The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Be More Persuasive, Get What You Want, & Leave A Better Impact On Friends, Family, & Strangers With Vanessa Bohns, PhD

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Tips for unlocking your influence, having more effective arguments, asking for favors, & getting a bigger raise.  a mindset shift that will make you instantly more confident  why you have far more influence than you think  research that will help you feel more comfortable speaking up in meetings  genius tips for making political convos less contentious + more productive  how to make a far more persuasive argument the areas you’re likely OVERestimating your abilities and the areas you’re likely UNDERestimating them the number one way to get someone to say yes to you, according to science  how to send cold emails that are far more likely to get a response a trick to viewed as a more powerful, influential person  how to get better at saying no when you need to a genius mindset shift for asking for things (including more money)  and so much more!  For more from Vanessa, find her at vanessabohns.com, on social media at @profbohns, and check out her book You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by: AG1: visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Paleovalley: head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. Cozy Earth: visit cozyearth.com and use code HEALTHIER35 for up to 35% sitewide.  Seed: go to seed.com/daily-synbiotic and use code LIZMOODY for 30% off your first month. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning the secrets to entrepreneurial success, diving into the latest research on hormones, or uncovering the health effects of drinking alcohol. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. I am so excited to welcome Vanessa Bonds to the podcast.

Vanessa is a social psychologist, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and one of the world's leading experts on the science of influence. Her research and writing has been published in top academic journals in psychology, management and law, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the economist, NPR, and many, many more. Her book is called You Have More Influence Than You Think, and it's an absolutely fascinating read. I was like 20 pages in when I was like, we need to get this person. on the podcast. This episode is going to make you feel confident and powerful, which I am very

excited about because I love that journey for you. We get into a mindset shift that will make you instantly more confident, why you have far more influence than you think, research that will help you feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, genius tips for making political conversations less contentious and more productive, how to make a far more persuasive argument, the areas that you're likely overestimating your abilities in the areas that you're likely underestimating them. The number one way to get someone to say yes to you, according to science. How to send cold emails that are far more likely to get a response. A trick to be viewed as a more powerful influential person. How to get better at saying no when you need to. A genius mindset shift for

asking for things, including more money for anyone out there who might be looking for a little raise and so much more. We would both love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag me. I am at Liz Moody and Vanessa is at Prof, Bonds, B-O-H, and S on Instagram. There is so much fascinating research in this episode. So please share it with your besties and your parents and your colleagues. You're going to want to discuss it. But also, this is just powerful stuff. And I want this knowledge in the hands of all of the good people of the world. So please send a text, add it to your workplace Slack channel, email your aunt. She would love to hear from you. And I am so immensely grateful to every single person

spreading the word. Okay, now let's get right into it with Professor Vanessa Bonds. Vanessa, I am so excited to have you here today. I'm such a fan of your work. You take such a different approach to the science of influence. Thank you so much. There are so many people out there kind of doing the traditional approach to influence, where they're really just trying to get people to buy books and go on seminars to find ways to be more influential. So when I give talks, for example, I always look up where Dale Carnegie's book is, how to win friends and influence people on the Amazon charts. And, you know, this isn't to pick on that book. It's a great book. It helps lots of people. But it cracks me up because that book is from the 1930s. It's from the 1930s. It's from the

1930s? The 1930s. I thought it was maybe from the 70s or 80s. The idea that man wrote that book before like computers were existing is insane. I know. It's wild. It's almost 100 years old. And still, every time I give a talk, it is still in the top 100 books on Amazon, sometimes the top 50, more often than not the top 50. It just shows you people are hungry for that kind of message. Like, just tell me how to influence people. That's not really my approach. I'm a social psychologist, and in social psychology, so much of what we study is people's influence and impact on one another. And we see all the time in our research how much influence people have every day all the time, just by walking in a room, how you can change the way people are having conversations,

you can change the way people are behaving. So this kind of idea that's out there all over the place of like, here's how you get influence just has never really resonated with me. To me, it's like, we already have influence all the time. So why is it that people gravitate towards that message? So I really wanted to kind of put out an alternative perspective, which was that you already have influence. The problem is you just don't see it all the time. You're overlooking it. The message that I got from your book was that you need to be able to recognize and hone in on the influence that you already have. And then I would also say to wield it for good. Absolutely. I like that you added that because that is a big part of it. I don't try to use the Spider-Man quote. I avoided

it in my book at least with great power comes great responsibility. But it's true if we actually do have influence all the time. If we are constantly impacting other people, then we need to be aware of that and make sure we're having a positive influence. Can you share a few of those ways that we are exerting influence in our life that we might not be cognizant of right now? There's this really fascinating phenomenon that my colleague Erica Boothby has discovered called the invisibility cloak illusion. This is basically the tendency that we have to feel as we walk through the world kind of invisible. Like we're walking around in an invisibility cloak. And you can kind of picture yourself like sitting on the subway with headphones or like walking through the park with your sunglasses on.

And you feel like no one's really paying attention to you. you're certainly not having any impact. But what Erica finds is that, in fact, when you ask people, how much do you think other people are paying attention to you in these sort of everyday scenarios? And then you ask the people around you, how much they noticed you, like, for example, what you were wearing, how curious they were about you, that we tend to underestimate the extent to which people are noticing us and are curious about us. And that can have all sorts of impact that we don't even realize. Because when people are curious about us and when they notice the things we do, they start to think maybe I should do that thing too. I wonder why that person's doing that. Now I'm going to

start to simulate that decision. In a practical way, you could think of during COVID, looking around and seeing people with masks, right? That immediately gives you information about, okay, here's what the norms are here. Here's what the expectation is. Maybe I'm going to go ahead and follow that in this particular area or in this room or office, whatever it might be. But we forget that when we walk in there, we are also setting that norm. People are looking to us and taking information, from our behavior as well. Two thoughts on that slash questions. One, has that changed at all with the increasing prevalence of smartphones?

