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

BRING THE BENEFITS TO LIFE
At a subconscious level, most people are reluctant to embrace the unknown.
Everyone’s brain has to work hard to process ambiguity, so their automatic
system tends to place more weight on whatever’s familiar and certain, versus
uncertain future payoffs. From a personal perspective, as we saw in 
Chapter 7
,
this 
present bias
is one of the reasons that we might procrastinate when we need
to exert immediate effort on a task that only pays uncertain future dividends—
like saving for our retirement, or writing the difficult email we’ve been putting
off for a week. But it’s also why it’s not straightforward for a colleague to do
something new or different, even if it involves a relatively minor change in
behavior like sending you a regular weekly update. People’s brains are generally
geared to stick to what they know, because it’s difficult for them to assess
whether they’ll benefit from what you’re proposing and whether it will feel
unpleasant or arduous.
Turn this around, however, and the advice is clear: you have a better chance of
encouraging cooperation from your colleagues if you can make the benefits of
that cooperation feel clear, vivid, and personally relevant. As soon as they feel
that what you’re proposing will be genuinely rewarding, you’re encouraging
their brains into discovery mode, where they’ll feel more receptive to new ideas.
And the best way to signal that is to give a tangible example of how life will be
better for them once they’ve said yes to your request.
Emma’s new pedagogical proposals seemed fairly abstract to her fellow
teachers. The phrase “thinkers, not regurgitators” was memorable, so it got
through their spam filter. But it wasn’t completely clear what it meant in reality.
So Emma did several things to make the benefits of her proposals feel more real
in her colleagues’ minds.
First, she asked some of the more supportive teachers to share stories of times
when they’d gotten their students to do some independent projects, and how that
improved the kids’ focus and engagement in the classroom. Then Emma invited
her colleagues to watch her demon strate the new teaching techniques in a class.
It took some courage for her to volunteer this, but she knew it was the best way
for them to see what it meant in practice. The teachers got to see Emma doing

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more asking and less telling, for example, and they saw the galvanizing effect
that this had on the children.
As well as boosting her colleagues’ awareness of the payoff from trying
something new, Emma also considered what might make the effort feel less
burdensome. Quickly, she realized she needed to address the fact that her
colleagues didn’t like the idea of being evaluated as they experimented with
these new techniques. It posed a threat to their sense of competence (one of the
common triggers we saw in 
Chapter 9
). But of course, they needed to get 
some
feedback on their efforts. So after her demonstration classes, Emma invited her
colleagues to share constructive observations with her. In those discussions, she
proved that chewing things over could be an interesting, even enjoyable learning
experience—which took the sting out of their fear, and helped them refocus on
the benefits.
So when you’re asking colleagues to try something new: