Eric Barker

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

• Need willpower right now? Clench your fists, cross your arms, tense your muscles, and stand up straight. (Improving your posture can improve your self control.)

• Mental control is important too. A wandering mind is not a happy mind. Meditation can improve this. Just making too many decisions can leave you depleted and burned out. To reduce this, build good habits and automate behavior as much as possible.

• Want to eat less at a meal? Wear a tight shirt. Context is huge. Whether the friends eating with you are heavy, whether your waitress is heavy and how close food is to you all make a difference in how much you eat. On the other hand, going hungry will also reduce self-control because a lot of willpower is about sugar. Your mind plays all kinds of tricks on you when it comes to food. Skipping breakfast might lead to murder.

• All this willpower stuff feeling difficult? Lean back. Increasing willpower can be as easy as pretending you’re left-handed. Mere postponement can be the key to resisting temptation. Writing things down makes you more likely to do them.

• When we use bigger plates we almost inevitably eat more. When the color of the food contrasts with the color of the plate we almost always eat less. A mirror in the kitchen can help you eat less. The wider a variety of foods at a meal, the more we eat. Dining with friends makes you eat twice as much at restaurants.

• If you don’t want to eat that whole bag of chips or spend all that money, break the amount up into a number of smaller packages.

• Just a little bit of practice every day can increase your willpower. Saying “I’ll never do that again” makes you even more likely to do that again. Just monitoring your behavior can improve it. Penalizing yourself for bad behavior works. Think about the pride you’ll feel in conquering desire, not the shame that follows failure.

• Religion increases self-control but reduces ambition. Thinking about money can immediately increase self-control. Keep a reward in mind to resist temptation and stick to your goals.

• “Precommitment devices” are very powerful. So give a friend $500 and tell them to donate it to the Nazi party if you don’t follow through with your goals.

• Form “if-then” plans. Decide ahead of time how you will respond when willpower is taxed and you’ll be much more likely to default to that.

• We can lose control and overindulge when we think a good mood is fleeting or a bad mood will not go away. By focusing on why good feelings will last or why bad feelings will pass we can prevent poor decisions.

• “Consumers who respond to temptation with the words “I don’t” versus “I can’t” are more able to resist.” There are many good tricks to stop you from overspending while shopping.

• Know the secrets to achieving your goals, the things that really motivate us, and how to improve yourself. Know the three techniques the Army uses to instill mental toughness as well as the four methods the government used to increase Navy SEAL passing rates.

• Self-discipline is better than IQ at determining who will be successful. Exercising self-control in one area of life tends to improve all areas of life. Focus on greater self-compassion, not greater self-control to increase willpower. Friends that support you can be the key to radically changing your life. There are tricks to breaking bad habits forever.

• Don’t get cocky. Thinking you have great self-control leads to failure. Sometimes little temptations are harder to resist than bigger ones. (Email can be harder to resist than alcohol or cigarettes.)

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

• Studies have shown the traits that correlated most powerfully with CEO success as well as the most common failures of bad leaders. Avoid extremes of assertiveness or passivity. The best leaders are supportive, not controlling, even in the military. Find a balance between tough and nice. Your leadership style must adapt to the environment around you.

• Understand what things really motivate people. (No, not money.) What’s the #1 motivator? Progress. Definitely progress. Want your employees to perform better? It can be as easy as believing they are smarter than average and having high expectations. (Expecting people to be selfish can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.) Money and feedback work best as incentives when combined with acknowledgement of an employee’s accomplishments. You can give a quick boost to employee motvation by reminding people why their job is important. When all else fails, yes, nagging works.

• Teams are smart because of social skills, not IQ. The best predictor of team success in the workplace is how the team members feel about each other. The words your employees choose can tell you how they feel about the group. When it comes to team trust, it’s true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. (The reason most people leave their jobs is because of a lack of trust.) A historical narrative inspires team morale. Don’t be afraid to touch each other. Might want to learn some tricks to creating a place where people are kind to each other. A difficult initiation might not be a bad idea. Dave Packard (of Hewlett Packard) has some great tips on building a solid work environment.

