something in an indirect but usually important way to have an influence on someone or something. So let's revisit and repeat that. To effect or to change someone or something, in an indirect but usually important way. Okay, so hold your understanding of that definition and now let's compare that to the definition that I found for manipulate. Which the dictionary defines as to control or play upon by artful, unfair or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage, to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose. Again, let's repeat that. To control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage. So what do you see as the key difference here? As I looked at these two different definitions, one thing stood out to me in particular. And that was the degree to which manipulate talks about the control you have over someone, or the influence that you have over someone. But to what end, and the end in case of manipulate is to your own advantage or in this case serving one's own purpose. The definition of influence is relatively agnostic about the end. Whether it's self serving or other serving simply says in an important way. But manipulate is very specific about I'm influencing, I'm in controlling another person or another thing, but to my own advantage for my own purpose. And so when we boil down the difference between influence and manipulate and this is what we find in our research as well is fundamentally the difference is about intent. What is your intent? The word influence often gets a positive connotation or a positive meaning because we assume that influence is used to influence for greater good, for goal accomplishment, for the group, for the team, for the organization. Manipulate is very specifically understood to be about my advantage, controlling your influence in you, for my own gain, for my own purpose, for my own advantage. A fundamental difference between influence and manipulate. So what we're gonna do, given that understanding of influence, manipulate, we wanna be able to protect ourselves from the unwanted influence and especially the manipulation of other people. We in this segment, are gonna talk about three very specific strategies that you can use everyday to protect yourself and to protect your team from that unwanted influence. The first one is going to be to minimize the biases, that we all as human beings have that enable others to influence us. The second will be to flip the influence tactics on the other person. So when that other person tries to influence you with a specific tactic, there are very specific strategies that you can use to reverse that tactic and flip it on the other person. And in third in last is to reframe the power relationship. Who has the control, who's dependent on who, we can reframe that power relationship which allows us to protect ourselves
