Doesn’t Hurt To Ask

Using the Power of Questions to Communicate, Connect, and Persuade

By Trey Gowdy

Regardless of whom you are talking to and regardless of who your jury is, you must have full command of your objective before you open your mouth.

Are you trying to begin a relationship, repair one, enhance one, or end one?

Are you trying to pacify or infuriate?

Is your objective consensus or conflict?

(Gowdy 2020, xxii)

But keep asking questions. First of yourself. Then of others. Ask questions about your existence, about everyone, and everything. The person you end up persuading may wind up being yourself, and sometimes that is the toughest jury of all.

(Gowdy 2020, 20)

I want you to ask yourself a question in the privacy of your own conscience and answer it truthfully: Are you genuinely open to moving on a position, of altering the way you look at an issue, or considering a different vantage point?

If you are not open to doing that, what makes you think others will be? I’m not asking you to surrender a deeply held conviction. Just be open to looking at that conviction in a different way.

(Gowdy 2020, 23-24)

Before you open your mouth—before you begin asking anyone anything – you have to put yourself through an extensive and deeply thoughtful round of self-inquiry. You’ve got to answer the following:

1. Do you want to start a fire, nurture a fire, or put out a fire?

2. Do you want to convert the person to your way of thinking?

3. Will you settle for the person with whom you are talking merely walking away with a different or new perspective and an agreement to take a fresh look at the issue?

4. Do you want to reach consensus on some points andagree to disagree on others? If so, what points are you willing to concede?

5. Do you just want to argue?

If you do not know your purpose, you are almost guaranteed not to achieve it. If you do not know going into a conversation what you are trying to accomplish, you will likely not accomplish anything productive. So, what is it you are hoping to do? Educate? Convert? Persuade subtly? Infuriate?

So, you know the facts.

You even know your purpose.

Now, know thyself!

(Gowdy 2020, 46-47)

Emotions are important in the quest for sincerity. Emotions are best deployed to augment and complement other tools of persuasion – like facts, rationality, and logic – rather than as a stand-alone tool. But emotions are powerful and they work when it comes to moving people. The key to the most effective and long-lasting persuasion, however, is to go deep within the reserve of your sentiments and emotions and connect them to a larger precept or fundamental belief. Be emotional about fairness, be emotional about justice, be emotional about opportueducation. Do not simply be emotional. To be effective, emotions cannot be engineered — they must be earnest – and the best way to have earnest emotion is to connect that emotion to some larger belief or truth. Manufactured or over-engineered emotions, on the other hand, are not only not helpful, they are destructive to what you are trying to accomplish.

(Gowdy 2020, 84-85)

…There have been Dreamer valedictorians. There have been Dreamers that sought to serve our country in the military. There are Dreamers who know no country other than this one, who speak no language other than English, and have nowhere to “go back to” if their status is in jeopardy here.

What I did disagree with was the conclusion they were seeking to reach: that because some of the fourteen million had achieved great accomplishments, that necessarily means all fourteen million should be on a path to citizenship. Only in DC politics can fourteen million of any group be homogenous and all pass a background check. Only in DC politics would you equate someone who was brought to this country as a one year-old and lived here without incident with someone who crossed the border at age fifteen only six months ago and treat the two the same. The conclusion did not follow logically. The conclusion followed perfectly when it came to politics: Cast Republicans as heartless for insisting that all “fourteen million aspiring Americans” are not similarly situated.

(Gowdy 2020, 135-136)

Bias is pervasive and almost impossible to overcome. When the person with whom you are doing intellectual battle is bias, you should spend as much time as possible highlighting you that bias as the facts reasonably allow.

That is the impeachment of a person. It makes those you are trying to persuade less likely to believe in the objectivity and neutrality of the person. It also has the residual effect of bleeding over into the larger investigation. Agent Strzok’s defense was not that he lacked bias. His defense was that while he was biased, his bias did not actually hurt the person he was biased against or influence his investigation. In other words, he was ineffectively biased. That is not a good defense to be relying on when you are in the persuasion business.

(Gowdy 2020, 141)

Certain words are just too big to make for effective and precise communication. “Everybody” is a big word. It assumes that you (1) know everybody and (2) know the email practice sample is the word “always.” Among the definitions and synonyms for “always” are “unfailingly,” “every time,” “at all times,” and “without exception.” The word “always” forces the person using it to have foreclosed every other option and it’s impossible to do that. It requires you to identify, analyze, and eliminate every alternative, and that is a big, bright, red flag.

(Gowdy 2020, 166-167)

It is impossible to effectively communicate if there is no common understanding of what is being said. When my Latin teachers spoke Latin, I had no idea what they were saying. I have the test scores to prove it. But even if you agree on the language, you still have to agree on the meaning of words. It is essential if you are really trying to understand and be understood. It is also extremely effective if you are trying to stop or slow down someone else’s argument. I never cease to be amazed at the difficulty some people have explaining words we all think we know the definition of. We use words every day that have multiple meanings and sometimes very different meanings from what we intend.

The word “decimate” is a classic example. Most of us use that word to mean totally destroy and wipe out. The historical definition is to wipe out every tenth person (decimat, meaning “taken as a tenth”—see, I eventually nailed Latin!). There is a big difference between leaving 0 percent and leaving 90 percent to fight.

Understanding what is being said, with precision, and making the other person define the terms, is a powerful weapon in wars of persuasion.