I am a firm believer in the power of persuasion. It's not hard to convince reasonable people if you use logic, argument, and rhetoric to good effect. Mind you, part of why they work for me is that I believe in the soundness of my position. I couldn't ever try to convince anyone if I wasn't convinced myself. Which perhaps means—now that I think of it—that the power probably lies in my authenticity. Authenticity invites trust. Rhetoric probably would fail if it came from an inauthentic place. People can see through fake. Or at least some can.

Well, my point was something else. Recently someone said some things to me that made me want to jump to my usual habit of defence through logic and argument. Make them realise their position is wrong. Show them evidence. Beat them with counter-examples. You get the drift. I had a lovely essay in my head to put to them and it almost seemed criminal to waste this masterpiece. But I stopped myself short... ironically with an argument. I felt in this particular instance I must resort to a more difficult technique. Silence. Not silence to prove a point but because it seems to me that in certain cases if people do something because you persuaded them with logic, their doing isn't worth it. The emotion of the thing is where it really is at. And it needs to be felt naturally. To give a bad example, if someone came to drop me at the airport in the middle of the night because I asked them to... wouldn't be the same as someone who did it because they wanted to! My silence is an invitation to let them figure out what they would rather do.