Because you use the subway example, and I'm like, are people looking up, looking around on the subway anymore? Are we looking at our screens? That's a great question. I think that the actual phenomenon of underestimating hasn't changed. We probably assume that people aren't looking even more because people are so much more distracted, and they probably are more distracted. In general, everything kind of moved to be less, but there's still this misperception. And then you say in the book that we shouldn't feel self-conscious

or embarrassed because of this phenomenon. And I think that's a really important point because I spend a lot of time in my work, for instance, saying like, oh, if you don't feel confident in the way that your body looks in a bikini at the beach, you should just go wear it anyway because nobody's looking at you, nobody's judging your body. How does that sit with the idea that people are actually paying more attention to you than we might think? This is a super important caveat to that finding, because often when I talk about the invisibility cloak illusion, people's first instinct is to think about all the things they're really self-conscious about. Like, oh, I knew everybody heard me make that stupid comment in that meeting or I knew everybody was looking at my body in the bikini,

whatever it is we're self-conscious about. But actually, it turns out that that is, not the case, that there is a complementary phenomenon called the spotlight effect. And this is our tendency to think that the spotlight is on whatever we're most self-conscious about. So if we're wearing something, a new outfit that we're really insecure about, we think everybody's noticing that. But in fact, that's not the case. And you might say, how can these two things both be true? And Erica Boothby actually reconciled them in one really neat experiment and brought people into the lab. And she either just had them wear their ordinary clothes, just going about your day, going to a lab experiment, not thinking that much about what you're

wearing. And she asked them how much they thought the people around them were noticing what they were wearing. And then in another condition that people were randomly assigned to, she gave people these embarrassing t-shirts to wear. And in that case, she asked those people as well, How much do you think the people around you in this experiment, notice what was on your t-shirt were paying attention to what you were wearing? What she found was that if people just came in their ordinary clothes, they had no reason to be self-conscious. They underestimated how much other people were noticing them.

They actually were being observed more than they realized. But the people who were wearing this embarrassing t-shirt, who felt really self-conscious, they overestimated how much other people were paying attention to them. They were like, oh, all eyes are on me. when in fact, people really couldn't care less about what they were wearing. How does that play out in your head when you're walking into rooms or on the subway or going to the beach or anything like that? How does that impact your behavior? I remind myself of these findings all the time.

In particular, I'd say that the moments that I feel most self-conscious or if I make a comment in a meeting and I'm like, oh, my God, that was so stupid. Everybody heard that. They're still thinking about it because I'm still thinking about it. And I always remind myself of these findings that I am so hyper-finding. focused on the thing that I'm self-conscious about that nobody else is focused on. Everybody else is focused on their own insecurities and what they're worried about. But at the same time, I also remind myself that being in that meeting, regardless of whatever comments I make, is still important because people are going to notice that I'm there. They may not obsess about some

comment that I'm obsessing about that I think was really stupid to say. But they are going to notice that Vanessa was at that meeting. And I bet she has this opinion on this thing. that affects how they're thinking about the discussion topics at the time. It makes me want to be present. It makes me aware of the things I'm doing around people. But it also is kind of reassuring. I don't need to beat myself up about things if I'm embarrassed by them. To the point of the comments and the meeting and things like that, I found the part of your book really fascinating where you talked about how the general gist of our messaging is so much more important than the specific words. And we tend to have this like nitpicky, you know, when we say things, we pick them apart and we try to be like,

oh, this word wasn't exactly right. And I didn't express myself perfectly. And at our worst, we don't express ourselves at all because we're worried about choosing the right words. Can you talk about that research for a second? This is something else that I find really reassuring in a similar context as I was describing. And as you said, this is the idea that we hear every little word we said, the times we misspeak, we hear when we use this word when we really meant this other word. Other people are not paying that much attention to the specific words we're saying. They're just getting the gist of what we say. That's partly because of a quirk of our memory that when you hear something, someone else says something or if you read something even,

you're processing it on two levels. On one level, you're processing the actual details. Like these are the words this person's using. On the other level, you're just processing the general theme. Like, okay, they argued in favor of that thing. So after, a couple minutes, you've already forgotten the exact way someone argued something. Like, our memories are just not that great. But you still remember that person was in support of this thing, and they gave some arguments in support of it. It really highlights the value of speaking up, even if you're worried that you're going to be inarticulate or you're a little nervous about saying things perfectly. But just getting out there that this is the side I'm on,

this is my perspective, is going to be just as impactful as if you've made this perfect. articulated point or argument. Is it an argument for making sure that your point actually is clear, though, quickly, too? Like, I feel like if people are having a hard time paying attention and following the train and they're just getting the gist, it could lead to them potentially getting wrong what your opinion is. Yeah, that's true. We've all had that experience of someone who's just kind of droning on and you're not

sure exactly what their point is in the end. So I'd say making your point clear. I'm in favor of this. One thing people will do in meetings that I actually find really helpful, people say, I'm leaning in this direction. I'm not exactly sure why, but here's where I currently stand. It's like, okay, so I have a sense of the room, and we can start from there, as opposed to this idea that everybody's being quiet. You have no idea. Maybe everyone is just like agreeing with whatever the last person said.

But maybe a bunch of people disagree, but they don't have a clearly articulated reason why yet. So just raising that sort of, I'm not sure I agree with you, but I don't know why yet. That can be really helpful for conversations. Do we do that because of the influences we're always exerting over each other? Do we just tend to agree with the thing the last person said, whether we're consciously aware of it or not? Yeah. When somebody put something out there, we have this idea from social media and from a lot of the political polarization that everyone's constantly arguing and disagreeing and people are really comfortable with conflict. But actually, in most cases, in our everyday lives, people are really uncomfortable with conflicts, and they really just want to be cooperative and agreeable. So if someone says something, we're inclined to sort of go along with that unless we have a good reason otherwise, a good reason to start a debate or like engage in this conflict that many of us are averse to. I think that 99.9% of the things that people say on social media, they would not be willing to say to a person in person, like, has a person. person who gets many comments in my job. And most of them are nice. Like I have a very wonderful community, but then you'll have posts go viral and it'll go to people outside of your community.

