Say it Better

The bleeding billboard evokes a reaction…

… akin to the candy bars that call out to you as you wait in the grocer’s check-out lane. In the most important moment both capture your attention. Change your behavior. The candy bar is a “POP” or point of purchase impulse buy.

However the stakes are much higher for the impulsive change evoked by the billboard by the New Zealand highway. The first day it rains every year more people drive carelessly. Some are killed.  The usual admonition, “Drive to the conditions” is dry (’scuse the pun), rational and not behavior-changing. 

Yet when the first rains come blood starts flowing from the boy’s eyes, nose and mouth.  If you are driving by you instantly get the picture.

Slow down.

Like POP the billboard evokes an emotional response at a significant moment.  For New Zealanders it is a teachable moment. So far, no more fatalities on that road since it was installed.

The lesson for us all?  What is an important moment for you to “touch” your customers, colleagues, friends or loved ones?  What behavior would you like to change in that moment?  What image and/or words will evoke that change?

How a Fertilizer and a Snack Stand Out - And You Can Too

Want to sell or secure support? You’ve got less than a minute, experts say. Much less it turns out. With the first three to five words, listeners instinctively tune in or tune out.

To compound the problem, you may know too much.  The deeper your expertise, the less able you are to offer the vivid detail up front that motivates them to listen longer.

Instead we start with background, qualifiers and other “underbrush.”  Meanwhile they go on a mental vacation.

To make your idea or product stick in their minds, here are two tips and examples that have helped me:

Two tips

1. Hot Button: First offer the point that most matters to this listener

Craft the sequence of words in your first sentence like a string of pearls, with each word solidly connected to the next. That way you build the briefest, “most valuable benefit” statement. Add supportive points if:

• They relate to the main point, and

• Can be said in three words or less.

2. Memory Anchor: Say it so they can see it

Offer the vivid, supporting detail that evokes a relevant and positive mental picture and thus anchors the benefit in their mind.

Two examples

1. Hot Button:

The natural fertilizer that outgrows the leading synthetic fertilizer, doesn’t burn plants and comes in recycled packaging.

Memory Anchor:

Terracycle's fertilizer is made from worm poop.

 

2. Hot Button:

Because they are made of dried fruits and nuts bound together by honey KIND bars are healthier than other health bars. We use whole natural ingredients  - not paste.

 Memory Anchors:

• Mango Macadamia is a favorite.

•  A Yale pilot study found that eating two KIND bars a day can help people lose weight.

Create a Tag Line to be Top of Mind in Your “Market”

"Because the earth needs a good lawyer" is one of my favorite tag lines. It is specific, emotional and short. 

What shorthand description do others use when describing your cause, business or other group?  If it’s not the one you cite then maybe you want to create a more compelling one.  Why not craft an apt, memorable tag line or slogan that describes your organization’s core value to us?

An extra benefit is that a clear, specific and vivid slogan provides a focal point for doing “first things first” and for making other choices when one seems overwhelmed with options. Ask “What choice now most reflects our tagline?”

Here are three tips I gleaned from last year’s winners of Nancy E. Schwartz’s Getting Attention contest for non-profits’ best tag lines:

Tag line tip #1:

Craft a (clean) double entendre.

• A clearinghouse for finding performance and rehearsal space called NYC Theatre Spaces: “Where Actors Find Their Space”

Tag line tip #2:

Evoke an emotion-tugging physical image.

 • The American Lung Association: “One Breath at a Time”

Tag line tip #3:

Piggyback on a concern with a pithy slogan as a solution.

• Oregon Center for Public Policy provides balanced coverage of state issues, many of which are hotly contested where opinions and facts are blurred in the public debate: “Because facts matter”

 As John Haydon adeptly notes, “Rather than having a tagline about the mission of the non-profit, they all speak about the client's experience and what's important to them - on an emotional level.”

Share your tag line for this year’s contest and keep a look out for fresh ideas when Nancy announces the results later this year.

"It happens when nobody is watching”

If an ad stops you in your tracks it must be good.  At a Berlin bus stop a camera detects that you’re looking at an interactive poster. You see a happy-looking couple when staring at the poster.

Yet when you turn away it morphs into an image of the man hitting the woman (“It happens when nobody is watching.”) 

