96: How to Identify People's Points of Resistance with Lisa Cron

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It's my pleasure to welcome Lisa Cron. She is the author of several great books. Her latest is entitled Story or How to Use Brain Science to Engage, Persuade and Change Minds in Business and in Life. Lisa, welcome. How are you?

I am just fine and it's a pleasure to be here.

Good. Where are you located?

I'm in Los Angeles.

I grew up in la. Fantastic. Why is story so important? You know, this just seems to be the way humans are wired for story, right?

We are literally wired for story. Story is built into the architecture of our brains. We use story, meaning narrative, to make sense of everything. Which is why people sometimes make the mistake when they want to convince someone of something, of giving them the facts. As if the facts alone will persuade and they. They don't. In fact, lately we might notice that giving someone the facts just makes them angry. And there are biological reasons for that.

You're referring to the political environment, I think, or the mask debate, or any of this stuff, right?

Exactly. It doesn't have to do with facts, because what your brain does automatically when it gets a fact is it spins it into narrative. In other words, it takes the facts and if we can unpack the fact, which is the other problem that people have when they just give facts, which is the assumption, you know, as Chip and Dan Heath talk about the curse of knowledge, that because we can unpack a fact, we assume everybody else can too. But provided that we can unpack the fact, we spin it into narrative to think, okay, how will that fact affect us boots on the ground in our life? Is it going to help us achieve our agenda, get us closer to what we want, or is it going to get us further away? And that is literally how we make sense of everything. We make sense of everything through story, through narrative. And that's why if you want to create a story or change someone's mind, you have to know first how they're going to unpack that fact and what it's actually going to mean to them based on their worldview, as opposed to your worldview. And the problem that we have, and none of this is on purpose, all of this is tacit and beneath the surface. But the thing is we, and by that I mean all of us, we don't see the world as it is. We see the World as we are. And in order to create a story that's going to convince someone else, you have to be able to step out of your worldview and into theirs. So you don't just see what they're doing. That's what you don't want them to do. What you'd like to change, but so that you really understand the why of it. And that's.

So, Lisa, before we dive in deeply to the topic, which I can't wait to do, you started off by, you know, explaining why story is important. Is there a, like, a biological reason for this? Why are we that way? I'd like to just back up and cover that first.

The reason that we're that way goes to unpack what I just said. The. The reason we're that way is because we are wired to. It's like what they say on an airplane, right? Like, put your oxygen mask on first before you attend to others. We're wired to really try to figure out how everything that we encounter, whether it's another person, whether it's an idea, whether it's something we want to do, how is it going to affect us? Again, based on our agenda. And the way that we do that is through story, through narrative. In other words, how will that affect me, given what I want? We never look at anything objectively. And I think that one of the biggest problems that we have is that the way that we thought that we approach the world and approach learning or doing anything, is just a myth and wrong. The cornerstone of Western civilization, the notion that it's objective reason and logic and something objective and dispassionately, is how we make decisions. And it turns out biologically that absolutely isn't true because we're taught, you know, it's logic and reason that we use to make a decision. And emotion is something sort of ephemeral that's the nemesis of facts. And its goal is to, like, have you make a wrong decision. And that actually, biologically, is not true. All emotion does is telegraph meaning. In other words, emotion lets us know what our rational analysis means to us and therefore what we should do. So it isn't. It's not binary, you know, logic or. Or emotion. It's both. And at the end of the day, emotion is the decider, and that's what lets us know what things mean to us.

Is emotion a shortcut? You know, I don't know. Like, emotion is good and bad, right? Sometimes it hurts us, sometimes it helps us, right? Yes.

