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The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.
The conventional view of economic behavior is that the two most important activities are producing and consuming. But today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving.
People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase. Across a range of
professions, we are devoting roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to it.*
And nearly 70 percent reported that they spent at least some of their time “persuading or convincing others.”
“What percentage of your work involves convincing or persuading people to give up something they value for something you have?” The average reply among all respondents: 41 percent. This average came about in an interesting way. A large cluster of respondents reported numbers in the 15 to 20 percent range, while a smaller but significant cluster reported numbers in the 70 to 80 percent range. In other words, many people are spending a decent amount of time trying to
move others—but for some, moving others is the mainstay of their jobs. Most of us are movers; some of us are super-movers.
A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.
To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.
“The challenge,” says Ferlazzo, “is that to move people a large distance and for the long term, we have to create the conditions where they can move themselves.”
Ferlazzo makes a distinction between “irritation” and “agitation.” Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them
to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.” What he has discovered throughout his career is that “irritation doesn’t work.” It might be effective in the short term. But to move people fully and deeply requires something more—not looking at the student ...
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“It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,” Ferlazzo says. “It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”
“The presence of people who wish to pawn bad wares as good wares tends to drive out the legitimate business.”
His book, How to Sell Anything to Anybody
caveat emptor
Use balance of information as step 1 in determining which caveat leads
“First, with your dominant hand, snap your fingers five times as quickly as you can. Then, again as quickly as you can, use the forefinger of your dominant hand to draw a capital E on your forehead.”
If the E resembles the one on
the left, the person drew it so he could read it himself. If it looks likes the one on the right, he drew the E so you could read it. Since the mid-1980s, social psychologists have used this technique—call it the E Test—to measure what they dub “perspective-taking.”
Attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you’re in.
an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more
subtle ones.
But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts. Ambi-whats? These are people who are neither overly extraverted nor wildly introverted.30 Go back to that 1-to-7 introversion-extraversion scale. Ambiverts sit roughly in the center. They’re not 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s. In Grant’s study,
these Goldilocks personalities—not too hot, not too cold—earned an average of nearly $155 per hour, easily besting their counterparts. In fact, the salespeople who had the highest average revenue—$208 per hour—had extraversion scores of 4.0, smack at the midpoint.
Discussion Map
The reasons are twofold.
Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow people’s vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment (I’m frightened, so I’ll flee. I’m angry, so I’ll fight). By contrast, “Positive emotions do the opposite: They broaden people’s ideas about possible
actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and . . . making us more receptive and more creative,” she writes.9
People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They
One way to begin is to visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”—a
Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life,
When something bad occurs, ask yourself three questions—and come up with an intelligent way to answer each one “no”:
For more information, visit Seligman’s website (http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx), and take his Optimism Test to get a sense of your current style. And check out his classic book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life.
As Csikszentmihalyi saw it, the first group was trying to solve a problem: How can I produce a good drawing? The second was trying to find a problem: What good drawing can I produce?
That’s why the most essential question you can ask
is this: Compared to what?
But the following five frames can be useful in providing clarity to those you hope to move. The less frame
The experience frame
As a result, framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business. So if you’re selling a car, go easy on emphasizing the rich
Corinthian leather on the seats. Instead, point out what the car will allow the buyer to do—see new places, visit old friends, and add to a book of memories.
But the
blemishing effect seems to operate only under two circumstances. First, the people processing the information must be in what the researchers call a “low effort” state.
Second, the negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse.
What we really should do, they say, is emphasize our potential.
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.
Among the students in the least likely group who received the less detailed letter, a whopping 0 percent contributed to the food drive. But their counterparts, who were more disposed to giving but who’d received the same letter, didn’t exactly wow
researchers with their benevolence. Only 8 percent of them made a food donation.
The lesson: Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved. —
the most effective tools for excavating people’s buried drives are questions.
