Your gentleness shall force More than your force move us to gentleness. AS YOU LIKE IT, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616
Power is elusive, enigmatic aura will make people want to know more, drawing to the circle – creating by hinting at something contradictory.
Mixed Signals
- Both tender, tough, innocent and cunning
- A mix of qualities suggests depth, which fascinates and confuses – Be hard to figure out
- Once the victim is aware – there is a need to stir the interest before it settles on someone else
- In the long run, ambiguity is much more potent
- Seductions – may reduce conquests but better quality
- indirect and fully constructed
Let us see if by moderation we can win all hearts and secure a lasting victory, since by cruelty others have been unable to escape from hatred and maintain their victory for any length of time … This is a new way of conquering, to strengthening one’s position by kindness and generosity. Julius Caesar (100-44 B.c)
When, in the course of studying a long series of military campaigns, I first came to perceive the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach, I was looking merely for light upon strategy. With deepened reflection, however, I began to realize that the indirect approach had a much wider application – that it was a law of life in all spheres: a truth of philosophy.Its fulfilment was seen to be the key to practical achievement in dealing with any problem where human factor predominates, and a conflict of wills tends to spring for an underlying concern for all interests. STRATEGY, B.H. LIDDELL HART, 1954
The Rescuer
- Solving people’s problems gives them power/superiority/ control
- Attracted to people with problems
- Identify – Good empathy
- Listen well, and will try to get you to open up
- History with troubled people
- Excellent victims – Play the boy who cannot deal with this harsh cruel world
- An air of suddenness
- Exaggerate weaknesses – Let them sense that you had little love – bad relationships
In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition. The indirect approach is as fundamental to the realm of politics as to the realm of sex. In commerce, the suggestion that there is a bargain to be secured is far more important than any direct appeal to buy. And in any sphere, it is proverbial that the surest way of gaining a superior acceptance of a new idea is to weaken resistance before attempting to overcome it; and the effect is best attained by drawing the other party out of his defences. STRATEGY, B.H. LIDDELL HART, 1954