Practical Eloquence Blog

We Need Less Motivation and More Determination

By Jack Malcolm / 1.17.2012 / No Comment

When five o’clock rolled around after work one day last week, I was not motivated at all to do my evening workout. After a full day of proofreading and editing my new book, I was motivated to crack open a Heineken and relax.

Yet, despite my lack of motivation I still ended up doing a hard and productive workout, because even though I was not motivated, I was determined.

And that got me thinking, why do we always spend so much time focusing on motivation, when the real work gets done by determination? Why do so many of us listen to motivational speakers but don’t seek out those who tell us how to improve our determination?

I read a lot of biographies, and the thought struck me that when you read about the accomplishments of great men and women, the word motivation almost never appears. So I put it to the test, using the trusty Google Ngram viewer, which tracks the frequency of words in English language books, and this is what I found:

The word determination traces back to 1374, but in the meaning I’m using it here, as the quality of being resolute, it dates to 1822. Looking a little further, I traced the word motivation to 1873, and its use in the psychological literature to 1904, meaning “inner or social stimulus to action.”

And that’s the key word, stimulus. A stimulus will get you moving, but when things get tough you need a lot more than stimulus. Motivation gets you to the starting line, but determination gets you to the finish line.

Motivation is a state, determination is a trait. Motivation is about preferences, which can change at any time; determination is about character, which is a part of who you are.

Maybe that’s why the word determination started losing favor around 1960. Using the word implies a value judgment, and the sixties roughly coincided with the rise of political correctness in which words like character became embarrassing and judgmental. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet 1960 is roughly about the time that kids’ sports leagues started giving out prizes to everyone—not just the winners. They did that to keep kids motivated, which is an admirable goal.

But if no one ever loses, how do they develop the character that keeps them going when things get tough? How do they learn to hate losing and quitting so much that they stubbornly refuse to let it happen?

We need determination because we’re all pretty bad at predicting how we’re going to feel about a situation before we’re in it. For example, smokers underestimate the cravings they will feel when they’re trying to quit. We know we will be tired in the last lap of the race, but the reality feels worse than we imagined. Determination keeps us on course even when reality is worse than anticipated, and it often is.

So much of achievement depends on the patient and consistent application of the right process and method to achieve a long term goal. The goal motivates, but sometimes when the pain, fatigue and boredom speak louder than the eventual payoff, it’s easy to cut corners. That’s when you need determination—the unwillingness to quit and the firm resolution to keep going. Determination in some ways is a negative word: not quitting is more important than keeping going.

Motivation without determination is fragile and fleeting—compare the attendance at any gym in America in early January and early February to see how far motivation alone will take you. Motivation prompted Roger Bannister to dare the four minute mile; determination kept him doing the laps and the intervals even while pursuing his medical degree full-time.

Motivation with determination scales mountains, breaks the four-minute mile, paints the Sistine Chapel.

Motivation contemplates the future; determination focuses on the here and now.
Motivation is fragile and flighty; determination is strong and steady.
Motivation is Red Bull; determination is red meat.
To paraphrase Mike Tyson, “Everyone is motivated until they get punched in the face.”
Motivation soars in the clouds; determination slogs grimly through the mud.

Determination is not a guarantee: on Everest, Mallory and Hillary both had it. But it’s that lack of guarantee which makes it so much more meaningful and so much more noble.

By the way, that Heineken I wanted? It made for a great recovery drink after my workout.

Persuasive communication

Strategic Persuasion: Sometimes You Can’t Get There from Here

By Jack Malcolm / 1.13.2012 / No Comment

Whether you’re in a sales call, sales presentation or internal presentation, it’s critical to have a carefully reasoned and well supported message, but even that can fail to change someone’s mind if they’re not prepared to hear it.

In fact, your listeners will hear your message differently depending on what their initial attitude is to your position on the issue. They may have their own opinion about whether your solution is the best fit for their need, or even about whether the need is worth addressing.

According to social judgment theory, there is a range of possible attitudes a person can take on an issue. Roughly, they can reject, accept, or be neutral about the issue.

But these three terms don’t really describe positions; they are more like zones, because there are differences within the zones, as you can see in the figure below.[1]

The baseline is neutrality. Members of your audience may be indifferent or neutral for one of three reasons, apathy, ignorance or indecision.

Ignorance: they are not aware of the issue. This is often likely in consultative selling, which by my definition entails bringing fresh ideas—in effect, solutions to problems they don’t know they have.

Apathy: they know about the issue but don’t care about the outcome or decision. Maybe it does not affect their profit center, or they are not yet aware of the impact it might have on them.

Indecision: they know and care about the issue but don’t know which course of action is the best.

So, if you want to move them from neutrality, you must know why they are neutral. You must either inform them, show them why they should care, or make the case for your solution to the issue.

The “negative” attitudes as they relate to your proposal are:

Skepticism: they don’t support your idea but are not necessarily resisting. Maybe they don’t trust you or haven’t heard enough to make them feel comfortable with the idea.

Opposition: in this case they are actively pulling back from your idea, perhaps seeing disadvantages for themselves favoring a different approach.

Blocker: besides resisting your idea, they take an active role in fighting against the idea. Maybe they favor the competitor’s approach, or possibly they view your proposal as too risky or causing them too much work.

The “positive” attitudes are:

Ally: the other person goes along with your idea. They may say yes, or agree not to block your efforts.

Coach: the other person personally commits to seeing that the idea gets implemented. They take an emotional and personal interest in the idea and become enthusiastically committed to it. This is the difference between following the letter of your request and promoting the spirit as well.

Champion: others make the idea their own and take an active leadership role in promoting and extending it. They may have a vested interest in seeing your solution implemented, probably because it will help them solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

When you closely examine the range of positions that someone in the decision-making process can take, several critical considerations emerge.

First, there is a “latitude of acceptance” that each person is comfortable with. In most cases, people can be moved slightly from their current positions. It’s reasonable and possible to move someone from opposition to skepticism or even possibly neutrality.

But if you try to move people outside their latitude of acceptance, it is very difficult to do in one shot. No matter how charismatic or persuasive you are, it’s unlikely that you will get someone to do something they are strongly opposed to just because of one presentation. With people like that, the phrase “You can’t get there from here” applies.

In fact, if what you’re selling is too far outside their latitude of acceptance, you run the very real risk of a “boomerang effect”, meaning that your message will have the unintended effect of strengthening their opposition. In some cases, that means that it’s better not to even try—or at least dial down your target and expectations.

Think of it like trying to pull a heavy weight with a string. If you pull too hard or too suddenly, the string will snap. But if you apply a bit of pressure and then patiently add to it, you have a chance.

Second, the listener’s initial position will determine how they perceive your message. If what you say falls within their latitude of acceptance, they will see your message as more similar to their position than it actually is. If it does not, they will perceive it as more different from their position than it actually is.

Third, it takes time to move people to the right. That’s why persuasion is a process and not an event. A sales presentation, for example, should be seen in the context of a complete sales campaign and not an end in itself. Don’t just show up and think you’re going to win everyone over with your force of personality and logic; socialize your ideas, find out where people stand and why, and do what you can to nudge them in the right direction.

Always be strategic!

[1] These labels are not the labels that psychologists use. They are labels used in sales strategy thinking.

Clear thinking

The More You Learn the Less You Know: How to Maintain a Healthy Learning Diet

By Jack Malcolm / 1.10.2012 / 4 Comments

This will not end well

Is it possible to learn more and more and know less and less? It depends on what and how you learn.

We live in a wonderful era of lifelong learning and easy access to the world’s knowledge. As a result, more and more of what we learn, we learn on our own, outside of the guidance of formal education.

In many ways, this is a good thing. Speaking for myself, I have always been an advocate of learning and personal growth. As a free-range grazer in the noosphere, I’m an active consumer of information about topics that interest me: with main courses comprising about 75-100 nonfiction books a year, and constant snacking on magazine articles, blogs, and videos. Much like you, I have a voracious appetite for new learning, and the world’s table is spread with abundance and variety.

This is especially true in psychology and the social sciences, where it seems every day brings a fascinating new study about how we think and make decisions. Writers like Malcom Gladwell and Daniel Pink know how to turn their research into palatable packages that go down easily because of their artful combination of solid research, sweetened with compelling stories and vivid detail.

Unfortunately, without using some good judgment and discipline, it’s too easy to stuff ourselves with empty calories of fluff and trick ourselves into thinking that we’re acquiring a real education. We need less sugar and more salt—it may be bad for you in an actual physical diet, but most of us don’t take enough of it when we read stuff that interests us.

Because we have so much choice in what we read, we tend to read material that is easy to grasp and that we already agree with, so it’s possible that instead of learning more, we may be merely embedding false information into our minds even more firmly. In those cases, it’s possible to read more and more and know less and less about something.

You can try to fight this tendency by being choosy about what you consume. Books carry the equivalent of nutrition labels in the form of the author’s qualifications, index, bibliography and notes; look those over to get a sense of what you’re about to stick into your brain. When listening to speakers, if they say “studies show”, without showing the studies, be very skeptical.

These precautions should help, but if you stop there you may be even more susceptible to error. In sports, the introduction of better protective equipment sometimes leads to worse injuries because it can make athletes more reckless. The same may be true in your reading. It’s possible that the fact that you’ve been rigorous in choosing what to read may make you less skeptical of its claims while reading it. After all, if a Nobel winner said it, or it’s in the Harvard Business Review, who are you to doubt it?

There are two good reasons to keep the salt handy even when reading a book from a “trusted” source. First, there is excellent documentation that expert opinion can be extremely unreliable.

Second, most of the studies that they cite in the footnotes are probably wrong, or even if reliable are cherry-picked to support the author’s conclusions. I realize that it’s ironic that I cite a paper to support the assertion that most published research papers are false, but John P.A. Ioannidis’ essay “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” makes for very interesting and disconcerting reading. (And it was written before the recent scandals involving falsification of research data.)

Unfortunately, the “findings” least likely to be true are the most likely to catch and stick in our attention. We’ve all had the experience of reading something in the paper like, “Scientists show rutabaga lowers risk of knuckle cancer.”[1] Here’s just one reason why you should not immediately rush out to the produce aisle: Maybe nineteen other research teams studied the link between rutabagas and knuckle cancer and found no correlation—they would not have bothered to try to publish their “negative” results. Even if they did publish their results, which study do you think the reporter would use to generate an article people would read? And, if you read articles on both sides of the issue, which would be more likely to stick in your mind when you went to the store?

To make the problem even worse, even if you read absolute proof that the information you read was false, you are much more likely to remember the vivid claim than the solid but boring refutation.

Guidelines for a healthy knowledge diet

Doubt first; look for contradictory information. Your default position should be doubt and skepticism, not immediate acceptance. At the risk of pushing the metaphor too far, chew thoroughly before swallowing.When you read something that rings true, it may be easy to bring examples to mind that support it, but you should also try to think of counterexamples. We all suffer from confirmation bias, which blinds us to contradictory information.

Go deeper. The footnotes aren’t just for decoration. You can’t verify everything you read, but you can find the original source in the footnotes and read it yourself to see what it says.

Learn just a tiny little bit of statistics. At least enough to understand how much weight you should put on reported results. At a minimum, you should understand sample sizes, correlation and effect sizes. (If this sentence made your eyes glaze over, read this.)

Fire bullets not cannonballs. This advice comes from Great by Choice, by Collins and Hansen. What it means is that you should not bet the farm on something new and untried by making big or irreversible changes to your business strategies or processes. Experiment, measure the results, and make adjustments as necessary. When you’re sure, then you can fire the cannonball.

Don’t be so damned sure of yourself all the time. As we’ve seen, it’s possible that the more educated you are, the more wrong you are likely to be. Be open-minded and willing to listen to others. Certainty shuts down learning.