• You have a vested interest in whether your employees are happy. Happy employees are more productive. (Happier employees bring companies better returns.) And your employees will be happier if you let them know their job has meaning. You can reduce employee stress by making clear what is expected of them.

• To be perceived as a leader, speak first and speak often. You can learn to be more charismatic. When you have to communicate bad news, monitor your body language. Face to face contact is important; communicating via email can turn you into a jerk. Saying “thank you” is vital. Don’t reprimand in public. You can learn a lot from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. You need to be positive for employees to be at their best.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

We know how most people spend their time. What can research tell us about the best way to spend our time?

• Maybe you’re a night owl. You don’t want to get out of bed. There’s a way to get out of that habit. And it’s important because your mood in the morning affects your entire day.

• Is it Monday? Don’t worry, it won’t be as bad as you think. (On the other hand, Fridays aren’t that great, either.)

• There are many reasons why a shower in the morning makes you feel so good and it might even make you more creative.

• Don’t skip breakfast, it can lead to murder. Then again maybe starving is better for your health. Have some coffee — here’s everything you need to know about it, including the best way to use it.

• Commuting makes everyone miserable. Try to avoid traffic or get a job closer to home, if possible.

• You’re at the office. Don’t procrastinate. Here’s a ritual to start the day off right. Do important things first if you want to hear “yes” from people. You can be a productivity dynamo with the right tips.

• During the day it might be good to know how to set goals, be a great leader, improve teamwork, give an awesome presentation, and deal with lousy meetings. And here‘s how to get through the work day without killing anyone. Need to do creative work? Do it at home.

• Have lunch or you’ll be cranky — even if you don’t realize it.

• Any way to sneak a nap in here? Naps increase learning, aid decision-making and purge negative emotions. Here’s how to make them amazing.

• (Is it the weekend? We know what activities best help you recover from the workweek and what makes the weekend fun. Most important, spend time with friends and family.)

• Do not just plop down in front of the TV. In the long term it will make you miserable. Wasting time on the internet might mean you’re not getting enough sleep.

• Between 6-8PM is the best time to hit the gym. (Your body temp is at its highest and this is the peak time for strength and flexibility.) I don’t need to tell you that exercise is good for you but it might get you a raise and you might be surprised to find out that looking at porn, action movies and superheroes beforehand might improve your workout.

• Now might be a good time to work on a hobby or build that skill you’ve been working on (gotta get to 10,000 hours somehow) Reading is great but it might be better if you did all your reading for the year in two weeks, actually.

• The best thing to do to increase happiness is spend time with friends and family. Having a better social life can be worth as much as an additional $131,232 a year in terms of life satisfaction.

• Between 10PM and 1AM is the best time for sex because skin sensitivity is at its highest.

• Didn’t get enough done today? Feel strapped for time? You might want to consider volunteering. Ironically, giving away time makes you feel like you have more of it.

• Exhausted? Oddly enough this might be a good time to get some creative work done. Or are you wide awake? Larks and night owls have different strengths and weaknesses.

• These tips might help you get to sleep. And you should make time for the proper amount of sleep — you can’t get away with less. No, you can’t. Missing an hour can take points off your IQ and make it harder to be happy.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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4 Lifehacks From Ancient Philosophers That Will Make You Happier

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

We all want success. And we’d like it fast. But we can only work so long and so hard. The more-more-more ethos only goes so far. What to do?

I decided to ask someone who knows about this stuff: Shane Snow.

Shane’s the bestselling author of Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success.

He did the research and looked at how people and companies achieve success quickly by trying new things, breaking the rules and taking shortcuts — or, as Shane calls them, smartcuts.

What’s a consistent theme throughout the book? Lateral thinking. The secret to succeeding faster isn’t working more, it’s working different.

Here’s Shane:

Lateral Thinking is the process of solving problems via different angles than you might expect. It doesn’t happen when you do more of the same thing. So just simply working harder may not accomplish a goal like rethinking the approach you’re taking. Lateral thinking is about getting in the mindset of breaking the rules that aren’t really rules; they’re just the way things have been conventionally done in the past.

The book is loaded with proven, counterintuitive strategies to help you get better faster. Shane and I talked about six of them.