But it's always there. Every decision we ever make Is emotion based? I mean, what science will tell you now, this is not a metaphor. If you couldn't feel and process emotion, you couldn't make a single rational decision. I mean, sure, emotion, I mean, we could all get, and this is a word I wish we could just bring down to its very narrow meaning, which is emotional meaning. An emotion that's over the top and if you let it run away with you, you'll wake up in the morning and go, oh my God, why did I do that? And absolutely that can happen. But emotion itself and the notion of emotion is a constant. There is never anything that we ever experience or think about or read about that doesn't bring with it a chorus of emotion, which is a chemical reaction that our brilliant BR nervous system then translates into feeling that lets us know what it means to us. So yes, emotion telegraphs meaning.

You know, Lisa, it's funny that we're talking about this because interestingly, I just read an article last week where someone, and you know, this is a very anecdotal thing, I'm sure, But someone analyzed Mr. Spock's decisions on Star Trek and said that they really weren't that good, that Mr. Logical was not very good at making decisions, actually. Now, of course that's all fiction, but maybe it's a metaphor for real life.

I think that's absolutely true. And in fact some of the best decisions he made, I remember that was in a movie where he really gets together with his mother who's an earthling, who really helps him have. And this is the thing that I think we need to have in order to create a story that's going to speak to someone else's story, which is empathy. And empathy is something that I think we're really in short supply of at the moment. And I think it's also really, again, something that's deeply misunderstood because I think we tend to think of empathy, sympathy as synonymous. And when we think of sympathy, we think of like, oh, poor baby, you know, a bad.

Or one is feeling for someone, the other is feeling with someone. Right, right.

But with someone not just if something bad happens, but if something good, if something just seeing how they see the world differently than we do and really experiencing that. Why? Because really, interestingly, when we believe something, it becomes part of our self identity and even more important, it becomes part of how we identify with our group or these days, as we'd say, our tribe. And to threaten that, to bring something up that would make us have to really rethink and go against something that's in our self identity and that cues us to our tribe is literally terrifying because of how we're wired. I mean, sadly on one level, we're wired to live in a world we don't live in anymore. We're wired to live in a world where the way that we learn how to interact with people and what to believe when we're very young gets rooted in our brains as if it's permanent, as if that's the way everybody is. So it's very hard to uproot that. And also when we have that, you'll hear often that our brain had its last big growth spurt about 100,000 years ago. And they'll say that's when we got the ability to think rationally. And that's true. That did happen then. But what evolutionary biologists will tell us now that the real reason we had that growth spurt was because it was at that point that nature realized if we were going to do the thing that better or worse we've since done, which is take over the world, we needed to learn how to do that thing that they've been telling us to do since like kindergarten, which is work well with others. And at that point the need to belong to a group became as biologically hardwired as is our air for food, you know, air and water. I mean we're all people who need people. But at that time we needed to really be one with the group that we lived in. And what is Dunbar's number I think is 150. Like most groups were not bigger than that. And that wasn't like now, you know, 150 self celebrity. That was like 150 people. That's it. So if you did something that went against your group's belief system, you could get ostracized. And that basically means left to die. So the way that we're wired is when that happens and when someone says something and I bet like all of you listening know that you know how whatever side you're on politically, when you hear the other side start to make fun of you and you get so angry, right? I mean you feel that blood boiling thing that isn't because you're weak or emotional or that you decided to get angry, that is literally hardwired in your brain, that is a natural reaction because what your brain is done is it's thought I am being attacked. Because we respond the same way to a verbal attack biologically as we do to a physical attack. I mean, fun fact, when someone attacks what we believe and we get Angry that way blood rushes to our thighs in case we have to make a quick getaway. Because your brain is going on the same metric as it would be if someone was coming at you with a. Like an actual literal bat.

Yeah. Okay. So, you know, you have a couple interesting topics in the book where you talk about your audience according to you and your audience according to them. I assume you're talking about a disconnect there, right?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the biggest problem is, as I said a second ago, we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So we very well assume that our audience wants the same things we want, believes the same thing. We believe that if we give them a fact, not only are they going to be able to unpack it, but they're going to read the same meaning into it and even understand what we want them to do and just go do it. And most of the time they're sitting there thinking, I know that there's something really important they're trying to get across. I just have no idea what it is. What you need to do is to dive into their world and how they see it, and not just what they believe, but why they believe it. Because that way you can create a story that speaks your story to their story. And.

But how do you do that? How do you know what they believe or the world according to them?

I guess that's where it comes into, I mean, really serious market research and being able to step out of your shoes and really into theirs and really listen and ask, like active listening, where you're not judging, where you're not listening. And then you're going to poke holes in a logical argument.

So when you say an audience, you're talking really one on one, or someone you know, or a small group versus a large audience.

Well, it depends. I think it can also be a large audience. Because what you want to do is figure out, okay, if you have a large audience and you want to be sure that you've picked a target audience, that your audience isn't everyone, because that's the same. An audience being everyone is the same as an audience of no one. So when you figure out what that target audience is, it really is zooming down into who do you think that one representative of that audience is? And then really figuring out specifically what matters to them, what keeps them up at night, what they really want, how they see the world. And then they become often the. If you are going to create an actual story, and story can be two words. I'm not talking about a long or anything that's like, you know, once upon a time. But once you really understand how they see the world and what you're looking for is when you do that, you're looking for what I like to call a misbelief. Meaning, I don't mean a factual, logical misbelief, but a misbelief in terms of what is it that they believe that you know is wrong, that you have a truth that can set them free from that misbelief. It is the misbelief that's keeping them from hearing your call to action. And then you can create a story that will allow them to experience, to see what the actual truth is. And then they themselves come to the next step would be the realization realizing that what they thought, this misbelief that they thought was helping them actually has not been. Has actually been keeping them from getting what they want. Once they have the realization, then their internal belief system transforms internally and externally. They then take that out into the world, and that's when they actually have the aha moment. It's not that you've told them what to do. You know, they've intuited it. It becomes they're not doing it because you're telling them to. Because, let's face it, whoever does anything because we tell them to, they do it because they want to, and then become something that they can go out and actualize and have that sense of purpose, which is, I think, the thing that actually, you know, makes us happy way more than, you know, going to Disneyland or something.

I mean, I think you're. You kind of covered this, but I just want to make sure we get this one point. Everybody's got their hidden resistance of why they resist what we're trying to convince them of. Right. How do we identify that? How do we know what their resistance is? I know you mentioned research earlier and so forth, and, you know, it might be with someone you know intimately, right? So the research is just what you do is you engage with them. And it's not necessarily like market research. But how do we identify their resistance?

This is the hard part. I mean, this is truly the really hard part. But it is coming down and being able to identify. First you want to identify, to have some notion of what you want your call to action to be. What do you actually want it to be? And then you would go in, and once you have some notion of that, you can go into why, in their view, wouldn't they already be doing it? And that comes into asking questions and keeping asking, often why? And not judging. I mean, the most important thing is not judging, not shaming, but even just the thought experiment. Okay, why wouldn't they do that? Okay, well, there's that then. Why wouldn't they do that? What does that really mean? And. Or continually asking. And so I want this. I believe this. Okay, and so where will that take you? Well, it's because of whatever that is. Okay, but what would the conclusion therefore be? Why is that important? And often you can get down to the actual, real, true reason they're resisting, because it's almost never what they say that it is. I mean, I can give you a couple examples using, you know, where focus groups were used, if that would be helpful.

That's more corporate, I think. Right. And I don't want to go too corporate because most people don't have a focus group available to them. Okay, so let's, you know, not do that. Let's use our time to talk about, like, how to craft this story. And you can certainly touch on hidden resistance in there. But there's been a lot written about this, of course. You know, the hero's journey and Joseph Campbell and a zillion others. Right. And back to the Greeks and the climax and the rhythm of the story and all of this stuff, right? You talk about the. The core conflict. You talk about. Keep it specific, talk about if, then, therefore, and no place like aha and the aha moment. Tell us about those things.

