Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Influence is Your Superpower with Zoe Chance

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

In this episode, Sharon talks with Zoe Chance, author of Influence is Your Superpower and Yale professor (who teaches the most popular course at the university: Mastering Influence and Persuasion). Zoe argues that the goal of mastering the path of influence is personal development and becoming someone people want to say yes to. An effective influencer respects the freedom, autonomy, and humanity of others. The goal of influencing the behavior of others takes a more nuanced approach than simply giving people information; increasing awareness is not enough to change minds. Sharon and Zoe use the example of voting, and the ways in which we can have an effective influence on increasing voter turnout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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encountered an influencer or two in your life. Maybe you've seen them on Instagram selling you something with the code. Today, we're going to talk about not just influencer culture, but about how you have way more influence than you think on the people in your life. I'm chatting with author Zoe Chance. She works at Yale, and she's written a very interesting book called Influence Is Your Superpower. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm so excited to chat today. I'm joined by Zoe Chance. Thank you for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me, Sharon. It's great to meet you. I would love to have you give everybody who's listening just a short introduction about who you are and what kind of work you do. I am the author of Influence is Your Superpower, and this came out of the course that I teach at Yale School of Management, which is called Mastering Influence and Persuasion, and it's the most popular course here at our school. mastering influence and persuasion. And it's the most popular course here at our school because everyone wants to be an influencer. At least everyone wants to be more powerful and influential than they already are. Yes. And a lot of people feel definitely negative about influencer, but even have mixed feelings about the idea of influence strategies and influence

tactics. So that was another reason that I wrote this book for people who want to do good stuff with it. Yes. I love that. I love that perspective that influence is a tool and just like a hammer, it can build a house or break a window. You can use your influence for tremendously good things and you should, that's my perspective and you should. Absolutely. I'm a big believer in the Spider-Man doctrine that with great power comes great responsibility. I would love to hear how you began your work in this sphere. What about this interests you? And what about people at Yale make them want to take this class? What is so interesting to the rest of us? Starting from the first part of that, how did I get interested in doing this work?

I think I've always been obsessed with trying to understand how to relate to people because I really sucked at it when I was young. And even now I'm very much an introvert. I love people. There's no conflict between being an introvert and loving people. There's only a conflict between being self-conscious and making friends. I was really, really shy. And also as a kid, being really smart can be alienating, especially during the time when I was growing up, like Gen X days, but being smart and feeling awkward and different in this way where it was very much not cool. And I was not just smart, but such a nerd that I would stay inside from recess reading books with my best friend, Elizabeth. And we

both did so well in class that in fifth grade, our teacher just decided that we didn't need to do language arts anymore. And he would just let us go down to the basement of our school and write stories by ourselves with the cobwebs and the spiders. No supervision. No, I can't even imagine that. But I just wanted to learn stuff and I just wanted to explore this world of the mind, but then other kids are figuring out how to make friends, what makes people cool. And as I wanted to be making friends, I didn't know how, and I had this theory that my voice was the same frequency as the ambient sounds in the universe. And that's why people talked over me. And of course, I'm sure it was just that I was quiet,

but I embarked on this personal journey that started with theater and then went into sales and marketing, banking on the theater skills that I had learned to really relate to people. And then seeing, especially when I started having success in sales and marketing that, wow, when you relate to people, you have a lot of power to make things happen, to bring people together, to have them want

to say yes. And when I went to grad school and started understanding, studying decision-making, doing behavioral science research at MIT and then at Harvard, I built the research toolkit that I needed to be able to really understand the nuances in how understanding psychology and communication helps us move the needle when it comes to behavior change and influencing somebody's maybe changing their mind, but it's much, much harder actually than nudging someone or influencing their behavior. So when I came to Yale, I had done an MBA. I had worked in industry. I was a Barbie brand manager and I got to teach MBA students. So I wanted to teach whatever's the most helpful

thing that I know. So I invented this course, bringing together marketing and sales and theater and behavioral science behavioral economics psychology to say here's how to navigate the world and get and do and be and have and give more of everything that you want fascinating I love that this is like the the melding of a variety of disciplines because I mean, they're all, they all intersect, right? There is no like, well, it's totally marketing, but in order to understand marketing, you have to understand psychology and what, what gets somebody to a decision point, et cetera. Yes. That's so interesting. Social psychology is the fundamental discipline underlying all of this, but in the book that I wrote, which

is based on the class, but it goes far deeper into the science of all of this. And I bring in neuroscience and some work in public health and law and many different disciplines, economics, to just say, I'm going to take an agnostic approach to trying to understand and share whatever it takes to influence other people to collaborate and do great stuff together. What do you mean when you use the phrase influence is your superpower? What if we're like, listen, I work at Target. Okay. I check out people's universal thread jeans. I stay home with my children. I am a teacher. Oh my God. Children? Yeah. Teacher. Okay. So first of all, every, so you're a mom as well, right?

Yes. I have four children. Is it easy for you to influence your kids? As a small child, it's easier. The older they get, the more they resist it. So for most of us, and this includes loads of CEOs and dads who come through my classes for, I would say most of us who are parents, our kids are the hardest people to influence. So this is another big reason for writing this book. It's not for a specific group of people that are in some particular business or industry, and it's not specifically for work. It's how to influence people in our lives and especially how to influence people we care about, because that's the big gap in the literature on influence. Most of it deals with transactions in sales and marketing and negotiations where you're trying to get

something from somebody. These aren't the same kinds of strategies that we can use with people like our kids, our colleagues, bosses, employees, partners, our close friends and family. So this is a key to the strategies that I've chosen for the book is that they should feel comfortable on both sides. And the litmus test for me when I was writing this is I want to write a book on influence that you want to give, not just to the people who you want to empower to be more influential, but to the people who have power over you. So this is what determines if it's comfortable on both sides, you want to give it to the people you're trying to influence and

to the people who are trying to influence you. And so far, what I'm hearing is that it, at least for a lot of people that was working. So I'm very happy about that. Yeah. You don't want your personal relationships to feel transactional. Yeah. That feels very uncomfortable to the person, especially who is, you know, like to whom you're directing the tactics. When people feel like you're just using them as a means or an obstacle to their own desires, that feels really awful. right? And you might do the thing in the moment or say yes, if it's something that benefits you in your own cost benefit analysis, but this isn't a person that you're going to then be happy to do a favor for. To me, the goal of

mastering influence, and when I say mastering, I mean that as a path, not as a destination, but the goal is personal development and becoming someone that people want to say yes to. And that means that you're not treating them like an object and you are respecting their freedom and autonomy and their humanity. I think we can all imagine ways in which we would like to comfortably influence our friends and family to choose something that we think is for the greater good. And one of the areas that I personally think is very important is in getting people to vote. It seems like just making announcements is the tool that a lot of organizations, people use. It's providing awareness. And awareness that something is an option

is an important component of it. If you're not aware that it's an option, then you're not going to choose it. But I would love to hear from you. What are some strategies that say somebody wants to influence their friends and family to vote in a way that is comfortable? Can I share an example of how poor the goal of awareness is? Yes. And I'm absolutely sure that this applies to voting as well. But the biggest public health campaign, as far as I'm aware, still the biggest in the history of the world has been the five a day campaign. And the initial launch was between 1991 and 1995, where they spent $50 million a year, making people aware of the idea that you should eat five fruits or vegetables a day in order to help prevent cancer.

And in 1991, there were only 8% of people in the United States who knew that this was a good level of produce. And then 1995, they had quadrupled awareness to 32%. And this was touted as a massive success. And it was replicated in 30 countries around the world. However, they were only measuring awareness and they weren't measuring behavior. And when researchers later went back and looked at behavior, they found that in 1991, 11% of people were eating that amount of produce. And in 1995, 11% of people were eating that amount of produce. And in 1995, 11% of people were eating that amount of produce. And during the rest of that decade, the number declined. So the idea that awareness

is what we need is completely wrong. If what you're trying to affect is behavior change and it's good news and it's bad news. It's not that it's easy to shift behaviors, but it's often easier to shift behaviors. It's just that if that's what you want to do, changing minds or just relying on awareness is not nearly enough. The reason that awareness is not enough, like the only introspection that one has to do

