I have purposely avoided reading “How to win friends & influence people” even though it has been recommended to me for years by a number of different people. The book itself seems to be a good literary work and I will, at some point, read it and more than likely take a great deal of knowledge from it. However, I have never wanted to see myself as someone who seeks out to influence others. And in my time I have met more than a few “influencers” that have their own ideas, agendas, and purposes for the people around them. Coincidentally those ideas, agendas, and purposes all benefit the “influencer” and that is what I consider manipulation.
Influence is something that many people strive to achieve. We wish to be able to have followers, we wish that people would quote us, we wish that if we said a restaurant was great people would flock to it, and we wish most of all for others to come to us for advice. We have the opportunity to influence others when we are confident in who we are and that we can help steer friends and family when they need it. We can give helpful, positive advice and we know that what we have to say is not always something that needs to be broadcast for the masses to hear. Those who have influence, don’t always need a microphone and those with a microphone don’t always have influence.
On the flip side of the coin, when we seek people out to tell them what they should be doing different or how we would have done it, than we are attempting to manipulate others. Manipulation is an ugly thing and it’s not always recognized in the act. The biggest attributes that I’ve seen in manipulators are forcing their own agenda and that they hand out their “advice” even when it’s not asked for. If we find ourselves pushing our beliefs onto others that we seek out, we’re probably attempting to manipulate them. Manipulators have an ability to affect others, but more than likely it is for their own good and can be detrimental to those that they are manipulating.