Here's really the key thing. If I could leave you guys with one thing, and I say this in the business world, in the world of other people, and I also say it to writers, which is a story is not about that external thing that happens. It's not about an external change. The story is about an internal change. And that is true if you're trying to change somebody's behavior as well as if you're trying to write a novel or screenplay or a movie, it is about that internal change. What a story is, is about how an unavoidable external problem forces somebody to change internally. In other words, internal belief shifts in order for them to solve that problem. And so that is the first thing that you're looking for, which is that misbelief. So that once you've got that, then you can figure out, again, if you're figuring out an entire, you know, story, story again, it can be two words. It can be a tweet, it can be a text. But if you're thinking of something that's gonna have that classic you know, even a little bit, even a, even a six word story can have that classic turn. Like there's one that something like I'm not gonna be able to remember, but it was like it's about playing golf with the boss, you know, golf with boss, you know, I lost, kept job, you know, and that's got an entire story in it, right? We totally understand that person. There's a person who's pusher. They're going to play. What's going to happen is they're playing with the boss. They're going to lose. They don't really want to lose, but they're going to keep their job. That's what mattered to them the most. So what you're looking for is that what is that misbelief that you want to counter? What is that internal belief shift that's going to have to happen in order to get them to do what you want them to do. And then you can find the external problem that will force them to come to grips with that. Because they're going to at first try to solve the problem with what they already believe and the problem is going to not let them do that. And it's going to force them to question the misbelief and then allow them to see the truth that you want to tell them because you never want to tell them. As we all know, when you tell someone a truth that contradicts what they believe, they are only going to get angry because that's how we're wired. What you want them to do is come to that conclusion themselves. And that's what the external thing that happens is going to force them to do. Because they're going to be a problem that they've got to solve. They've got no choice but to solve the problem. And that's what leads to the aha. The aha moment isn't simply here's how I can solve my external problem. The aha moment is here's the belief that held me back now that I see things differently. Now you've also got that external aha which is the transformation. And they're going to go out now and do something differently. But it all comes back to how you feel. All story, like all life is emotion based because if you change how somebody feels about something, you're going to change how they see something and that's going to change what they do.

Okay, so that's great. You talked really about how we can't push them into it. We've got to lead them to it. Right? And Some will say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. But at least you let them. Right? You didn't push them. Right. You can't push them to water at all, probably. So how do we do that? Just more on anything more we can learn about how specifically to make that happen or how to use emotion. I mean, you do it with emotion.

Here's the thing about emotion, then. Emotion isn't conveyed, especially if you've written something, if it's a tagline or what. Emotion isn't conveyed through body language or through emotional tags like, they were crying, they were laughing. This was really funny. I was really sad. Emotion is really between the hard choice that a person has to make, what they're weighing. In other words, I really want to do X. And this has always gotten me to X. But in order to get there, I'm going to have to consider something else that I've really been taught. Doesn't work. But that's the only thing left that might work. And that's where we get the feeling and the emotion and the aha comes from. It's like sort of think of story as an emotional cost benefit analysis of taking a particular course of action. I mean, story also. Another way of looking at it is it's the world's first virtual reality. When we're in a story, the same neural pathways open up as would if we were doing what the main character or if you're telling a story, what you're doing. And that is how the change really comes, because we literally feel it, because we are experiencing. We're not thinking about it, we're feeling it.

You know, I referred to the Hero's Journey earlier, which is probably the most popular, arguably story methodology. Would you agree with that?

Yes, I think it is. Absolutely.

I don't know that your methodology is a competitor to that at all, you know, or not. But I just wanted you to comment on Campbell and his work and the Hero's Journey stuff.

I will say what I always say about all story structure books, starting from the Hero's Journey on up. And this is incendiary, both literally and figuratively.

All right, go for it. We need emot.

