Steal These 3 Advertising Secrets–To Use As Motivation Hacks

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business, behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews, and ask me a question. By leaving a review, I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com.

Steal these three Advertising Secrets to Use as Motivation Hacks by Near Ale Narrated by Johnny Heller. You can create some powerful motivation hacks by learning techniques from the persuasion business. The reason why you hate being micromanaged by your boss is the same reason why as a kid you refused to put your coat on when your mom told you to bundle up.

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We're all wired with a knee jerk, don't tell me what to do response called psychological reactance, and it can kick in even when it's you telling yourself what to do or trying to motivate yourself. Saturday Night Live recently captured this tendency with a skit about the pelotone getting writers to work out not through encouragement, but through passive aggression. A woman in the spoof says, if I hear the phrase you can do it, I literally won't, but when her coach taunts her instead, she pedals faster to prove them wrong. That's psychological reactance in action. Our desire to protect our sense of autonomy is so strong that we'll even do the exact opposite of what we're told just to prove a point. The SNL ad is obviously fake, but real advertising can teach us how to disarm our tendency to rebel indiscriminately. After all, advertising is intended to move people to action. Sometimes ads can motivate us to action by gliding under the reactant's radar, and we can do the same to ourselves by understanding how to work with, not against, our hatred of being bossed around. Now let's get to three techniques you can use today. 1. Offer the right rewards 2. Leave room for refusal 3. Change the narrative 1. Offer the right rewards when my daughter was younger and we'd ask her where she wanted to go eat, her instant response was almost always McDonald's. She insisted it was because the food was so yummy, but we knew what she really wanted most of all was the toy that came with the meal, though, over time we went to McDonald's enough that it really did start to seem like the yummiest food in town. That's temptation bundling, or using the rewards from one behavior to incentivize another. Get a customer to come for the toy, then get them to fall in love with the burger. And we can use the same strategy to build healthy habits too. In a well known study, Catherine Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School demonstrated the effectiveness of providing a reward to disarm reactants to incentivize people to exercise in the gym. Milkman gave some volunteers an ipod loaded with audiobooks they could only listen to while they worked out. She picked page turning books like the Hunger Games and Twilight that she knew would keep people wanting to hear more. The only way they could keep listening to the story was to keep exercising and and indeed the people who had the iPod were 51% more likely to go to the gym than those who did not. As I describe in my book Indistractable, I went through something similar. Listening to audiobooks while exercising helped me get in shape. For the first time in my life, I started to actually enjoy exercise because I kept coming back to it. I initially came for the reward of listening to interesting audiobooks, but over time I started to enjoy the routine. This motivation trick finally disarmed my psychological reactance and my lifelong resistance to exercise by using rewards effectively. 2. Leave room for Refusal One of the best ways to get people to say yes is to remind them that they're free to say no. By affirming that you can refuse my request, I'm giving you control so you don't have to arrest it back. In one notable experiment, people were presented with one of two requests to fill out a survey or to lend their cell phone to a stranger for a phone call. In both cases, people were significantly more likely to comply with the request when it came with the caveat that they were free to say no. Listen for this trick next time you're talking to a salesperson. It's standard practice. You can adapt this tactic by giving yourself options. For example, if your goal is to exercise at a certain time, give yourself the choice to refuse. Maybe you can choose between a bike ride, swimming, or lifting weights, but when you put that event on your calendar, you can write something like bike ride but can swim or lift weights instead. This hack disarms reactants because rather than constraining yourself to a single rigid requirement, you're simply focusing on your options. Many parents have figured out that they can use the same principle to temper their kids reactants. Rather than telling a toddler exactly what to wear, only to be met with hostility, show her two or three options. More often than not, she'll be perfectly happy to choose between them. Our decisions get more complicated when we grow up, but our desire to exercise our agency doesn't go away. Build flexibility and choice into your overall plan and you may find yourself feeling more agreeable. 3. Change the narrative the most sophisticated marketers position their products and capabilities as magic for slaying a monster. They're not telling you what to buy, they're teaming up with you against a common enemy. The narrative is the key. By default, when someone tells you to do something, you feel a little adversarial. But when that request or instruction is framed in a way that positions you as the hero of the story, you feel much less resistance. For example, if you manage your schedule with a practice like timeboxing, reactance can make you feel like your calendar is the adversary. Of course, it's not. The real enemy is distraction. Distraction is anything that's not what you intended to do, and it moves you away from your goals. The more you internalize this, the more you'll be able to disarm that self harming reactance against your own plans. Instead of flaking on commitments because of a knee jerk feeling, you can change your narrative. Your freedom isn't being threatened, it's being actualized. You're choosing which life you lead instead of letting life happen to you. You're hacking back against distraction and you're winning.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog, nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on ITUN.