Okay, you know the drill — let’s break them down.

1) Forget “Paying Your Dues”

If paying your dues was essential, there would be no child prodigies or Zuckerberg billionaires.

Looking at the research, Shane realized the best US Presidents had the least experience in politics. Here’s Shane:

The best presidents of the United States actually have less time in politics than the worst presidents of the United States. In all sorts of industries, what you see is that the fastest risers and the most successful are often not the ones with the most experience. What the patterns show is that people who tend to switch tracks, switch from different ladders or different careers, or even different jumps quickly, end up amassing more skills and more flexibility and more of this critical, lateral thinking that allows them to make breakthroughs and surpass their peers a lot faster than others.

And this lines up with the research of Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda: it’s the renegade outliers who make the big changes.

Often when people talk about the importance of paying dues, they’re afraid of failure or afraid of breaking rules.

Playing it safe can help you do “pretty good” — but it’s rarely the way to get to the very top or to get there fast.

(For more on what the most successful people have in common, click here.)

So you don’t have to suffer for years before you can take your shot. But you do need to learn. Where’s the best place to get help?

2) Find Your Yoda Outside The Office

The research Shane initially looked at said mentors don’t help you get ahead. And Shane reacted the same way I did…

Mr. Miyagi didn’t help? Morpheus didn’t help? Yoda was useless? HERESY.

So Shane dug deeper. Turns out formal mentorship didn’t work. That guy they assign to guide you at the office? Zero effect on your career.

But the mentors you seek out on your own? Boom. They take you to the next level in a big way. But what’s the difference between the two?

Mentors need to care about you.

Here’s Shane:

In great mentorship relationships the mentor doesn’t just care about the thing that you’re learning, they care about how your life goes. They are with you for the long haul. They are willing to say, “No,” and to tell you what you’re doing is wrong. Those kinds of relationships yield outsized results in terms of future salaries and happiness.

And caring goes both ways.

If you don’t feel a bond with your mentor and you don’t open up, you won’t get the most from them. You need to care about them too. Here’s Shane:

An organic mentorship is built around friendship and vulnerability. You need to be open about what you’re scared about and what you’re going through. Good mentors don’t just guide your practice, they guide your journey. This is the thing that you see in Star Wars and in the Karate Kid.

Forget the silly “mentor” that work or school assigned to you. Hitch a ride to the Dagobah system. Go “wax on, wax off” an old Japanese man’s cars.

Find a teacher who you care about and who cares about you and you’re not just on your way to a great career, you’re on your way to a primo life.

(For more on how to find the perfect mentor for you, click here.)

So informal mentors can really make a difference. How else can you keep improving? The answer might surprise you…

3) Watching Others Fail Helps You Succeed

Not making others fail, mind you. But seeing others screw up helps you learn.

It’s a shortcut to getting around a little known cognitive bias Shane discovered in his research.

When surgeons tried to learn a new procedure, which ones improved the most? The ones who saw others make mistakes.

Here’s Shane:

Surgeons who did successful surgeries tended to continue to improve, but surgeons that sucked at the surgery got even worse. And if you saw your buddy succeed at a surgery, it didn’t help you at all. But, paradoxically, if you saw your buddy fail at a surgery, you actually got better.

Huh? So unless you’re good from day one the only way to get better was to watch other people fail? Why?

Because your brain is trying to stop you from feeling bad about yourself. So it lies to you.

When you screw up, you make excuses. “Not my fault. Sun was in my eyes.” When you see someone else do well, you say, “Well, of course, I’d do it just like that.”

But when you see someone else bomb you say “Whoa, better not do that.” Here’s Shane:

If you are a heart surgeon and your patient dies on the operating table, you’re gonna say, “Oh, the patient was in bad shape. Oh, there wasn’t enough time. Oh, it was hard to see. The incision wasn’t very clean…” You blame your failures on things that are outside your control. But by watching a surgery you are less personally invested in you are able to be objective. “Oh, they did that wrong. Note to self. I shouldn’t do that.”

It’s one of the fundamental differences between the beginner and the expert mindset. Beginners need encouragement so they don’t quit.

