10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Trying to Change Someone’s Mind on Vaccines
Published in
2 min readDec 21, 2020
Perhaps someone in your life needs a little bit of convincing to get a lifesaving, pandemic-ending vaccination. Their reasons may be grounded in something real, like historical trauma due to the health care system’s legacy of racism. Or they may be the byproduct of — as you see it, anyway — complete, incomprehensible boneheadedness.
Whether your first reaction is to nod in sympathy or to recommend that they get their heads checked for brain worms, you’re likelier to change their mind if you first ask yourself some questions about your own motivations and tactics.
The productivity and creativity expert Barry Davret suggests the following 10 questions (or, nine questions and a suggestion):
- What am I dying to tell them?
- Who is my target audience?
- What does this person likely believe today?
- If I believed what they believed, what would make me question my belief?
- How do I get them in the right frame of mind to persuade them?
- What do I want them to believe?
- What’s the bigger reason I want to change this person’s mind?
- What’s the smallest unit of change that I hope to see?
- What do they get out of it?
- Sneak in a pink shirt. (Okay, not a question, but it’ll make sense once you read the whole thing.)
Davret lays it all out in more detail here:
