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

G
ETTING
 T
HROUGH
 T
HEIR
 F
ILTERS
Next time you’re intent on getting a message across:
Provide a reward: surprise, novelty, or anticipation.
Aim to get your
audience to want to tell others what you said. Flag clearly the most
interesting aspects of what you’re saying, so they don’t get buried, and
promise a “reveal.” Try a different medium for getting your information
across (e.g., posters, videos, hand-drawn pictures). Adopt an unusual
vantage point.
Emphasize the human angle, with the formula: “people plus
positive emotion.”
Show how your idea affects real people, and invite
your audience to put themselves in their shoes. Explain why your
message means so much to you or your audience. Inspire them by
painting the picture of a potential positive outcome for everyone
involved.
Make it “fluent.”
The easier it is to understand and remember, the
more compelling your message will be. So: keep it simple and short;
use signposts; use sticky phrases; give concrete examples; if you can,
include a visual image to illustrate your point.
Overcome the curse of knowledge.
Don’t assume they know what you
know. Ask what they understand and feel about the topic under
discussion, and work from there. Stop to check their perspective as
you’re talking.

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FIFTEEN
Making Things Happen
Much of the time, we need to do more than make sure the world hears and
appreciates what we’re thinking. We want our words to lead people to actually
do
something, whether to lend us their help, give us their time, or change the
way they work.
And that’s no small thing. People have well-established pathways in their
brains that correspond to their routines, and their energy-saving automatic
systems are geared toward reusing those pathways again and again, making them
inclined to repeat past behavior. What’s more, doing anything differently
requires people to bear some uncertainty about what will happen as a result—
and since uncertainty stretches the brain’s resources, it’s something the brain
likes to avoid.
That’s why the status quo can be hard to shift. It’s why your colleagues may
say a well-intentioned “yes” to a request, but fail to follow through when their
old patterns prove hard to break. As Emma, our iconoclastic teacher, says, “At
my school, most of the staff has taught in the same way for a long time. And
they’re good at what they do, so it’s not obvious why they should try something
different.”
But if we knew how to make people feel good about trying something new,
we could make our ask feel less worrying and more appealing to their brains.
And that makes it more likely that we’ll succeed in securing whatever it is we
want or need from them. The techniques in the previous chapter will help you
frame your request so that people pay attention; the techniques in this chapter
will help you translate that attention into real action.