Beyond Stubborn: Strategies for Changing Closed Minds

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Everyone has something they want to change. For example, we might want to change our behavior, or we might want to help our clients change their behavior in a positive direction. But let's face it, change is hard. We push and push, but often nothing happens. Could there be a better way? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Professor Jonah Berger. Jonah is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and internationally bestselling author of 3 books, Contagious, Invisible Influence, and the one we're going to talk about here today called The Catalyst. In today's conversation, we discuss why successful change isn't about pushing harder or exerting more energy, Rather, it's about removing barriers. It's about overcoming resistance by reducing friction and lowering the hurdles to action. You'll learn the 5 hidden factors that impede change and how by mitigating them, you can become a catalyst. So let's get started with Professor Jonah Berger. Professor, where I'd like to start here today is you've written a new book, it's called "The Catalyst." So I'd love to hear about what prompted you to write the book and then what problem were you trying to solve with it?

A few years ago, my life changed a bit. I came out with my first popular press book called Contagious, and I started getting calls from companies and organizations who wanted products, ideas, and stuff to catch on. So, you know, the Googles, the Nikes, the Apples of the world. And I got a good chance to see how marketing works in today's day and age and get my hands dirty in solving a variety of problems. And I soon realized that there was a problem that almost every client I was hearing from had, which is they had something they wanted to change., right? So, you know, some people think about changing client or customer or consumer behavior. Some people want to change a colleague or a boss's mind. Some people want to change an organization or organizational culture. Startups want to change industries. Nonprofits want to change the world. But change is really hard, right? Often we push, we pressure, we cajole, we add more facts, more figures, more reasons, and people don't budge. We put in all that work and nothing happens. And so I started wondering, well, could there be a better way, right? Could there be a better way to change minds and incite action, not not by pushing, but by taking a different approach.

And that different approach, I'd imagine you've done your own research and you probably have other research that you reviewed as well. So what were you finding either in some of your research or some of the earlier research about how we get people to actually change?

Yeah, so I think a little bit of an analogy may be helpful here. So usually when we think about creating change, we think about some version of what I'll call pushing, right? So I've interviewed thousands of executives from a variety of different industries, including the financial service industry, and asked them to say, you know, hey, list a thing you want to change. Financial advisors might want to change a potential customer or client's mind. Managers or leaders might want to change something about the industry or the organization. And list something you want to change, list something you've tried to do to change it. And over 98% of the time, people come back with some version of pushing, pushing people in a particular direction, pushing them by adding facts, pushing them by adding figures, information, send them one more email, make one more phone call, make one more PowerPoint deck. If I just pitch them harder, if I just If I can try to get them to see where I'm coming from, they will come around. And it's clear why we think that works, right? If we want to move a physical object like a chair, pushing is a great way to get it to go, right? We push that chair in the direction we want it to go, it goes. But when we push people, there's a problem. People don't just slide across the floor. They push back. They resist. They dig in their heels, often doing the exact opposite of what we want them to do. And looking around, I realized there's actually a different approach to change, different than pushing. If you look to chemistry, there are substances called catalysts, and we think about catalysts in the social world as just change agents, but in chemistry, catalysts actually have a very specific meaning. Catalysts don't just create change. They actually create change by reducing the amount of energy required to help change occur. And how do they do that? Well, they don't increase the energy in the system. They don't add temperature or pressure like most chemical change does. They identify the barriers to change and they mitigate them. They figure out what the roadblocks are and they reduce them. And it turns out the same is true in the social world. What great catalysts, what great change agents do is they don't add more facts, more more reasons. They don't say, "Well, what could I do to get that prospective client or customer or colleague to come around?" Instead, they ask a subtly but importantly different question. Why hasn't that person changed already? What's stopping them? What are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way, and how can I mitigate them? And so, in working on this book, I've talked to an amazing set of change agents. I've talked to top-selling salespeople and great consultants and transformational leaders and startup founders. I've also talked to hostage negotiators and substance abuse counselors. Counselors and parenting experts, people that have a lot more difficult situation than most of us find ourselves in. And again and again, the same 5 barriers, the same 5 roadblocks kept coming up. And so, I put them in a framework in the book called the REDUCE framework, and that stands for reactance, endowment, distance, uncertainty, and corroborating evidence. Put those 5 things together, they spell the word REDUCE, which is exactly what great catalysts do. They identify the barriers to change and they reduce them.

