The Jordan Harbinger Show - 522: Daniel Pink | To Sell Is Human

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Daniel Pink (@DanielPink) is the author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which uses social science, survey research, and stories to offer a fresh look at the art and science of sales. [Note: this is a rebroadcast from the vault.] What We Discuss with Daniel Pink: What’s the best way of dealing with an “off” day? Learn why sales and a sales skillset are a part of our lives — whether we like it or not. Understand the concepts of irritation versus agitation (and how to use both to motivate others). Attunement: what it is and how it can make you more persuasive. Tips for both introverts and extroverts to improve a social skillset and build better rapport. And so much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/522 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. One of the areas where technical salespeople go arrive is they always use their own specialized jargon rather than the customer's language. And there's a lot of evidence of mimicking people's language using their words is extraordinarily effective. The customer says, I want a roast beef sandwich with three pickles on the side and diet Pepsi. You would say, okay, you want a roast beef sandwich with three pickles on the side and a Diap Pepsi. Repeat their words back word for word. But when you look at the dependent variable of tips, the second group, the group that repeated

the order back word for word, earned 70%, 70% higher tips. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional former cult member, drug trafficker, or extreme athlete. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we've got episodes starter packs. Those are

collections of top episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to take a look at those or to help somebody else who's new at the show gets started with us. Of course I always appreciate that. Now today we're talking with my friend Dan Pink, author of multiple best-selling books, including To Sell is Human. This is one from the vault. You should listen to this show, because we're going to talk about why sales and a sales skill set are part of our lives, whether we're a salesman, whether we like it or not, the concept of irritation versus agitation, in other words, the carrot, the stick, and how to use both to

motivate others, a process called attunement in how it could make you more persuasive, and last but not least, tips for both introverts and extroverts to improve their social skill set and build better rapport. This is a great episode, lots in here. Enjoy this one with Daniel Pink. And by the way, if you're wondering how I managed to wrangle up all these amazing guests for the show, it's because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network, whether it's in the office, at home for leisure business, whatever it is that you want to do to develop business or personal relationships. Check out our course. It's free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you'll find it. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course.

contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Dan Pink. So, Dan, we started the show in an interesting way that you asked me how I was doing and I actually told you honestly, having a little bit of an off day, kind of weird, don't really know how to shake these things when it happens. What do you do when you have an off day, when you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? How do you handle that? You know, I have to say that happens to me quite a bit. and my strategy, such as it is, is not to indulge myself and just get to work. So rather than sit and think about it, rather than wonder why am I, oh, what's off today, what's going on?

Did I sleep the wrong way? Did I drink too much? What happened? I think the best solution is just to get to work. And I find there's something about, with many things, simply the momentum of getting to work that can cure a lot of ills. So just getting right back on your usual track? Yeah, it reminds me of this great line.

from Julius Irving, the Dr. Jay, the basketball, the Hall of Fame NBA and ABA player. And he said once to, he was interviewed by David Halberstam, the late great journalist. And Irving said, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, being a professional is doing what you love to do, even on the days you don't feel like doing it. And so that's where you're at with it. You're like, look, this is just about toughing it out. Dr. Jay has written my prescription for this ill. Yes, nice.

It sounds like, so you work through it and you just get as cool. quickly back onto your routine as possible from the sound like of it. And sometimes you don't get back on the routine. Sometimes you just have a crappy day. But to me, it's a matter of not indulging. And this is really important to me, Jordan, because as you and I are talking, you know, I'm working on a book right now. I'm writing a book. And that's just excruciating. And if I sat around complaining all the time about it, I would never get anything done. So I think that Seth Godin has written about this. Stephen Presfield has written about this. I think that what makes a professional is that he or she

shows up. And that's the blunt force method that I've used for myself. Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense that you have to get back to your routine as much as possible. And sometimes you're right. Yeah, being a professional, you just have to know how not to indulge. Today, though, I'll admit I indulged. I was like, I've got optional stuff. I'm going to just not do it. And I curled up in a ball and took a nap, which I never do, which makes me think like, uh-oh, am I getting sick? But that's interesting because when you indulge, you start going down this negative thought process, and I'm not saying you're going to make yourself sick with it, but it's really easy to have waking up on the wrong side of the bed snowball into, woe is me and having a terrible day when really you could just

kind of suck it up if you really focused on sucking it up, even for just 10, 15 minutes and got to work and got back in the groove. Yeah, and I have to say, you know, NAPS are not the worst thing in the world. In fact, believe it or not, just strangely enough, I've been doing a little bit of research on nap for something that I'm writing. And there's pretty good evidence that naps can be quite useful for you. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. I love a nap. I just, I'm not practiced with it, but maybe that's a skill for another day. It is. Yeah, you got to do it right. There's naps and there's naps. The problem, at least in my reading of the research that people have, that I've had myself, because I've never been a napper. I've hated naps. You've got to keep them pretty short.

You got to keep them pretty short. Once you go past, say, 25 minutes or so of napping, you're so deeply asleep. You just went back to bed at that point. Yeah, and so when you wake up, you're spending like, it doesn't save you any time and it doesn't refresh you as much because you're spending another 15, 20 minutes trying to get back to your baseline level of awakeness. That's interesting. I didn't know. So there's a penalty to taking too long of a nap. You have to be disciplined even while you're asleep, man. This is BS. No, no, no, no, no. This is smart. I wish we were, you know, doing a TV thing because I could draw a chart for you to show this. So by the length of naps and how long it takes to recover.

There's some actually, no joke. It happens to be in front of mind because I was just reading this research, but there's some pretty good evidence of that. And what I do, on the off chance, it's useful for your readers, as I've been experimenting with it myself, what I do is I set my phone alarm a countdown for 25 minutes, and then I lie down, and then I just get up when the 25-minute buzzer goes off. So if it takes me five or 10 minutes to fall asleep, that means I can nap for 15 or 20 minutes. And that's really the sweet spot in terms of giving you the refresh without giving you that

kind of alertness deficit that you sometimes have to crawl out of when you nap for too long. Good to know. And I think it's funny because I'm afraid to take naps and I think a lot of people do it wrong. But now we got a nap game plan. And that's a game plan I can get behind. Yes, indeed. We have our nap game plan. So we're all set. All your listeners now are going to click off and take a 25 minute nap. I know, right? Like don't do it during the show and don't do it while driving. Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is because I've heard a lot of good things about you through mutual friends. And usually when a book is talked about as positively as has been, especially to sell as human, there's a threshold at which I become suspicious of how good

it actually is. Because when books are relatively unknown, that could go either way. When they're talked about a little bit, I think, oh, there must be something to this. But when it's talked about a lot, it has the opposite effect on me just probably because we're around marketers and things like that a lot where I thought, okay, what's really happening here? Is this guy just a master marketer, or is this book that good? And not to blow sunshine where there isn't any, but I read DeCell as Human for the first time recently. I'm surprised I haven't read it before, probably just wanted to be the one guy who hadn't. I love it. And I don't like a lot of the stuff that I read, but I really, really liked the book because there's a lot of original stuff in here

that's not just make sure you're following up with your prospects every day. I mean, you know, the basics. You mentioned you're writing another book. I got to ask you. if it's so excruciating, how can you keep doing it? Yeah, that's a great question, Jordan. And I've actually wondered that myself, and I don't have a very good answer, but the answer that I'm giving myself is that it's what I do.

At some level, it's how I think about the world. If I talk to somebody and we start talking about a set of ideas, oh, you know what, that'd be an awesome book. In fact, the way to do it would be to be X, Y, and Z. And there are these moments, though, it's often very excruciating. There are these moments, at least,

in writing for me. They're rare. I don't know the percentage, call them 3% of the time, where you have moments of transcendence that are unlike anything I've ever experienced, where you come up with a thought that you had no idea that you had

and that it turns out to be pretty amazing, like you've learned something from yourself, or you come up with a way to phrase something that is so original. It's like, holy crap, did I just think of that? And so I think it's those 3% moments of transcendence, at least for me, carry me through the 97% moments of drudgery and pain. Yeah, so you think about the world in books, which is it's kind of a painful way to see things, right?

Because it's not just, you know, if you think about the world in pictures, you can get a camera, you can take a lot of shots and really mess with it. If you think about the world, even in oil pastels, you can create something brilliant in a few days or a few weeks. I'm not an artist. I have no idea how long that stuff takes. Watercolors, same deal, right? a day or so, or even a few hours. If you think about the world in books, man, you're in trouble.

Yeah, yeah. At some level, I'm a literary agent trapped in a writer's body. Yeah, right. I love coming up with ideas for books, figuring out how to, you know, craft a book that no one has written before. You know, there are a lot of things that I'm curious about and I'm like, oh, man, that would make a really good book. Like, I would totally read a book about that. And to some extent, the books that I write, one reason that I write them is that I want and read them. And that's certainly true for to sell as human. I've had a lot of experiences interviewing business people and spending time around companies and whatnot and talking to people who were in sales. And I found that

none of them were like the stereotype of what I had in my head, what many of us have in our head about salespeople. They were really smart, really sharp. And then I realized, you know, also that so much of what I do as a business owner, as a writer, as a father even, involves selling and persuading. And so, you know, I wanted to read a decent, good smart book about sales and persuasion, except for, you know, Chaldini's influence, which is a remarkable book, there aren't that many great books out there. So I decided at some level to write a book about sales for people who might never read a book about sales. Yeah, I think this is an important realization because we're looking at fewer and fewer, just to end the market in the world,

fewer OG salesmen who are glad-handed and kind of, you know, following up and putting you through the assumption closed or whatever the techniques are. There's fear and fewer tactical salesmen and peddlers. But people, even in business, we're moving more towards individual contractors or entrepreneurs or who have to manage people or solopreneurs or work alone. We're kind of all in sales whether we like it or not. And I think that's an important realization because a lot of people say, I don't want to be in sales. I hate selling. I hate the profession of selling. I'm not in sales. And what I'm kind of hearing from you and what I saw in the book and what I've noticed just through my observation since reading it is that you might say you hate sales, just like people

say they hate networking. But if you're ignoring it, you're either being willfully ignorant and oblivious to the secret game being played around you and thereby losing it, or you're just saying, I'm not a salesperson and just cutting yourself off at the knees. I have only one thing you can say to that analysis, amen. I'm with you. Yeah. I mean, you started to research the sales book, and like you said, you noticed it even as a father, and I assume you don't mean selling your children, but persuading them. Right, exactly. Well, man, I didn't think about that. That could have made things a lot easier. Yeah. Yes, it could have. Short term anyway. But there's a trend, as you mentioned, towards micro-entrepreneurship. Tell us what that is. Prove to us that sales is

everywhere, and so people don't just have to take my word for it. Well, I mean, it's embedded in your very question is you want me to sell you on the idea. Ah, tushay. Tushay, Dan Pink. Even the very act of what we're doing right now is that way, but there are other indicators of it. And some really, really interesting indicators in what people do for a living and the nature of work today. One of them which you mentioned before is this move toward people working as solopreneurs, as proprietors of very small businesses, as independent contractors, people in what's called polyemployment, that is they're doing more than one thing, people with side gigs. And so if you are working for yourself, you're in sales.

I've never gotten any pushback from somebody who was working for him or herself on this claim that they're not in sales. So if you're an itinerant graphic designer, you're selling your graphic design services all the time. You're not merely cranking out graphic designs. Part of what you do is selling. So you've got the rise of small entrepreneurs as one facet there. Another thing that's happening is, I think it's pretty interesting, is that even in

other kinds of jobs. There's much less segmentation within a firm. I wrote about a couple of companies, software companies. One of them is doing in the billions of revenue. And they don't have salespeople. Why is that? Because they consider everybody part of it. Like their engineers are their sales force in the way that they've structured the business. So that's another reason why so much of us are in sales. And then the other thing, if you look at the U.S. workforce, the biggest by far job growth in the U.S. workforce has been in two sectors, education and health care. And those are professions all about selling. Teachers are selling students on the idea of learning, of learning how to do a quadratic equation. Healthcare professionals, whether they're physical therapists selling, hey, you've got to do

this exercise or a physician saying, you've got to take this medicine. All those have this degree of sales without a cash register ringing embedded right in it. And so if you actually go to the guts of what people do every day. A remarkable portion of it is some form of selling. Sometimes you're selling a product or a service. Other times you're basically asking someone, hey, you give something up, I give something up, we'll make a deal and we'll both be better off, even though the cash register is not ringing, even though the sale is not denominated in dollars, but is denominated in effort or attention or commitment or zeal. And we're doing this inside and outside our businesses. I think it's important to know because I think people might be able to swallow the jagged pill of selling

because they decided to start their own business or because they're in a sales role temporarily until they can get themselves out of it or something like that. But I think it's important to realize the greater point of the book, which is that you're in sales no matter, you could be a stay-at-home dad or mom. You're in sales, period. Anytime you have to interact with anybody. Yes. And as you said, Jordan, at the beginning, a lot of us don't like that. A lot of kind of recoil at that. And we can talk about why that is. If you think about just anybody who's listening to your show

who's an individual contributor at a company, all right? You know, you are going to a meeting and you're pitching an idea. You're selling. Maybe one time you're going to ask for a raise. You're selling. You're trying to convince your boss, you know, that you should do this project

rather than that project. You're selling. You're trying to convince a colleague to come over on your team rather than another team. You're selling. I mean, over and over and over. And I think that it's really important to talk about.

about why people have this visceral response to selling. And I think it has to do with information. Most of what we've known about sales, of anything, has come from a world of information asymmetry, where the seller always has more information than the buyer. When the seller has more information than the buyer, the seller can rip you off. But from basically the very beginning of commerce,

the first time there was any kind of commerce among human beings, whether it's some guy selling a goat in exchange for shells, you know, the seller always had an information advantage. Almost everything we know about commerce from the history of human civilization has been a situation in which the seller had a lot more information than the buyer. This is why people think that selling is sleazy because they've been buyers in a world of information asymmetry. But what's happened in the last 10 years is that things have sort of flipped. Many, many markets are no longer information asymmetry but are more or less information parity. And that's a very, very different world. And

when buyers and sellers are evenly matched on information, the seller cannot take the low road. The seller will be found out. Forget about the moral side of it for a moment. It's a bad strategy. So this has changed the game because now if you're telling me something, I can look on my phone in the middle of the conversation with you and find out whether or not this is the lowest price we've ever offered. Exactly. Precisely. I mean, I'll give you an example for my own life. Okay. So to think about car sales, okay, this is quintessential American sales transaction. Okay, so I live in Washington, D.C. So not that long ago, my family and I bought a car, We're a one car family.

We have some of urban setting here. So we have one car. So about three years ago, we bought a car. Think about buying a car three years ago, or today, versus, say, 20 years ago. 20 years ago, if I went into a car dealer, that car dealer would know a lot more about cars, a lot more about that making model than I ever could, right? This is why we have the principle of buyer beware. Huge information advantage for, say, the Toyota dealer in Rockville, Maryland, who's selling

me car in 1996. Today, I go into that Prius dealer, Toyota dealer. I know what every dealer in Washington is charging for a Toyota Prius. We had a trade-in, and the guy offered, it was ridiculous. I said, so what would you give me for the trade-in? And he does this elaborate little dance where he goes in the back, I've got to check something, then he comes on and he writes the number on a piece of paper and kind of swirls it at me in this sort of grandiloquent way. And I'm like, what? And I get on my phone. No, this is the price of a trade-in for this particular car that I'm trading in. You know, show them to it on my phone. So we've gone from this world where buyers have not much information, not many choices, and no way to talk back to a war where they got lots of

information, lots of choices, and all kinds of ways to talk back. That's a fundamentally different world. Yeah, this is a great insight because we're looking at the tactics are now completely destroyed. This is like trench warfare versus after airplanes, right? This is just you can't come at us with that stuff anymore because we will just go right over you. That's a good analogy. I like that. I mean, that's exactly what it is. It's a more antiseptic way that I was about to say it. Yours is better is to say it's not a difference in degree. It's a difference in kind, all right? It's not like, oh, this is a different kind of trench warfare. No, it's a different kind of warfare, period. And it makes all the other tactics irrelevant and obsolete, right? You really, you can't come at us with

that stuff. Because, I mean, I can imagine him going, hold on, I have to ask my manager. And it's like, well, you go ahead, but I'm not going to sit out here in the suspense that you think you're creating, because if your manager says no, I'm literally going to show you the same screen, and I'm going to show him the same screen. And if you still say no, I'm just going to go anywhere else and show them the screen until I get what I want, because this is what it actually is. Right. I'm going to go to one of the other 18 dealers in the Washington metropolitan area that are selling a Toyota Prius for basically this price. And resent you for trying to pull the wool over my eyes and definitely never do business with you, even if you do offer me that price, because now you're jerking me around.

Jordan, I'll see you and raise you on that because in this particular sales transaction, I won't go into all the details. It's not that interesting, but we ended up having a point of sale which is a horrible, horrible experience. I mean, really bad. And I was so ticked off. I tweeted about it, you know, and I got a call the next day from the dealership, the head of the dealership, apologizing. You know, what can you do to make it right? Okay. It's not only like, Like if you mistreat somebody, they lose you as a customer with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and all these other kinds of networks. People can broadcast the unfair treatment.

And so mistreating me is not losing one customer. It's threatening to lose, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 or 30. Yeah. Now you're not just pushing your luck with one person. You're pushing your luck with that person and everybody that they influence, which had they Googled you, they definitely would have given you the price on your stupid phone. Right? Like it's not worth it. Give them the price. Give them the Prius. You know, it doesn't even matter who it is. Like anybody who comes in there and says,

hello, this is the price. I mean, come on. It's like, it's sort of archaic about why we're even haggling over something like this in the first place. When there's so much transparency for that kind of product, you know, it's not some kind of specialized B2B solution where someone is coming to a business and installing, say, a computer system and, a knowledge management system that has to be tailored and customized. It's a freaking Prius, all right? It has four wheels. It has some seats, a steering wheel.

It comes in a finite set of colors. Okay, this is kind of a commodity product here, guys. Yeah, even if you're not, quote, unquote, in sales, if ever your competitive advantage is, well, other people probably don't know any better. So that's a bad competitive advantage that is temporary at best and very tenuous, right? if you're selling things because people can't find out that there's a better price, if your services that you provide for your own employer,

or if you're a solopreneur, or if you work for another company, if you're competitive advantages, nobody knows there are better alternatives out there. You are in trouble. You're building on sand. You're in big trouble. Yeah.

You might have an okay today, but you're going to have a series of painful tomorrows. This should be something that is the canary in the coal mine where you just go, I've got to start working on my ability outside this because it's only a matter of time. It's literally only a matter of time because information over time is getting easier to access unless you work for somebody who's completely ignorant and isn't willing to do the work. And that's where you're stuck.

You know, information asymmetry, believe me, has not completely disappeared, but it's moved more quickly and more powerfully to something close to information parity than most people ever expected. And you also have just, I think, in general, this is not all positive in terms of our social lives and our moral lives and our political lives. But there's this greater and greater transparency in everything. And there's fewer places to hide, to hide to yourself, to hide information. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dan Pink. We'll be right back. Now back to Dan Pink on the Jordan Harbinger Show. What I really liked about this book was not just that it changes the way that we look at selling

and changes the way that we look at sales or whether or not sales. is for us, but you have some really interesting social dynamics concepts in here, whether you consider them that or not, such as irritation versus agitation. Can you speak to that? Because I like this. This seems to be very original, or at least something I haven't seen before. I'm glad that you mentioned that because it actually underscores one of your, the other things that you would say, which is that that's a concept, that irritation agitation in sales, that's a concept that doesn't come from a salesperson. It comes from a teacher who's talking about that.

And it ends up being extremely relevant for that. So this guy, Larry Ferlato says, he talks about irritation, okay, is challenging people to do something that they don't want to do. This would be my son, like, taking out the garbage, right? He really doesn't want to do it. Agitation, this guy, Larry says, is challenging people to do something that they actually want to do. I think that's an interesting way to put it. And it goes to a lot of different pieces of research and social science about why people do things and how you get people to do things.

I hate to use my son as an example again, but irritation is the only way to get him to take out the garbage. Okay. Got it. Come on. You got to take out the garbage. Okay. It's irritation, okay. Agitation, though, I can use agitation with suggesting that he go and practice whatever sport he's involved in in that particular season. In fact, today it was like, I said, okay, you haven't hit off a T. Once the last time you hit off a T, oh yeah, I got to do that. That's something that he wanted to do. And so if we think about like, here we are moving people to do different things.

And this guy, Larry Perlato, this teacher, it says, you know, we've got to think about most of what we want to do is agitate. And this is such an important concept in such a deep way. A few years ago, I wrote a book about the science of motivation. How do you motivate people? And one of the leaders in the field of human motivation, a guy. at the University of Rochester named Ed D.C. says, we have to get past this idea that motivation is something that one person does to another and recognize that motivation is something that people do

for themselves. And so what you want to try to do is change the context where people will do something because they want to do it rather than doing something because they're simply being forced to by you, they're being bribed by you, and they're simply complying with you. They will do that, but it's short term. In the long term, what you want to do is you want to agitate people, create the conditions in which they want to do things for themselves. So how do we create those conditions? What are some techniques or mindsets that we can use to help create those conditions? Well, there are a number of different things.

I mean, you know, in the book I talk about if we accept this idea that we're all in sales, no matter what we're doing, but sales isn't what it used to be because we're no longer in a world of information asymmetry. The next question is that is, okay, what do you do about it? And there I look for answers in this wide, rich array of social science. not in sales per se, but in economics, behavior, economics, cognitive science, linguistic, social psychology. One of the principles that comes out is this idea of attunement, which is can you get out of your own head and see things from someone else's point of view? And that ends up being,

if there's one skill that I would like everybody to start working on, it is getting out of their own heads and trying to get into someone else's heads. And so there are all kinds of ways that you can do that. For instance, there's a big difference, say, between persuading up and persuading down. So when you're persuading up, say, inside of a company, the most important thing you can do, according to the research, is not trying to attune yourself emotionally to the boss, but figuring out the boss's interests. What's in it for the boss? So part of it is when do you focus on interest and when you focus on emotions. And when you're persuading up, say inside of a company, you focus on interest. No question about it. For other kinds

of things, maybe peer to peer or with your family, you want to focus on emotions. One of the things that I tried to do in the book is explore some of these great precepts of sales and see whether there's any scientific weight underneath them. So let's take something like mimicry. There are many people who have been taught, oh, what you should do is you should mimic the other person's gestures. You should mimic the way that they're standing, okay? It sounds completely duplicitous, but there is a giant volume of research saying, you know what? That's actually effective. That is, when you stand the way someone else is standing, you actually do a better job of understanding where they're coming from.

When we're talking about sales, particularly of more complicated things, more technical things, one of the areas where technical salespeople go arrive is they always use their own specialized jargon rather than the customer's language. And there's a lot of evidence of mimicking people's language using their words is extraordinarily effective. There's one great study of waiters, some European country. I think it might have been Holland, where they had one set of waiters, take the order as usual from customers. They had another set of waiters.

Repeat the customers order back word for word. That is, they were trained. Mimic the customer. The customer says, I want a roast beef sandwich with three pickles on the side and diet Pepsi. You would say, okay, you want a roast beef sandwich with three pickles on the side and a diet of Pepsi. Repeat their words back word for word.

Was there any difference in these two sets of waiters and waitresses? Well, it turned out the orders were accurate most of the time. I mean, there wasn't any difference in the accuracy of the orders. But when you look at the dependent variable of tips, the second group, the group that repeated the order back word for word, earned 70, 70% higher tips. What I was trying to do here is say, you know, what works and what doesn't. If we're persuading all the time, we're doing it in a remade landscape, how can we follow some evidence-based rules about what to do? And so, just sorry, Jordan, to circle back to your original question. One of the most important things is how do you attune yourself to other people?

How do you stop, think, listen, ask good questions, say, where's this person coming from, and then say, do I focus on their interest? Do I focus on their emotions? Maybe I can get a better, deeper understanding if I repeat their words. There are also some very interesting dynamics regarding power that is feeling powerful to distort your perspective-taking abilities. And so, but again, at the heart of all of it is attunedment. Get out of your own head, see things from someone else's point of view. You know, it's funny you mention the roast beef sandwich thing. I literally, I never eat like this, but I was in the city yesterday, and I had a roast beef sandwich, two pickles, not three on the side, and a diet Pepsi. Get out, really. Very strange coincidence, yeah. Yeah. But I definitely understand the idea of getting out of your own head.

I mean, basically you're speculating on how other people might be perceiving you. You lose presence, you stop listening as effectively, and then you start overthinking weird stuff that you shouldn't be doing, like your nonverbal communication and things like that that should kind of be on autopilot, and you end up with a very awkward interaction, which not only does that break any rapport that you had, but it's impossible to build more of that nonverbal rapport if you're constantly working on kind of freaking out, essentially, about how you're being perceived by others. I love the concept of attumen. It sounds like something we normally call calibration as well, and you did mention something else interesting, that when we become powerful, we lose our ability

to chameleon a little bit. Can you tell us about that? That seems important because it seems like our ability to get us to a leadership position could then end up being exactly the thing that makes us a bad leader or a poor salesman, so to speak. Yeah, you're exactly right. And I think that as you say that, many people who are listening can think of somebody who fits that description very well. There's some really interesting research showing basically this. I'm oversimplifying a tab, but not too much, that there's an inverse relationship between feelings of power and perspective take. That is, the more powerful you feel, in general, the more your perspective taking abilities degrade. And it makes a lot of sense because if you're feeling powerful, there are all various kinds

of experimental manipulations to make people feel powerful that social psychologists have used to test this proposition. But if you're feeling powerful, you think, well, why should I take someone else's perspective? If they were as awesome as me, they would be the one in power. And feeling powerful is actually can be very, very helpful sometimes. It can give people greater confidence in job interviews, in doing things that they're uncertain about. And so feeling powerful isn't a bad thing inherently. But there is evidence that it degrades your perspective-taking abilities. And so this is, as you say, this is exactly where bosses go awry. If you look at why people leave jobs, they usually leave jobs because of a bad boss.

And I think the biggest flaw of many bad bosses is that they don't take their employees' perspective enough. They don't consider things from the employee's point of view. And so what you have to do as a leader persuader, persuader leader, is you have to think of your power as almost a dial. I think people do think a power as a dial, but they think it only goes up. They're actually sometimes where you want to dial down your feelings of power, and that will increase the acuity of your perspective taking, that is feeling less powerful can make you more

effective. It's a little bit of a paradox for a lot of people who associate this direct, linear relationship between power and effectiveness. But actually reducing your feelings of power can enhance your perspective-taking abilities, which in turn can make you a more effective leader. So how do we reduce our feelings of power? Because it would be pretty hard to do that if I'm the CEO. Okay, so let's say this would never happen in real life, but we can create this fantasy land for a podcast. So let's say I'm your boss, okay?

I'm your boss. We're in a company X and I'm your boss, and I want you to do something, and you think it's not a great idea. I mean, it's not illegal or immoral. It's not going to hurt anybody, but it's kind of a waste of time. Are you still going to do it?

I think so. I would have to just because it's my boss, you know, I would do it. Right, exactly. Okay, so even if you even look at the tone of your vote, Yeah, okay, I gotta have to, right? So I think that, oh, wow, okay, here I am being persuasive. All right. Now, let's say that, now, maybe there's a better way for me to do this.

So I could go into you as a typical boss. I say, Jordan, we need you to do this thing. And you might say, okay, you sure why? Come on, come on, just do it. We got to do it. Okay, that's typically how many bosses would do that. But what I can do to be more effective is this. If I tell you to do something and you resist,

this is not true in all cases, but in some cases, if I tell you you to do something and you resist, in that resistance is information I can use. Well, wait a second. He's resisting. If I continue to dial up my power and force him to comply, he's probably not going to do it in as great of a way. So what I could do instead is this.

I see you resist. I say, I'll tell you what we'll talk about this later this afternoon. I come back and before I go into that conversation, I basically, before I just think about things a little bit differently. I say, you know what, Jordan's really good. in order for me to accomplish my objectives as a boss, I need him not to go about this in this half-ass way, but I need him to really be all in on this.

Right, you need buy-in. Yeah, I really need him to like want to do this. Like, he really needs to do a good job on this because that's important to me. You know what? At some level, actually, you know, Jordan's really good. Maybe he needs us in this very tight labor market a lot less than we need him.

And so what I'm doing there is I'm kind of think about the power dial. I'm just clicking at two clicks to the left. even though I'm nominally powerful, I have a higher position on the org chart, you report to me, I make more money, I can fire you. Maybe in this particular situation, if I reassess it, I'm less powerful than I think. And so if I dial down my feelings of power in that moment, okay, I'm not like giving back my salary, I'm not resigning, I'm not saying, hey, you and I are going to be equals side by side forever. All I'm doing in that moment is saying, recalibrating my own, in an accurate way, my own notions of how powerful I am,

I can become more, remember inverse relationship, I dialed down my power. In general, I increase the sharpness of my perspective taking. And so I can say, hmm, why is he resisting? I can maybe ask you some questions about that. Maybe there's an obstacle in the way and I'm the boss, I can kick that obstacle out of the way. Maybe if I really break a sweat, I can say, hmm, what's in it for Jordan to do this thing differently or do this thing in a different way? And so it's small things like that, small kinds of recalibrations,

based on this and some really good evidence of this in social science can help us be a little bit more effective in those kinds of encounters. Yeah, this seems like a really tricky task because once you're at boss level, it's not that pleasant to go back and think, oh, I've got to take into account what everybody else, what their motivations are,

I'm in charge here. Why do I need to do that? It seems like it's frustrating. It's frustrating, I mean, but it's also the reality. I mean, you see this with CEOs, CEOs of publicly held companies. These are figures who we think can catch like bolts of lightning

in their hand. And even they will talk about how difficult it is to get people to do stuff, to get buy-in, to get people to move beyond compliance. People will comply. That's the thing. If you have a power differential, you will get compliance from people because of that power differential. But in business, in any realm of life, if you're a leader, if you're a boss, do you want compliant workers or do you want to engage people working for you? And the way you get engagement is not through coercion and control. It's through these other kinds of mechanisms.

Right, yeah. And sometimes it can be kind of tough to think, I've got to reinvest in persuasion and a quote-unquote sales skill set. I already got promoted. I don't need to do that anymore, but that's part of leading. I would argue, I don't have data to support this, but you make an interesting point. My hunch is that as one rises in the organization,

the percentage of work that involves persuasion and selling increases, that as you move from, say, an individual contributor probably doing something technical, and as you rise in the ranks, portion of your time and brain power spent on sales and persuasion will rise with it. I mean, if you think about a public company CEO, what does he or she actually do all day? Good question. They're not like, oh, writing code all day. What are they doing? They basically have, you look at somebody like Jeff Imel to GE. I mean, GE is essentially like a nation state, right, in its size and in its breadth. He's essentially a head of state.

He has, in some ways, a diplomatic role. If you know, diplomats persuade all the time. You know, he's going to talk to customers. He's going to talk to employees. He's going to talk to his board. I mean, his job, the job of a public company CEO, has got to be, you know, 90% persuasion. Sure.

Essentially internal sales, right? Selling down the chain. Multidirectional. Because, you know, you're going in front of customers to persuade them. You're going in front of investors to try to persuade them. You're going in front of your board

to try to persuade them. You're going in front of your employees to try to persuade them. You're going in front of your senior management team to try to persuade them. A CEO job isn't like me. It's like, oh, I got to come to my office and write for three hours by myself.

I mean, it's all persuasion all the time. One of the other elements that plugs into this skill set into the ability to chameleon is something you call social cartography, which I love that term. Can you tell us what you mean by that and how it works? Yeah, it's a way to attune oneself to groups. And this is, I like writing about work and studying work

because it's sort of like being an anthropologist in a way. And this is sort of anthropology for the workplace. You want to know, like, who's making decisions? You know, who do people care about? Who do people respect? So let's say you go into a meeting, okay? And you're maybe an outsider or you can be in the company as well or you're new to the company, whatever.

And what you can do is you basically, you know, put everybody's, you know, just do it kind of quietly, put everybody's initials kind of in a little map of where they're sitting. And then think about how often people talk and who do they talk to. So every time somebody talks, maybe draw a line. And if they talk to a particular person, draw a line with an arrow to that person. So, and then what you'll see if you do this in the course of a meeting is that you'll have this kind of what seems to be this jumble of lines. And you'll see who's talking a lot, who's not talking a lot, but also important. You'll see who are they talking to? And that can give you a very quick and dirty

map of the power dynamics of a particular individual. And when you get into like B2B sales, one of the keys is always who's the decision maker. And this is a really sort of a makeshift way to figure out who has influence in this organization, who has influence within this social group, and who might be the decision maker. Yeah, this is interesting. So to be clear here, you're talking about keeping track of who people are talking to because that person, not the person who's talking the most, but the person who's being talked to the most, has the most influence in that situation. Well, you want to see who's talking the most because that can give you some clues,

okay, but you want to compare it to who's being talked to. So if you have somebody who is doing a lot of talking, but no one is talking to him, that's probably someone with very little influence. Not always, but that's someone with very little influence. So what you want to do is you just want to get a map when we're in a meeting. It's sort of like playing a sport. Let's say you're playing basketball. And in the moment, in the heat of the moment, you're sort of aware of what's going on,