But experts love negative feedback. That’s the secret to how you keep improving. Here’s Shane:

Experts have gotten to a place where they don’t take it personally and they can take the negative feedback as feedback on the activity rather than on them as a person. And that’s what you should do.

Turn failure into feedback and then turn feedback into actionable steps.

(For more on how to have an expert mindset, click here.)

Mentors, watching others fail… so you’re learning a lot. But what if you’re just too late?

4) Forget First Movers. Be A Fast Follower.

“I had that idea but they beat me to it.” Ever said that? Okay, you’re now officially a whiner. Because you were dead wrong.

You were actually in the better spot. Research shows the guy who starts second is more likely to win.

Via Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success:

…Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis of the University of Southern California, published a study in 1993 to see if historical evidence backed the claim that market pioneers were more likely to succeed. They researched what happened to 500 brands in 50 product categories, from toothpaste to video recorders to fax machines to chewing gum. Startlingly, the research showed that 47% of the first movers failed. Only about half the companies that started selling a product first remained the market leader five years later, and only 11 percent of first movers remained market leaders over the long term. By contrast, early leaders — companies that took control of a product’s market share after the first movers pioneered them — had only an 8 percent failure rate. Fifty-three percent of the time in the Golder and Teller study, an early leader became the market leader in a category.

When you’re first you have to waste a lot of time and energy figuring out best practices. When you’re second, you can just play “follow the leader.”

Dan Coyle said the two most important words when it comes to getting better are “reach” and “stare.”

• Reach: Keep trying to get better.
• Stare: Study and emulate those who are better than you.

You’re not too late. You’re right on time.

(For more on the attitude that produces success, click here.)

So timing isn’t as big a deal as you thought and you can learn from those who came before you. But what about when you need original ideas?

5) Want To Be More Creative? Add Constraints.

When you have limitations you can’t take the easy route. Constraints force you to think. And often, unless forced, we don’t think much at all.

When challenged, we have to be original.

Via Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success:

Constraints make the haiku one of the world’s most moving poetic forms. They give us boundaries that direct our focus and allow us to be more creative. This is, coincidentally, why tiny startup companies frequently come up with breakthrough ideas. They start with so few resources that they’re forced to come up with simplifying solutions.

One of the most insightful DVD commentaries I’ve ever heard was Robert Rodriguez discussing his movie, El Mariachi.

He made a 90 minute film with only 7000 dollars. Such an incomprehensibly small budget forced him to rethink every part of filmmaking.

He didn’t have a dolly so he attached the camera to a wheelchair.

The critics loved his editing but the only reason he cut the film like that was because his cheap recording equipment would lose sync during long shots.

You don’t need the freedom to be creative. You need the constraints.

(To learn the four principles that will take you to breakthrough creativity, click here.)

So creativity comes from limitations but your goals, well, they need to go in the total opposite direction…

6) “It’s Easier To Make Something 10 Times Better Than To Make Something 10% Better”

That line is from Astro Teller, head of Google X. Those are the guys who build driverless cars and other supercool stuff.

When you try to make something 10% better, your brain is burdened with all the baggage that came before. You have no room to maneuver.

When you say 10 times better, you have to reinvent the whole process. It makes you think big. You toss out the old rules and start fresh. Here’s Shane:

If you’re aiming for 10% improvement you are going to work within the conventional bounds of what normally happens in your product or industry. If you say that this has to be 10 times better, then it forces you to get down to the first principle of what is most essential. This is a way to force reinvention, which is really what innovation is.

And when you dream big, people want to join you. The media wants to talk about you. Venture capitalists want to throw money at you. Ambition is a force multiplier. Here’s Shane:

If you’re working on a business that has small potential, it’s going to be hard to recruit really great talent for it. But if your mission is to get humans to Mars it’s easier to attract the world’s greatest rocket scientists. So it’s rallying the support, and not just from employees and investors, which you need if you’re doing something big, but also from customers and from press and the universe that needs to conspire around you in order to make you successful.

And, perhaps most importantly, when you think 10x instead of 10%, you behave differently.