And I definitely want to go into this framework and go into some of the details on it, but as I think about trying to change people's behavior, it seems to me that there's a variety of different ways that that could happen. So one way might be to make some kind of emotional appeal. So you mentioned pushing harder, giving more facts. That usually doesn't change people's minds. So we've got to get some kind of emotional reaction. I also think about how we want to make them feel like it's their idea, that they came up with the idea to change, or somehow we want to increase their motivation to want to make the change. So are those some of the ideas that are factored into your REDUCE framework?

So I'd say yes and no, because there's a few things in what you said. So, so I would say emotional appeals work sometimes but are still pushing, right? That's still us saying, okay, I know what's right for you, client, potential client, colleague, listener, audience. I know what's right for you, and I'm just going to cue up this— in case, kind of information, but under the guise of emotion that'll get you to come around. And sometimes emotional appeals do work, but they only work if that's the problem. I've worked with a lot of clients and organizations applying these ideas, and almost all the time, people think there's an information problem. They think, well, why hasn't that person changed? Why hasn't that, you know, client or potential client changed? They don't have the right information. If I just give them the right information, if I just frame it the right way, if I just help them see how I see it, they will come around. But if you go into the doctor's office, the doctor doesn't start by putting a cast on your leg. The doctor starts by saying, well, tell me about the problem. What's wrong? What's going on? What do you need? And only once they understand the problem do they prescribe a solution. And so, I think too often we prescribe a solution without understanding the problem. And so, things like making people feel like they're participating, like it's their idea, hopefully, we'll get into this in a couple of minutes, but that's squarely within the idea of reactance, right? The idea of if we push people, they push back, so how can we allow for autonomy and make them feel like they're in control, that's great. That would certainly be there, but emotional appeals would still be more of the pushing variant. I think the key idea here is saying, what's stopping people, right? What is getting in the way and how can I get rid of the thing that's getting in the way to make change easier rather than just adding things that work for me?

So let's dig into the framework. So you mentioned it goes by the acronym here, REDUCE, R-E-D-U-C-E. You mentioned the first one here is reactance, and you touched on that a little bit. So, you know, We don't like to be told what to do. What's maybe one or two tools under reactance that we might be able to use to help mitigate that particular issue?

