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Yes—but it’s not easy. While most people think that willpower and self-control are the keys to acting in their own best interests, research and experience suggest otherwise.

What actually works are methods like:

• Environmental design – changing your surroundings to make good actions easier and bad ones harder.
• Reframing – changing how you think about a situation to shift motivation.
• Identity shifting – aligning choices with who you want to be.
• Habit shaping – building automatic behaviors that serve your long-term goals.

A skilled persuader can succeed by combining persuasive reasoning (“This is in my best interest because…”) with behavioral tools like those above. The real skill is in using persuasion not just to convince—but to create conditions that make follow-through likely.