Sales & Persuasive Techniques: Attunement – Part 2/15

Understanding Attunement: The Art of Seeing Through Someone Else's Eyes

To persuade effectively, you first need to step outside your own perspective and genuinely understand the world as your counterpart sees it. This is the essence of attunement — and it may be the single most powerful skill you can develop as a freelancer or entrepreneur.

Finding Common Ground

Attunement is deceptively simple in concept: it means taking someone else's perspective and seeing the world through their eyes rather than your own. Yet in practice, most of us default to our own viewpoint almost every time.

Why does attunement matter so much? Because in any persuasive encounter — whether you're pitching a client, negotiating a contract, or rallying your team — you have very little coercive power. You cannot force people to say yes. You cannot compel clients to hire you, partners to trust you, or colleagues to follow your lead. The only reliable path to moving people is to find common ground, understand where they're coming from, and craft a solution that genuinely works for both sides.

The Perspective-Taking Exercise

Here's a quick exercise that researchers use to reveal how naturally — or unnaturally — we take other people's perspectives. Try it now:

1. Identify your dominant hand.
2. Snap your fingers five times quickly with that hand.
3. Using your index finger, draw a capital letter E on your forehead.

Simple enough — but here's the insight. There are two ways you could have drawn that E. You might have drawn it so you can read it (facing inward), or so the person in front of you can read it (facing outward).

If you drew the E facing yourself, you took your own perspective. If you drew it facing outward, you took someone else's. Scientists use this small exercise to measure perspective-taking tendencies — and the results are remarkably revealing.

Taking another person's perspective allows you to see where they're coming from, understand what they're really saying, and honour their point of view. It makes you a far more effective persuader. It is not, however, something most of us do naturally. The good news? It is absolutely something you can learn and practise.

Why Power Works Against You

Here's where things get counterintuitive — and critically important for anyone in a leadership or client-facing role.

When researchers ran the E exercise after first making participants feel more powerful — by prompting them to reflect on their accomplishments, the size of their budget, or how many people report to them — those participants were significantly more likely to draw the E facing themselves. In other words, increased feelings of power led directly to decreased perspective-taking.

The relationship is clear: the more powerful you feel, the worse your perspective-taking becomes.

People who feel lower in status tend to be exceptional perspective-takers. Why? Because understanding others isn't optional for them — their success, and sometimes their survival, depends on reading the room accurately. People who feel powerful, by contrast, often stop noticing other people's perspectives altogether. Power subtly distorts how they see the world. History — from ancient Greece to Shakespeare to modern corporate failures — is littered with leaders undone by exactly this blind spot.

The Counter-Intuitive Solution: Turn Down the Power Dial

So what's the fix? It's not what your instincts will tell you.

Imagine you're a manager, and you've asked a team member to take on a task. They push back — politely, but clearly. Your instinct as the person in charge is probably to dig in, assert your authority, and push harder. That instinct is almost always wrong.

Think of your sense of power as a dial. When we feel threatened or resisted, our natural reaction is to turn that dial up. But the smarter move — the more effective move — is often to turn it down.

What does that look like in practice? Before re-entering that conversation, you might remind yourself:

• This person is genuinely talented and usually gets things right.
• Our organisation probably needs them more than they need us.
• Even if they comply reluctantly, they won't bring their full effort — and I won't get the result I actually want.
• In reality, I'm less powerful in this situation than I'm assuming.

By deliberately reducing your feelings of power, you open yourself up to genuine perspective-taking. And that makes you measurably more effective — not less.

The Empty Chair Technique

One of the most practical tools for building attunement into your everyday work is the empty chair technique — a concept that has been used in business circles for decades.

Here's how it works: when you set up a meeting, you leave one chair deliberately empty at the table. That chair represents someone who isn't physically in the room — your client, your end user, or whoever the decisions being made will ultimately affect. Throughout the meeting, participants are encouraged to keep that person in mind: What would they think of this? What do they need? What would they say if they were sitting here?

The empty chair is a simple, tangible reminder to stay attuned to perspectives beyond your own. It keeps the conversation grounded in the reality of the person you're ultimately trying to serve.

Key Takeaways

• Attunement means genuinely seeing the world through your counterpart's eyes — not just acknowledging their view, but actively adopting it.
• In persuasion, common ground and mutual understanding are far more powerful tools than authority or pressure.
• There is a proven inverse relationship between feelings of power and the ability to take someone else's perspective.
• When faced with resistance, deliberately reducing your sense of power — rather than increasing it — leads to better outcomes.
• People with less positional power tend to be better natural perspective-takers; this is a skill you can consciously develop regardless of your status.
• The empty chair technique is a simple but effective way to keep client and stakeholder perspectives central to every decision.

Your Action Steps

1. Try the E exercise right now — and honestly reflect on which way you drew it. Then practise redrawing it the other way as a mental cue to shift your perspective before your next important conversation.
2. Before your next client call or negotiation, spend two minutes listing three things that make the other person's position valid or understandable — even if you disagree with it.
3. Identify one ongoing situation where you've been pushing harder when met with resistance. Write down two reasons why the other person might actually be right, and approach the conversation again with that mindset.
4. Set up an empty chair in your next team meeting or strategy session, and assign it to represent your ideal client. Refer back to it at least once during the meeting when making a key decision.