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

Flag an interesting “reveal.”
In the modern world, this technique has been
raised to a high (or low) art by websites that specialize in creating “you’ll
never believe this” headlines that can be difficult to resist. You might groan
when you see the most blatant examples of this clickbait, but they’re
prevalent because they generally work, and they work because people like
having their interest piqued. It’s a technique we naturally use when talking to
our friends, saying, “You’ll never guess what happened today…” (rather than
“I’ve got three key points to tell you about my day”). But it’s pretty rare in
communication at work, and it can be a simple way of getting people to
engage. Try the following:
• In your opening, hint at something intriguing (e.g., “I noticed something
surprising/remarkable/startling…”) It’s even better if you can share an
anecdote that gets people interested in how the story ends, since it sustains
the anticipation for just a little longer.
• When you want people to pay attention, use a simple marker phrase that
creates a moment of suspense and promises an imminent payoff, for
example: “Now, what’s really interesting is this…”
Try a different medium for conveying your information
. Even in the most
serious of settings, I’ve noticed that people who are used to reviewing thick
documents suddenly become more engaged when given the chance to absorb
information in a different way. I like turning presentations into large posters
and inviting people to walk around the room to take notes and discuss. Peter,
the IT consultant whom we met in 
Part III
, had a breakthrough with a
prospective client in the financial sector when he showed them a rough video
he’d made on his phone, containing interviews with people on the street about
their approach to personal finance. Meanwhile, an unpublished experiment at
Stanford found that even drawing a chart live on a whiteboard was 9 percent
more memorable than walking people through static slides that included the
exact same content.
2