Hi, I'm Jennifer Hancock. I'm the author of several books and the founder of humans learning systems. And I want to welcome you to How to Win arguments by not arguing a program about Socratic jujitsu, what I like to call Socratic Jiu Jitsu. Basically, learning how to persuade people to agree with you is a life skill. There's all sorts of situations you find yourself in where you, you need people to agree with you. And then somehow, if they don't agree with you, you end up arguing about it.

And this happens in the realm of politics. It happens in our professional lives in the workplace. It happens with spouses and family members. Learning how to not argue but still get people to agree with you is a really useful skill to have. It allows you to remain calm and professional and to not devolve into slipping into Fighting and stuff like that, which is really bad if you're in the workplace or in your in sales or anything like that. So what this course is going to teach you is how to not argue but to still persuade people that you're right.

And you can only do that if you're actually right. So that's the first caveat. But there's actually some science to this. And we're going to cover that in this course. It turns out that there are ways that really do work to persuade people even on really contentious issues. And what the scientists have found is that Socrates was right.

When you ask questions, instead of saying, I'm right, I'm right, I'm right. And fighting. You ask questions, as Socrates did, and a funny thing happens when you do that, and that is that you sow doubt. And once you've sowed doubt, you can then move people to considering your way of thinking. But the other thing that is is that you learn a lot by asking These questions. So if it turns out you're wrong, you're not making a fool of yourself by arguing a wrong position.

So asking questions has multiple benefits. It's people forget to do it though because we get so invested in being right, that we lose sight of the bigger issue, which is that we need to get something done and creating consensus, through the art of persuasion through the art of asking questions will help us get there in a way that the people you're discussing this with won't even know there's an argument going on. It's very important life skill. Hope you enjoy the program, do ask questions, and I'll see you on the course.