And you can tell immediately because the comments just become like, how are you human and saying these things? And I do think it's a fascinating phenomenon, the things that people say. It feels like shouting for attention. Like I actually wonder how it intersects with your work in some ways, because if people felt like they had more influence in their day-to-day lives, would they feel the need to do this call for attention online in the way that they are? That is one of the conclusions that I draw is that if we underestimate our influence, no one's listening to us and everyone is primed to argue against us, then some people will raise their voices even louder.

So they'll shout even louder. They use the all caps. They'll make their arguments super assertive and aggressive. And in fact, there's lots of research showing that that is not effective. If you actually want to make your point, making a softer argument, especially if someone's not quite ready to agree with you, the softer and more gentle, you can make that argument, the more effective you're likely to be. But if we underestimate our influence, we just come in like guns blazing when we want to make a

point. Let's dive into that for a second because I think a lot of us, find ourselves, especially in today's political and social climate, engaged in conversations with people that we often disagree with, whether it's our family or our friends, and those can be really tricky conversations. Can you give us some tips for making those conversations productive? There's the sort of everyday influence that we have where we say things and people are inclined to just agree with them because they're not very controversial. And then there's this unique case of I'm trying to debate something with someone who has completely opposite views to my own.

So it's kind of a different version of influence. But again, we tend to think that the way that we're going to make our point is by coming in really strongly with this argument that can't be dissected by the other person. I'm going to give you tons of facts. I'm going to make this really clear argument. And there's tons of research showing that just doesn't work, that people are not persuaded by facts and in fact they can bring their defenses up when they feel like you're really trying to actively influence them. There's a few different ways that people have talked about this. Adam Grant talks about something called motivational interviewing. Instead of telling the person why you think what you think, which might be different from what

they think, you ask them questions about what they think. You try to sort of get them to see the inconsistencies in their own logic. So you might say, so why do you believe that? How do you reconcile that with this? And a lot of times people will say, I think this, but they don't actually know how it would be implemented. Like, how would you actually implement that idea that you have? And the trick is coming across in an open, genuine way, not like, I got you. You couldn't answer that, done. But actually cultivating curiosity in this perspective, like, why do you think that? And then gently asking questions that start to get to changing minds, but only after you, like, truly understand the other person's point. Another suggestion that people make is to find and identify the higher level values that you share in common with somebody else. Because a lot of the time, we may have different perspectives on the implementation of something or a particular policy, but the general values of I care about making sure that everybody has access to health care. Maybe one person thinks it should be through your job and another person thinks it should be through the government. But there may be this higher order of value.

I think everyone should be allowed to go into a hospital and get the care that they need, for example. So kind of abstracting concepts to this point where you can both agree on X, but how can we like talk through the pros and cons of implementing that? What could we do to actually solve that problem? Do you think that for these types of conversations to be productive, you kind of need to approach it as a willing participant? like you need to be willing to be influenced as well? I do, actually. There's a lot of work in negotiations, and to some extent,

these kinds of debates are like negotiations, and it basically shows that reciprocity is a fundamental way to get other people to make concessions. If you expect the other person to just concede, concede, and you're never going to concede anything, that's just not going to work, right? A negotiation is going to break down, and the same thing is true if you're having a debate over politics.

there does need to be a certain back and forth, a willingness to say like, okay, that's a fair point instead of just disagreeing with everything everyone throws at you and actually being willing to sit with some discomfort. I don't feel comfortable with the possibility you might be right about that, but like I'm willing to consider it at least. Knowing everything you know, do you feel like we're in a bad place with our divisions as a country or do you feel like there's hope for us? I feel like there's hope, but I do think a lot of it comes from, in in-person interactions, that's where you actually get progress. And I do think that social media, it just the way the algorithms work and this preference for negativity and this tendency to sort of

circulate the most emotionally resonant articles and tweets, that is really problematic. We need to move away from this discourse that's primarily over social media and make sure that we're actually talking to people in person from other sides of the aisle. That was something else you said in your book that it feels almost obvious, but I think that in the moment we don't pay attention to it, which is that the stuff that is most widely shared and most widely circulated is usually emotionally resonant, not factual. It's being shared because it's hitting an emotional trigger, not because it's technically right. And I intuitively, I'm like, yes, yes, I get that. But I do look to those numbers and how many sites are reporting on it and whatever as validity pings in my brain. Absolutely. Emotion is really tied to action, so much more than just thought and cognition. But as soon as we feel like, oh, that makes me angry, you want to retweet it. You want to put it out there. You want to share it. You want to actually do something with whatever you just saw. So there's research showing that more emotional tweets, for example, spread much further. They also happen to be the tweets that are most likely to be misinformative, right? They also tend to be the fake news. And so the things that actually get you feeling in your belly. I got to share this. They're the things you want to double check over and over before you actually do share them because they spread wider than you're even spreading them, right? The next person spreads it and the next person spreads it. There's this invisible audience.

People we don't see, we put something out there and we see the few people who engage with it. We don't see all the many more people who just see it and maybe remember it later. And we don't see all the people who see the things that our friends and close connections have retweeted. So there's just tons more people seeing the things we put out there than we realize. The number one rule of habits is to make the things that you want easier and the things that you don't want harder. Yet so many of us want to eat healthier, but so few of us actually take the steps to make eating healthier easier. That's where Marley Spoon comes in. What I love about this company and what's different than all of the other companies out there that are doing like stuff in the same arena is that you can customize your choices based on the effort that you want to put in.

