“People of goodwill and passion can change the course of the future.” The most important part of that quote is the word “goodwill”, as it represents something more, often signifying friendly, helpful, or cooperative feelings or attitude. Goodwill is also the key driver behind the skill of being able to convert and to bring people together, and it is important to move away from the thinking that people are actively programmed “follow” to the thinking that people are actively programmed to actively engage and collaborate.
If there was one key barrier that holds people from getting back on track it might be best described as the emotion of “shame”. If that is the case, then the two questions that need to be asked are how do we make people feel that they will not be ashamed if they admit that they have been viewing the world through the wrong lens, and under what conditions will people think about why they did what they did. It might start with everyone coming to terms with two hard truths; that most people are way better than they get credit for, and that people can either work to find the best in others or they can wait for the worst to manifest in them.
Perhaps the first step of converting starts with not making people feel bad for what they have not done and, instead, making them aware of what they could do and supporting them for who they can be. Yet, there is an early challenge that is guaranteed to arise, and it is to do with the realization that nobody is wrong all the time. So, if someone is occasionally right then it is important to be able to answer them. Perhaps that can be done by listening and being a subject matter expert, but it also helps if a person is zealous about everything they do, and do it big. Whatever it takes, everyone should feel obligated to help people transition out of denial.
If anything, the social sciences have contributed to our understanding as to how information gets absorbed through the prism of a person’s own beliefs, experiences, and needs. These might result in people having closed-minded views on matters like immigration matters, religious matters, reproductive matters, political matters and more, and it has contributed to individuals thinking of greatness and pride as the ability to choke out others and to push them around. In reality, this thinking has been allowed to go unaddressed and individuals have conflated it with patriotism, and these hazardous thoughts have given way to actions that have the opposite effect. Precisely for these reasons, who people listen to, what people read, and most importantly who people look up to for their version of “hope” matters.
Individual. Individuals.
An excerpt from Michael Eric Dyson’s book on Jay-Z titled Jay-Z: Made in America, there are two sentences that illustrate and connect the idea of being a converter with hope. “Those who are in a position to hustle, to climb and strive because of education, find hope and inspiration to excel in their realms of pursuit because of Lebron and Jay’s narratives of success. Those who are left behind in poor neighborhoods project their desires and pin their hopes on those who escape.” Someone like a Lebron or Jay-Z, who represent hope for so many people, have the power to convert and help people overcome their plaguing circumstances, like poverty, social dislocation, gang warfare, and so much more. And that same hope can lead individuals toward building, doing, go-getting, dreaming, working hard, inventing, organizing, engineering, and so much more. Maybe the best answer to “how does one covert?”, might be by being an extraordinary cooperator and by being able to connect with people from all walks of life, and by leveraging genuine optimism to optimistically guide others and to help them believe that anything is possible.
The difference between the existence of bad thinking and the absence of better thinking is the difference between unhealthy and healthy societies. The key identifying features of healthy societies are that they are both helpful and educative societies. What further separates healthy societies from unhealthy societies is that they are societies that share the future and that help people to understand that they are better off because they work together for a shared purpose, and that the people in a healthy society never forget hope, which is often tied back to converters.
Being able to convert is what the ambiguous label of the “it factor” attempts to describe. The “it factor” is often described as being an innate ability when it is in fact a learned skill with many components to it, which is what makes it rare. Converters stand out because they have become masters at causing individuals to experience cognitive dissonance, by getting them to behave in ways that they normally would not. That causes a clash of conflicting values, attitudes, and beliefs, and it can lead towards a positive recalibration of sorts, because nobody wants to be uncertain about the most important aspects about themselves. Then with a sprinkle of some positive reaffirmations and with sensitive understanding while also removing any judgemental qualities, not being cynical about looking for the good in a person can result in a shared discovery of exactly that.