Being Funny Can Make You More Persuasive

Research conducted over the past 40 years suggests that watching comedians or other funny bits improves people’s capacity to solve problems.

Here’s proof:

• Alice M. Isen, a psychologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore in the late 1980s, found that people who watched a short series of television ”bloopers” were better able to problem-solve than those who watched a film about math or physically exercised prior to being presented with a problem. 

• The cognitive neuroscientist Mark Beeman found that showing test subjects stand-up routine clips from the late comedian Robin Williams increased the success rate of solving insight problems by 20 percent.

• The journal Neuropsychologia published a study in 2013 by Stanford researchers that linked humor to higher IQ scores.

What does all this mean for your persuasion efforts? Humor helps people make smarter decisions. Being funny (in the right ways) can propel your persuasion attempts as effectively as one of the Roadrunner’s rocket sleds powered by the Acme Corporation.

Give it a try.

Try a New Way to Think About Thinking

According to Nobel Prize-winning economist and author Daniel Kahneman, we possess two “systems” for thinking: one that processes information very quickly, and one that does so more slowly and requires significantly more effort.

Here’s the thing: Most of us don’t really like to think all that hard. As humans, we rely on what comes to mind with the least amount of cognitive strain. We also don’t always act rationally — rarely going to the trouble of, say, doing the math or weighing the pros and cons of a decision.

But don’t be too hard on yourself: We act that way to survive in a post-modern world where the amount of information we are exposed to has grown exponentially, but the basic architecture of our brains hasn’t changed since the likes of Australopithecus africanus roamed the earth. We employ mental shortcuts to survive. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t.

Discovering Heuristics and Biases

Heuristics are supportive cognitive shortcuts that help us make good decisions in times of complexity. Biases, on the other hand, impede decision making. Sometimes, biases also are referred to as cognitive illusions, because much like an optical illusion, they twist our thinking about reality.

So how do we distinguish between the two? It’s often difficult to parse heuristics and biases, because the same factors that impact our thinking also impact our thinking about our thinking. For example, sometimes we fall prey to something called base-rate neglect. This is when we ignore statistics in favor of anecdotal incidents.

Heuristics and biases are built into our psychological makeup and are so pervasive that we rarely even notice them working inside our heads. Plus, they feel so natural, so how could they be wrong? If you make what turns out to be a good decision, you’ve just used a heuristic. If the decision results in a negative outcome, you’ve succumbed to mental bias. As one psychology student so aptly put it: “Heuristics are helpful biases. Biases are hurtful heuristics.”

Regardless of how you might categorize these mental patterns, understanding and labeling them will help you consider these cognitive processes more easily and create strategic persuasion campaigns based on them. They also will help your targets make better decisions.

Don’t worry about getting too hung up on trying to determine whether something is a heuristic or a bias. Simply concentrate on what these mental tendencies mean to you in terms of your persuasion efforts.

It’s OK To Say ‘No’ To Your Persuasion Priority

What if, after careful evaluation, you determine that your persuasion priority is not worth the effort?

Maybe it’s not financially feasible. Or it won’t necessarily enhance your professional skills or expand your networks. Perhaps it will stress you out or overwork you.

Regardless of the reason, don’t be too disappointed. You’ve just saved yourself precious time, energy and effort — and perhaps minimized any potentially career-damaging risks. Contrary to Robert Plant’s timeless lyric in Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” all that glitters certainly isn’t gold.

Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and set another priority. 

This is why analysis is so important when it comes to engaging in persuasion. It allows us to see things in black and white, forcing us to think clearly and make the tough decisions.

If, on the other hand, you’ve carefully considered your persuasion priority and are convinced you’re headed in the right direction, you will now have the energy and proper mental mindset to help you succeed.

The Difference Between Happiness and Satisfaction

How will the pursuit of your persuasion priority impact your happiness and satisfaction?

First, it’s important to realize that happiness and satisfaction are two separate and distinct notions. In short, happiness is based on conditions; satisfaction is based on reflection. 

Happiness is the short-term elevation of mood, typically influenced by conditions. Is what you’re doing at the moment fun, are the people you’re interacting with enjoyable to be around and is the work environment convivial? Or do time pressures exist with micro-managing bosses nagging you in a work environment that feels awkward or even toxic? 