So if you want them to send you ingredients, so you can make your own 20-minute meal and, like, get into your chef energy, they'll send it to you to all be in perfect portions so you'll eliminate waste. Great, that's sorted. But they also have meals that you can just heat up. They have ready-made breakfast, which is always such a tough time of day to get a healthy meal in. They have grab-and-go snacks. Everything is made from farm-fresh produce with high-quality proteins, and you can select by dietary preferences, including Mediterranean diet, which is the top diet that doctors are. on this podcast recommend. Also things like gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sodium, anything that you need. The food is so good and it's so gourmet-fe feeling like you feel like you're at a nice restaurant.

We're talking like chicken Milanese with a crunchy cucumber arugula salad or everything bagel salmon with truffle chive potatoes. My favorite recent meal was the creamy lemon chicken tray bake. I had one of those moments where I looked at my plate and I was like, wait, I made this. And so quickly, like so easily. It's just so little effort for so much reward. Marley Spoon just makes eating well feel easy instead of stressful, and honestly, that is everything. This new year, fast track your way to eating well with Marley Spoon. Head to Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. That is right, up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon.

That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer in there. Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25. free meals. If you have headaches, allergies, brain fog, skin irritation, or you've been dealing with hormone issues, you are especially going to want to listen to this ad. Every single thing that I just listed has been linked to chemicals and household cleaners. One study found that regular use of cleaning sprays was associated with a lung function decline comparable to smoking 10 to 20 cigarettes per day. Synthetic fragrances are a well-documented migraine trigger and a number of studies have linked

ingredients in common household cleaners to fertility issues, thyroid dysfunction, mood changes, and more because of their impact on our endocrine systems. Luckily, you can just make one simple swap and you can eliminate all of those risk factors that you get from common household cleaners. Branch basics makes cleaning products that are plant and mineral based, completely fragrance-free, and made safe certified, meaning they are screened against thousands of known and suspected harmful chemicals. And best of all, you literally use one product, but you mix it with different amounts of water to make your kitchen spray, your bathroom cleaner, your laundry detergent, your produce wash, your glass cleaner, literally everything. It does not smell. It does not give me headaches.

It does not give me rashes or itchiness from clothes because you are. Remember, we're using this for laundry. We're using this for literally everything. And it works so well. Everything gets so clean. And I know that I'm protecting myself from all of those long-term issues. too. And I'm protecting my kittens who are much tinier than me. So anything they're exposed to has a much greater impact on their little tiny systems. And they're running around on their little paws and they're licking them. So I'm protecting them too. Brand basics is now available at Target.com, Amazon and branchbasics.com. So it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for

15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. Let's go back to some of the discussion around confidence because I thought a very interesting part of the book, which you talked about that in a lot of our areas of our life, we tend towards overconfidence and a lot of areas of our life we tend towards under confidence. Can you share a little bit about which applies to which areas? Yeah, for many years in my field of social psychology, people were just racking up these findings showing that people were overconfident. So, for example, people are overconfident in their driving. I'm not. So you're an exception, but the average driver

thinks they're a better driver than the average driver, right? So this is clearly a logical inconsistency. It's impossible. But on average, people think they're. above average. The same goes for things like morality. We think we're more ethical than other people, like we're better people than other people. We think that we're smarter than other people. So all these kinds of non-social mostly things, these sort of activities or skill-based assessments, we tend to think that we are above average. I teach a class of 300 students and every year I have the whole class say like, where do you fall in the percentiles between zero and 100 percent and all these different things. And year after year, they always are the average person in the class is above average

and all sorts of things like hygiene and athletic ability and attractiveness. But interestingly, more recently, a lot of researchers like Erica Boothby, like Tom Gilevich, like myself, have found that in the social domain, it turns out that we show a lot of signs of underconfidence. When it comes to assessing what other people think of us, we underestimate our. We underestimate ourselves. There's something called the liking gap, and that is this tendency when we interact with another person. So we have an interaction with a stranger at a party, for example, and we walk away from that interaction. We think that person liked us less than they actually did. So we think we come across as less likable, less interesting, and we think the person is thinking about us less

after the fact than they actually are. So both people walk away from an interaction, assuming the worst about what the other person thought of them. There's other work showing that we underestimate our sociability compared to other people. So in a paper that's titled something like Home Alone, there's this finding that shows that we think that while everybody else is out like partying and going to dinners and having these amazing social lives, that we're the only ones who are kind of alone at home on the couch flipping through Instagram and seeing what everybody else is doing. But in fact, that's not true either. So on ad, average, lots of people are actually sitting home flipping through Instagram, but we don't compare

ourselves to those people. We compare ourselves to the most social people we know, those people that we see who are posting everything while we're home alone. In a number of different domains, it seems that we have this underconfidence about what other people think of us. Why do you think that is? Why are we overestimating our hygiene and our driving? Is that because, because we think higher of ourselves or, like, worse of other people, and then why are we underestimating these other things? The sort of argument is that it's a different kind of cognitive process, a different reflection process. When we're trying to estimate how good we are at some skill, we think about ourselves and what we've done. If I'm thinking, like,

am I a good driver? I think of times that I was driving. And I have a very clear sense of what I did and I remember these times I navigated some difficult driving situation. I'm like, you know what, I'm pretty good. That's why I think I'm a bad driver because I think about the times I've driven and I'm like, oh, you're lucky that you're not dead. Yeah, but we're still kind of looking at our own behavior, right? And when we're trying to figure out what other people think of us, we can't just look back at our own experience. We have to guess. There's this huge black box about what other people think of us. So we're guessing what other people think of us. And in that case, we often have to fill in the blanks.