but you're not fully aware of what's going on until you end up watching the tape later on. And so this is a way of essentially, you know, poor man's version of a videotape, sort of recording what went on in that meeting, forgetting about the content of it, looking at the social dynamics. It's modeled after something that you see in sort of information sciences called social network theory, where you can actually do this in a very, very sophisticated way with, say, email. And so you can take a trove of email from an organization and look at the email patterns. Who's sending email? Where are they going? How's it being forwarded? And what you often find in social network analysis is there's certain people inside of organizations who are kind of nodes, you know, who are like really important in terms of getting information out, getting information disseminated, who become in some ways the go-to people inside of organizations. And that kind of map,

kind of cartographic view of things, can reveal who's influential. And one of the things that comes out in social network theory often is that when you map these, kinds of social relationships. Who's going to who for advice? Who's going to who for information? The people who are the nodes who everybody is going through are often not the top people in the organization. They are people who are, end up playing essential roles, but they don't have necessarily the formal title that signifies that they're an essential role. Oh, that's interesting. I love the fact that people are doing this with email. It makes perfect sense. The things that we teach in our live program involve, of course, doing this in live social situations in person, but it makes

sense that you can do that with actual hard data. Exactly. That's exactly right. So basically this technique of social cartography, which is similar to, I guess, what you guys do, is sort of kind of the lightweight, quick and dirty version of actually what ends up being a very sophisticated research technique. One thing I noticed that I thought was especially relieving, I think, for a lot of people, myself included, is that extroverts are not necessarily better at sales.

Extroverts, because I think a lot of folks think, well, look, I'm too introverted to be a salesperson, or I'm not one of those gregarious, outgoing people. So this is going to be harder for me. I'm not naturally talented at it. And you debunk this. Yeah, well, I mean, I debunk it because there's research out there, research done by a guy named Adam Grant, who looked at a really lovely piece of research

where he looked at very large sales force, measured the introversion, extroversion levels of the sales force. I mean, they're well-established instruments from measuring introversion and extroversion. So he measured the introversion, extraversion levels of this very large sales force. And they went out and sold, they were selling software,

B-to-Bs, they went out and sold software for a certain amount of time. And we saw how much each person sold. And it turned out that there's a great myth about strong extroverts. We think that big extroverts are great salespeople. That is completely not true. There's no evidence to support that. And grants research showed that. So the strong extroverts, not that good. The strong introverts, even a little worse. The people who were really good were the ambroverts, which is a term that a lot of people surprisingly don't know, even though it's been in the academic literature for nearly a hundred years. Well, we all like to think we're special, right? Well, part of it is, I mean, I think it's Myers-Briggs's fault because Myers-Briggs has told us

that we're either an introvert or extrovert. Ah, good point. When, in fact, the way that social scientists measure extroversion and introversion is not the way Myers-Briggs does it. They measure it on a, essentially on a continuum on a spectrum. And it turns out the people who are the best at selling are people who are ambiverts. That is, they're not fully extroverted. They're not totally introverted. They're kind of in the middle. It's sort of like, you know, if you go to that prefix ambi, you know, it's like ambidextrous. They can go left, they can go right. And those people are the best sellers because they know when to push and they know when to shut up. They know when to speak up. They know when to stop talking. They know when to assert. They know when to observe.

And so they're out there in this world of sales is this gigantic myth that, as you said, In order to be successful, you have to be strongly extroverted, gregarious, a backslapper. And truly, there is no evidence of that. Actually, strong extroverts are generally terrible salespeople. They talk too much and listen too little. They sometimes be too pushy. They sometimes are so concerned about how they're perceived. They lose track of what the basis of the conversation is about.

They often want to be well-like, which means it's harder for them to say no. So strong extroverts, there's no. evidence that they're good at sales. But it doesn't mean that you want like strongly introverted people because they're not very good either. What you want are people in the middle, ambroverts. Somewhat introverted, somewhat extroverted. And the truth is, is that when you take this broader view of introversion and extroversion, the view that science has had for years and years and years and years and years, a few of us are strong introverts, but not very many. A few of us are strong extroverts, but not very many. Most of us are kind of a little of both. Most of us are

Amberts. But what if I'm shy? Does that mean I'm an introvert and can't do this? Well, on this, shyness and introversion are different things. So you can be an introvert and not be shy and you can be shy and not be an introvert. If you're a super strong introvert, like if you're a very strong introvert, then you don't want to be in a role where you have to do a lot of selling and persuading. But we just talked about not being able to avoid that. Okay, so there's a scale that they often will use to measure introversion and extrovert. So think about a zero to seven scale. So let's say that you are a one on a zero to seven scale where zero is, you know, at the left side of it is super strong introvert on the right side is super strong extrovert. If you're like a one,

you probably don't want to be in a position where you have to sell. You're probably not going to be very good at it. So don't have kids. Yeah, or have quiet, have super, super quiet kids because these traits are somewhat fairly heritable, so you might end up having introverted kids. But the truth is that the distribution in the population of introversion and extroversion is very much a bell curve. So if you draw a bell curve over that one to seven scale, you're going to have very, very few people who are super strong introverts. So I'm a good example.

So on this scale, the zero to seven scale, all right, I tested about a two. I'm definitely more introverted than I am extroverted. But here's what I can do. I can go from, say, being a two on that seven point scale, to maybe being at best a three. All right, what can I do there? I can look at my extroverted friends and maybe try to do a little bit of what they're doing

every once in a while. You can't change yourself fundamentally, but you can go from being, say, a two to a two and a half or two to a three, and that's actually pretty good. Two and a half and threes are very good at sales because they end up being good listeners. So let's say that you're on the other side of it. Let's say that you're a six.

You're not a crazy seven, but you're a six. You actually want to become a little bit more introvert. So what can you do? You can actually start practicing listening a little bit better. You can actually wait until people finish their sentence before you start talking. You're never going to be a two like me if you're a six, but you can end up being, say, a 5.5, and that's very good. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dan Pink.

We'll be right back. Thanks so much for listening to this show. I hope you're getting a lot out of it. I certainly love making it for you. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us going. So to learn more and get links to all the discounts you hear in the ad, on this show, all those codes, all those URLs. We put them all in one place. You don't have to take notes while you drive or lift or run. Check out the amazing sponsors all in one place, all on one page.

Jordanharbinger.com slash deals is where that is. Please consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes. If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place. Links to worksheets are in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode with Dan Pink. According to Myers-Briggs, anyway, I'm an introvert, but most people seeing me speak on stage, seeing this show, for example, listening to the show, you wouldn't be able to guess it. But these skills, you just learn them manually. It doesn't matter whether or not you feel rested or ultra-comfortable all the time doing it. You just get used to it. It's maybe half of it. I'm loath to assign a percentage, but a lot of it is habits and skills, public speaking skills, etc. That can be learned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But also speaking in public has basically... basically nothing to do with introversion and extroversion. Yeah, that's good to know. Let's separate that.