Research shows when you set bolder, more audacious goals you work harder than when you’re reasonable. Here’s Shane:

Subconsciously, we actually push ourselves harder when we’re going after bigger, loftier, harder goals. Research shows people who set higher goals end up outperforming their peers or themselves because they push themselves harder or because they force themselves to find more creative, alternative, unconventional solutions to problems.

So dream big. No, even bigger.

(For everything you need to know about setting and achieving your goals, click here.)

These are some great ideas. Let’s round them up and finish with the one thing you absolutely need to remember.

Sum Up

Here are Shane’s tools for achieving bigger, faster success:

1. Forget “Paying Your Dues”
2. Find Your Yoda Outside The Office
3. Watching Others Fail Helps You Succeed
4. Forget First Movers. Be A Fast Follower.
5. Want To Be More Creative? Add Constraints.
6. “It’s Easier To Make Something 10 Times Better Than To Make Something 10% Better”

That’s a lot to remember. So if you forget everything you just read, what’s the one thing you need to keep in mind? I asked Shane that and here’s what he said:

The mistake that all of us make is we don’t step back enough to ask, “Why are we doing things this way?” In fact, we should first be asking ourselves, “Why are we doing this in the first place?” But certainly ask, “Why are we doing it this way?” Often the answer is, “Because that’s the way people have always done it in the past” — and that’s a problem if you want to make more rapid progress or if you want to get off the plateau that you’re on.

So look around today at the things that are important and ask why you’re doing them that way.

Is there a better way? A way that’s quicker, more effective, and more fun?

More often than not, I’ll bet you there is.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 140,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

No, you won’t do better work by procrastinating. And you will not have more time next week. In fact, leaving things unfinished makes you stupid. Here’s what works:

• Make specific plans. Just setting a date and a time when you’re going to do something makes you more likely to follow through. Or write down the steps necessary to do the work.

• Use short, painless dashes of effort. Just have at it for five minutes and feel free to watch the clock. Chances are you’ll realize it’s not so bad.

• Rewarding yourself for doing things you don’t want to do can be a powerful motivator.

• Use “precommitment devices” to make sure you follow through. Stickk is a good one.

• Asking yourself whether you intend on doing something is a more powerful motivator than telling yourself you will do it.

• Understand the secrets to willpower, breaking bad habits, productivity, and achieving goals.

• Forgive yourself when you do procrastinate to prevent a vicious circle. Hey, even procrastination researchers have a sense of humor about it.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join 135K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

I’ve posted about getting people to like you, winning arguments and FBI methods for negotiation — but let’s take it to the next level.

There are ways to deal with people who are difficult but brass tacks here, folks: most of the people who cause you problems aren’t going anywhere.

You work with them, you live with them, heck, in many cases you love them, but the people closest to us can still cause a lot of problems.

How do we get them to behave better over the long haul?

I decided to call an expert. Dan Pink is the bestselling author of numerous great books about human behavior, including:

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

His latest project is a TV show that uses social science in fun ways to see how we can nudge people to do the right thing.

It’s called Crowd Control and it premieres November 24th on National Geographic at 9PM EST.

I wanted to see what Dan learned making the show and what we can use to get coworkers, spouses and children to behave better.

In this post you’re going to learn:

1. The one principle all behavior change hinges on.
2. Where guilt, shame and plane crashes fit into this.
3. Why the best way to get one person to change might involve 10 people.
4. Why your first instinct about how to change people is wrong.
5. The one technique that was so effective Dan now uses it to get his son to take out the trash.

Okay, change starts now. Let’s get to it.

First, Get Their Attention

Often we try to be subtle and then we’re shocked when people don’t do what we’d like — or even what’s best for them.

People need to see what they’re doing wrong and the effects those actions have. But for that to happen they need to really be listening.

For instance, we all know we should wear sunscreen. It’s good for you. But just like eating your vegetables, many of us don’t do it.

So Dan tried an experiment to get people’s attention and really show them why it was important.

Using high tech software he showed people what their face would look like years in the future if they didn’t use sunscreen.

When people saw their own faces aged, sun-damaged and wrinkled they were aghast. Some screamed.

Here’s a clip from the show.

