Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything--Fast - Hardcover

Pantalon PhD, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316083348 ISBN 13: 9780316083348

Verlag: Little, Brown Spark, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

If you want to motivate your employees to be more productive, convince your customers to use more of your products and services, encourage a loved one to engage in healthier habits, or inspire any change in yourself, renowned psychologist Dr. Michael Pantalon can show you how to achieve Instant Influence in six simple steps. Drawing on three decades of research, Dr. Pantalon's easy-to-learn method can create changes both great and small in 7 minutes or less. This scientifically tested method succeeds in every area of work and life by helping people tap into their deeply personal reasons for wanting to change and finding a spark of "yes" within an answer that sounds like "no."

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael V. Pantalon, Ph.D. is a motivational coach, consultant, therapist, and award-winning faculty member at Yale University School of Medicine. He has published numerous articles in publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among others, and has presented his work at national and international conferences. Dr. Pantalon lives in Hamden, Connecticut, with his wife, Marianne, and their sons.

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Instant Influence

How to Get Anyone to Do Anything--FastBy Pantalon, Michael

Little, Brown and Company

Copyright © 2011 Pantalon, Michael
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316083348

PART I

Get Anyone to Do Anything—Fast

CHAPTER ONE

What Makes People Want to Change?

You’ve just left the gym to join your friend Kelly for coffee. When you meet up with her, she glances at your gym bag. “Oh,” she says, “I wish I could be disciplined like you are. I never seem to get to the gym—I haven’t exercised in months.”

Being a good friend, you’d like to help, so you start trying to motivate Kelly to exercise. “It’s so important,” you say. “You’ll look better. You’ll feel better. You’ll live longer…”

“I know,” Kelly says. “Wouldn’t that be nice! I just can’t seem to get started.”

“Starting can be tough,” you say sympathetically. “But you’ll feel so good afterward. You’ll have lots of extra energy to get everything done.”

“Maybe. I’m just always so tired.”

“But exercise perks you up,” you say. “I know. I’m always tired, too, but then I start my workout, and pretty soon I’m wide awake.”

“You’re so lucky. You’re really disciplined. I’m just not.”

Suddenly, you think you’ve come up with a perfect way to fix the whole problem. “Why don’t you book some sessions with a personal trainer? That’s how I got started. I thought it would be really expensive, but actually it’s not. Then you’d have to go!”

“Maybe I’ll try that sometime,” Kelly says, and the conversation turns to other things. You feel bad for Kelly, because you know she really wants to exercise. And you feel frustrated with yourself, because you just couldn’t find the right way to help her take action.

What went wrong?

In fact, at almost every turn, your efforts were doomed to fail. That’s because you were using what I like to call the tell-and-sell approach: you tell someone your reasons for doing something, then try to sell her on them. Unfortunately, no matter how good your reasons or how heartfelt your sales pitch, the tell-and-sell approach almost never works.

What happens when you try to sell someone on your reasons for change? Usually, as in this example, your efforts go nowhere. The other person might agree with you, as Kelly did, but that won’t spark a desire to take action. That desire—the motivation to act—lives in each one of us. But the only way to unlock it is with our own reasons.

In the example, you told Kelly to exercise because she would be healthier, live longer, feel better, and have more energy. All good arguments, but they didn’t work for Kelly because they weren’t her reasons. Although she agreed with you, she didn’t personalize the reasons or explore how much they meant to her.

You also told Kelly how to take action: hire a trainer. But if she hasn’t figured out why she wants to take action, she certainly won’t care about how to do so.

Three decades of scientific evidence clearly demonstrate that tell-and-sell methods not only fail to motivate; they also lower the motivation level. That’s right. Using the wrong type of encouragement can actually make a person want to do something less.

So what works? Here’s the secret to Instant Influence: people take action when they hear themselves say why they want to. People can tell you all day long that they wish they could do something. But when they tell you why they want to do it, that’s when things start to happen. That’s Instant Influence in a nutshell. Get someone to tell you why he wants to act, and action is almost sure to follow.

There’s a catch, though. Other people can’t simply agree with your reasons for change or parrot back to you the reasons they are “supposed” to have. For example: “It’s good for my health.” “My boss will be happier with me.” “It’s the right thing to do.” They need to dig a little deeper and find their own personal reasons for change, often unexpected reasons that may surprise both of you.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM INSTANT INFLUENCE

Instant Influence can quickly open someone up to the possibility of change. The actual process of taking action or implementing new behavior may require a bit more time, but this first step is critical.

When you have an Instant Influence conversation with someone, there are four possible outcomes:

1. You have complete success. Your influencee commits to making a change or to taking a step toward positive action. You’ll follow up by making an action plan (we’ll discuss that in chapter 9) and by continuing to monitor his progress. If necessary, you may want to have a second Instant Influence conversation later on, to revive flagging motivation or to help him further along the path to his next step.

2. You have partial success. Your influencee opens up to change in a way she hasn’t before, but she still won’t commit to taking action. Give her time to process the conversation in her own way. She may go on to take independent action, or you might need to have another Instant Influence conversation to help her keep moving forward.

3. You have limited success. Your conversation ends on a civil note, but it appears to you that very little was accomplished. You’ve planted a seed that may need time to take root, so remain open to the possibility that more progress was made than you realize. If you don’t see any signs of improvement in a week or so, you may want to follow up with another Instant Influence conversation, using some of the suggestions in part II to make the conversation more productive.

4. You seem to have reached a dead end. The person refuses to have the conversation or remains highly resistant throughout. As in the previous scenario, be open to the possibility that more progress was made than you realize. If you don’t see signs of action in a week, you might want to attempt another Instant Influence conversation, just to keep the door open. Chapter 10 offers tips about how to accept the situation and move on when you feel that you have reached an impasse. Don’t give up too quickly, however. People change in their own ways and in their own time. If you’re not attentive, you might miss it.

Test Your Instant Influence Skills: Helping People Find Their Own Reasons

Throughout the book, I’ll give you opportunities to test your Instant Influence skills. But before you learn how to use this approach, maybe you’d like to find out how good you already are at motivating yourself and others to take action. You may have instinctively been using the Instant Influence technique all along—or you may be realizing that, like most of us, you’ve relied far too much on tell and sell. Here’s a quiz to test your motivational skills.

Imagine that a close friend needs to get a mammogram, but she keeps putting it off. There’s a history of breast cancer in her family, so you know it’s urgent, but she keeps...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Little, Brown Spark
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0316083348
• ISBN 13: 9780316083348
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland