Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a strategy each week to change minds, shape decisions, and drive actions from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

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A client told me something last week I haven't stopped thinking about: "Most people in the influence and persuasion space give off sales bro energy. You don't. You're approachable, normal, sincere, and that's actually why I joined your cohort." She wasn't describing the features of my cohort or the curriculum. She was describing an emotion: she felt safe and free from ick. And that was the real reason she signed up.

This is what today’s issue is about.

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

My client didn't credit a framework or a results deck. She credited a feeling: sincere, approachable, real. That's the emotional reason why she said yes, and most people never get told the real reason.

Ask someone why they chose you for that promotion, to buy your service, and they will usually lie to you. Not on purpose. They don't know they're doing it.

The brain makes a decision emotionally, then builds a logical explanation after the fact, one convincing enough to say out loud. "It was the price." "It fit the timeline." "The data made sense." All true. But none of it the real reason.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with behavioral marketing expert Talia Wolf. She is the founder of Getuplift and author of Emotional Targeting and has interviewed thousands of customers to find the actual driver underneath their polite answers. The core principle: "First, we buy on emotion, then we rationalize our decision later."

The problem is you can't just ask for it. "Why did you really do that?" gets you a more polished version of the same lie. You have to ask differently, and keep asking.

Here's Wolf's method: never accept the first answer. "It's important to ask open-ended questions that require people to think, and mostly you want to keep asking why until there are no whys left."

One client's homepage used to say "Fix your posture." Sales were flat. Interviews revealed people didn't lack motivation, they'd just given up believing they could follow through. The fix wasn't a better feature. It was permission to stop trying: "You will fix your posture finally... not because the posture trainer is amazing, it is, but because you never have to think about it again." Signups jumped 33%.

The takeaway: the next time someone gives you a clean, logical reason for what they did, don't write it down. Ask one more why.

People don't hide their emotions from you on purpose. They just haven't been asked in a way that lets them find the words.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

The actual problem sits upstream. You never found out what the other person was actually afraid of, or actually wanted, before you built the argument at all.

Wolf discovered this by accident, working with what she calls "the most boring products that you can think of": cybersecurity, accounting software, B2B platforms nobody would call emotional. She expected logic to dominate. Instead she found the opposite. "I would argue that the B2B space is far more emotionally driven than the B2C." Ask her why, and she doesn't hesitate: "You could literally lose your job. You could lose your status."

(Read the issue about the importance of status and storytelling in my conversation with NYT best-selling author Will Storr)

Think about what that means. A consumer who buys the wrong blender is out $40. An employee who champions the wrong software for their entire company is out something much harder to recover: their credibility, in front of every person whose respect they've spent years building. That's not a checklist decision. That's a status and identity decision wearing a checklist as a disguise.

This is the part leaders miss constantly. You assume that once someone clears their logical requirements, budget fits, timeline works, the case is made. But Wolf's research shows people run one more pass after the logic clears, entirely below the surface: "Does this speak to me? How does this make me look better? How does this stop me from looking like a fool?" If you never answered that question, you can win every rational point and still lose the yes.

So how do you find out what someone is actually afraid of, or actually hoping for, before you build your pitch or make the ask? Wolf's team runs the same four questions, in order, in almost every interview.

The Trigger Question. Not "why did you buy this," which invites a rehearsed answer. Instead: "What was going on in your day that made you come to our website?" It's broad enough that people tell you a story instead of a justification.

The Why-Ladder. Whatever story they tell you, ask why. Then ask why again. "You keep asking why until there are no whys left," Wolf says, and her team has a second rule that makes it work: echo their own words back instead of leading them. If someone says they felt guilty, you say "guilty?" and wait. It's uncomfortable at first. It works because you're not supplying the next thought. They are.

The Loss Question. "If I took this product away from you tomorrow, what would you miss the most?" People will tell you what they value out loud, and it's rarely the feature they praised in the last sentence.

The Referral Question. "If you were trying to convince a friend, what would you say?" You're not asking for a testimonial. You're asking them to translate your idea into their own language, so you can find the gap between how you describe it and how they actually experience it.

None of these questions mention price, features, or logic. That's the point. They're built to get underneath the answer someone has already rehearsed for you.

The posture-trainer story is the clearest proof this isn't just a copywriting trick. This is for a company that has a device on you that helps you adjust your posture. On paper, customers wanted better posture. In the interviews, a different pattern kept surfacing: people had tried and failed before, and they'd quietly decided they couldn't be trusted to follow through. The company didn't need a better pitch for "posture." It needed to remove the fear of failing again. The moment the message shifted to "you never have to think about it again," signups rose 33%, and nothing about the product had changed.

Whatever you're pitching or “selling” this month, a project, a hire, yourself, someone is running a version of this same subconscious check. You will not out-argue it with a better slide. You find it with a better question, and then you build your case around what you actually hear.

The people who move you most rarely won you over with the strongest case. They won you over because at some point, you felt like they already knew what you were afraid of or what you cared deeply about before you said it out loud.

That's not a persuasion trick. It's attention, applied early enough to matter.

The next time you're building an argument for your team, your client, your kid, pause for one moment and ask yourself “what do they need to feel”, then ask them “why?”

The answer you get on the fourth why is almost always the one worth building around.

Try this during a real conversation this week: to someone who said yes to you recently, or no, ask the Trigger Question, then keep pulling the thread. Hit reply and tell me what you find. I read every one, and the most interesting answers might end up in a future issue.

Alright, people of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday.

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

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P.S. Wolf mentioned this method works on kids too. I haven't tried the Why-Ladder on my own household yet. If you test it on your kids before I do, reply and let me know how far you got before they caught on 😉