Here’s Dan:

We had people who would come out of the booth after seeing that and immediately start applying sunscreen.

That got their attention.

We all spend 40% of the day on autopilot. Much of what we do every day is determined by habit and context, not by choice.

If change is going to happen we need to wake people up for a second so they see the problem.

(For more on how to work with difficult people, click here.)

Okay, attention is important. So should you just tell people what to do? Actually… that’s a really bad idea.

Telling People What To Do Doesn’t Work – But Showing Them Does

Setting an example is far more powerful than telling people what to do.

These days it seems like everyone is always busy on their phone. (You might be reading this on your phone right now.)

Often they’re not paying attention to anything around them. Dan thought it might be fun if phone zombies had their own lane. Here’s Dan:

So, with permission, we spray painted two lanes onto a large downtown sidewalk. One for people with cell phones. One for people without cell phones. Then we enlisted these five actors to be marshals of sorts. They wore these orange reflective vests and directed people. “Oh, cell phone lane is over here. Oh, you don’t have a cell phone? That’s your lane over here.”

You know what happened? People didn’t play along. In fact, they got angry. Nobody likes to be told what to do.

So Dan had his team take off the vests and just pretend to be pedestrians. Half of them took out their phones and walked in the phone lane.

The ones without phones walked in the other lane. And you know what happened?

Without a word, people complied. As crazy as a “phone lane” is, they joined right in without even thinking about it. Here’s Dan:

It’s all about social norms. The way to get people to change their behavior wasn’t to direct them like originally thought, but simply to get other people doing it. We all look around for cues about how to behave. The power of those social norms is remarkable. Social proof ended up being a really big factor. One of the big takeaways is that you can change individual behavior by targeting the group.

People wouldn’t take direction for the same reason people never take your advice: it’s a status issue.

If they do what you recommend, you’re “telling them what to do.” And, hey, you’re not the boss of me.

Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:

The source of the difficulty here lies in who comes up with the solution. Paul’s suggestion makes him look smarter, and Eric less smart. This impacts their relative status, which Eric is likely to fight against. The better Paul’s answer is, the more likely Eric might resist it. It’s bizarre… Paul’s giving out suggestions also threatens Eric’s autonomy: it’s no longer Eric’s choice to follow a specific path.

Research shows that autonomy makes us happier than money.

Leaders take note: the best way to get a bad employee to behave might be to ignore them and focus on having your good employees follow the rules.

Same is true for parents. If everyone in the house does it one way, that problem child might be more likely to fall in line.

(For more on how to win every argument, click here.)

Of course, getting a group of people to all comply can be tricky too. Is there a simpler method? Yes.

Make Them Feel Something

Engaging people emotionally can be far more effective at producing change (and easier) than trying to make them think.

People who aren’t disabled sometimes park in disabled spots. They know they shouldn’t, but they rationalize it away.

Big fines don’t stop them. But what happens when you put a face on the crime? What happens when you prime people for empathy?

Dan’s team changed the disabled parking signs so they had a photo of a person in a wheelchair on them looking right at you.

This did not reduce abuse of disabled spots –it totally eliminated it.

Cameras in the parking lot showed not a single person parked illegally while the new signs were up. What happened after the photos came down?

Here’s Dan:

Just two days after the signs came down somebody parked in a disabled spot… You can change how people act just by “putting a face on something.” In some cases, literally.

Getting people to feel something is powerful.

Research shows that guilting people works. Shame works. Even nagging works. (Sex studies show that when aroused, we’re different people.)

Lecturing people just bores them. Telling them what to do backfires. But if you make them feel what you’re feeling, you’ve got a shot. Here’s Dan:

We appeal to people’s empathy. It’s interesting and somewhat heartening that the way to change people’s behavior is to make our appeals more human and much less antiseptic and utilitarian.

(For more on how FBI hostage negotiators build empathy, click here.)

But some people are tough. What if none of this stuff works? There’s still something that can help.

When Nothing Else Works, Distract

Sometimes we can’t change people, but we can reduce problematic behavior by distracting them.

Dan and his team set out to stop jaywalkers. But that’s hard — jaywalking is so spontaneous.