is think about, say, if you've ever made a new year's resolution, there's at least a two thirds chance that you failed with it. And I failed on probably a hundred percent of my new year's resolutions. If you look at a long enough period of time. So we knew that we should do or wanted to do the thing. And then the motivation was there. So we had both awareness and motivation and we still didn't follow through. So this means there's this massive gap and researchers call it an attention behavior gap. This is a big thing for voting. What's going on in a lot of cases when get out the vote efforts, focus on, it's not just awareness,

awareness, but a lot of messaging and motivation and candidates who are yelling at each other and trying to get you to hate the other person and spending so many millions of dollars on television ads. The major massive body of research on get out the vote campaigns finds that the average impact of get out the vote campaign is zero. And there are many get out the vote campaigns that even have a negative return on investment overall. So first of all, if you just start by focusing on the behavior and say in the United States, where we have a two-party system, there's so much attention and so much money and time that gets focused on the swing voters, when voter turnout for both parties is quite low, if you look at other countries around the world. And even if you look at kind of similar democracies like Australia, in Australia, the voter turnout is 80%. And what is our voter turnout here? It's more like 60%. This last election, it was 60% roughly in 2020. And that was very high. It's normally more like 50% of eligible voters. Okay. And if you think about what are all of the

obstacles to voting on a systemic level, one of the biggest obstacles is that we have it freaking on a Tuesday and we don't get the day off. So one of the things that all of us who care about civic engagement and who care about democracy should be doing is supporting people who are lobbying for getting an election day holiday, or at least shifting it to the weekend. It's no coincidence that in Australia, voting election day happens on a Saturday. So how much of the 30% is accounted for that? A great deal. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeye's. A buttermilk battered chicken breast served on a brioche bun with barrel cured pickles. And here's the best part. It's topped

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Dairy Farmers of Canada's national quality assurance program with six modules. Modules like Milk Quality, that stands for high standards of milk production. Or food safety, producing milk that meets 42 requirements. And animal care, that means caring for every cow. ProAction sets standards of excellence. That's what's behind the Blue Cow logo. Dairy Farmers of Canada. At the national level, one of the big changes that we need is to help people have the day off. At a more intimate level, all of us can be lobbying the leaders of our organizations to give people the day off or at least to give people time off to go and vote on Election Day. off or at least to give people time off to go and vote on election day. And all of us who are leaders in any organization of any size, including that you employ a babysitter or a housekeeper, like anyone who's in your employ, if you can give them paid time off to go and vote in every election, this is a huge service that you can do

for democracy. There's a study. So helping people have the day off or paid time off for voting is major step number one. And then separately, major step number two, that's behavior focused intervention is helping people figure out how they're going to get there. And if we're talking about friends and family, maybe we help them get there. Right. So just the literal logistics of, OK, so you want to vote. Great. So we can ask them, are you voting? Do you plan to vote? you voting? Do you plan to vote? If they say that they're not planning to vote, the normal way that we think about influence and persuasion is that we try to persuade that person to vote. That is an uphill battle. I'm not saying that it's not important and that it doesn't matter, but the

low-hanging fruit is everyone who already intends to vote and who just doesn't end up voting because life gets in the way. So for each of us who cares about this, how can we focus our time and our efforts on those people and say, oh, you don't plan to vote? Okay, well, maybe I'll check in with you later and then check in with everybody who plans to vote and say, when and how are you going to do that? And when they share when and how they're going to do that, what they're doing technically is creating an implementation intention. It doesn't matter that anybody remembers the name of this research term. But implementation intentions are one of the most effective behavior change interventions that exist.