Yeah, Susan Kane wrote about this in her book, Quiet. I mean, again, so all these things that we think involve introversion and extroversion that have nothing to do with what we really think it is. So, I mean, you mentioned shyness before. I'm actually more introverted than I am extroverted, all right? But I'm not shy. So people look at me, perhaps, if anybody, it looks at me, and say, well, this guy's not shy. This guy talks a lot, so it can't be introverted.

But I'm actually quite introverted. What are the markers of that degree of introversion? Well, number one is that I'm completely content and happy being by myself. Number two is that it's a really important measure of introversion the way the social psychology measure it is the degree of stimuli that I can take. So I can't multitask. I will often wear earplugs to drown out noise, whereas someone who's more extroverted will often, you know, likes being around ambient noise, likes to have a lot of people around him or her. So when we really look at this, though, I mean, I think the really big takeaway here, Jordan, is that this introversion, extroversion thing that we always talk about, it's not binary, all right? It's not black and white. It's gray. And the truth of the matter is that most of us are a little bit of both. And that's a good thing, because the people who are a little bit of both are more effective at sales and persuasion. So do you think, and do we have any data on whether or not it's easier for an extrovert to dial it back versus an introvert? to take social risk and move outside their comfort zone? Great question, I don't know. The fact of the matter is you can learn the skills.

Yeah, the one thing that I want to emphasize, though, is that these are not perfectly 100% fixed traits. It's not like height, you know, so that, you know, height is a very fixed trait. I could hang upside down from my knees, and I'm probably not going to get much taller. But these traits are, you know, they're heritable, in part. Heritability explains, I can remember what proportionate.

of it, but a significant, indecent portion of the variance from one individual to another. And so you can't take someone like me, we go back to our seven-point scale, okay, where, you know, one is really introverted and seven is really extroverted. I'm a two, you know, two-point-three, whatever. I don't care what you do to me, what kind of counter-programming, what kind of training you give to me. I'm never going to be a six. That's just not who I am. And that six is never going to be a two. But you can nudge people a little bit by moving the them, as you say, a little bit outside of their comfort zone. As someone who's fairly introverted, on airplanes, I often wear either earplugs or headphones all the time, partly because

to preserve what's left of my hearing, another one is just so people don't talk to me. But you look at extroverts. Extroverts do something that is really peculiar for those of us who are on the introverted side. They will sit down next to a complete stranger and start talking to them. I would honestly never do that. Really? Ever. I find that peculiar behavior. But that's what extroverts do. And you know what? It's not a bad idea sometimes. And so every once in a while, I will push myself out of my comfort zone to talk to the person next to me, one time out of 10. And you know what? It's actually good for me to do that every once in a while. Honestly, though, it breeds opportunity like crazy. And I'm sure you've found that. It's just that you would balance that with the level of comfort in doing so, right? I would imagine some beneficial relationships have come out of talking to strangers. The other thing, though, is I'm kind of a hyper-rational person, so I always look at it in terms of opportunity costs. So maybe there's a benefit that comes out of it, but if I spend an hour talking to this person sitting next to me, that's an hour I'm not spending writing.

It's an hour I'm not spending answering email. It's an hour I'm not spending more likely watching baseball highlights. Sure. Wait, wherever the value lies, right? Wherever the value lies, I got you. Yeah, yeah. One of the interesting parts of the book that I'd highlighted as well is that self-taughts, talk that is positive is good, but interrogative self-talk is better. And we obviously spend a lot of

time talking about self-talk because it's a hot topic. Most of us would not have any friends if we spoke to our friends the way that we speak to ourselves when we talk. That's true. That's true. So we're always trying to hone that, right? But tell us what the difference is between, you know, just positive self-talk and interrogative self-talk, which is superior. In certain circumstances, it can be better. And you got it exactly right. This is not a case. Evan does it doesn't say, positive self-talk is worthless. It's actually better than doing nothing. There's no question about it. So if I'm about to do an important encounter and I say to myself, Dan, you got this, you can do it. That's better than going in neutral. There's no question about it. But interrogative self-talk is

something that's a little bit different where instead of saying to yourself, you know, you can do this, you got this? You turn it into a question. You ask yourself, can you do this? And if so, how? And the reason it's effective is that questions operate differently. Questions by their very nature elicit an active response. So if I ask a question to someone else or even to myself, I kind of have to respond. So if I go in, say, I'm going to pitch an idea for something. And I say to myself before the meeting, Dan, you got this, you're awesome, you can do this. You know, I feel pretty good about that. You know, I like telling myself I'm awesome. I love hearing from myself that I'm awesome. But if I go in there and say, Dan, can you do this? I have to answer myself, you know? And so I say,

yeah, I can do this. You know, I'm prepared in this way. Yeah, I can do this. I got to make these three points, make sure I get them in. Yeah, I can do this. Last time I did something like this, I didn't listen well enough, so I got to make sure that I listen. Yeah, I can do this. You know, sometimes I talk too fast, so I got to maybe put a break on my rate of talking. And what am I doing in that case? I'm preparing. I'm rehearsing. And that ends up being, in many cases, more effective than the more sort of superficial muscularity of pumping yourself up. Yeah, it forces us to examine our motivations and our methods, right? Because we're actually making our brain answer these questions. Exactly. And the motivations are actually a pretty important

part of that because a lot of research shows that when interrogative self-talk can surface people's intrinsic, autonomous motivations for doing something. Can you give us an example of what this might look like in action? I mean, you don't have to use something you're really using with yourself, but I think it would help if we add an example for the framework. Sure. So let's say I'm going to go in and pitch an idea for a new book. And let's say, I mean, I love my publisher, but let's say I were to take it around to different publishers, an idea for whatever, then. a book in a few years. Okay, so I'm pitching an idea for a book. I can go in there and I can say, before I go into this meeting, I'm sitting in the lobby, I can say to myself, Dan, you got this,

you're awesome, you're an animal, you're going to tear it up. Let's go. Seriously, that's often better than doing nothing. That's not a bad idea. I want to make that really clear. Well, what if I did this? What if I said, Dan, can you do this? And if so, how? I have to answer the question. So I can say, Dan, can you do this? I've written books before. I know how this game works. I can picture what the room looks like. Can you do this? Yeah, I can do this? You know what? This is a really good idea, but it's a little complicated. So I got to make sure I just distill it these two key points and just keep coming back to these two key points. Yeah, can you do this? You know what? Other times I've pitched books before, there's one person over there.

Jane, Jane has hated every idea that's come out of my mouth in all years in publishing. She's just a complete naysayer. But in my back pocket, I have something that I can think I can move, Jane. Yeah, can you do this? You know what? I haven't done this for a while, and I know that sometimes when I do this, I end up basically sort of talking too much and being a little too crazed. So what I want to do here is I want to make sure that I really listen, really make sure that I stop and listen and maybe even wait for the idea to fully settle in before I immediately jump in, try not to interrupt people. So in this case, what I'm doing is I'm preparing, I'm rehearsing.

