Former congressman and prosecutor, Trey Gowdy, teaches the art of persuasion and effective communication.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• In persuasion there is no clock; there is an acquired sense of when there is an opening and an even more acquired sense of when to step into that opening.

• “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Rarely does something just happened. Rarely do you just “luck” into something. Life rewards preparation.

• Know your objective, know your facts, know what success looks like, and it becomes much easier to plot the course to achieve it.

• If it’s real people in the real world that you aspire to communicate with, move, and ultimately persuade, you’ve got to get better at understanding how they process information and the language that speaks to them particularly. You have to meet people where they are, not where you are and not where you may want them to be.

• Know what you believe, why you believe it, be able to both defend it and understand why others believe differently, and then—in word and deed—persuade others.

• On a scale of 0 to 100%, probable cause would be more than 35% but less than 50%.

• You cannot “fake” sincerity. If you don’t believe what you are saying, no one else well. If you’re not invested in what you are selling, no one else will be either. If you are not passionate about what you believe, chances are the person with whom you are verbally sparring with will not be, and passion is essential if you are engaging in passionate reasoning.

• “It’s not that I am upset you lied to me, it is that I am upset I don’t know when I can believe you in the future.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

• There is no such thing as “public speaking” because there’s no such thing as “public listening.” People process information individually, they hear different things even if the words are exactly the same, and they reach conclusions based on their own experience, education, and bias.