How to Get What You Want

When you're trying to change people's behavior is use fear the right way. There are 2 different almost ideologies about fear as a motivator, fear as a mechanism of behavior change. One of them says, people are only motivated by fear. You gotta scare 'em. That's the only way. And then there's other sort of namby-pamby view of, no, people are more enlightened. They don't really respond to fear. Both of those are completely wrong. Here's a way to think about fear. Negative emotions narrow. Think about N and N, negative, narrow, negative, narrow. That's very good sometimes. You block out extraneous things, you put your blinders on. That's very useful. So for emergency kinds of settings, fear works really well. If you are leaving a burning building, are you focused or not focused? You're focused like a laser beam. You are locked in. You're not worried about how fast you're self-actualizing in that moment, right? You're trying to save your frickin' life. So if you want people to have a narrow focus, use fear. If you want them to have a wider focus, don't use fear. You can't scare people into doing things that require an expansive view, things like creativity, things like conceptual work. So think about it in a business setting. If we don't do 3 more deals by the end of this month, we are going out of business. I think you'll get 3 more deals by the end of the month. But here's where it doesn't work so well. If we don't come up with a new product idea, we're sunk. You're not gonna get a new product idea there. For new product ideas, you want an expansive view. Fear narrows. Negative emotions narrow. Positive emotions expand. You want a narrow view, negative. You want an expansive view, positive. Let me tell you a little, give you a little political history lesson that's going to yield a lesson in influence behavior change here. 1980 in America, the incumbent president is a guy named Jimmy Carter. The challenger is a guy named Ronald Reagan. He said, ask yourself, are you better off than you were 4 years ago? He used a question to change behavior. He used a question to persuade. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. Their wheels turned a little bit. They said, hmm. Let's see, 4 years ago was 1976. Bicentennial, disco. This is pretty good right here. 1980. Oh my God, I'm much worse off than I was 4 years ago. My situation is terrible. Things have gotten a lot worse. What happens? This is the axiomatic principle here. People come up with their own reasons for agreeing with you. People come up with their own reasons for doing something. When people have their own reasons for doing something, they believe those reasons more deeply, adhere to the behavior more strongly. So in many cases, questions beat answers. But they don't always beat answers. It's 2012. Barack Obama is the incumbent. Mitt Romney is the challenger. Romney wheeled out that same Reagan-esque line, are you better off than you were 4 years ago? He wheeled it back into the barn, never to mention it again. 2012, it sucks. 2008, holy smokes, I think things were a little worse. When the facts are clearly on your side, persuading with questions is enormously effective. When the facts are not clearly on your side— Don't do this. When the facts are not clearly on your side, get some new facts.