Next to the button pedestrians hit to get the streetlight to change, Dan and his team set up a screen with a little video game.

You got to play a version of tug-of-war with the person on the other side of the street. This distracted people from the boring wait.

Not only did jaywalking decline, some people didn’t even cross the street because they wanted to keep playing the game. Here’s Dan:

What I loved about that one was not only did they not jaywalk, but they wanted to play again. We delayed them crossing the street and they stayed there. The research shows people actually experience time differently when they are occupied versus when they’re not occupied, or when they are distracted versus impatient.

Parents know that putting a movie on for the kids can keep them occupied. And that guy at work is less annoying when he has a deadline.

John Gottman, the relationship expert, has done research showing that 69% of a couple’s problems are perpetual.

Those issues aren’t getting resolved and fighting just makes everyone angry. Distraction can help.

Research shows distraction is great for reducing anger:

According to this theory, anger can be reduced indirectly by interfering with the feeling of anger rather than by dealing directly with the source of anger.

(To learn how you can use dog training methods — yes, dog training methods — to get people to change, click here.)

So distraction is a good weapon when nothing else works. But what strategy worked so well Dan now uses it all the time in his personal life?

Tell Them Why

Explaining to people why you need them to do something is incredibly simple — yet very effective.

Dan and his team wanted to get people to listen to the safety instructions flight attendants recite on airplanes.

So they had a whole group of people get into a test plane at a JetBlue facility. The plane never left the ground but it could simulate any part of a flight.

So after the flight attendant read the safety instructions they simulated a plane crash. Smoke, loud noises, the whole structure shook.

What happened? Here’s Dan:

The control group did terribly. They’d forgotten almost everything. The flight attendant said, “Many of these people would have died if this were a real emergency.”

So they rewrote the safety instructions explaining why each one of the things was important.

They gave explicit descriptions of the awful stuff that could happen to your body if you didn’t put your tray table up or wear your seatbelt. Here’s Dan:

“Please put your tray table up. If you don’t and you try to evacuate, it might puncture your abdomen and hurt your internal organs. Please put your bags underneath the seat in front of you. If you don’t, you risk falling, getting trampled and dying.”

With the new group they simulated the crash again. And this time everyone “lived.”

Research shows that making a request and explaining “why” has huge effects — even if the explanation is silly.

Via Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons:

At a Kinko’s, a customer asked to cut the long line for a copy machine, saying, “Can I jump the line because I need to make copies?” …Another used the phrase “Can I jump the line, please?” The result? Ninety-three percent versus 24 percent success, respectively.

Dan now uses this method to get his son to take out the trash:

I’ve got a 12-year-old son. Since we filmed that episode, I don’t say, “Saul, take out the garbage.” I’ll say, “Saul, take out the garbage, otherwise this area is gonna look really ugly.” Or, “Saul, please take out the garbage, otherwise it’s gonna start to smell.” That works half the time.

And as anyone who has dealt with a 12-year-old knows, 50% is very good.

(For more on how to deal with kids, click here.)

Okay, Dan’s given us a lot to work with. Let’s round it all up.

Sum Up

Five lessons from Dan’s experience on “Crowd Control”:

1. First, Get Their Attention
2. Telling People What To Do Doesn’t Work, Showing Them Does
3. Make Them Feel Something
4. When Nothing Else Works, Distract
5. Tell Them Why

One last experiment from the show: they wanted people to wipe down machines at the gym after they used them.

So the makeup team did up an actor so that he was just drenched in sweat and totally repulsive.

The machine he used was disgusting by the time he was done with it. When he went to leave without cleaning it, people were yelling at him.

And afterward, of course, nobody wanted to be a hypocrite, so they all cleaned their machines when they were done. Very effective.

So nudging others to behave better can be a good path to something we all too often neglect — correcting our own behavior.

As Mark Twain quipped, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

• Your Facebook profile probably reveals your true personality. It’s especially indicative of how extroverted and open to new experience you are but it can also tell people whether you have anxiety and even predict your job performance.

• I wouldn’t get too paranoid though; most people just judge you off the photo. Then again that photo can predict how happy you’ll be 3.5 years from now. (Just from status updates, Facebook knows how happy the entire US is every day of the year.)