And when we do that, the things that are most salient are the negative things. We think of the stupid things we shouldn't have said. We think of how we should have asked more questions or we were talking too much or whatever our insecurity is to fill in that sort of blank. We reflect on times when we were particularly insecure. There's this negativity bias. We fill in those blanks with all of our worst fears. and we don't actually ever get insight into the objective reality of what that person actually thought of us.

So that's what researchers like Erica Boothby do is they actually ask that other person. They're a black box until we actually asked them. And then they're like, oh, no, I totally liked that person. They were great. I remember all these lovely, general gisty kinds of things about our interaction, whereas I'm here picking apart the individual, detailed sort of things that I feel like I did really wrong. I feel like your book could have also have been called you're paying attention to the wrong things. It's not as catchy. Since we're reflecting on our own behavior, if we talk shit about other people after we're

at a party or meeting new people, are we more likely to think that other people are going to like us less? Because we're like, oh, when I meet new people, I kind of pick them apart. Would it behoove us to try to actively look for like the good things in people and to like people after we meet them so that we can train our brains that that's what happens after that type of interaction. So we believe that that's what other people are doing about us. I mean, maybe. I actually think that our default isn't to do that. Like, our default is to see the good in the other person and to view that interaction in a positive way because it makes us feel good

to feel like we have positive social connections. We think of those times because they're unusual when like we really talk shit about another person. Maybe. Maybe. it makes sense to do it less because those negative times or those unusual instances really stick with us. And then we think that's what it's like out there when we network or when I talk to new people. When in fact, probably nine out of ten times you either just leave with a generally sort of positive impression, but nothing really remarkable to talk to someone about. And then that one time you have this long conversation with someone where you just tear that person apart. And that's the thing you remember and you forget that actually nine times out of ten,

and everyone leaves having had a really nice interaction. It's because it's unusual. It's like the plane crash phenomenon, which I'm terrified of flying and I'm working on that. But like when there's plane crash, it's on every newspaper cover or newspaper headline, all of that. And then when there's car crashes every single day, they're not. So we get this idea that plane crashes are far more common and far more scary than they actually are. When it's in fact because they're not common at all. And they're super rare.

Can you give us one tip to right size our confidence? Try to get out of your own head. One thing I talk about in the book is the fact that part of the problem is that we are just, you know, biologically constructed so that we are always looking out of our own two eyes and because of that we can't see ourselves. We just don't see what we're doing. So we're always guessing. We're always trying to see ourselves through other people's eyes. And so one suggestion that works for a lot of different things is to get out of your own head and do this mental simulation where you imagine looking at yourself from a third party perspective. So you can do this mental exercise where you're a fly on the wall or maybe you're a neutral third party observer and you're picturing yourself talking to other people.

And whatever the case might be, if it was you in a meeting, if it was you interacting and socializing in a networking event or a party, usually once you get out of your own head and you think of yourself from this neutral objective standpoint, you can see a lot clearer. It's not like I'm trapped in my own head with all my insecurities in this black box guessing what this person I'm facing is thinking of me. Another way that accomplishes kind of the same thing is to imagine if your friend was saying, oh, so-and-so hates me or I had such an awkward interaction, you would probably immediately be like, I'm sure it wasn't as bad as you think, and you would believe it. So being a friend to yourself in that way, it also is a way of sort of getting yourself out of your own head and taking this more objective

perspective that isn't just wrapped up in all the self-consciousness and worried that we feel when we're in our own bodies. Even just having the information changes it from the get-go, too. Like it would change the way I would approach an interaction initially, not just the way that I would reflect back on it later. Definitely. This really, this really, research has just been so reassuring to me whenever I'm doubting whether I should talk to someone or my inner critic is coming out and saying like, oh my God, you're such an idiot. Why did you, like, ask that question? I just remind myself that the research really shows that I am being harder on myself than anyone else is being on me, that people are probably leaving this interaction,

feeling just generally positive, that no one's paying as much of attention to these little negative details that I am so focused on. And just knowing that, there's something objective out there that's been done in research makes me feel so much better. Does that play into your notion of always complimenting people or giving strangers compliments? Yeah, this is related to this idea that we underestimate how much our words impact other people. We talked a little bit at the beginning about how just kind of existing in the world and our presence in the world, people notice it, they copy it. They think about us after they talk to us. And the things that we say to people actually resonate a lot more than we expect and then we realize. So any of us can probably reflect back

on something someone said that really changed our life or we always think about. It could be something someone said years ago and you're like, I remember this person said this thing and it could be bad or it could be good. But it really resonated and they probably don't even realize it. So if all of us have that in our heads, that means there are things that we say that similarly resonate in other people's heads and they're spinning around in their minds as well. So sort of extending that to just everyday interactions, what is one thing that makes people feel really good, but we may not actually realize how good it makes people feel? And that's compliments. In a series of studies, we actually brought people into the lab and we sent them out to give random people compliments.

And they had to guess before they did this how much they thought that the other person would appreciate this compliment and how flattered they would feel and how good they would feel about this interaction. And then they went out and they did it. And then we came up after and gave them a survey or our participants sometimes gave them a survey right after saying, how good did you feel after this interaction? Like how flattered do you feel? And what we found is that our participants underestimated how good these compliments would make people feel. We started with like simple compliments, really. Just tell them you like their shirt. It doesn't matter if you do or not. Just do it. And even that where it could feel really contrived and not genuine, it still made people feel good because at the end of the day, we just like having people say nice things about us. In later studies, we also told them find something you genuinely like about this other person and then compliment them on that. We found the same effects. The most interesting piece is that not only did they underestimate how good these compliments would make people feel, but they actually overestimated how.

how awkward and unpleasant this interaction would be for the other person. So people's inclination was to be like, I'm going to interrupt this person. They're going to be annoyed at me. I'm going to be bothering them. It's going to be so weird and awkward. But the other person is just like, you just gave me a compliment. Like, you just said something nice about me. Of course, it's not awkward or weird.