Yeah, and I think it's important to understand first what we mean by people don't like being told what to do, because I think it's easy to hear that, but it's harder to understand the meaning. And there's an example I tell in the book that I think may be relevant here. So a decade or so ago, Tide, owned by Procter Gamble, wants to make laundry faster and easier. Laundry's not that difficult. Difficult, but they want to make it faster and easier. Sometimes you don't know how much detergent to add. It gets sticky. It gets on the counter. So they come out with this solution called Tide Pods. Basically, set it and forget it. Throw these little pods in the laundry, set it and forget it. They spend $100 million in marketing. They think it'll take a big chunk of the over-billion-dollar laundry industry. And so they release Tide Pods, and they're doing okay, but then there's a problem, which is that people are eating them. And you might say, what do you mean people are eating them? Aren't they filled with chemicals? Yes, they're filled with chemicals, and yes, people are eating them. And so there was a funny video online. They looked good enough to eat. There was a piece in CollegeHumor showing them sort of melted on top of a pizza. And suddenly, mostly young people were challenging one another to eat Tide Pods. It's called the Tide Pod Challenge. And so imagine you're a Tide executive in this situation. People should know not to eat Tide Pods. It's obvious they shouldn't, but just in case, you feel like you should do something. And so you release an announcement saying, "Don't eat Tide Pods." And in case that's not enough, you hire celebrity Rob Gronkowski to tell people not to eat Tide Pods. You think that'll be the end of it. But if you look at the data, you see something interesting. So Tide tells people don't do it. Gronk tells people don't do it. They think that will encourage people not to do it. It has the opposite effect. Interest in the Tide Pod challenge goes up over 400%. Visits to poison control go up as well. Essentially, a warning becomes a recommendation. Telling people not to do something makes them more likely to do it. Now, this is just a sort of silly example, but it points out the broader idea of reactance, which is when pushed, people push back. People have an ingrained desire for freedom and control. I want to feel like I'm making my choices. Why did I pick the investment strategy, why did I support this particular initiative, why did I think hiring this person was a good idea? I did those things because I wanted to. I thought it was a good idea. But the more we, whether we as an advisor, as a colleague, as a boss, whatever it is, come in and try to influence someone, try to push them in one direction or another, now it's not clear to them whether they're in the driver's seat or we are. And the more they feel like we are, the less interested they are in doing it. It's almost like people have an ingrained anti-persuasion radar, almost like a missile defense system that goes off when they feel like someone's trying to persuade them. And so, they engage in a series of defensive measures. They avoid or ignore, right? Every time someone, a salesperson calls or we get pitched on LinkedIn or over email, we delete it or sort of change the channel on the television. But even worse, we counter-argue, right? Sure, we seem like we're listening, but we're really poking and prodding the argument saying, "Well, of course, you think this is a good idea. Of course, you think you would be a great advisor for me, right? Why wouldn't you think that? You're trying to sell me on your services, but how do I actually know that that's the case? How do I know that you're going to deliver? Of course, you say you're trustworthy and helpful and all these other things, but no one would say they're not those things, right? And so counter-arguing, avoiding, ignoring makes it really hard to persuade people. I think the key idea for the solutions there is allowing for agency, giving people back some of that sense of freedom and control, putting them back in the driver's seat so that they feel like they're shaping what's going on, not trying to persuade them, but getting them to persuade themselves not trying to sell them so much, but to get them to buy in.

Many of the best advisors function more as a collaborator where they might offer a couple different options or maybe 3 different options. And maybe the advisor is thinking, well, I think Option A is really the best for you, but I'm not going to push you into that. I'm going to lay out the options and then give you, quote, that agency to decide what you think is going to be best for you. Is that what you're seeing here when it comes to reactance, is giving people some options and then letting them make that decision?

Yeah, so that's certainly one direction. You're picking up on the strategy I talk about called providing a menu, right? Rather than giving people one option, give them a couple and ask them which one they prefer. Because doing that subtly shifts the role of the listener, right? Rather than sitting there and thinking about all the reasons they don't like what you've suggested, instead they're focused on, well, which of these do I like better? And because they're thinking about which one they like better, right, they're much more likely to choose one at the end of the interaction. In some sense, it's guided choice, right? It's not saying, hey, Hey, pick whatever you want. And it's not saying, hey, do this. It's finding a middle ground where they still feel like they get an opportunity to choose. They're focused on the choice they have rather than the choice they don't. When you go to a restaurant, most of the time, they don't say, okay, here's your dinner. They say, no, which of these options would you like? They don't give you any option. You can't go to an Italian restaurant and get Japanese food, but they give you some set of options making you feel like you have an opportunity to choose. So that's certainly one solution, providing a menu. Another is ask, don't tell.

Right?

Too often, we make statements. This is what we should do. This is the solution. This is whatever it might be. But when we make statements, people push back. And asking questions, though, can open things up rather than close them. I was talking to a startup founder a few years ago who's having trouble getting her colleagues to put in extra hours, right? So, they had a big thing that was due, and they needed people to stay after and work late and on the weekends. People didn't want to do it. So, she called a meeting, and she asked first a rhetorical question. What kind of company do we want to be? A good company or a great one? Everyone answers that we want to be a great company. But then she asks a real question, which is, "How do we get there?" And questions are really powerful for a couple reasons. First, again, as we've talked about already, statements get pushed back on. Questions, "Oh, wait, you're not making a statement. You're asking me my opinion. I'm more than happy to give you my opinion. I feel like I'm participating in this process. I'm happy to share my opinion." But in sharing that opinion, you get to collect some information. You, the advisor, you, the startup founder in this example, you, whoever you may be, you're getting a better sense of the person that you're trying to change, just like a doctor does. A doctor doesn't start by saying, "Hey, here's the solution." A doctor starts by saying, "Let me understand the problem." And so, good questions— and there's a whole appendix at the back of the book about active listening and the right type of questions to ask— but good questions allow you to collect information. But then there's the third key benefit, which is asking questions encourages commitment to the conclusion. Because when you ask questions and someone says, "Okay, great. This is the thing I care about," or, "This is the way we should become a great company," Now, right, when you come back and say, great, based on your suggestions, I think we're going to do this, it's much harder for them to disagree because they came up with it in the first place, right? And so you're dovetailing around using what they suggested to help do what you might have wanted to do in the first place. And so again, it's guiding the journey, but doing so in a slightly different way.

So that's reactance. And then we've got endowment.

What is endowment? Endowment is the simple idea that we are attached to stuff that we're, we're doing already. We tend to stick with the status quo, the stuff we're doing already for many reasons. It's easier. So anytime there's a decision, there's something called the status quo bias where people tend to, if they're picking between the status quo, something they've done before and something new, they tend to stick with the status quo. Why? A couple of reasons. First, it's just easier. So think about in a consumer setting, it's easier to buy the same product and use the same service again and again. So think about a financial advisor, easier to stick with the same advisor. That's why you don't have to switch your paperwork over. You don't have to do all this form signing. You don't have to learn how to interact with someone and get on their cadence and all those things. It's easier to stick with the advisor you already have. Think about if you ever even pick something simple, going to a different grocery store. Going to a different grocery store is so much more effortful than going to your usual grocery store. I had an experience myself about a month and a half ago. It was so frustrating. I was looking to buy the same things, but I didn't know where anything was. It took twice as long. Simple as shopping for groceries, but it's easier to do it at the place you're used to compared to the place you're not. You're also attached to what we've been doing in the past. And so the work on home buying and home selling, for example, shows the longer someone's lived in a home, the more they value it above market price. Why? Because it's not just a home, it's their home, and they've become attached to it, making it hard for them to let go. And so endowment is sort of this attachment to what we're doing already. And the challenge, I think, when it comes to applying these ideas in an advisor role or something like that is is it's less costly to do what I'm doing already than to do something new. It's easier to stick with what I'm doing already. If I didn't like what I was doing already, if what I was doing already was terrible, I'd be happy to change. But if I haven't already changed, it's because what I'm doing already is fine. And if it's fine, why do the work to create change? There's some great research, for example, that shows that it asks people sort of which do you think is more painful, a minor injury or a major one? So, a minor injury being you tweak your knee or you have a little bit of lower back pain and a major minor injury is like you have a heart attack, you break your leg or something like that. And everyone would say, well, major injury is much worse, right? Minor injury is just this trivial thing. Major injury, of course, is much worse. And that makes sense, but it's wrong. And the reason why is if something's really bad, if it's a major injury, you do all the work to fix it. You go to physical therapy, you get a cast, you do all these things. But if it's a minor injury, you never get it fixed. You never end up going to physical therapy because it's not that bad. But because it's not that bad and it never gets fixed, it causes you that pain repeatedly over time. And so, I'm happy to talk about specific solutions, but I think the key insight here from an advisor standpoint is people are going to be wedded to doing what they're doing already, whether it's keeping money in savings, whether it's investing the way they've been investing, whether it's using the advisor they've used in the past. And so, you have to help them realize that doing nothing isn't as costless as it might seem. It seems like the safest thing to do, but it might not be as safe as it seems. Yeah.

So, let's use an example here. Let's say that that I'm an advisor, I have a client who has a highly concentrated position in the publicly traded company that they work for. And as an advisor, I know this is a situation that could end up very poorly. Now, there, of course, there are things that we can do. We can do option strategies and so on and so forth. But what if the client says, "You know, I really don't want to sell this. It's done so well. I've had it for 20 years and we've made so much money on it." But the advisor knows there's a big risk here. Do you have a tool here as part of endowment or maybe one of the other ones that would help us think through that situation?