• Your “relationship status” says a lot about how happy you probably are. What’s a really good sign? Men who listed their partnership status (“In a relationship with…”) and women whose profile picture displayed their partner both had happier relationships.

• Facebook knows the days and months when you’re most likely to start a new relationship. Hell, Facebook can predict with a 33% accuracy who you’ll be dating next week.

• Dunbar’s number says we can only sustain 100-230 friends. It holds up online too; despite how many “friends” you have you’re probably only active with about 100-200 of them consistently. Facebook promotes mainly weak, low-commitment friendships anyway. And the main reason for un-friending is because somebody posts too much uninteresting crap.

• Only about 1/5th of your Facebook friends influence your behavior. You don’t end up blindly liking what your Facebook friends like; in fact, you look to them to find out what not to like. And it’s definitely worth reconnecting with old friends on the site.

• On Facebook everyone shows the best and not the worst, leading to portraits of unattainable lives that can make us feel bad by comparison. Here are some great tips by experts for using Facebook to enhance your happiness. Overall, Facebook users get more emotional support than other people. Now there are definitely problems that have been caused by Facebook; for instance the site makes it quite difficult to be an undercover cop. :)

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 135,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

1) Eating slowly allows more time for the “full” feeling to kick in.

2) Eat off a small plate. Without realizing it, we often judge whether we’re done by visual cues like an empty plate.

3) Keep the serving dishes in the kitchen. Merely having to get up to get more makes us less likely to keep eating.

4) Sit next to the people who are skinny and who never eat much. We’re influenced by those around us, even if we think we’re not.

5) If you do blow it and gorge yourself there’s still an upside: overeating on Thanksgiving can make you less likely to spend so much money on Black Friday.

For more tips, check out Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. It’s by Brian Wansink, director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join 135K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Just try.

Put a small amount of conscious effort into trying to be a better friend, spouse, whatever.

That’s it.

Sounds ridiculous but research shows:

• Improving any relationship is as easy as actively showing interest in the other person or sharing with them.

• Pretending time with a romantic partner was a first date makes it more enjoyable for you and for your partner. Why? On first dates we make an effort to impress.

• Racists actually make a better first impression on minorities than non-racists do. Why? Because they have to try to not act racist and the effort makes them come off better than someone who doesn’t have to try.

• Worried that all this is fake and contrived? Relax. Putting your best face forward actually reveals your true self.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 135,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

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How To Make Your Life Better By Sending Five Simple Emails

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Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

• Practice in front of a large audience if possible.

• Rhetorical questions make your arguments more persuasive. Use a lot of imagery. You can create an instant feeling of familiarity with an audience by using the word “we.”

• There are a number of tips for being making a good first impression, being more persuasive and being more charismatic. Stand up straight to feel powerful and confident. We like people who are prideful. Guys, don’t be modest. Trying to seem smart makes you look stupid.

• Gesturing helps you communicate better. Palm down gestures indicate power. Palm up shows submission. Pointing at something might make you look smarter.

• Knowing your material isn’t everything. Presentation style is key. People prefer eloquence over honesty and confidence over expertise. Tone and body language are frequently far more important than what you actually say. When your message is counter-attitudinal fast talking is more persuasive. When preaching to the converted, slow speech is better.

• Looking good matters. We make up our mind about someone in about 100 milliseconds. We assume attractive people are more similar to us and similarity is good. Quickest way to make yourself more attractive? Smile. And dress appropriately – what you wear affects how you act.

• Expect that people will like you and they probably will. Feeling stressed? Ladies, drink coffee. Guys, don’t.

• “Obscenity at the beginning or end of the speech significantly increased the persuasiveness of the speech and the perceived intensity of the speaker. Obscenity had no effect on speaker credibility.”

• Take a second beforehand to imagine someone who is a great presenter. This alone can improve performance. Positive self-talk and positive mental imagery are potent preparation tools. You can learn a few things about top notch performance from the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers.

• Still nervous? Faking it until you make it works.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Join over 135,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

How To Make Your Life Better By Sending Five Simple Emails

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