Satisfaction is the longer-term, overall feeling of contentedness. Have you achieved significant accomplishments, overcome stiff challenges or reached your potential in a certain area? When you reflect on your life, how fulfilled are you? Do you look at your life and career with pride, or do you regret opportunities lost and potential not realized?

Three Key Questions

If you are seeking to be a persuasive professional, you simply need to ask yourself these three questions:

  1. What will the pursuit of my persuasion priority contribute to my happiness?
  2. How many more happy moments will I experience in the average day as a result of this endeavor?
  3.  When I look back several years from now, will the pursuit of this persuasion priority contribute to my overall professional and personal satisfaction? 

Keep in mind that delayed gratification and eschewing fleeting moments of happiness for longer-term satisfaction can yield much more significant results.  

Effective Persuasion Requires Effort, But Don’t Overwork Yourself

In previous posts, I’ve written about the importance of taking into consideration how much your persuasion priority is worth to you.

Now, here is another question to ask yourself: Will my efforts unreasonably and negatively impact my labor intensity? Will it require me to work more hours, juggle more tasks and take on more burdens? Is there a more effective way of achieving my persuasion priority?

One of the reasons more people aren’t more effective with their persuasion attempts is because they require too much additional effort. This concept is nothing new; too much work leads to the abandonment of ideals and priorities. The reduction of labor intensity often is considered a fundamental component of self-improvement. If you want to continue to develop and grow, it’s essential to reduce your labor intensity such that you can free your capacity for new experiences, new people and new information. The fastest way to understand this concept is to explore input and output.

Conducting a training workshop counts as input; changes in employee behavior and the overall business are the result (or the output). Conducting a focus group is the input; the accurate understanding and takeaway of the session is the output. The fastest way to reduce your labor intensity is to focus on the result, not the input. 

If your persuasion priority is to oversee a new product to market, and you want to gauge your retail channel’s likely demand, focus groups are one way to do so. If you’re able to attain a statistically sound assessment with only five focus groups, don’t plan eight. Endeavor to exert just enough effort to achieve the desired result.

Persuasion always requires effort, but you need to ensure the effort is commensurate with the payoff.  Assess the labor intensity of all your persuasion attempts.

How Are Your Stress Levels Today? You’ll Need Some Stress to Survive

Any time you reach for something new, better and different, stress will be involved. The key is determining what kind of stress you might experience with your persuasion priority.

Bad Stress

The first is distress, the sort most of us already know and experience — probably quite frequently. This is when your body responds physically and negatively to your mental state. Typically, heart rates elevate, muscles tense, teeth clench and the body releases the damaging chemical cortisol into the bloodstream. Although I’m not a doctor (and I don’t play one on TV), too much of that is never a good thing.

Good Stress

The other kind of stress is eustress — the “good” kind of stress. When you’re mentally challenged to follow a speaker’s logic, complete a challenging math problem, learn a tough piece of music or rise to the occasion and meet a pressing deadline, new neural pathways help your brain become more fit.

You also can experience eustress when you challenge yourself physically by lifting a heavier weight, running at a faster pace or increasing the incline on the treadmill. You’re forcing your body to increase your physical and cardiovascular capacity for work, which releases the positive chemical dopamine and makes you feel good about exerting energy. 

You Need Stress

You can’t live a life without any stress. Distress is inevitable, and reasonable levels of eustress should be encouraged. My mentor Alan Weiss, who penned the foreword of my book, Persuasion Equation, is a naval battle expert who often quotes Revolutionary War naval hero John Paul Jones: “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to sail into harm’s way.”

If you want to hear “yes” more often, you’ll have to sail into harm’s way.   

Load yourself with the right kind of stress to help you continue to grow. If you pursue your chosen persuasion priority, will you be putting yourself in a position of growth — or something else?

(Photo courtesy of Gratisography.)

Does Your Persuasion Priority Expand Your Networks?

Few things are as important to a working professional as a network of contacts. But if there is one area of weakness in most people’s persuasion arsenal, it exists in their professional network. We know it’s important to create and cultivate relationships, but we don’t necessarily put in the energy and effort. 