Yeah. I think it depends on how soon you think that risk is likely to occur. At any moment in time, you may think there's risk, the client doesn't. And so it's easier for them to sort of stick doing what they're doing, but you can say, "Okay, well, look, I think there's some risk in this. And I think in the next 6 months, you will see this thing happen. And so let's play it this way. I know you don't want to change. That's no problem, but let's agree what might make make you more willing to change. And if something like that occurs in the next 6 months, we'll change. And if it doesn't, it won't. Or alternatively, put together a package where you show them, look, I totally see what you're saying. In the past, this hasn't been a problem. Here's another example of a similar firm where in the past it looked great, but then this is what happened in the past 6 months compared to the further 20 years because of this problem of being too concentrated. And so helping them come to that conclusion themselves on their own. I talked about a very similar example in the book with someone who wanted to keep everything in savings. And this is probably not an issue many of I don't know if your listeners have, but I was talking to an advisor in one of my programs at the Wharton School who was saying, "Look, I have this client who wants to keep all their money in savings. Why? They think the market is too risky." And I'm saying, "Look, the market's not risky. You make more money in the market." But they're saying, "Look, I make money in savings and the market's risky." And so instead, what he did is he essentially said, "Look, I'm going to keep a running calculator of how much money you're losing by not putting some of this money from savings into the market." And so kept this calculator, started at time zero, kept it for weeks and months, and eventually some time over years. Would show this to the client every so often. The client said, "What do you mean I'm losing money? I'm in savings. I'm making money." And the advisor said, "Yes, you're making money compared to no change, but compared to the market, you're actually losing money." And that's important because losses loom larger than gains. Losing $100 feels worse than winning $100. In some cases, losing $100 feels as bad as winning $200 would feel good. Gains have to be much larger than losses to motivate action. So, rather than framing sort of an investment strategy as a gain, you could make You're going to make more money if you put it in the market. Framing it as a loss and showing them, "Hey, look, you've lost this much money in the past, but now the past has become the future," makes it easier for them to say, "Well, wait, maybe I should actually think about changing." [Speaker:MICHAEL_SEIBEL] So I'm going to share an idea here and just tell me if this kind of fits into the framework that you think about here as well.

But before someone makes a change, they're basically in a state of equilibrium where the reasons why they should keep doing what they're doing are strong and they're kind of evened out by the reasons that are preventing them or making them resist the change. So as we think about this desire to make a change, we can either make these forces that are kind of pushing them toward making the change, make that stronger, or reduce the resisting ones. I think your book basically is saying that by removing those things that are resisting the change or reducing that friction, that's much more powerful than trying to enhance the forces that would be favorable for them to make the change.

I agree with everything you said. Psychologists would call this a tension system. And it sounds like a very technical sort of phrase, but I'll make it very concrete. Imagine there's a big wind, I don't know, a hurricane or something coming like that. The wind is pushing on you and you're leaning into the hurricane. And so you're not falling forward and you're not falling backward. You're just, you said, in perfect equilibrium. The forces pushing forward are the same as the forces against. And so you don't move. So, often, we think, "Great, people are in equilibrium. I'll just push more. I'll just add more pushing force and then they'll change." And that would be right, except the problem is when we push more, they don't just do nothing. They add more of the force in the opposite direction. They put up more barriers, not less. And so, the challenge is if pushing more is just going to lead them to resist more, we have to change our approach. And that's really why reducing some of those restraining forces, reducing some of those things that are preventing them from changing means you don't have have to push more. They're just more likely to go along because now it's no longer an equilibrium.

Okay. And then, so the D here is distance. What does that mean?