a major domain where this research has been done, but in other areas like health related, like exercise, diet, breast self-exams, recycling, you have an intention to do the thing and just making the plan and voicing it puts this plan into your subconscious and sets an alarm clock where if you say, I'm going to vote in the morning on the way to work, then you've set this little reminder. So when I get in the car that morning on the way to work, my subconscious mind goes, ding, time to go vote. I would also suggest setting a plan B contingency plan if you're doing this. And, you know, if I ask you when and how are you going to vote and you say maybe you're going to go vote on your lunch break. Right. So lunch break thing, time to go vote. But I'll also ask you, let's say that you're jamming on a really important project for work. What if that doesn't work out? What's plan B? So the cue that you created for yourself

and the ones that we talked about are the kinds of cues that people need to have this happen because they're behavioral cues. So when you start doing that thing, then your mind knows this is very different from just saying in the morning in the morning is not a trigger because there's no particular thing in the morning that makes your mind go ding or saying at 10 a.m. is not a very effective trigger for your subconscious mind. And if we're talking about friends, family, we can also ask, would you like me to remind you? Do you want me to send you a text? And when we have their permission, we text them, check in, hey, did you have a chance to vote? Text reminders are again,

one of the most effective behavior change interventions. So this includes for voting. This includes things like showing up for a court appearance. Another thing that I do and they do is phone banking and text banking. And there's so much of this going on and it's a little bit annoying sometimes to be getting lots of calls and lots of texts, but it really does help if you can be doing phone calls and texts to people you know who live in swing states, swing precincts, whoever you can do this for and with, it's great, but very specifically with people you know. it's so scary for people to do cold calling, actually have a cold calling challenge for my class. And we do fundraising

for the school, but especially now, the younger you are, the less phone calling you do period. And so just getting on the phone is a challenge. And so the more support we can give each other and do this stuff together, the more fun we can make civic engagement. And then the more we can spread civic engagement and definitely voting. Now I've shared like 29 things because I'm super passionate about the topic. Can I ask you though, Sharon, like, is there something that you do that I haven't covered that we can take inspiration from as well? I love all of your ideas. I endorse all of those. I would like to add a couple of things. One is

childcare is often a big obstacle. And there are a variety of ways that you could support somebody through the need for childcare. If you have one small child, that's usually manageable. Many times people can bring that small child to the poll, but let's say you have five kids under four. You're like, I'm not bringing all these children, like strapping them all in. The amount of labor that is required to just take your children to the polls is significant. I live in Minnesota where we have amazing civic engagement, 80% of eligible voters in Minnesota vote. We have the best voter turnout in the country and have for decades. And I do believe one of the ways we create that incredible voter turnout is a couple of different

things. One is we have an adequate number of precincts so that waiting time is very minimal. I never have to wait to vote. I literally pull into the parking lot, walk inside, give them the pertinent information. They hand me the thing and I walk over and vote and I'm literally done in under two minutes. So if there is some way that somebody could support somebody through their need for child care, that could look like a variety of different things. A childcare swap. I want your kids. If you watch mine, it could be like, listen, it's open house day at my house and you just drop your kids off. I'll watch them for an hour.

We'll have some goldfish crackers and watch some cartoons, you know, like make it as easy for yourself as possible, but swing by, I'll watch your kids. It'll be fun. And you go vote and come back again when you want to, because you have that relationship with that person, they would trust you to watch your children for an hour. And so if you just do that, not everybody can do that clearly, but if you have the capability to do something like that of just kids, open house, drop kids off and vote. That would not be necessary where I live. Do you know what I mean? Just because voting is so fast here, but if you live in an area where wait times are long, that might be an option.

My other thing that I think this is where we are going to need a greater amount of support for people who are wanting to vote is in early voting and voter registration. Like the logistics of how do I vote early? Where do I go? Because your normal precinct is not necessarily open. Where do I go? How do I obtain the forms if I want to vote absentee? You know, that whole frontier of voting that is currently opening up that is not pre-election day voting, that is still like an area of confusion for many people. The other thing that Minnesota does well is that we have same-day voter registration. And that dramatically increases voting participation because literally on voting day, I could be like, let's go vote. And you could make that choice if you wanted to. Whereas the intention setting that's required in other states is so much more

extensive. There's that long gap between you must be registered and voting day. In some states, it's three to four weeks. I'm not necessarily being very good at offering a strategy for how to combat that gap between voter registration deadlines and actual voting day. and actual voting day. But I think that's another area that is, we need to influence is your voter registration day or deadline is October 1st. And that is something that you might need to influence your friends and family about. This is one of the few domains where awareness really does matter. And you don't know that you can't vote if you just moved here. You don't know that. You have to be made aware.