Your persuasion priority may require you to establish new relationships or refresh existing ones. During the course of your efforts, you also may need and want to seek out subject matter experts, mentors, historians, prognosticators and contrarians. 

Networking Examples

If your persuasion priority is to bring a new product to market, making the case for it requires an analysis of product liability risks — an area that might be outside your expertise. You’ll need to find a subject matter expert, and you’ll need to make a solid first impression while establishing a positive relationship and expanding your professional network.

Additionally, you may want to seek out someone to teach you a new skill or provide guidance. Whether you refer to that individual as a teacher, a mentor or a coach — and there are distinctions between those terms — doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’re reaching out.

Say you’re creating a point-of-purchase marketing support initiative and you need help determining the best way to communicate with your retailers. Find someone who has done the same thing before and ask for guidance. You’ll not only get new information, but establish a new relationship, too. 

Perhaps you’ll need a historian, someone who possesses the history critical to your persuasion priority. Maybe you’re pitching a new idea to an existing client, but you’ve never worked with this client directly. You’ll need someone who knows existing relationships, past experiences involving the client and your organization, and where minefields might be lurking. To get started, reach out to a colleague. 

In other situations, you may seek out what are sometimes referred to as prognosticators. They are usually found in market research areas and can evaluate current indicators and make educated predictions about what’s going to develop in the coming years and quarters. Perhaps the product line is maturing and therefore will be subject to competitors, or the client base is aging and there will be natural attrition, or the markets will align and there will be an opportunity for new offerings.

Finally, if you’re confident and adventurous, you can seek out contrarians. Those people have the ability to powerfully argue the opposite and tell you why your ideas aren’t as good as you think. You’re free to disagree, of course. But in the end, you’ll have another opinion — and maybe even some new ideas you hadn’t previously considered — to strengthen your approach.

Relationships can be as powerful as splitting the atom in terms of creating your credibility and influence. So think about your persuasion priority in terms of a clean slate, an opportunity to reinvigorate your networking efforts.

Will Your Persuasion Priority Enhance Your Professional Skills?

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of determining if your persuasion priority is really a priority.

Remember that your persuasion priority must be specific, significant and meaningful to you and your organization, and realistic enough to be attainable. It also must be set with others in mind, because if you can help them get what they want, you’ll ultimately get what you want.

If you pursue your persuasion priority, be sure to ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Will it improve your communication skills — such as writing a compelling email, facilitating a brainstorming session or making an executive presentation?
  2. Does achieving your persuasion priority add to your actual or abstract organizational abilities?
  3. Might it help you build relationships, hone your problem-solving talents or sharpen your decision-making abilities?
  4. Will it help you attain mental toughness to compartmentalize a challenge and put it off for later while you work on other more time-sensitive issues?
  5. Will it increase your negotiation skills?
  6. Does it require you to consider more carefully your proficiency at work-life balance?

All of these potential improvements can be considered more qualitative than quantitative financial gains

Breaking Down Your Skills

Keep in mind that the fastest way to achieve competency in a skill is to break that skill down into its various components. 

Far too many people think far too broadly when it comes to analyzing a skill. Take the ability to make an executive presentation, which some might categorize sweepingly as  “presentation skills.” That’s a mistake. 

Making a presentation involves researching your topic and your audience’s perspectives on the topic, as well as blending third-party expertise with your own insights. Then you need to develop your content: the opening, a middle section, examples, anticipation of questions, response preparation and even a recovery plan for gaffes or an unexpected comment. Then comes the creation of an effective closer that leaves your audience thinking, knowing or doing something different. Each of these components in and of themselves could be considered a skill set.

These skill sets might come easier to some people than others, but just because you struggle to achieve competency doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue a given skill — or a given persuasion priority.

Why Money Matters in Persuasion Situations

It’s time to revisit you persuasion priority: Who is the one person you want to say “yes” to what? 

In other words: If, in your professional endeavors, you could flick a switch and convince one person to do just one thing, what would that be? Remember that your persuasion priority must be specific, significant and meaningful to you and your organization, and realistic enough to be attainable. It also must be set with others in mind, because if you can help them get what they want, you’ll ultimately get what you want.

Is Your Persuasion Priority Really a Priority?

