In the balance of hearts and minds, which should win? It’s one of the oldest questions in persuasion; Aristotle drew the distinction between logos, which appeals to the mind, and pathos and ethos on the other. His contention was that ethos is the strongest of the three, which put him on the side of the heart.
In more modern parlance, we can view it as the difference between Daniel Kahneman’s distinctions between fast System 1 thinking and slow System 2 thinking.
A central theme of this blog is that content is king: the most persuasive and sustainable arguments are those built from sound logic and verifiable facts. One way of looking at it is that in the battle of hearts and minds, the mind should win. Another way is that need should trump want in influencing others’ decisions. Calm deliberation, judgment and careful weighing of pros and cons should lead to better and smarter decisions, which is especially necessary when you’re making decisions with momentous consequences in terms of money and even lives.
But the reality is that there is often a vast gulf between should and do, and even big decisions can be swayed by appealing to the heart.
A famous quote attributed to Josef Stalin is, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” We saw that played out last night as President Obama addressed the nation about the need to step up military action against ISIL forces in Iraq. A few short months ago, the idea of getting entangled in Iraq again would have been unthinkable; now it is almost unthinkable not to. Before the President’s speech, ABC News reported that 91% (!) of Americans supported increased military action in Iraq.
Why has public opinion changed so fast and so radically? I don’t believe it’s the statistics of the horrifically high death toll from the Syrian civil war – that’s been going on for three years and has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives. But none of those lives distracted our attention long enough to care, until two American hostages died. And it’s not their deaths that galvanized us, it’s the way they died, in revolting and public fashion.
Of course there are very sound geopolitical reasons to get involved to stop the spread of the ISIL “caliphate”, including denying a territorial base that can be used for terrorist attacks, and further destabilization of a volatile and critical region of the world. But those reasons existed before Foley and Sotloff lost their lives. The justification was there, but the drive was not. Without an appeal to the heart, those reasons would not have been enough to drive action.
It’s important not to take this too far. The emotional side attracts so much attention that it’s easy to forget that there has to be a strong logical justification underlying it. As I’ve written before, you can sell the sizzle all you want, but if the steak turns out to be crappy, no one wins. Effective and ethical persuasion requires an appropriate balance between the heart and the mind.
But no matter how smart and rational your idea is, no matter how eloquently you can explain your reasoning, logic will only get you as far as agreement. If you want action, you must appeal to the heart.
Have you noticed that most of the training we need is about what we already know, but don’t do enough of? That’s certainly the case with listening skills. We all know how important listening is, but we all fall short of the level we’re capable of.
The interesting thing about listening skill is that we all can perform at top levels when we’re really, really motivated, so it’s not a question of knowing what to do; it’s about executing at the necessary level consistently.
If you think you’re a good listener, here’s some listening math to ponder:
| 50/25/10 | A study showed that the average person remembers only 50% of what was said immediately after a 10 minute oral presentation. After 24 hours, the figure drops to 25%, and to 10% after a week. The first 50% is not a memory problem, it’s a listening problem, as anyone knows who hears a person’s name for the first time and “forgets” it ten seconds later.
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| 500/125 | In standard American spoken English, we speak at about 125 words per minute, but process words mentally at about 500 words per minute. I’m not sure how scientific the thinking speed measurement is, but it’s obvious that we can think much faster than others can speak. That’s why it’s so easy to get distracted while listening to someone else. We think we can listen and think about something else at the same time, but we’re actually rapidly switching back and forth – except when we forget to switch back.
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| 583 | The number of people killed when two 747s collided at Tenerife airport in 1977, caused primarily by a chain of listening errors and misunderstandings between pilots and air traffic control, and between pilots and copilots.
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| 80/45 | Those of us in business spend up to 80% of our waking hours in communicating almost half (45%) of our communication efforts consist of listening. There’s a lot of effectiveness left on the table if we’re not listening to our full potential.
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| 43,8 | The average length of a political sound bite on national news in 1968, and the average length in 1988. CBS News tried to counter this trend by mandating a minimum 30-second sound bite, but had to abandon the effort when people would not listen.
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| 18 | “That’s the average time it takes a doctor to interrupt you as you’re describing your symptoms. By that point, he/she has in mind what the answer is, and that answer is probably right about 80% of the time.” Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think
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| N = 1 | One of the reasons that doctors (and possibly ourselves) tune out is that we think we’ve heard it all before. Maybe the other person needs advice with a problem, and it’s something we’re familiar with. Every conversation has a sample size of 1, because every person feels themselves unique, and maybe if we listen a little longer we may learn something new ourselves.
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| 51+ | This is a number I made up. 51+ represents the minimum level of responsibility you should take for your side of the conversation. When listening, don’t just passively take in the other’s words; meet them more than halfway and make sure you get their meaning. When talking, don’t assume that they got it just because you said it, make sure.
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Put your money on the guy in green
In part 1 of this series, we began with an easy challenge: develop your patience muscle less than a second at a time. If you found that hard, stop reading right now; you’re not ready for this yet. Go back and work on your split-second patience – this will still be here when you’re ready.
But if you found the split seconds easy to handle, you’re ready to step up to the next challenge: developing patience on the minutes time scale. You’ll need it during conversations, where the challenge remains the same: how to improve effectiveness by curbing your impatience for immediate results.
At the seconds time scale, your weaknesses may work against you: caring more about your own needs and wanting to dominate the conversation. At the minutes level, ironically, it’s your strengths you have to guard against. Being passionate about your idea, adding value, solving problems, and planning ahead for the conversation are certainly good things, but they can also try your patience.
Let’s take one common example. Doctors would certainly seem to be models of wanting to help people, but a 1984 study found that the average time they listened to patients before interrupting was 18 seconds, and in 2001 another study found that the average was down to 12 seconds. What are the consequences? According to Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think, by the time the doctor interrupts, he or she has already homed in on a diagnosis. About 80% of the time, the diagnosis is right, but the other 20% becomes less likely to be corrected either because the doctor has anchored on a diagnosis, or because the patient is unlikely to volunteer additional information.
In this example, the cost of misdiagnosis is clear and severe, but in daily persuasive communication the costs of impatience may be less clear yet still important. People may ignore good advice, customers may not buy the right product, and band-aids will get slapped over real problems.
The solution is not to abandon your strengths, but to recognize how they can make you impatient and then carefully guard against them.
- If you like to solve problems, keep in mind that problems are often better solved at deeper levels than they are first described. The other person may not fully describe their problem, or may even need to work it out for themselves in the actual conversation. When you hear about something you know you can solve, hold off solving and ask a few more questions.
- If you’re passionate about your idea, recognize that passion may be contagious, but it does require at least some incubation period in the other person. Don’t try to “close” them too fast.
- If you want your advice to be heard, you can deliver it right away, but if you want your advice to be acted on, you have to find a way to make it the other person’s idea. That requires the patience to ask the right questions and let them work it out for themselves.
- If you like to plan ahead for the conversation by preparing an agenda and list of questions, keep doing so, but allow for the conversation to take unexpected turns; use your prepared plan as a safety net, not a straitjacket.
If you can develop the habits of withholding judgment until you’ve heard the full story, of asking a few more questions before jumping to solution mode, and of keeping your attention on the process without looking ahead to results, the investment of patience at the minutes level will return you hours, days or months, in the form of more effective persuasion and more sustainable agreements. As the old saying goes, “you can speed up buying by slowing down selling”.
First the seconds, and then the minutes. The next section will address strategic patience at the level of days, weeks and months.
In this rushed and distracted time, prescription there seems to be more and more incentive to get results fast, solve problems, cut to the chase, and multi-task. We scan headlines, give continuous partial attention, consume sound bites, and then hurry on to the next shiny object, because we think it makes us more productive. In fact, most of you probably won’t finish reading this post – and you’re the ones who need it the most!
Is it possible that all this speeding up is just slowing us down? Or, medicine looking at it from the other side, can slowing down actually get us where we want to go faster?
That’s the idea behind the motto: Festina Lente, which means “make haste slowly”. In this series of articles, we’ll explore how old-fashioned patience can make us better communicators.
Patience is a personal quality; it’s a state of mind; it’s a habit, and – most importantly – it’s a skill that you can develop (over time). The good news about the skill of patience is that it’s scalable. You can get results in terms of improved learning, relationships, and persuasion from slowing down by less than a second, just as you can all the way up to the level of months or even years. I know you don’t have the patience to read through the entire scale, so we’ll start small in this article, and move up the time scale from there in other articles.
When Seconds Count
When someone else is speaking, do the spaces between their words sometimes seem interminably long? Do you begin formulating your response to the other person before they even finish their sentence? That’s because you can think much faster than they can speak. Although that sounds like an advantage, the problem is that after you begin thinking about your response, you are now listening to a different conversation, and you tune out of theirs; maybe you even interrupt. Either way, the price of impatience is missed information or making the other person feel slighted.
Cultivate the habit of listening fully and intently to the other person, focusing on the words and the non-verbals; try to extract every gram of meaning that you can. Don’t worry about not having enough time to compose a response, because the speed of your thinking will give you plenty of time to do so when it is your turn to speak.
Probably the most valuable split second in persuasive communication is the space between the other person finishing their sentence and you opening your mouth to speak, because that’s when you either react or choose to respond. Unlike Jeopardy, you don’t get points for speed of response. In fact, pausing even for less than a second can help you tremendously. It gives you time to formulate a more thoughtful response; if the conversation is difficult or emotional it gives you time choose your response; it makes you look more thoughtful. In addition, because so many people have what Tom Wolfe called information compulsion, they may have an overwhelming need to fill that small moment with additional information.
The third opportunity to use patience on the seconds time scale is during your presentations and speeches. Some of the most eloquent and powerful moments in speeches are the pauses. I’ve seen too many people deliver a major point – and then ruin the effect by rushing on to their next point before the audience has had a chance to take it in. Small pauses will seem long to you as the speaker, but they will appear natural to your listeners and make you come across as confident and in control.
If you want to work on developing patience, these small split-second intervals are a great place to start. Work on these ideas for the next couple of days, and then we’ll move up the scale to minutes, and after that, focus on strategic patience, or the days, weeks and months.
