Most advice on influence is written for strangers. It assumes you can walk away, start again with someone new, or win the room. None of that helps when the person is your father, your sister, your wife, or your grown son, when you have already had this argument eleven times, and when everyone else in the family is watching.

This is a book about changing one mind in your own family, on one issue, over weeks rather than minutes. It gives you a way to state precisely what you want to change, a screen for telling a movable position from a fixed one, and a method for finding out what the current position is doing for the person holding it. Then it works through the sequence: the short first conversation, the quiet weeks in between, the second conversation where the change gets small enough to accept, and the repair when it goes badly.

It also covers the endings nobody plans for, including how to accept a no, act alone when you must, and recognise when the situation calls for a lawyer, a doctor, or a safeguarding service rather than another conversation.

This book was created with generative AI. The text was generated by an AI system and reviewed and edited before publication.