How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Share a human example.
• Start with an anecdote or example that illustrates how your idea affects a
real person—either someone in your audience, or someone they can relate
to or care about. (Just as Emma talked about the effect of new teaching
methods on the teachers’ students.)
• Find an individual who’s a great example of what you’re trying to say, and
tell his or her story.
• If you’re talking about something very dry, like a business process, you
can still talk about how it makes life easier for somebody when it’s
working well.
Highlight the emotional side.
Here are two non-hokey ways to do it:
• Emphasize why the thing you’re talking about matters to you and/or to
your audience. (Remember how Emma tapped into teachers’ desire to

---

make a lasting difference in their students’ lives.) Don’t be scared of the 
F
-
word, “feel.” You can make people sit up and listen with simple phrases
like “It makes me feel proud that…” or “we should all feel good about…”
• Invite your audience to put themselves in your shoes, or in others’ shoes.
For example: “You can imagine how I felt. I was really worried. That’s
when I had the idea to…” “Just think how it will feel to have been one of
our students…”
Talk about a positive outcome.
Inspire your audience by painting a picture
of the likely positive outcome that will result from addressing the issue
you’re talking about. Even if you’re talking about a very negative situation,
you can still describe what it would look like if the problem were solved, to
leave people feeling energized rather than depressed: “Imagine if this were
fixed…”
MAKE IT FLUENT
If you’re trying to get heard, it helps to make your communication as easy as
possible for other people’s brains to process. That’s because the more effort
people have to make in understanding what you’re saying, the less mental
energy they have left to engage with the information in any depth. And one rule
of thumb that everyone’s automatic brain uses (as I said in 
Chapter 12
, on
decision making) is to assume that things that are readily understood and
remembered are probably correct.
There are lots of ways that this liking of 
processing fluency
plays out.
10
 In one
example, Princeton psychologists Adam Alter and David Oppenheimer found
that companies with names that were easy to pronounce outperformed
companies with “disfluent” names on two stock markets.
11
 Another study found
that people trusted aphorisms when they rhymed; less so when they didn’t.
(Woes unite foes: sure. Woes unite enemies: really?)
12
 Other research suggests
that people tend to believe statements they find easy to remember, whether
they’re true or not.
13
Phrases they find easy to read—either because of the
language used or because of the way the text is laid out—are seen as being more
compelling and appealing than similar but less accessible information.
14
We
process and recall concrete words that we can picture (e.g., “animal,” “chair,”

---

“coffee”) more readily than abstract concepts (e.g., “seniority,” “justice,”
“patience”).
15
So processing fluency should be a primary goal in your communication,
whether you’re writing or speaking. Here are five ways to make your message
easier for people’s brains to process: