Waging influence can be a tricky topic to apprehend. Many people like to be influential to those around them as they would like for their thoughts and opinions to be adopted by others as beliefs.
Many times we would like others to do things in the same way that we do things. To accomplish this, we must wage influence effectively.
There is a world of difference in being influential with our words, this as opposed to using or tacitly endorsing ostracism, a form of psychological peer pressure.
Influence and control are two different things. When you gain influence over someone, there are two willing parties because they are both on the same wavelength, this happens through effective communication.
When you desire to control someone, this many times has nothing to do with influence at all yet rather more to do with the desire to dominate the actions of others.
Many times some religions or even cults will use a form of social ostracism in order to gain the compliance of their membership. For example, excommunication in Catholicism, shunning in Amish communities, or maybe even being labeled as a suppressive person, which tends to happen in Scientology.
How do some religions and cults gain control over their members? People will join and invest their time in a community filled with individuals who have a similar mindset, they will make friends and so on and so forth.
As time passes some religions or cults will attempt to get people to act in a prescribed way, this is because those in control want uniformity among their members. They do this by slowly introducing new ideas and concepts to the inductee.
At some point, it will be suggested to the inductee that s/he must adopt and live by these precepts else they may be subjected to suffer either some form of loss within the organization or a complete shunning.
At these times it may be wise for an individual to choose just how involved they are willing to be in a particular group, or maybe how much autonomy they are willing to sacrifice in order to gain approval of the hive mind.
If the group is successful in this type of power play, that is where the individual stops and the groupthink begins.
More and more the individual will fade away and the homogenized world of group consensus bypasses the critical mind of the individual and becomes adopted as reality.
Waging influence is largely about winning hearts and minds. It is about changing people’s perceptions with the information that you present.
When we step outside of these efforts to change people we begin to walk along the dangerous path of trying to control people. Although this might work with some, it is generally not a healthy method employed to influence others effectively.
