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  • So let me give you a hypothetical. Suppose that you're a parent and you have a daughter,

  • say a teenage daughter, who's room is an absolute mess. It just looks like a bomb went off in

  • there and you want your daughter to clean her room. You're trying to sell her on the

  • idea of cleaning her room. What do you do? Well, you could try to bribe her and that

  • might work in the short term. You could try to threaten her -- that might work in the

  • short term. You can try to exhort her, you can try to, you know, tell her about the meaning

  • of clean rooms. But there's actually a technique from actually the counseling literature really

  • crystallized by a fellow named Mike Pantalon of Yale University called motivational interviewing.

  • And what you can do more effectively is ask two irrational questions. So, let's say that

  • you have a daughter named Maria and Maria has a messy room and you want Maria to clean

  • her room. The two questions you could ask Maria are this. "Maria, on a scale of one

  • to ten, one meaning I'm not ready at all; ten meaning I'm ready to do it right now.

  • How ready are you, Maria, to clean your room." Now, Maria's room is a pig sty so she's not

  • going to give you a ten or a nine or even a five. Maybe she'll give you a two.

  • So she says, "Dad, I'm a two." Well here's where the second question comes in and it's

  • a really interesting counterintuitive question. You say to Maria, "Okay, Maria. You're a two.

  • Why didn't you pick a lower number?" Now our instincts as parents is to say -- as a parent

  • of three kids I have this instinct very strongly. If my kid were to say to me I'm a two, I would

  • say, "What, why are you a two? You should be a nine." But you say, "Why didn't you pick

  • a lower number, Maria?" So here's what happens. Maria has to explain why she isn't a one.

  • Okay. So she says, "Well, you know, I am 15 and I probably should get my act together.

  • You know, if I had my room cleaner I'd be able to get to school on time, faster and

  • maybe see my friends a little bit more. You know, you and mom never know where anything

  • is anyway so I'm kind of wasting my time asking you to help me." What happens?

  • With that second question why didn't you pick a lower number, Maria begins articulating

  • her own reasons for doing something. And this is really axiomatic in sales and persuasion.

  • When people have their own reasons for doing something -- not yours -- their own reasons

  • for doing something they believe those reasons more deeply and adhere to the behavior more

  • strongly.

  • Now suppose Maria says, "Dad, on a scale of one to ten I'm a one." Okay. That makes things

  • a little more complicated but it's actually really, really important to understand this.

  • If you say to Maria -- if Maria says, "Dad, I'm a one." Here's what you say to Maria.

  • "Maria, what can we do to make you a two." And what often that does is this. Maria will

  • say, "Well maybe if you and mom help me for 15 minutes to get this started." "Maybe if

  • you maybe not set the table and take out the trash tonight, that would free up some time

  • for me." Because usually when people are a one, it's often because -- not because they're

  • purely obstinate. It's because there's some kind of environmental obstacle in front of

  • them. And if someone says they're a one, find out what that obstacle is, try to make them

  • a two and that might give you some more momentum.

  • Now the example I just gave had to do with parenting but you can use this more universally.

  • Now you can't whip it out at every single persuasive encounter but you can use it to

  • persuade your boss. You can use it maybe to persuade a reluctant prospect in an actual

  • sales encounter. You can use it with someone -- your neighbor who's resisting moving his

  • garbage cans or something like that. The key here -- and again you've got to go back to

  • first principles here. The key here is that we tend to think that persuasion or motivation

  • is something that one person does to another. And what the social science tells us very

  • clearly is that it's really something that people do for themselves. And your job as

  • a persuader, as a motivator, is to reset the context and surface people's own reasons for

  • doing something. Because it works a lot better.

So let me give you a hypothetical. Suppose that you're a parent and you have a daughter,

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