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January 27 - March 26, 2024
A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.
When the seller no longer holds an information advantage and the buyer has the means and the opportunity to talk back, the low road is a perilous path.
other words, those who’d received even a small injection of power became less likely (and perhaps less able) to attune themselves to someone else’s point of view.
How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”
Tell yourself you can do it. Declaring an unshakable belief in your inherent awesomeness inflates a sturdy raft that can keep you bobbing in an ocean of rejection.
To help get us out of the door, then, the first component in buoyancy is interrogative self-talk. Can you do that? Well, you’ll have to ask yourself.
The conventional view holds that negotiators shouldn’t necessarily be nasty and brutish but that they should remain tough-minded and poker-faced.
Hall seems to have found the proper mix. He says that he tries to begin his day with one or two sales calls that he knows will be friendly. He also seeks positive interactions throughout his day. For instance, in one three-hour stretch I was with him, he visited a restaurant to ask after a friend who worked there who’d been ill. He stopped a longtime customer on the street to catch up on what was going on in his life. He entered a clothing store, was greeted by its proprietor with a hearty “Mr. Fuller!” and the two embraced, albeit in an awkward bro hug.
In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal—sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer.
His is not blind optimism but what Seligman calls “flexible optimism—optimism with its eyes open.”20
As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind. But don’t simply leave the question hanging in the air like a lost balloon. Answer it—directly and in writing. List five specific reasons why the answer to your question is yes. These reasons will remind you of the strategies that you’ll need to be effective on the task, providing a sturdier and more substantive grounding than mere affirmation.
Julie Norem calls “defensive pessimism.” Her work has shown that thinking through gloom-and-doom scenarios and mentally preparing for the very worst that can occur helps some people effectively manage their anxieties.
Envisioning ourselves far into the future is extremely difficult—so difficult, in fact, that we often think of that future self as an entirely different person. “To people estranged from their future selves, saving is like a choice between spending money today and giving it to a stranger years from now.”
The researchers’ breakthrough was to identify a new, and previously unknown, problem: that we think of ourselves today and ourselves in the future as different people.
“the contrast principle.”
“Adding an inexpensive item to a product offering can lead to a decline in consumers’ willingness to pay,” the researchers concluded.
As a result, framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business.
The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “blemishing effect”—where “adding a minor negative detail in an otherwise positive description of a target can give that description a more positive impact.”
People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain, the researchers argue. That uncertainty can lead people to think more deeply about the person they’re evaluating—and the more intensive processing that requires can lead to generating more and better reasons why the person is a good choice. So next time you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.
“Putting content curation into practice is part art form, part science, but mostly about daily practice,” writes Kanter. For more, see her “Content Curation Primer”:
Or he might say, “No, I can’t give right now.” That’s an offer, too. The obvious move is to fasten onto the “right now” and ask when might be a better time.
“Offers come in all shapes and sizes,” says Salit. But the only way to hear them is to change the way you listen and then change the way you respond.
“Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made.”
‘Yes and’ isn’t a technique,” Salit says. “It’s a way of life.”
Fisher’s signal contribution was the concept of “principled negotiation,” which proposed that the aim of negotiating shouldn’t be to make the other side lose but, where possible, to help it win.
Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. “Never argue,” he wrote. “To win an argument is to lose a sale.”
As goes improv, so go sales and non-sales selling. If you train your ears to hear offers, if you respond to others with “Yes and,” and if you always try to make your counterpart look good, possibilities will emerge.
Nineteen centuries ago, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
Then when you have a conversation, take five seconds before responding. Seriously. Every time. It will seem odd at first.
And your conversation partner might wonder if you were recently bonked on the head. But pausing a few additional seconds to respond can hone your listening skills in much the same way that savoring a piece of chocolate, instead of wolfing it down, can improve your palate.
“Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
Instead, it’s a broader, deeper, and more transcendent definition of service—improving others’ lives and, in turn, improving the world.
And that’s more likely to happen if we follow the two underlying lessons of the matatu sticker triumph: Make it personal and make it purposeful.
But it does mean that a single-minded reliance on processes and algorithms that obscure the human being on the other side of the transaction is akin to a clinical error.
This is what it means to serve: improving another’s life and, in turn, improving the world. That’s the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.
“Why not always act as if the other guy is doing the favor?”
And it demonstrates that as with servant leadership, the wisest and most ethical way to move others is to proceed with humility and gratitude.
