It’s seldom I read a book and I want to start putting in to practice what I’ve read right away. First written in 1983 by Genie Z. Laborde, Influencing With Integrity has so much that is applicable within the working environment today.

Laborde begins with a foreboding opening, almost a warning. A warning that the subsequent pages will help you understand the practice of influencing. She acknowledges that the techniques in the book can be used for manipulation, but that the intent for use originates from inside the person applying them. That the methods and approaches, the ‘super powers’ must be used for good…

“Achieving your own outcome at the expense of, or even without regard for, the other party constitutes manipulation. What makes this particular “informed manipulation” so frightening is that people with these skills acquire such personal power that they are able to affect people deeply, and their capacity to misguide others is thereby increased to the point of evil. I cannot prevent that evil. It exists within those people as a choice they have made. It does not exist within the skills elaborated here. I recommend influencing over manipulation.”

Essentially, the book centres around effective communication – specifically around defining intent and steps to realise what you want to see. She begins by taking the time to discuss the desired state that you are trying to reach, which she refers to as Outcome. This is immediately interesting as it’s something that people often don’t take the time to do. How do I want to feel after this exchange? What do I want to observe happen? This is a great help in pushing forward the focus and the reason for the interaction. It can be particularly difficult when sometimes you don’t even know what it should be, or it’s perhaps hidden from you subconsciously on some level. There also needs to be time for reflection ‘how will I know when I’ve been successful and achieved the desired outcome?’ which is used in countless other books and outlined methods on how one should be effective. Laborde’s writing feels a little different though, perhaps a little more based on intraversion, or even intimacy. She uses the senses much more in her exploration, these being a prominent theme which aligns with the rest of the book.

The approach is deeply rooted in familiar aspects of psychology and linguistics and so feels very familiar and is of course the back bone to much of communication studies as a whole – exploration of the gaps between meaning and intention, and the noise that always comes from trying to convey a message. Many ideas have a very similar feel or even have similar themes to those within NLP, which is mentioned in the book fairly early on, but Zaborde refers to her particular technique as the ‘Syntonic model’.

“Syntonics separates the intricacies of the communication process into discreet steps of easily understood information. Knowing these steps enables you to interact with others successfully”

At length she describes difference types of observation during communication – the ways in which others approach their interactions. Visual, auditory  and kinaesthetic, explains their largely subconscious thought processing traits and how to recognise them both in yourself and in the eyes of others to aid in positive influencing. Exercising the muscle of the trait you lead with least can really help when responding to others and develop what she calls your ‘sensory acuity’:

“By paying attention to your least-used sense (visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic) you can increase your awareness of the information perceived through that door. You can become conscious of a whole new class of data.”

I do think the core of much of what she covers is about developing and exercising your self awareness muscles – the techniques that really help you to recognise what you’re seeing or hearing, both in yourself and with others. It’s important to develop this sensory acuity into what I refer to as ‘muscle  memory’ and Laborde gives exercises that one can practice – but this needs to be done in concurrent consciousness. In other words, you need to be able to pick up on it while someone is talking , and simultaneously be listening to the content of what they’re saying, which, although gets easier with dedicated application, is quite a tricky feat. Whilst explaining she uses a variety of anecdotes to help bring some of the concepts to life and make the reading more enjoyable.

It takes a bit of practice but I highly recommend the Fiver Finger Pointers exercise… Which I won’t relay in detail here, but it is designed to help you understand what an individual really means with their communication, and contains ‘the most useful set of words you will learn’. Other techniques or frameworks described involve lots of acronyms, and feel a bit like common sense but can actually make a world of difference when applied thoughtfully. Some of the questions are quite basic, but are ones I wish I’d asked more often in the past, as I may have reached the core of an issue or a problem more easily.

Laborde gives a word of warning about the entanglement of behaviour and identity. Something I think should probably have been given a march larger section of the book and always deserves attention. Attaching behaviour to identity inevitability makes us inflexible – we cannot realise or try out new behaviours to gain our desired outcomes as this risks us ‘becoming someone else’ – keeping us rigid to the familiar. This is a very interesting topic and Laborde has some somewhat amusing exercises to help us come out of our rigid ways be trying new things that perhaps we would have thought would have never really chimed with our personalities. The humour within the exercises makes the subject accessible whilst recognising the fluidity of situations. People are not just one thing or the other different flavours arise due to particular and individual contexts.

“We are not our behaviours. We are responsible for our behaviours, but our behaviours are not us.”

On reflection, the book is very much a toolkit – some hugely helpful exercises that can be developed to be called on when needed (building muscle memory) but this book is not going to help you figure out what you want your outcomes to be or who to speak to about them in the first place. It’s very much that toolkit to get you from A to B, once you’ve been specific enough about what B is and what it feels like to have arrived there.

Many of the tools you will have read/seen in any other good communication based book (The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease is probably the best, it’s old, but still good) such as mirroring to build rapport and watching the lower lip for tell tale emotional cues. The writing is chunked up across the pages with lots of white space, accompanied by some fairly gaudy drawings which at first glance look like they belong in a surrealist museum but after a while seem to compliment the sentiments described. They definitely help break up large paragraphs and give you space and time to reflect on where the approaches may be applicable in one’s own personal circumstances. The book is old, but it doesn’t read as dated.

In the latter stages the book gives a lot of airtime to the notion of Congruence – how to keep personal integrity whilst using the techniques to influence, which again feels like quite an important topic, perhaps more so these days. I would perhaps refer more to that as authenticity, which is something that’s become quite important yet hard to discern in our modern world of professional influencers and deepfakes.

Although the prologue does make mild reference to differences in language and cultural context, there isn’t much mention of this in latter stages of the book where I feel, certainly in more current times it is a really pertinent topic. Particularly so in the philosophical chapters that are effectively talking about linguistic determinism and how this gives way to differences in sentiment and understanding or perceptions of reality:

“Words are representations of the sensory representations – several steps removed from the experience. This representations of representations is where part of the slippage of language occurs.”

“Reality is a puzzle each of us puts together.”

How have I managed to utilise what’s here in my everyday life? I have to say, trying to apply these techniques in a world where your meetings are either side of a video call or behind masks is near impossible, and it has forced me to rely on other cues. It’s also become much more difficult to ‘read the room’ when it’s just a gallery of faces where people are actually sitting at home, or picking up on subtleties within breathing when nearly everyone is on mute. Much harder to read the energy. Perhaps there is a market for video-based NLP.

Continuing my unintended theme of circular book references across posts, it does mention the difficult balance of wanting to be part of a team yet striving to be recognised individually that is cited within In Search Of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. This is another oldie which I have actually read, but is still on my list to write about.

I have already felt that this book was much easier to write about, and even now I still feel like I have more to say. It’s another of those books that’s pretty old now, but still gets recommended regularly for a reason. It’s certainly much more memorable and stays with you long after reading. As Rain Blockley writes in the editor’s note, even before the preface:

“This book is too much to absorb in one reading, yet alone one sitting. Don’t bother trying. Read it carefully, and then keep it handy.”

I definitely will.