Right. Overall, I think what you and I are saying is we're speaking to two of the most powerful forces of influence being, is it easy and is it enjoyable? forces of influence being, is it easy and is it enjoyable? And people overestimate the importance of making it enjoyable and they underestimate the importance of making it easy. So easy first and enjoyable second. But what's not in here that we haven't talked about yet are incentives. And many people think that incentives are the very most important thing when you're trying to influence somebody. And it's not that people don't respond to incentives or don't care about incentives, but they have a very short-term transactional kind of influence. So for people in your community and for your friends and your family and for people in your organizations,

your community organizations, wherever you work, figuring out what are the obstacles and how can I make it easier? And then how can I be lobbying for policies in organizations, in your community, precinct, state, nation to make it easier for people? And then after we take care of all of this, okay, how can I make it more enjoyable? I also love what you had to say, because I think this is very true is that we cannot influence everyone to do everything. That's not possible. And nor should that be our goal. I strongly believe I have this very non-scientific phrase called the cuspiest 10%. And it's exactly like the low hanging fruit that you're referring to, which is who are the 10% of the people

that are most open, most amenable, whose thought process is not yet formed in cement? Who are the 10% of the people that I can make a difference for? Because 10% of people in a democracy is a needle mover. 10% of people is exactly what we need. And in fact, most of the time it's much less than that. But if you can have a goal of influencing 10% of the people in your life, that is a worthwhile goal. Absolutely. Absolutely. I like the cuspiest 10%. And that's true of a lot of things, not just about voting. Right. Right. As an influence principle. This should just like, can't fix everybody. Can't influence everybody. I can influence this number and that's the number I need.

Yeah. And if we're talking about voting, not just focusing on the 10% who might or might not vote, but they're closest to voting. But focusing on the, if you call it cuspous 10% of your friends who could do the most for other people, like you and I are going to vote because we always vote, right? We don't need to influence each other to vote. However, you and me having this conversation where we both care about democracy and we care about influencing other people. And you have just influenced me to now share this idea about the kids open house. So it's preaching to the choir, but it's influencing

the organizers, the outspoken people, and those of us who, anybody who's trying to make a difference for other people, we need to connect with those people as well. Let's switch away from voting for just a minute and talk about, let's say you just want to influence your children to be better humans. Can you give us one strategy of a way that we could use our superpower to influence a friend or a family member or a child to be a force for good in the world? So first of all, when we're trying to influence someone to do something amorphous, like be a force for good, that's really hard. And, and it comes up a lot. Like it's not weird that you would say, how do you influence somebody to do this amorphous thing? Like a big thing is say, how do you influence maybe your kid to be a better student? Or how do you influence your partner to be more romantic or kinder or less crabby? What we first need to do

to be influential and make it easy for them and easy for us is focus on a specific behavior. So like, what would being a better human look like for a kid? Doing a chore without complaining or doing their homework or a chore or whatever they're being asked to do without being asked and reminded 28 times. So this last part is probably the hardest part. And I would say this for kids and for partners, both. When I talked about how text reminders are one of the other most effective interventions for behavior change, people really do need reminders. And over time, doing the same thing again and again and again

with the same behavioral cue can make it a habit. It needs to be consistent. And the research on habit change, contrary to what some people believe or have heard, doesn't say you do something for 30 days and then it becomes a habit. If you want somebody to do something without being reminded, the only hope for having that happen is that there's a consistent behavioral cue. So it's, say, you want your kids to put the dishes in the dishwasher every single night after dinner. It can't be that sometimes you want them to help. It has to be every single night after dinner.

And you have to be willing to remind them as many times as it takes for them to do the thing and make it a habit. And a lot of interpersonal strife and families come from us feeling like we don't want to have to do the reminding of our kids or our partners. And I just want to say to everybody who's listening to this, we just need to make peace with the idea that becoming influential requires asking and reminding really an infinite number of times. So we just have to take that on. Accept it. Accept that as our responsibility. Work on the habit building. So make peace with the asking, work on the habit building. And the best force for influencing somebody's behavior in a close relationship is a very old fundamental principle of psychology, but it's positive reinforcement.

But a lot of people haven't read about it, don't understand exactly how it works. And the key feature of positive reinforcement is that you reinforce baby steps. Like let's say it's the dishes into the dishwasher example. You don't get mad at the kid for taking their own dishes in and putting them in the dishwasher when what you wanted was them to bring everybody's dishes in while they're developing this habit. Positive reinforcement can look like, Hey, thanks. High five, smile. Like you got the dishes in. You're not constantly criticizing because if you're criticizing, you're actually punishing them. So criticism is punishment and it's perceived that

way. And it makes people not want to do the thing for which you were trying to make them do. Cause you criticize them. So building the habit, they brought their own dishes in or they opened the dishwasher. They did half of the dishes. So you give positive reinforcement. And the next time they're bringing the dishes in, it's not criticizing if they're bringing your own dishes in and be like, hey, thanks. You got everybody else's dishes too, right? And they're like, oh yeah, that's right. And it's just a reminder.

So positive reinforcement of baby steps, building a habit. And then the third layer of this, which is less important is what you brought up with the kids and the voting. Is there any way to make it fun? I'm bad at the habit building with this, but one of the things that we're good at is when we're cleaning the kitchen together, we pick a song and we're singing karaoke style while we're cleaning up the kitchen and Rasputin is our main song right now. And it's just more fun. So building the positive neural pathways, but I want to share with everybody one specific question that is my

very favorite influence. So you could use this in any relationship or you could use it with strangers. You can use it repeatedly. You can teach the people and then use this question with them. And it's super simple. And the question is just, what would it take? Anybody you have rapport with, you can ask this question and it shifts the context from something where they can be resistant to your persuasion to something where now we're just in collaborative problem solving mode. A work example at a company that I interned with as a MBA student was this is Guidant Medical Device Company. They had the good problem that they couldn't keep up with demand and they needed to ask people to come in three shifts a day, including over Thanksgiving and money that they will feel forced to do that. But you kind of feel like a slave. And then as soon as that money stops, there's no goodwill that you have for this company. It's not like, oh, I love my job now. No, the money is done. And you're going to go look for some other job that gives you that much money. So Ginger Graham, who's number two to the CEO at that time, asked the employees, Hey, what would it take for you to feel

good about coming in and putting an extra time? Of course, I'm going to pay you money, but tell me what would it take? And they told her, so we take the bus and the bus doesn't run at night. We need cab fare. She wouldn't have known that they told her we're hungry. We like pizza. Okay. Good to know. And they said, we're stressed about wrapping our Christmas presents. And if you could hire a Christmas present wrapper, that would really mean a lot. So she does all of these things. They do come in production hits record levels. Everybody gets, I think it was a 30% bonus and they are excited to stay working at this company and putting an effort after that. And this is the kind of company that thrives in a situation like we have now with the

great resignation or reset or whatever we're talking about, companies that have been respecting employees and figuring out whether they ask it directly or not, what does it take for them to be happy to come in? So in a context like the dishes example, the reason why my daughter and I have dance parties and karaoke parties right now when we're cleaning the kitchen is that I asked her, Hey, what would it take for you to feel good about bringing the dishes, loading the dishwasher? And she was like, Oh, well let's put music on. Like, Oh, okay, great.

And it's super simple, but I just hadn't thought of it myself. And kids also, even though they're wheeler dealer negotiators, and a lot of parents are like, oh, I don't want to ask what it would take because my kids are going to be so demanding. First of all, they are actually often less demanding than we would expect. And second of all, just because they told you that what it will take as you buy them a pony doesn't mean that you have to do that thing. The magic question is just the beginning of a longer conversation. And so you can decide you want your kid to clean their room and you ask, and they say an extra hour of screen time, or they want a piece of candy.