It was up to me. I would burn every copy of the Hero's Journey and every book from then to now that goes to story structure because it is a complete misnomer. It's plot structure. It's about external things that have to happen at a certain point in time, even if they're talking about some internal change. It is Completely non specific. Story structure and story is organic. It is bottom up, not top down. Story structure is the byproduct of a story well told, not something you can write to externally. And I'm constantly telling writers this because it ends up. You end up with, sadly, if you want to talk about the writing world, you end up with 99.9% of the manuscripts that come into editors and agents, which are, you know, nothing but, as I'm fond of saying, they're nothing but a bunch of things that happen because they're not about anything. And a story has to be about something from the very first word. All stories make a point beginning from the very first word. And then they go forward, making that point not overtly the way that like an OP ed would, but like a Trojan horse, you know, it's implied and it's in the struggle that the character goes through, the person goes through as they're trying to figure out what to do. And that's what changes us. I mean, people talk about the mindless entertainment, you know, tv, movies, mindless entertainment. There's no such thing as mindless entertainment. We're affected by stories every minute of every day. But you could redefine mindless entertainment as it comes in through our gut because again, same neural pathways we are feeling, we are literally experiencing what those characters are. So we're feeling it and it makes the world look different. It shifts our belief system, but it doesn't go through the thinking part of our brain. So we can think of it as mindless in that way, which makes it kind of scary, you know, when you think about it. But yeah, I do not believe in the hero's journey at all. I think you end up with a bunch of external things that happen and not really the core thing that a story is always about, which is somebody changing their mind about something. I mean, that's what stories are. They're about how we change internally, not what happens externally.

Very interesting. Okay, so wrap it up for us with any closing thoughts. Anything. I didn't ask you that. You want to make sure you share with the audience and also give out your website.

Really the key thing that I would say is it all revolves around the ability to empathize and the ability to really understand and flip the script on how we feel about emotion because we are very afraid of emotion. We've been taught to be afraid of emotion because emotion disrupts the thing we most want to feel, which is in control. Right. And the goal of emotion is to disrupt that, to go, hey, you need to pay attention to this right now because it's important. And so we tend to sort of vilify it. And I think that is honestly the most important part. Because if we don't flip the script on emotion, it's going to be really difficult to have the empathy that we need to have in order to really step into someone else's shoes to understand not just what they're doing, because we can get to that, but why it means something to them. And as Mr. Rogers says, it's really hard not to like someone once you know their story. And I think that that could really help us in these super polarized times to be able to at least be able to sit down and talk with each other again, as opposed to, you know, constantly throwing names at each other, which doesn't get us anywhere. So, I mean, to me, that's the biggest thing, you know, that is absolutely the biggest thing. And I can always be reached at my website, which is just, you know, wiredforstory.com I'm super easy to find.

Excellent. Good stuff. And we didn't mention it, but you've been. How long have you been studying and writing about story, Lisa? Because you've just got a huge body of work on this.

Decades. For truly decades. I've been doing this for decades. Yeah. I mean, I love story. Again, it's the only thing that changes us. We think in story, we think in narrative and understanding that makes such a difference. Both. It also. Last thing I'll say is it helps you understand yourself better, too. It helps you understand why you do those things. Where you go, why did I do that? It really helps you not only understand yourself better, but I think, feel better about yourself. Because, you know, so many of the things that out there that we do, they're sort of like vilified and we think of it pejoratively. Like we're always worrying about what other people think about us. And we think, oh, my gosh, that makes us so insecure. You're wired to do that. We're wired to always wonder what other people are thinking because we're always, you know, we're wired to think, are you safer? Aren't you? Am I safe or am I not? So it really helps. The things that screw us up are not us doing something wrong consciously, but a lot of it just has to do with biology and understanding that lets us be kinder to ourselves and also make the changes that, you know, that we need to make to be kinder to ourselves and to be kinder to other people. As well.

Yeah. Good stuff. Lisa Cron, thank you so much for joining us.

My utter pleasure. This was super fun. You asked great questions, Jason. Those were really good.

Well, thank you. I'm trying to be empathetic and understand where you're coming from and discover your. Your hidden resistance. Lisa Cron, thanks so much.

My utter pleasure.

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