How to Persuade Others with the Right Questions: Jedi Mind Tricks from Daniel H. Pink Video Lecture | Understanding the art of Public Speaking: Become a better speaker - Self Help Learning

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.