I'm not bothered by that. It's like a double reason to go ahead and compliment people. We hold ourselves back because we don't realize that it's going to feel that much better to the person than we realize. but also because we actually think that we're just going to annoy the person. Like, they've heard it before. I'm bothering them. And that's definitely not the case.

I take a real New York City subway approach to compliments, which is if you see something, say something always. Because I just feel like I've never disliked a compliment that I've received that I can think of. I did have, speaking of negative stuff sticking with you, a 10-year-old tell me once that my pores were big. And this was maybe 15 years ago. and I have not been able to stop thinking about that. So words do matter. And children are scary because they

haven't maybe been taught how much their words can matter yet. Can you explain a little bit about the concept of how our behaviors are contagious? That's something that I've talked a lot about. My last book was called Healthier Together and it was based around the notion that if we were trying to eat while doing it with a friend, a partner, a mom, a dad, etc. makes you way more fun, first of all. And then it also just makes you way more likely to stick to eating well. So I've really been interested in the idea of contagious behavior for a while, and I would love to hear some of the science behind it. Yeah, this is such an interesting concept. And it is this idea that when we are around people, we observe them to figure out what's normal,

what's normative? What am I supposed to do in this situation? Is my behavior aligning with the expectations because we all want to be liked and part of the group and part of the way of doing that is kind of doing what the group is doing. So we look to what other people are doing and then we copy that. But as I talked about earlier, we don't always realize that other people are doing that to us, that they're copying our behaviors. My colleague here at Cornell, Bob Frank, talks about this through this very vivid illustration of solar panels in neighborhoods. If you look at the aerial imagery of various neighborhoods, you'll see these solar panels that are in clusters, almost like little diseases that have spread. And his explanation is basically that people walk

around their neighborhood. They see their neighbor putting up a solar panel. They start to wonder like, oh, I wonder why someone so is doing that. You know, maybe they're doing it to save money. Maybe they're doing it because they want to reduce their carbon emissions. And they start simulating another person's decision and wondering about it. And once we start doing it, doing that, we're kind of halfway towards simulating the decision for ourselves. We start thinking about it and then all of a sudden we're putting up a solar panel and then someone else in the neighborhood sees us doing that and it just goes on and on. And so you wind up with these clusters of behavior. So you see clusters of friends quitting smoking at the same time as well.

So you also get it with these health behaviors too. I think it's such an important thing to be aware of because we can often beat ourselves up when we're trying to make a lifestyle change. Maybe we're trying to be more active. Maybe we're trying to pursue a career path, but we're surrounding ourselves with people who aren't doing that same behavior or are even doing the opposite behavior. I've seen a lot of people experience this when they are starting to cut back on drinking or they're interested in a more sober, curious lifestyle. And all of their friends are still going out to the bars and drinking every single night.

And I think it's such a hack that people don't talk about, which is like, yes, you can do all the habit changing things and all the things that make the behaviors easier for you. But a huge way to increase your chance of success is to surround yourself with people who are going to increase your ability to do the behavior and your likelihood to do the behavior. Definitely. There's the support angle. We're going to do it together and we're going to support each other and motivate each other. And then there's just like the simplest kind of cue. And this is where behavioral contagion comes in. Many years ago, I smoked. And I remember, I still had friends who smoked. When I quit, someone would get up and go outside. It's like, oh, that's a cue. And I always had to

fight that cue. So even if, you know, they're completely supportive of you, just being surrounded by people who are still initiating this thing that you're trying to avoid can just cue you. Oh, and each time you kind of have to override that initial impulse to like go do that thing. Whereas if they're queuing you in the other direction, I mean, I know what the opposite of smoking is, But if you're always hanging out with friends who are putting their phones away at dinner or who are picking restaurants that have a lot of vegetables or I have a friend whenever we go on vacation, she wakes up in the morning and does a workout. And I'm always like, oh, I should do a workout this morning. It just does make it so much easier. The phone is a great one too.

Someone pulls out their phone at a restaurant and then you just see everybody else pull out their phone too. It's like, oh, yeah, I could check my phone right now. It always makes me feel so boring. If I am out with a friend and they pull out their phone, I know it's habitual and I know that it's like a dopamine rush or whatever, but I'm like, I want to be your dopamine rush. Like I want to be interesting enough for you. Based on your research into how contagious behaviors are, that old adage that we are the amalgamation of the five people that we spend the most time with, would you say that's true? I don't know if we're just that, but they certainly have a big impact on us. The way that I always think about these things, though,

that yes, that might be true that these people we spend the most time with have this enormous impact on us. But I think we also forget that that means that we're impacting them as well. It's always a back and forth. Whatever we're doing is changing their behaviors, whatever we pick up for maybe one friend we spend time with and then start doing with another friend, that behavior can sort of transfer. So I think it's true, but I also think that we're very active participants in that as well and that it's a give and take. I'm going to shift gears a little bit. A lot of your research and your message is obviously about how much influence we have that we don't know we have. But you also do talk about some ways that we can up level our influence a little bit, that we can tweak it,

that we can massage it, that we can have a little bit more influence. So I would love to talk about that for a second. If we wanted to ask somebody a question in a way that made them more inclined to say yes, could you give us some tips for that? I have a lot of studies where I have people ask other people for things. And in general, we find that people are more likely to say yes than we think. And we've found this, you know, with people who have asked over 15,000 people for small favors and different kinds of requests at this point. So it's a really robust finding.

But there is a very critical boundary condition, which is that in all those studies, they're asking someone face to face. As soon as we have run these studies using email and even other kinds of mediated communication, we get the opposite effect. The number one recommendation I have if you want someone to say yes is to ask them in person. It makes such a difference. If you can't ask them in person, we have found that things like Zoom and FaceTime and video communication is better than email.