You get to decide, right? Is that fine? Or is that not fine? But if you decide that you give them that thing that they asked for, you will often find that it's not the slippery slope where they're asking and asking and asking and asking, but they're being reinforced to understand that you want to work with them and you are influenceable. So one of the principles of influence is that if you want to become influential, you need to be influenceable as well. I love that. I love that. The magic question of what would it take that can apply to like literally every single situation in your life? To get you to register to vote. Yeah. Maybe it's, maybe it's, I don't have a printer. Right. Guess what? A lot of millennials and Gen Z have zero's, I don't have a printer. Right. Guess what? A lot of millennials

and Gen Z have zero printers. I don't have a printer. And the printing situation is actually a significant obstacle for a lot of people. Maybe it's, I don't have a printer. What would it take to get you to register? Well, I need the forms. I don't have a printer. I'm not going to go to the UPS store, the library and like get an account and pay the money. Nope. Not doing that. What would it take to get you to vote on election day? Well, somebody to watch my kids. Yeah. What would it take to, you know, two hours in the afternoon off of work? Because it's going to take that long waiting in that line. What would it take to get you to vote? Well, maybe if you had like a box lunch made for me that I can eat while I'm standing there, you know, you don't know what it is until you ask the question and maybe what it is, is something that you can actually make happen.

Exactly. And maybe it's something that you don't even need to do anything about it, but just having asked the question and having them go through the implementation intention, I guess of like, I asked, I had a TA who was showing up late for my class and I was super pissed at him, but instead of criticizing him, I reminded myself what I teach. And I just asked, Hey, Steve, what would it take for you to come in on time every single day for the rest of the semester? And he's just talking to himself about his bicycle and his alarm clock. And he's like, okay. And I said, is there anything that you need for me? He says, no, consider it done. And he comes in on time for the rest of the semester.

And a key here was that I allowed him to save face. So what would it take is also a question that you can ask in lieu of criticism. So like, aren't you doing it? Why aren't you loading the dishwasher? Right. So we had this plan that you were going to do the dishes after dinner. And I am just wondering what will it take for that to happen? Right. That's so different from you're not loading the dishwasher. You're supposed to take out the trash. You weren't doing it. What would it take for you to take out the trash? And, and about the reminders, they might tell you an alternative reminder. Like I was talking to somebody who was trying to get his kid to wash out the sink after brushing his teeth. And he asks the kid, what would it take for you to remember

to do that so that I don't have to remind you? And the kid said, if we put my Hot Wheels car on the sink by my toothbrush, that's going to make me remember to wash out the sink. So like, okay, great. If that's what it takes. Awesome. That would not have been my choice, but if that's what it takes, then so be it. Yeah. I love that. Well, tell everybody more about where they can buy your book and all the things related to influence is your superpower. You can buy influence is your superpower almost anywhere that books are sold. But if your local bookstore is tiny, they might not have it. But kudos to you if you're buying books from your local bookstore. By the way, I've recorded the audio book. So if you've enjoyed this conversation between Sharon and me, and you like audio books, you can find it anywhere you get audio books.

The website that I have is zoechance.com, Z-O-E-C-H-A-N-C-E. And you can find information about the books. You can also find a newsletter where I share free influence tips, and I will be letting people know about the free massive online course that I'll be launching this summer. So I hope that you have found this helpful and I really, really hope you go out and vote and get other people to go out and vote. And I have plenty of other ways to help you be influential. And Sharon, I'm super grateful for this conversation and for you helping people get registered, get out to vote and really preserve our democracy. And with the current state of the world that we're in,

more of us are realizing how important that is and how important people like you are. So kudos. Thank you. And I also love that you're using, you're putting your money where your mouth is. You're donating a percentage of the profits of the book to a super worthwhile cause. Yeah. Yeah. I'm donating half my profits from the book to organizations fighting climate change and three 50.org is the one that I'm working with this year.

And there are grassroots network of climate activists trying to end our dependence on fossil fuels. So this is putting my money where my mouth is. And again, the Spider-Man doctrine, with great power comes great responsibility. So I try to be a good influence. I love that. Thank you so much, Zoe. Thank you, Sharon.

Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon

McMahon. I'll see you next time.