One of the best books I’ve read in a while is David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion.

(Thank you David, a former—and soon-to-be-returning—School for Good Living Podcast guest for providing me with an advance copy.)

This book contains SO MANY interesting and useful insights into how and why we think, feel and act the ways we do. It’s fantastic for anyone who wants to be a more effective coach, salesperson or leader.

Anyone who wants to better understand and get along with people, really.

How Minds Change makes a grand promise: “You are about to gain a superpower, a step-by-step script of how to change people’s minds on any topic, without coercion, by simply asking the right kind of questions in the right order.”

I highly recommend reading it if you, like me, are FASCINATED or CURIOUS or PERPLEXED and maybe a bit OBSESSED about understanding patterns of human thought and behavior.

If you’ve ever eaten an entire bag of cookies when you swore you’d quit after just one more, or you didn’t go to the gym after work even though you promised yourself that morning you would, you know how perplexing we can be, even to ourselves.

And if you’ve ever tried to get someone to change their mind about anything—from whether or not to get vaccinated, to going to college when they don’t want to go, to eating their vegetables—you know that FACTS and VOLUME almost never cause someone do what you want them to or to adopt your point of view.

People can look at the same evidence and come to polar-opposite conclusions, and it happens all the time: global warming is/isn’t real, America is already great/could be great again, the Earth is/isn’t flat.

Here’s a review at The Guardian.

Just promise me that you’ll use what you learn from this book about influencing others for good, and not for eeeevil.