It's better than text because it's real time. You know, you can see the other person's expressions and their nonverbal communication. But even video communication does not be in person. There's just something different about being. face-to-face in the same space with somebody. So that's number one. The other one that we found, interestingly, both of these are counterintuitive to people. So when we ask people, will it matter essentially if you ask for something face-to-face versus email? People don't think it will because they think people do things because they weigh the cost and benefits and they decide

whether to help you out. So they're just going to think about it. So it doesn't matter how you ask, they're just going to decide what they want to do. But in fact, so much is about that interpersonal interaction and whether someone's right in front of you. And you can imagine like having a friend standing right in front of you asking for something. Like how do you get out of that? It's more awkward all around though because it's scarier for you to ask the question in person, but it's also scarier for them to say no. So you kind of have to get over that initial hump, whereas I know I'm a little conflict avoidant. So I'm more likely to send a text or an email because I'm afraid of that initial confrontation. We convince ourselves too that it's actually better. Like if I

write it over email, I can lay out my reasoning so clearly, right? But actually, it's that in-person communication is so much better. But you're right, it's awkward. So you have to kind of get over that hump. The other piece that also is surprisingly counterintuitive to people is to ask directly in like this straightforward way. So not assertively. You know, we talked early about like you don't want to be overly assertive, but you do need to actually ask. So when we ask our participants, would it be just as effective asking in a way that's like, hey, you know, I have. could really use some help with this versus, will you help me with this? Our participants, again, they think that it doesn't really matter, that people will do things because they want to do them.

And if they want to help you, it doesn't matter if you hint at it or if you come out and ask. But actually, it makes a huge difference in our studies. So actually saying, can you please give me this? Will you help me with this? That is much more effective than these kinds of beating around the bush. like I'm looking for someone to help with this. You know, I could really use this thing right now. It just doesn't work in the same way. I find the former even kind of annoys me. Sometimes I'm like, I know you have a request for me.

Like just say what your request is. Yeah, totally. It's similar to the awkwardness we feel that leads us to use email. We feel awkward coming out and asking for something directly. And so we use this like beating around the bush kind of language. And maybe we convince ourselves that that is more. effective and more polite or something. But as you said, it often annoys people and it's just so much more effective to just be straightforward. Is there any difference between those findings for people

that you know already versus strangers? So interestingly, we find there are differences, obviously, between strangers and friends, but they're not as big as we think in our heads. When we have our participants make requests of either friends or strangers. We find that for small little favors, both strangers and friends are actually quite likely to do things for you more than you expect. So people are generally inclined to be helpful. They don't like to let people down. They like to look and feel like good people. And it doesn't matter if it's a friend or just a random stranger on the street asking you for something. But in our heads, it's going to be dramatically different. So we think that, you know, our friends are much more likely than strangers to agree

to do things for us. But that turns out not to be true. But we do find that, you know, when you're emailing a friend, it's not as big of a difference as when you're emailing a stranger. And you can imagine, like, if you're emailing someone you don't have a relationship with, they don't know that other person on the other side of the email. There's not the same amount of trust. It's just not the same rapport. And so email works better for friends than for strangers. But there still is a difference between asking face-to-face and over-email or asking directly for beating around the bush. So it's not as big of a difference, but it's still there. I very rarely get genuinely excited about skincare, but this is one of the most innovative products that I have come across in years,

and I'm so obsessed with it. I've been telling all of my friends to get it, so now I need to tell you guys. Here's some science first. Your skin isn't just getting older. It's being actively broken down by something called senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped functioning, but refused to die. They sit there, releasing inflammatory signals, breaking down your collagen, degrading your skin barrier, and accelerating every visible sign of aging. Scientists call them zombie cells, and as they accumulate, they are one of the primary drivers of how old your skin looks and feels. The team at one skin, a group of female longevity researchers and PhDs, spent five years testing over 900 peptides to figure out how to help reduce the accumulation of senescent cells. And they

finally landed on it. OSO-1, the first peptide scientifically studied to reduce skin's biological age at the molecular level. OSO-1 goes in and it clears out the senescent cells so it helps skin function like healthier, younger-looking skin. It is not masking the signs of aging. It's not targeting one thing. It is actually rolling the clock back at a cellular level. I've been using the face moisturizer for almost six months now, and I love it so much. It feels amazing. It goes on really smoothly. It's not tacky at all. And I actually see a difference, which I just feel like is never the case with skincare. You want to always like see a real difference and you're kind of like, do, do I? Do I? And this, I genuinely do. Because it's clearing the senescent cells, it doesn't just target one thing. So my skin looks

firmer. It looks glowier. The texture feels dramatically smoother. And I feel like you can see that too. I also love the body moisturizer. It dries down really quickly, which is always a pet peeve of mine with moisturizers. I hate that like sticky feeling when you go to put your clothes on. This does not do that. But it does moisturize really, really well. And then again, I'm reducing my skin's biological age. I am not making it just look younger. I am making it actually younger. One skin has four peer-reviewed clinical studies and over 10,000 five-star reviews. The data backs everything up for a limited time get 15% off with code Liz at one skin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.com with code Liz. I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single

field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly, like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest, this is like a use case I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I'll just watch it for entertainment when I want to do something that's far more interesting than scrolling. Christina Aguilera taught me to sing. Shan Boudrum's Art of Mastering Confidence and Sex Appeal class is 10 out of 10. There's menopause classes with leading doctors. There's script writing with Mindy Kaling. Literally, you name it, they're on master class and it is such a good way to get off your phone but have something that's like not quite as long or hard to

get into as a TV show or a movie and that it just keeps you entertained and interested. And you are learning. There are over 200 classes from the world's best, all for just $10 a month when build annually, and you get unlimited access to every class on the platform so you can learn at your own pace whenever you want on your phone, your computer, or even in audio mode, like a podcast. If you're looking to stop scrolling and start consuming entertaining content that makes you feel excited and helps you learn, masterclass is it. And the best part, every membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can start learning risk. free. Right now our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com