[1] I purposely used a silly example to avoid another phenomenon: if something sticks in our minds when we read it, we tend to believe it even after it has been proven to be false.

Presentations

The Eyes Have It

By Jack Malcolm / 1.6.2012 / No Comment

Your eyes are—by far—more important to your presence and persuasive effectiveness than every other tool in your physical inventory, as John Travolta teaches Danny DeVito in this clip from the movie Get Shorty. By themselves, they can convey confidence, enthusiasm, credibility and personal connection.

Research has shown that listeners pay far more attention to the speaker’s eyes than to any other part of the body: 43% of the time, compared to the second-most part, the mouth.[1]

Even without the research, we instinctively know this to be true. To stress the importance of eye contact, think of what people infer about you if you don’t look them in the eyes when you talk to them. They either think you’re ignoring them, you’re lying, or you lack confidence.

There’s a good reason listeners pay so much attention to your eyes: they can be incredibly expressive and brutally honest. They are quite literally windows into your brain as you speak.

Eye contact makes you more persuasive. It’s much easier to ignore someone if they don’t make eye contact, which is why most of us tend to avert our eyes when a panhandler approaches us on the street or people sitting next to a vacant middle seat on Southwest Airlines look away when someone walks down the aisle looking for a place to sit.

It can make you seem more powerful. More powerful people look at people when talking and away while listening. I don’t advocate the latter, but the former will definitely make you seem more dominant.

It can make you more genuine because the eyes can be very expressive of genuine emotion. At least unconsciously, listeners are calibrating the emotional content of your words against the message conveyed by your eyes.

For speakers, the most important point is that eye contact can even make you more credible to people who are not the target of the gaze. Courtroom research shows that witnesses who look at the cross-examining attorney are perceived as more credible with juries. That means that you don’t have to look at everyone to be credible, but you do have to look at someone. People who suffer from presentation jitters are often advised to look over the heads of the audience; this may calm them, but it will suck the credibility right out of their message.

Finally, and just as important, eye contact also helps you maintain your audience focus and awareness. How are they responding? Are they listening, or tuning out? Do they look confused? Do they agree with your message?

With so much riding on your eyes, you can’t leave it to chance. The most important rule is to look your listeners in the eyes when you speak to them. Although that’s obvious, too many presenters violate the rule either out of sheer nervousness or by spending too much time looking at their own slides. Keep your slides uncluttered and make sure you know your material.

To ensure that you keep the visual connection, think of your listeners not as an audience, but as a group of individuals, each of whom is critically important to the success of your presentation. In most sales or internal presentations, the audience will be small enough that it’s realistic to try to make direct eye contact with everyone.

Scan the room, but make sure you look at one person for a second or two and then move on, or you’ll look like a human sprinkler. Your gaze can linger on one person immediately after making an important point, but don’t lock on for more than about two seconds or it can get uncomfortable.

You can also kick up the level of personal engagement by providing “customized eye contact”—when you make a point that is most relevant to a particular person in the room, look directly at that person. Some of the best moments in sales presentations occur when you seem to be momentarily having a private conversation with one person, and you are rewarded with a nod of agreement.

Finally, be aware that it’s possible to err on the side of too much eye contact. There are two likely scenarios where this can happen. The most common mistake salespeople make is to focus too much on the most important person in the room. Since their opinion counts for so much, it’s natural to be more concerned with their reactions, but it can cause you to ignore others in the room. The other problem is to spend too much time monitoring the reactions of the one skeptic or opponent in the room. If it’s not going well, it can make you uncomfortable or throw you off your message. Unless they have veto power over the decision, your eye time would be better invested with the other influencers in the room.

If you’re speaking to a larger audience in a ballroom-type venue, you can mentally divide the room into slices, such as left –middle-right, and then choose a friendly face in each segment to focus on. Sometimes this may not be practical, because when you’re on stage with the lights shining on you the audience may be invisible; just fake it and no one will know.

[1] Dale Leathers and Michael H. Eaves, Successful Nonverbal Communication, p. 57.

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