The key insight of distance is when we ask for something that's too far from where people are currently, they're often unwilling to even listen to the possibility of being changed. So even though I'm not trying to persuade people, just giving them information— information isn't just information, right? It's easy to think about this in, in terms of politics. There was a great study that was done by a friend of mine a few years ago where he said, look, there's obviously political polarization in the United States. People say one reason for political polarization is lack of information, right? Democrats only talk to Democrats. Republicans only talk to Republicans. If people just had information about what the other side thinks, and feels, and does, they would come around, right? Filter bubbles. Filter bubbles is the problem. And so he did this study on Twitter where he gave people information from the other side. So he gave Democrats information from Republicans, Republicans information from Democrats. It was a complicated study. It took a bunch of money to do, a while to set up. And he analyzed the results. And the hope was that information from the other side would reduce polarization. But that's not what happened. In fact, being exposed to information about Republicans made Democrats slightly more liberal, and exposure to information about Democrats made Republicans even more significantly conservative. And the reason why is that when information falls in a so-called region of rejection, too far from where people are currently, they don't just ignore it. It often pushes them in the opposite direction that we want them to go. You can almost think about people as a raid on a football field of beliefs, right? So in politics, maybe you put the Democrats on the left side and the conservatives on the right in each end zone, and you can put people on the 50-yard line, which would be completely moderate or somewhere on the field. And there's kind of 5 or 10 yards in either direction from where people are on that field that they're willing to listen to. So it's not where they are currently, but it's close enough that they're willing to hear out the message and potentially change. And that's what we call the latitude of acceptance. There's a zone around their existing beliefs that they're willing to listen to, but move beyond that zone to what's called the region of rejection, beyond 5 or 10 or 15 yards, and that falls outside the zone they're willing to consider. It's too far from where they are currently, even willing to consider the possibility of changing. And so what we need to do there is we kind of need to shrink the distance, right? When we ask for too much, people may disregard what we're even talking about, be unwilling to even think about changing. And so by, in some sense, shrinking distance, we can overcome that challenge.

So if we think about organizations and and we have a leader that needs to make a massive change in the organization. Let's say it's a turnaround situation. So I know some people would say, well, you know, we need a massive transformational purpose, or we need this huge vision. And with this huge idea, this huge vision, that we can excite people, we can get them motivated, and they're going to work extra hard to try and do that. So that would be maybe one end of the spectrum where we want them to take massive action. And then we've got the other end, which I think is what you're talking about, which is let's take some baby steps. Let's do something that is well within our control. We can see some immediate results. Maybe that'll give us some positive momentum to keep moving forward along the way, perhaps toward this big vision that we have. How do you think about those two barbells? Are they both effective but maybe just used in different situations or different contexts?

I think the challenge is, are we hoping that people will listen to us or are we sort of forcing something to occur, right? If we're the boss and we can force everyone to listen to us, then it may not matter. Though, if they're less interested in doing what we want, they may not actually implement what we're looking for. There's an example where I was talking to a doctor that I think is illustrative of a little bit of what you're talking about. She was dealing with an obese trucker, a guy morbidly obese, was way overweight, was drinking 3 liters of Mountain Dew a day. Every day. And the tendency in that situation is to tell someone to quit cold turkey, right? Don't drink any Mountain Dew, it's causing you to be morbidly obese. But if she does that, he won't listen. Not only will he not listen, he probably won't come back to see her again, right? And so, take the same thing to the office context. You're the boss or you're someone suggesting an initiative or an idea. If it's so far from where people are currently, they may dismiss it out of hand. And so, a different approach is usually better, what I call asking for less, right? In the doctor situation, instead of saying, "Hey, stop drinking Mountain Dew," she said, "Look, I know you like Mountain Dew. Let's just go from 3 liters to 2 liters a day." Guy grumbled, didn't want to do it, but was eventually able to do it. Then when he got down to 2 liters, she said, "Great. You're doing a really good job. Now, go to 1." Again, grumbled, didn't want to do it. Then when he got to 1, she said, "Great. Doing a good job. Now, go down to 0." And so, she didn't just ask for less. She asked for less and then asked for more. In some sense, she chunked the change. Thinking again about that football field, she moved him 5 or 10 yards and then moved another 5 or 10 yards and then moved him another 5 or 10 yards. And so, we can think about the same thing whether it's programs within the organization or approaches or even investment strategies with particular clients, right? We're trying to get them to move from one thing to something else. They may be wary of going whole hog or jumping into it with a big chunk of money or a big chunk of their investment. It might be the right strategy, but they may be wary of doing it. And so by starting them with something small and making them more comfortable with the idea, then it's easier to then move them again in the right direction.