Too bad that Amnesty International only got one of these anti-domestic violence ads. 

This high-profile, high-risk taking non-profit had another attending-grabbing ad format and tagline in 2006 – images on transparent posters with the line ....

           "It's not happening here but it's  happening now." 

Some ads use images with graffiti style words that are raw and apt for the message and audience. 

Others place familiar toys in an unexpected situation. 

For your cause or company what images and tag line or slogan would you use to touch the people you want to reach and influence? Avoid meaningless cliches and empty promises.

Guess How Soon You Could Read Others

It didn’t take long for you to recognize basic behaviors and know what they meant for you. Even before you were a year old …

• You understood that individuals you saw over time would to act in certain ways.

• You recognized different emotions in those around you —fear, anger and happiness.

• You knew how to manipulate others as soon as you could move your body.

• When you saw people who were helpful and others who were hurtful, you understood the ones to avoid – even if you couldn’t.

Even before your first birthday, you knew all that according Paul Bloom, Yale psychology profession and author of Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human, a fascinating book.

After reading it you may be sufficiently intrigued to read Bloom’s next book, due out on my birthday, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.

Within each of us “different selves are continually popping in and out of existence,” he writes. “They have different desires, and they fight for control—bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another”….

He suggests that this might explain why we act in contradictory ways and sometimes against our best interests.  It might explain “certain puzzles of everyday life” such as why:

•  Addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off.

• We insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.” (For reducing stress, watching a high-definition TV was as worthless for patients as looking at a blank wall. Yet anxiety does goes down when they can see nature out a window.) 

Bloom’s book seems to complement Rita Carter's Multiplicity.  “We used to think that the hard part of the question ‘How can I be happy?’ was understanding happy. But, believes Bloom, it may have more to do with the definition of which "I” is top-of-mind at the time. 

Bloom wonders: “Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? 

Are you always better off when a Good Self wins?” For example Bloom seems conflicted about the attempts by some behavioral economists such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler to set up rules in business and government that reinforce our smarter self's ability to take hold.  For example, those businesses that automatically put a portion of employees’ salaries into their retirement account, unless the employee opts out, have discovered that more people save more. In short, this practice supports the Good Self.

Now I am going for a walk to ponder my weaker and wiser selves. 

From Obesity to Resilience, Performance and Happiness – How We Can Do Better By Our Children

NurtureShock. From the real root cause of obesity to where the worst bullying really happens this book is a wake-up call for parents and anyone involved with schools or children. I’m betting it will spark some excited – and heated conversations.    

From letting kids sleep longer to starting school later to keeping kids off the “hedonic treadmill”, this heavily-researched yet highly captivating book takes on many of the major myths about how we raise our children.  Some findings have already generated pushback from school administrators who “just feel it doesn’t make sense.”

From the first page I was pulled in as any parent will be.  So much of what Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman discovered in their three years of wading through the research is startling – and runs counter to public policy and how we spend money, ostensibly in support of children.  The co-authors were inspired to write this book after covering the groundbreaking research by Carol Dweck on fixed vs growth mindsets.

Some findings in the book:

• Rather than praising most everything a child does, offer focused praise that helps your child see “strategies he could apply the next day.”  (This book is worth the price just to read about the study comparing the very different ways American and Chinese mothers encourage their children that enable one group to gain greater confidence and success.

• Children’s sleeping patterns and needs are substantially different than adults. Over time, “a loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to (the loss of) two years of cognitive maturation and development” in children.  “Sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.”

• From obesity to mood and performance, children did better when school started at 8:30 a.m. instead of the more usual 7:30 a.m. In one study in Lexington where schools changed to the later hour, “teenage car accidents were down 25%, compared to the rest of the state.”

Even if you aren’t a parent you’ll find this a fascinating read for what it tells us about human development, lying, longing for love and other behavior. Or about how we make education policy (for the convenience of the adults or the kids?) - and what specific actions we can take as parents and as citizens to give children a better start in life. Now I’ll get off my soapbox.

A Clue to Why Friendships Enable Women to Live Longer

Letting down one’s guard. Chatting. Getting to know each other in comfortable ways. These are not frivolous activities for women after all. Scientists have long known that having close relationships – even simply social contact – leads to living longer.  Until now they did not have proof as to why -especially for women. One clue comes from the chemical reaction to social closeness – even with strangers. 

