⚠️ A note before we start. This issue opens with a personal story about a suicide attempt. It isn't graphic, but if it's not something you want to read today, skip ahead to 🔎 INFLUENCE DEEP DIVE. And if you're struggling right now, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is there anytime, by call or text.

Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a playbook each week to shape decisions, change behavior, and become impossible to ignore, from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

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He was 14. Bullied at school, lonely, and deep in a depression he didn't have language for yet. He'd made a plan to end his life. He sat down and started writing a letter to his parents to explain why.

He got to the line: I love you so much.

And then, without meaning to, he wrote the next sentence.

Is this how much you love them?

He doesn't fully know where that line came from. But it stopped him. He pictured his parents standing over his coffin. Broken. And in that moment, something changed in him that no amount of reasoning had managed to change before.

He survived that night. A new story was conjured up in his head that overtook the old one.

That teenager grew up to become a psychologist. His name is Owen Fitzpatrick, he's studied how belief gets built and weaponized in North Korea, Rwanda, and Afghanistan — not from a desk, but on the ground. He is one of 51 people worldwide named a Global Speaking Fellow — the highest designation in professional speaking, awarded to fewer people than there are Nobel laureates most years. His new book, Inner Propaganda, is what happens when that field work turns inward: at 14, he survived a suicide attempt that reshaped everything he now teaches about belief.

I sat down with him on the Influence Anyone podcast and here's exactly what you're getting in this issue: the real reason your best ideas get nodded at and then ignored — and the two-part test that decides whether anyone actually acts on what you say next.

(If you want the deep dive, keep scrolling 👇🏽)

The mindset shift: stop trying to be right. Start trying to be believed. Those are two different skills, and only one of them gets your ideas adopted and helps you make the impact you want.

Most leaders and professionals think their job is to be right. Gather the evidence, make the case, let the facts do the persuading.

That's not how belief works. Not for a scared 14-year-old, and not for the client sitting across from you deciding whether to trust your recommendation.

Here's the two-part test, straight from Owen's research. Before logic ever gets a vote, an idea has to pass two checks:

Fail either one, and it doesn't matter how correct you are. The idea gets nodded at, and nothing changes. Pass both, and the brain goes looking for logical reasons to back it up on its own.

This is why the smartest argument in the room routinely loses to the most believable one.

It's also the difference between a thought leader and what Owen calls a belief leader. A thought leader introduces an idea. A belief leader gets it adopted. Anyone can repeat a fact. Getting someone to actually live differently and change their behavior is a different skill entirely.

The takeaway: As a professional of influence, your expertise was never the bottleneck. Your ability to make an idea feel safe to believe was.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

Here's what nobody tells you about persuasion: the order is backwards from how you were taught.

We assume it goes evidence → belief → feeling → action.

Show someone the data, they update their belief, and how they feel follows along, then they take action. Owen's work — and frankly, his own life experiences — argues the opposite. Feeling comes first. Belonging comes second. Belief comes last, built mainly by reasoning that shows up to defend a decision the brain already made. Action follows right behind it.

That's the design of human psychology, working exactly as intended. Your brain isn't optimizing for accuracy. It's optimizing for two things: safety and stability.

Believing what your tribe believes keeps you safe. Believing a consistent story about the world keeps you stable. Logic gets recruited afterward to make both of those feel justified.

This is why Owen's 14-year-old self couldn't think his way out of that bedroom. The belief that ending his life was the right call didn't come from a chain of reasoning — it came from isolation, exhaustion, and a story that had become his only stable one. What changed wasn't Owen having a better logical argument. It was one sentence that made a different story — I am loved, and this would break the people who love me — suddenly feel more true than the one he'd been living inside of.

Owen calls this the shift from thought leadership to belief leadership. A thought leader hands someone information. A belief leader understands that information alone rarely moves anyone, and instead does the quieter work of making a new belief feel safe to hold.

For you, as a professional of influence, that shows up every time you're trying to get a client to trust a recommendation, a boss to back an idea, or a room full of skeptics to consider something new. Stacking better logic on top of better logic won't pass the test if the idea doesn't feel right yet, or doesn't fit who that person believes they are — and until it passes, nobody acts on it. They just nod.

Owen's framework for building a belief that sticks runs on four levers: how credible you are, how sound your logic is, how the person feels, and — the one most people skip — how well you actually understand the person you're talking to before you say anything at all.

Application:

This is about recognizing that the story someone tells themselves about who they are will always outrun your data and evidence. Your job is to help them believe in a new idea and a better story, one that makes it feel true all along.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Owen what he'd want on a sticky note on everyone's desk — one line to remember all of this by.

He said: "It's just a story."

That's the whole point. The belief that almost ended his life at 14 was a story. So is the one that says you're not good enough, not senior enough, not someone who deserves more opportunities.

Stories can be rewritten.

🎁 You made it all the way here and I have a gift for you! I bought 20 copies of Owen’s new book Inner Propaganda and I want to give it ALL AWAY. I haven’t received them yet, but once I do, I’ll pack them up to ship to you. All you have to do is reply to this email and say “I want it!” and if you are the first 20, you get a free book. That’s it.

Unfortunately this will only be for folks in the USA. I’ve tried to mail someone a free book in Europe the last time. I paid $60 to mail the book (with a handwritten note), after I bought it for $30, and the person who was receiving it was met with a bill of $50, she declined and the book came ALL the way back to me! Yeah, not doing that again (sorry).

Ok beautiful professionals of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday!

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

P.S. What's one belief about yourself you've quietly outgrown, but haven't rewritten yet?