Occasionally, professionals spend inordinate amounts of time, energy and effort on persuasion campaigns that aren’t worth all that hard work. Discretionary time is wasted, political capital is squandered and relationships are sometimes damaged irreparably in the pursuit of an ill-advised strategy.

Thus, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking an objective is worthwhile. We feel the opportunity is scarce (I’ll never get another chance to work on a project in Germany!) or fall prey to base rate neglect (I know a person who tried this approach to product marketing and it worked for him! [But maybe it failed for everyone else…])

The carpentry rule applies here: Measure twice, cut once.

What Will Be Your Personal Financial Return?

There are many questions to ask when crafting your persuasion priority, and I will cover them in a series of posts beginning with this question: Is there a personal financial gain at stake?

In other words, if you are successful in achieving your persuasion priority, will you make more money? I’m talking about individual compensation or group compensation, as well as short-term compensation and long-term return. 

An example of individual compensation is when you earn an individual sales commission for closing a deal. Group compensation involves receiving additional dollars when the sales team as a whole meets a particular sales objective. Short-term compensation is reflected in your next commission check, while long-term return may refer to quarterly or yearly returns. 

Typically, people place their highest priority on individual short-term financial gains, such as an increase in hourly wage or salary, so they can enjoy immediate gratification. 

In reality, the more-powerful financial return might be long-term group financial gains, such as stock options, deferred compensation and royalties.

The question of potential personal financial gain is the first one to ask because, well, money is important. I chuckle when someone tells me it isn’t. My mind immediately jumps back to my earliest days working for Harley-Davidson at the company’s Milwaukee headquarters. Rich Teerlink, then president and chief executive officer, gave me a piece of advice I’ll never forget: “Mark, if someone ever tells you they are not interested in money, watch them, because they’ll lie to you about other things, too.”  

That said, while money is important, it’s far from the only thing that matters. I’ll cover more of those things in future posts.

How to Better Believe in Yourself

Do you ever talk to yourself? (Right now, you’re probably thinking: Hmm, talk to myself? Do I do that?)

Most people have an ongoing mental conversation with themselves. This is what many psychologists call self-talk. Left unattended, that conversation typically sways negative. 

When I was younger, I used to be pretty hard on myself:

• “I can’t possibly deliver workshops and write a book.”

• “I can’t possibly work for that company, because I don’t know anything about the beer business.”

• “I can’t work out in the afternoon; I’ll be way too tired.”

• “I can’t possibly hold my own with this guy; he’s written 64 books.”

None of it was true.

The problem with these mental conversations is that after a while, neuroscientists theorize that those thoughts go from the neocortex part of your brain to the basal ganglia. This is where your habits are hardwired. And it takes real effort to rip out the negative stuff.

My 3-Step Plan to Crush Self-Limiting Beliefs

1) Catch yourself in a negative thought. This requires cognitive diligence. You must think about what you’re thinking about — and not mindlessly scroll through Instagram or Twitter.

2) Disabuse yourself of this notion. I do this using my 82-year-old father’s increasingly cantankerous and challenging voice: “Yeah? Who says?” Immediately, something in my brain switches, and my next thought is: “Challenge accepted.”

3) Take action. Any action, no matter how small, just to get the ball rolling. There’s a great old turn of phrase that says, “Throw your butt over the bar and your heart will follow.” I really believe that.

Plan into Action 

I love to work out, and one afternoon when I was out for my typical 10-mile hike, I had about two miles left. Then a fleeting thought hit me: Maybe I should run the rest of the way. No, I can’t. I haven’t run in over 13 years.

That’s right: I used to be an avid runner, but once I turned 40, my knees hurt, and I told myself I was too old to run. I caught myself having this thought and — no kidding — I heard my dad say, “Yeah? Who says you can’t run at 53?”

 I took a couple of steps. Then took a couple more. And bam: I ran home.

Far too many of us convince ourselves we can’t do it:

• “I can’t ask this person for a referral; he just bought a motorcycle from me.”

• “I can’t call these people; they’ll think I’m sort of telemarketer.”

• “I can’t sell 18 units in a month.”

•“I can’t sell 300 units in a year.”

Yeah? Who says?