It's like you think about somebody, you think about athletes. I mean, there's evidence from athletes that great athletes don't do this kind of pumping up self-talk, or they do some of it, but they actually do this more kind of instructive. self-talk before a big encounter. Because they don't need to pump themselves up. They need to practice and rehearse. Interesting. So the higher level we are, the more likely we are to use this by training or maybe

by chance. What often separates experts, not experts, is the degree and depth of their practice and preparation. And self-talk is part of that. Speaking of positive self-talk, there's also something to be said for positive emotions, expanding our creativity and enhancing our effectiveness. is you also mentioned the concept of explanatory styles. Can we dissect this? I think this is a useful tool as well. Yeah, so this has to do with, you know, if you're in sales, you're going to get rejected. There's no

question about it. So one of the qualities that I talk about is a quality, I call buoyancy, which I got the concept from a guy who was in sales who said, every day I face an ocean of rejection. Okay, that's what sales is like. You're facing an ocean of rejection. So buoyancy is how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection. And one of the things that's important is how you respond to failure, how you respond to rejection. And Martin Seligman at Penn has some very longstanding research showing that one of the best predictors of sales success is how one explains failure. And what he talks about are the three P's, personal, pervasive and permanent, personal, pervasive, and permanent. And the goal is to say, we hate being rejected so much. We often take it very personally. So

We say, oh, it's all my fault. It always happens, and it's going to ruin everything. And so what this explanatory style does in the face of failure is in an accurate, substantive way, rebut some of those negative explanation. Is it really all your fault? Most failures are not entirely your fault. Does it always happen? In most cases, you know, it doesn't always happen. Is it permanent?

Is it going to ruin everything? Most things don't ruin everything. And so an explanatory style that looks for ways to make it in an accurate way, to make it less personal, less pervasive and less permanent, offers a very important muscle-building skill for dealing with rejection. How can we start to change our paradigm if we find that we're pessimistic?

Can we track positivity over time? I mean, how do we go, all right, I'm that guy, let's start a process to changing that? I actually think you just practice. And so I think you ask yourself this, you catch yourself in an entirely negative browbeating explanation, and you challenge yourself. You say, is it entirely personal?

is it entirely pervasive and is it permanent? And at some level, talk to yourself the way you might talk to a friend coming to you with this. So what if we find ourselves maybe not only being pessimistic, but catastrophizing regularly, really taking it to the extreme? I mean, you must see high performers that you train dealing with that all the time. Sometimes it works to get us to the top,

but then it drives us slowly crazy. I think there's a balance. I mean, I think one needs the negative critique in order to improve, but there's a way that things go from negative to, debilitating. The way I look at, and I use this technique myself, you know, the personal, pervasive and permanent. Well, the way I look at it is, like, what would I tell a friend who was coming to me with this? I wouldn't tell a friend, a good friend, oh, it's all right, everything's

great, it's not problem, da, da, da, da, da, I wouldn't tell them that. I would tell the friend, I would try to be as helpful and constructive as I can with the friend. And so the friend was coming to me beating him or herself up, saying, oh, it's all my fault. I would say, well, what happened? Well, that doesn't sound like it's entirely your fault. It's partly your fault, but it's not entirely your fault. You say it always happens. Well, remember two weeks ago, something actually good happens, so it doesn't always happen. It's going to ruin everything. Well, it's not because most things aren't permanent in that way. So you basically talk to yourself the way you might talk to a good friend. Yeah, so basically you can walk other people or yourself

through that structure. The answers will probably alleviate the concern, unless of course you're unable to even be realistic about that stuff. But maybe divorcing yourself emotionally from this stuff and doing this exercise after you've had your requisite panic attack or whatever kind of thing, before you take action in the other direction that might be permanent, you can walk yourself through the three P's and find out whether or not you're doing the right thing and you're not just stressing out over nothing. Because I made this change myself, which is why I'm so curious, and it took a long time to develop the habits. But once I was able to do that, it was a huge relief, right? And even now, Jen, my fiancé sometimes has to be like, do you think this will even matter next week?

And it's like, well, okay, no. Or in a year? No. Some of those, peas can really come in handy. There's actually some other science behind that particular thing. It's something that is called a focusing illusion. Basically, the focusing illusion is a cognitive bias. We think that whatever we're thinking about right now is actually less important than it is the moment we're thinking about it. So we tend to think whatever we're thinking about now is extraordinarily important when in the grand scheme of things is really not. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before we get into that, I wanted to give you a quick bite of the episode I did a while back with skating legend Tony Hawk. Tony virtually defined the entire sport of skating and was

innovating in the niche before anyone even gave it a second look. His marketing and business savvy and stories of some very close calls really made this a good one. I picked up skating at the tail end of its first boom in the 70s. That was the trend. And then when I discovered the possibilities and I literally saw people flying out of empty swimming pools, that was my wow moment. There was like a danger factor. There was this edgy factor. And I just devoted myself to it. I want to learn how to fly.

For guys who considered yourselves nerds and outcast, you were pretty tough. That is the defining moment if you want to do this seriously or continue to do it is the moment you get hurt. One of my worst injuries in the beginning was I got a concussion. I knocked my teeth out. I knew when I woke up in the pro shop of the skate park that I wanted to get back out there and do it. I can't believe people still recognize me. I can't believe that I get recognized for skating because I was. That was never something, there was a goal.

There was never something that was an option when I was younger. The most famous skaters, when I started skating, were only known to a very small group of skateboarders. They were in the skate magazines. They were definitely not on TV. They weren't considered sports stars. I still feel strange that I get recognized. You know, it's weird.

Skateboarding now, some people get into it to be rich or famous. When I got into it, neither one of those things was even possible. For more with Tony Hawk, including how he almost lost control of his brand entirely, check out episode 3-2-4 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Fantastic stuff from Daniel Pink, of course, that's what we expected. And, you know, it's interesting, the sales skill set part of life, whether you like it or not. Attunement, irritation, agitation. It's really interesting to me to see how both introverts and extroverts can sort of go

towards that middle ground in order to reap the benefits of those skill sets in kind of both directions. And I think a lot of us, we do suffer from these stereotypes that extroverted people are the only people that can do this or that they even have some sort of advantage. But it looks like really we're on equal footing. It's just a matter of how we use our skills to improve and leverage our strengths to do the same. Big thank you to Dan Pink. The book is titled To Sell Is Human. He's got a lot of great books.

Check those out. We'll link them in the show notes. Links always for everything, books and otherwise in the show notes. And please do use our website links if you buy the books. It does help support the show. Yes, they work in other countries. Yes, they work on Audible. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes.

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I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. I'd love to see you in there. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie O'Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in these

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