Direction.

Does it take more time to do this? It certainly does, right? It's, it's much easier if you can get people to do it all very quickly. But unless you can sort of force them to do that, that often fails. Product designers call this sort of idea stepping stones. Why do they call it stepping stones? Well, when I introduce a new version of a product or a service, sometimes if it's so different from what people are used to, they won't want to adopt it at all. And so what some companies do is they say, great, I'm going to introduce a worse version of this I'm going to do this thing that's more similar to what people are used to already. And then once they've gotten used to that version, I'm going to do another version that's a little bit different, another version that's a little bit different. And, and just like sort of stepping stones across a river require a couple hops but make it easier for people to cross. And so in general, I think unless you have the ability to sort of force people to do big change, asking for less, asking for more, or sort of chunking the changes is often more effective.

We make a change, and we've got two options. One is like a long-term change that we need to make, something that we need to sustain over, let's say, years, versus something that is more of a short-term change. Does the time frame have any bearing on the strategy or the framework that you use to implement or to try to make that change?

Yeah, I mean, you know, certainly time is helpful. The more time we have, the more we can use a strategy like ask for less and ask for more. And honestly, big changes usually require time. I interviewed some people who switched political parties. It didn't take 5 minutes to get someone to switch political parties. Or think about the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon wasn't formed overnight. It was a little bit of rain that eventually became a trickle, that eventually became a stream, that became a river, that wore down a gorge, that eventually became the Grand Canyon. And so big change often takes time. Small steps encourage that change to eventually happen. And I think it's not just small steps, it's about steps that understand where your audience is, where your customer is. If we think about sort of customer focus from marketing, whether that customer be a client, whether that customer be a colleague, whether a customer be employees, but, you know, understanding where they are in the field, not just asking for less, but tailoring your appeal, your message, your idea to where they are, and recognizing that that will make them more likely to listen and make them easier to move.

Well, Professor, you've shared some great strategies here that can help us all do a better job at helping people people and facilitating behavior change. So tell us, how can people reach out to you, and where can people find the book? And are there some resources that people might be able to, to download from your website as well that can help them?

Oh sure, yeah. So the book is available wherever books are sold, so Amazon, Barnes Noble, wherever, you know, Audible, wherever you get your books from. Uh, you can find me on the web at jonah— that's just J-O-N-A-H Burger, B-E-R-G-E-R—.com. And there's a bunch of— there's a resource tab there, a bunch of free resources to begin to apply these ideas. So guide for how to change a customer or client's mind, a guide for how to change a boss's or a colleague's mind, a one-pager with, you know, we covered some of the steps to changing minds, but other barriers we didn't. There's a whole guide to those sorts of things. And so a bunch of resources there. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn or @j1berger on Twitter.

Excellent. And I know you've got a couple other books that you wrote. We didn't touch on those today, but I'd love for you to just mention those because I think those could be very helpful for the folks listening to this as as well.

Oh, sure. So my first book is called Contagious: Why Things Catch On, all about word of mouth, social influence, why things become popular, and how we can generate more word of mouth both online and offline. So you get more referrals and, you know, increase, increase our business there. And often teach a course on that to a bunch of financial service folks at Wharton, including advisors. And then the second book was called Invisible Influence, and that's all about how to motivate others, when influence leads us to do the same thing as others, when it leads us to do different things, why it might lead us to invest in strategies that may not always be the best but are what others doing, and, and how by understanding the invisible influences that are out there, we can take advantage of their power.

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. So, Professor, appreciate your time here today. Congratulations on the new book and all the great work that you do. Much for having me. My key takeaway from my conversation with Professor Berger is how the best way to initiate change is to focus on reducing the barriers to making the change, as opposed to piling on more reasons to make the change. It's easy to fall into the trap of trying to convince someone to change, but the better strategy is to simply make it much easier for them to make that change. And the professor's REDUCE framework is a catchy way to remember how to do it. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Com/podcasts.

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