It’s… been a minute since my last “Message in a Minute” video. I moved apartments and it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to set up my recording equipment in my new office (and I’m still not convinced I have it the way I want!).
In the face of all this newness, though, I thought it might make sense to restart the series with some “oldness”: a concept that’s guided my work for years. Namely, that:
You can’t create change—only the conditions for it
Here’s the video’s Red Thread:
- GOAL: Create a shift in thinking or behavior with your message.
- PROBLEM: The challenge? You can’t create change, only the conditions for it. That’s because…
- TRUTH: Action requires agreement. Before we’ll act, some part of our brain has to say “yes, doing this is a good idea.”
- CHANGE: So, to create the conditions most likely to create change, make all aspects of your message as agreeable to your audience as possible.
- ACTION: The most agreeable aspects of all are those that align with how your audience already sees the world—what they’re already saying “yes” to. Most often those are:
- What your audience already wants (but doesn’t yet have)
- What your audience already believes
- GOAL REVISITED: When you give your audience an even stronger story to tell themselves, you’re creating the conditions for not just a one-time change, but an enduring one.
How to apply it
I believe all communication is about creating change. Every time you share information with someone else (or they share it with you), something changes. Sometimes it’s just your level of awareness or knowledge of something. Sometimes it’s something much bigger.
I believe all communication is about creating change. Click To TweetIt’s those bigger changes that fascinate me because the smaller changes in knowledge and awareness must precede them. That’s why, back when I was moonlighting as a Weight Watchers leader, I was so interested in how those big changes happen.
What I discovered? Big changes don’t happen by force, that’s for sure. At least, not long-lasting ones.
I’m sure you’ve probably seen this in your own life. There undoubtedly have been times you did something because you had to. Maybe it was a parent or guardian telling you so, or a boss. Maybe it was your own inner voice (if you have one—some people don’t!).
Sure, we can tell ourselves, that person “made” me do it, (I sure have!). But unless that person was controlling your arms, legs, or whatever else was required to do whatever it was, you were actually the one that performed the task or did the deed.
And to do that, some small part of you had to agree. In other words:
Action requires agreement.
Now, I’m not saying you agreed with the other person’s reasoning for acting or even their intent. But maybe you said “yes” because the consequences of saying “no” were unacceptable to you. Maybe not acting would get you fired or put someone else in danger. However hard it was to say yes, though, saying no would have been harder.
That makes that “yes”, that agreement, very, very important.
When I realized how important that agreement was, I began to wonder: when the motivations for asking for a new action or behavior were pure, and the benefits to the other person only positive (both extremely important conditions, by the way)…
What would happen if it were easier to say “yes”?
Going further, what would make it easier to for someone to say “yes”? After all, as mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal once said,
“The art of persuading is as much that of agreeing as that of convincing.”
I take that to mean that the easier it is for your audience to say “yes” to your message and the change inherent in it, the more likely they are to agree with and act on it.
The easier it is for your audience to say 'yes' to your message and the change inherent in it, the more likely they are to agree with and act on it. Click To TweetBut what do people say “yes” to? For that, the answer is all around you: it’s what they’re saying “yes” to already. The things already guiding their behavior. There are two main ones:
What they want
and
What they believe
That’s why it makes sense to always anchor your message in something your audience already wants—what I call the GOAL. When you do that, you don’t have to convince someone your idea is relevant. They already want an answer to that question. As long as your idea can legitimately answer that question, they’ll likely agree they’ll want to know more.
Bonus benefit for anchoring your message in an audience goal: people are very unlikely to stop wanting something they want, at least in the short term.
Do you know what else people are unlikely to change in the short term? Yep, the second of that pair I mentioned earlier: what people already believe.
I was talking about this to my new friend Brian Miller the other day. Brian’s background is in magic, and we got to talking about this idea of beliefs. The reason the effect of a well-done magic trick is so powerful, he said, is because the effect violates what we believe to be true about the world. People don’t just disappear. Solid objects can’t pass through solid objects.
It’s because those beliefs don’t change that we’re amazed when someone does just “disappear” or a solid object does seem to pass through another solid object.
Counterintuitively, that same mechanism can turn the power of an unchanging belief into a springboard to change. It can make the impossible—like an urgent problem that remains unsolved—suddenly seem very, very possible.
How? Well, think about what has to happen for us to do something (or stop doing it). It has to make sense to us, right?
We have to have a reason to do it (or not).
