Psychologists have long found that the person most likely to persuade you to change your mind is you. You get to pick the reasons you find most compelling, and you come away with a real sense of ownership over them.

People are terrified of changing their minds. Changing your mind is a door you don’t want to open because you don’t know what’s behind it. Changing your mind means losing all your friends. Changing your mind means a complete revolution in your life. Changing your mind means publicly admitting you’ve been wrong. […] People don’t want to change their minds.

When you change how somebody feels, you’re changing how they think. And when you change how they think, you’re changing how they feel. That, in essence, is persuasion.

We must not limit ourselves to words alone. To convince someone is to convert them, and to assist that conversion, we must not be afraid to share with another human being in his difficulties and sufferings. We have to be witnesses to God's mercy.

If you want to change someone’s mind, you must understand what need shapes his or her opinion.

Convincing other people to think again isn’t just about making a good argument — it’s about establishing that we have the right motives in doing so. When we concede that someone else has made a good point, we signal that we’re not preachers, prosecutors, or politicians trying to advance an agenda. We’re scientists trying to get to the truth. “Arguments are often far more combative and adversarial than they need to be,” Harish told me. “You should be willing to listen to what someone else is saying and give them a lot of credit for it. It makes you sound like a reasonable person who is taking everything into account.

If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way — deeply and intuitively — you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.

When somebody persuades me I am wrong, I change my mind.

What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing; if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there.

The most important consideration for those engaged in mind change, however, is probably the following: Avoid egocentrism — becoming ensnared in one’s own construal of events. The purpose of a mind-changing encounter is not to articulate your own point of view but rather to engage the psyche of the other person. In general, the more that one knows about the scripts and the strengths of the other person, the resistances and resonances, and the more that one can engage these fully, the more likely one will be successful in bringing about the desired change — or at least holding open the possibility of such changes.

The process of changing your mind is a tricky one. You start at Position A, which you hold with stern stubbornness, resolving never to give it up. Then you start to question your original resolution. Is it wise to be so stubborn? Perhaps you should consider alternate ideas. You revise your original inflexibility a little, abandoning Position A and adopting Position B, which is very much like it in most ways, with only a few ifs and maybes added. Then, by a gradual series of compromises, private deals, and shifts of purpose, you slide spinelessly through the alphabet until you arrive at Position Z, the total opposite of your original point of view.

You can’t convince people to adopt your beliefs (we’ll get to that later). Just listen to them. But always do your own thing.

What I will do is change their minds…. If I can’t change them, then I will have to work with them.

It’s vital to remember that you can’t change others unless they want to change themselves. You can influence them and facilitate change, but you can’t make them change. And they’ll only decide to change when they have an incentive – such as a better life or a better relationship with you. If they don’t identify a problem with their way of being, they won’t be motivated to change.