A rather depressing realization of life is that people generally approach us only if they see benefit in doing so.

There are those you’re close to and who love you for who you are – but this unconditional love comes only from a select few. People will try to change your mind and they’ll try to sway you. They’ll sell you benefits and hide the detriments. They’ll smile when the door’s open and frown when it’s closed. All of us has have an agenda of some sort, both in hidden and public form.

This article’s public agenda is to educate those who read on how to recognize someone else’s act of pushing an agenda. This article’s hidden agenda is to impress new readers, develop interest in our content going forward, and encourage them to visit our website. Once they visit our website, those who pursue their interest further will contact us for consulting services, thereby bringing in profit for the exchange of personalized consultation.

Now that this article’s hidden agenda has been communicated, your perception toward it may change. You may resist playing into our plan, you may stop reading, and may never come back again. People keep agendas hidden and discreetly packaged because of a similar fear.

Those who know our hidden agendas may begin acting differently toward us. They have a chance of derailing our plans and rejecting our propositions.

This article hopes to arm your ability to reject the, possibly nefarious, agendas of those around you.

Recognizing times when someone’s pushing an agenda is an important skill to tune prior to knowing how to act in the face of such agendas.

Those Who Listen Are Sophisticated – Possessing Desirable Traits

When pushing their agenda onto others, people make it seem desirable to do what they ask of others. They will associate people who help them with their cause as acting altruistically, as being more intelligent than those who refuse certain propositions, and impose other desirable traits on them. People who push their agendas into reality act to entice others into following whatever it is they’re proposing.

Should you see someone making a clear effort to label those who listen with positive traits, it makes sense to investigate their motive. If someone’s ideas don’t entice others to accept them on merit, they’ll begin trying to sell them. A common strategy for selling one’s ideas is to label those who accept their ideas as smart, above average, and desirable.

You’ll be enticed to accept people’s ideas and plans by being labeled to be better than those who do not. Veer away from accepting these labels as truth, as any effort made to sell ideas should be taken with a grain of salt. When it is clear that someone’s assigning desirable traits to only those who do as they wish, focus on cutting the fat of the exchange.

Begin to follow the logic of what they’re proposing and ignore any commentary on the side. Do not take desirable labels seriously when someone’s trying to change your mind, as their motive in the situation is clear. All actions must thereby be analyzed with the motives at play, and their act of labeling you in a favorable light will be driven by hidden motives.

Unrealistic Desire to Help Others

Akin to assigning desirable traits to others, people who push agendas will assign desirable traits to themselves as well. They will tend to present themselves acting altruistically and being on the lookout for others’ interests. Always remember that people mostly act to first benefit themselves, those close to them next, and only then society at large.

Your life would be a disorganized mess if you were to reorder these priorities. Your benefit to society is strictly dependent on the well-being of yourself and your close ones being taken care of. The well-being of those you consider to be close is dependent on your own well-being, as you wouldn’t be able to help anyone unless you first took care of yourself – physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

The people who push their agendas on others will tend to shy away from exposing the potential personal perks they may go on to experience. They will focus on how their ideas benefit everyone around them but themselves.

A person who’s acting with honesty, and is aligned with the merits of their ideas, will mention the benefits they’ll experience for themselves within the plan that they propose. Should you see that someone is shying away from mentioning the benefit in it for themselves, your suspicion should be piqued.

People are tuned into what rises suspicion in those around them. We instinctively know to sell the perceived benefits for others prior to mentioning the benefits we’ll experience ourselves. The salesman seldom mentions what commissions they will collect, and the politician seldom mentions the explicit goal that drives every promise and proposal: ascending to a position of their desire.

The salesman will tirelessly look for how the act of buying what they sell will benefit you, rather than themselves. The politician will tirelessly spew promises which serve to benefit you, rather than how your vote would benefit them. Should an uncharacteristic desire to help others be consistently projected by someone speaking, allow your interest wander down the path of what is in it for them.

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