That reason, 100% of the time, is based on one of those ideas Brian and I were talking about: what we believe to be true about ourselves or about the world. We do something because we believe that “I’m a person who…” or that “This is the way things are…” or that “If I don’t do X, Y will happen.”
The core of all change communication is grounding change in belief. Most of the time, though, we try to instill new beliefs. But new beliefs aren’t nearly as strong as the ones already in place, the ones already guiding what we do.
That’s why the Red Thread approach has you anchor the reason to make a change—the Truth—in something your audience already believes to be true. After all, if something is true over in that part of our world, our brains tell us, why wouldn’t it be true over here in this one?
(For example, as many of us have told ourselves: If a diamond is “forever,” or close to it, physically, wouldn’t it be true symbolically, as well? Just ask De Beers….)
What’s the secret to creating the conditions for change then? Simply this:
When something you believe puts something you want in jeopardy, you will change something.
Maybe you’ll decide you don’t really want what you want (possible, but unlikely). Or that something you believed to be true no longer is (again, possible, but unlikely). Or that some other way of looking at the situation allows you to keep both your wants and beliefs (much more likely).
That last shift happens because of one more quirk about us humans: we like to think of ourselves as open-minded (it’s part of being seen as smart, capable, and good). In the face of immovable wants and beliefs, we’re often very willing to shift our perspective.
That is, we’re willing as long as that new perspective also aligns with our existing wants and beliefs.
In essence, this is what the Red Thread helps you do. It helps you plan out the most agreeable explanation for doing something different, based on how someone sees the world right now.
— Is this question something you want the answer to (the Goal)? Yes.
— Is this how you’ve thought about going about that so far (the first part of the Two-Part problem)? Yes.
— Would you agree this is another, equally viable way to think about it (the second part)? Yes.
— Is this other, related concept something you believe to be true about the world (the Truth)? Yes.
Then, more subtly:
— Do you agree that, because that last concept is true, your current perspective makes getting what you want harder, if not impossible? Yes.
And finally:
— So, do you agree that this new approach—which is based on the new perspective you agreed was equally valid—represents a potentially better way to get what you want? Yes.
If you can get a “yes,” whether explicitly or implicitly, to each of those questions, you’ve quite literally done everything you can do to create the ideal conditions for change. Now, you just have to wait and see what your audience decides.
Sometimes they’ll change what they want. Sometimes they’ll decide they don’t believe you. More often, though, you’ve given them something they can’t unhear. A logical and emotional puzzle their brains can’t help but solve, one way or another. That’s because this is literally true:
When faced with a gap like the Red Thread creates, the human brain must close it
People can’t tolerate the kind of mental dissonance that gap between what someone wants and what they believe creates. Something will always shift in someone’s mind in order to bring everything back into balance.
These are the stories we tell ourselves about the world.
So, when you want to help someone to do something different, don’t force them. Give them a better story instead. When you give someone a better explanation for how to be who they want to be, you’ve created the ideal conditions for them to make the change themselves—both now, and in the future.
Please note that many of the links are affiliate links, which means if you buy a thing I link to, I get a percentage of the cost, and then donate it to charity.
Transcription:
You’ve got a big idea, you want it to have impact, and that means you need people to change, right? You need them to change their thinking or behavior. The problem is you can’t make people change, you can only create the conditions for it. That’s what we’re talking about in this Message in a Minute. I’m your host Tamsen Webster, of Tamsenwebster.com. And this idea of creating conditions for change all comes down to a really important fact about human nature. And that is action requires agreement. Before you’ll do anything, something in your brain has to say, “Yep, this is a good idea.” So if you want to create that shift in somebody else, you need to make how you talk about your idea as easy as possible for them to say yes to.
Mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal put it beautifully when he said that the art of persuading is as much that of agreeing as that of convincing. So what do people agree to? Well, the most common things are what people already want, what they already believe, and how they already see the world. So if you can frame your idea in those terms, not only will you get a one-time shift in thinking or behavior, you’ll get a change in thinking or behavior that lasts. Because people can say yes to it over and over again. If you want to learn more about how to create that kind of change for yourself, or how to create your own message in a minute, you can find more information on all of that in my book, Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible. I’m Tamsen Webster of Tamsenwebster.com. Thanks so much for watching, and I can’t wait to see your message and big idea out in the world.
Like this content? Be the first to get it delivered directly to your inbox every week (along with a lot of other great content, including my #swipefiles). Yes, please send me the Red Thread newsletter, exclusive information, and updates.
Leave a Reply