What happens, for example, when women who are strangers to each other are put in a situation where they are encouraged to talk or collaborate?  Their progesterone and cortisol levels go up.

How does this affect their behavior? In a recent study women were divided into two groups, one with no encouragement to interact.  The other group was given just 20 minutes of an activity that encouraged conversation – such as playing a cooperation-based video game. (I can't wait share this with my women's group).

Remarkably, even in that short a time, that second group, with the elevated hormonal levels were more likely to:

• Have reduced chemical levels of stress and anxiety in their body.

• Say they would risk their lives for their partners in the experiment.


Reading this, some may be tempted to take a medical shortcut and take progesterone. But Dr. Steven Park, a professor at New York Medical College, warns, “You need it in the right doses.  And it has to be in the right balance as estrogen in the body.”  The easier path to better progesterone levels may simply be by making it a point to connect with friends and family more often.”

Who Packs Your Parachute?

Charles Plumb was a U.S. Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now speaks on the lessons learned from that experience.

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, "You're Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. "You were shot down!" "How in the world did you know that?" asked Plumb.

The Purpose of Storytelling

“Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is ‘to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.’”

Thank you Colum McCann for this story of your father in celebration of Bloomsday - and for Let The Great World Spin.

Repeating Positive Affirmations Backfires For Many of Us

Eric and Emma, the couple up the hill from me in Sausalito have been married 54 years, they proudly told me.  They walked, hand-in-hand past my home each morning, usually laughing, smiling and pointing out things to each other along the way. Originally from Ireland, they listened to BBC at dawn so they usually had a tidbit of news to share with me if they happened to pass my home when I was finishing my lame attempt at morning exercises in the back yard. 

When Emma died suddenly last year, he stopped walking, stayed in their home and ignored my knock on their door.  Later, when he started walking again, he told me his son, a public speaker on leadership, suggested that he start saying positive self-affirmations every morning “to lift his mood.” He retorted, “My mood doesn’t need lifting!  It’s right where it’s supposed to be.” So his well-intentioned son then mailed him a card pack with cheery faces on one side and, on the other, a series of upbeat daily affirmations.  The card pack was entitled  "Yes, I Can!” to which he responded (to me, but not his son, I gather) “No I won’t!”

That inspired Eric to act, but not in the way his son intended. He wrote his own series of Realistic Affirmations. The sentiments reflected his way of responding to grief, his stubborn resistance to being told to feel better and his core attitude about life.  Some were funny. Yet his basic resilience started to shine through as he finished writing his sayings by the end of the year. “Not every cloud has a silver lining so start liking the clouds."

I thought of Eric today when I read that Norman Vincent Peale may have been wrong, at least for many people when he advocated saying positive self-affirmations to lift your mood. That oft-repeated notion that feeding ourselves upbeat messages can make us feel better isn’t necessarily true according to Joanne Wood's research.  In fact, these wildly popular self-esteem boosters put some people “in peril.” (This finding may disturb fervent The Law of Attraction followers.)

If, for example, you say to yourself, “I’m a loveable person” yet you don’t really feel that you are you will feel worse than people who:

• Did not repeat the affirmation, or

• Focused on how the affirmation was both true and not true.

That’s a startling revelation for many of us Americans who have been bombarded with self-help messages based on the belief that positive affirmations are entirely beneficial.  It’s also a relief to know that one wasn’t simply self-defeating when one was feeling low, said positive affirmations and then felt worse.

In the study, those with high self-esteem who …

•  repeated the positive affirmations, or

•  focused on how they were true

…felt better than those who did not – but only to “a limited degree.”

I’d like to see more study on this because it means that there is little benefit for anyone in saying positive self-statements.  Plus this practice backfires for the very people who most need them. As Ed Yong concluded, “Statements that contradict a person's self-image, no matter how rallying in intention, are likely to boomerang. “

This new study doesn’t take away from the power of a related practice.  That’s preparing to perform well, in a sport, speech or other activity by vividly visualizing the performance in advance.

Eric, by the way, has begun writing his memoir, describing some of the adventures he shared with Emma, the people they met and the joy of living with her “through thick and thin.”    As Byron Katie would say, he is “loving what is.”

It has lifted his mood I am happy to report.