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Daniel Pink explains why asking yourself "Can I do this?" before a sales call works better than saying "I can do it." The question forces you to answer, triggering actual preparation instead of just pumping yourself up with empty affirmations.
Daniel Pink explains why asking yourself "Can I do this?" before a sales call works better than saying "I can do it." The question forces you to answer, triggering actual preparation instead of just pumping yourself up with empty affirmations.
The conventional view on self-talk is that we should pump ourselves up. Going into a sales call, you can do it, you got this. And what this research found is that you're better off deploying what they call interrogative self-talk. Not saying, I can do it, but asking yourself, can you do this? And it seems weird, it seems, you know, like Stuart Smalley and Tony Robbins would start, you know, going crazy over this. But when you unpack it, it actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, it has a kind of fake muscularity to it, this, you can do it, you got this. But the real muscularity is in asking yourself the question and actively responding because then you actually begin to rehearse, you begin to prepare, you begin to summon your reasons for doing it, and it ends up being far more effective. And what I like about that is that anybody can do it. I mean, it doesn't cost you any extra money. It just is a matter of changing your self-talk from affirmative and declarative to interrogative.