slash Liz Moody. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash Liz Moody, masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. And if we have to send an email, like we are cold pitching ourselves for a job or I want to be a podcast guest or I'm right now asking people for blurbs for my book, for instance, and a lot of them are like big name people that I don't know. Is there a way to make the email more persuasive? Is that just about being direct into the point? Or should I still be laying out all my arguments as to why it's such a good book? And you would love to have your name on it. First of all, we always make our emails too long. People just aren't going to read a super long email. My husband yells at me through this all the time. He's like, this is way too long. You need to edit it down when I like show it to

him. So I'm like, oh, what do you think of this? I'm going to send this. And then I'm like, no, no, they need to hear all of my really persuasive points. Like, I need to fit in all. Because I'm a writer. And that's how I express myself. And I'm just like, this is such valuable information. How could I cut it? I know. When I write emails, that's my impulse. But I know when I read them, okay, first couple sentences, last couple sentences. I'm like, I won't even like read all that stuff. This is a fair point. It's about like getting the person hooked early on, being really clear in that first paragraph and people are persuaded by stories and connections and similarity. So anything that can say, like, here's the kind of person I am, here's why you want to help me, here's how you and I are similar

or how you can feel really good about yourself and effective for helping someone like me. All of that stuff is what drives people to do it. Not necessarily like you're going to benefit in some instrumental way for like blurbing my book. But it's going to feel really good to you to help me because I'm a person who you want to help because we have a similar background or because I've had these hurdles to overcome and I really need some help being pulled up. So something that says this will make you feel good to help me. Interesting. What if we want to exert more influence over the people in our lives, but we're being met with roadblocks? Like I get messages from people all the time who wish their partner had healthier habits or would go to therapy and they're refusing.

Is there anything that we can do in that type of situation? So there is some research, and this goes back to the assertiveness question, showing that when we want someone in our lives that we really care about to change, especially if we know that this would be good for them, that we tend to be overly assertive about it. And we push so hard that they kind of tune us out. And so I think the gentler approaches are probably better, just mentioning it from time to time and kind of assuming it's getting in there, maybe more. modeling it, making it easier to do the thing. A lot of the times there's just some actual barrier that's stopping me from doing this. But once that barrier is removed, it's a lot easier to imagine it. Another thing is that influence is cumulative. So it's not just this one attempt by one person to get this person to change. It's like, I say something gentle, so you know my opinion on it. And then

a friend maybe has an opinion. And maybe a doctor has a similar opinion. And it's like, oh, wait, Now it's starting to accumulate, like, all these different people who think that I should do this thing. And it's not any one person being more forceful necessarily, but it's like, oh, wow, look, my whole social group kind of has this one opinion. Maybe I should do it. Does it matter at all if you say this is important to me? It might. I do know that people are often motivated to do things for other people that they wouldn't necessarily do for themselves. So I think that is possible.

I know lots of people who have gotten more healthy because they wanted to do it for their kids. Once they had kids, now they care a lot more about their health. I actually have a colleague here who one of our colleagues needed a kidney transplant. And he tested and found out that he was a match to be able to donate his kidney and essentially like save our colleague. And so he decided to do it, but he wasn't in the greatest health. And so he spent two years before he actually donated his kidney, like getting into really good shape. And he wasn't doing it for himself. He hadn't done it most of his life for himself,

but now that he was doing it for somebody else and he felt like, okay, there's sort of a higher value in this, it got him to actually commit and do it. That makes me think that figuring out what people's individual motivation is is probably a really key part of the thing. Like, what are your partner's goals? What are the things your partner wants to be able to do with their life that the thing you're trying to get them to do might ladder up to versus your goals and the things that you're trying to get them to do with their life. Yeah, that's sort of higher meaning. I do think the pro-social element is something we overlook, though. We think that people do things for these instrumental benefits for like money and these kind of personal selfish

reasons. But people really do do a lot of things for prosocial reasons. So it might not be like just do it for me, but there might be some other pro-social reasons. But there might be some other pro-social social reason. Do it so that you can see your grandkids or something like that. What if you just want people to see you as influential? Are there tricks or tips that we can use if we just want people to view us as like a power player in that way? A lot of people will talk about charisma as an indicator of influence. There are these people who just seem to have charisma. And my colleague Zoe Chance, who wrote a book on influence as well, she talks about charisma as actually being able to bring out the attention and ask questions of other people that charismatic people aren't like,

hey, look at me, look at me, look at me. They're like, let me look at you. Let me shine the spotlight on you. Let me ask you questions and show that I'm really engaged and care about you and want you to change. So it's kind of people who are able to convey this idea that like, I really care about you and I see you. That makes them look influential. We all kind of want to be around those people. right, who make us feel like seeing and like cared about. Yeah, there's a quiet confidence to it. Like I don't need to spend my energy highlighting my great attributes. I'm so confident in them that I can actually be focused on you. When you think of this question, how can I be influential? You're like, how can I shine? But it's really like, how do you make other people shine? So focus on

making them shine and then that's when they'll pay attention to you. I love that. A lot of your research is focused on how we can get people to say yes and how we can exert our influence and tap into our influence. On the flip side, I think a lot of people have a hard time saying no. So can we apply your research in the other direction? And can you give us some tips for being better at saying no? Definitely. This is something people struggle with. It's actually the reason my studies work when people ask for things and people say yes more than we expect. The reason they say yes more than we expect is because it is so hard for them to say no. So I often just kind of flip my studies around. If I'm talking to people about getting people to do things, it's like, here's the things that get

people to find it hard to say no. And if I'm talking to people who want to say no, it's like, okay, do all these counter things. For example, we talked about how asking in person is a lot more effective because, again, imagine someone face to face with you and you have to come up with your answer right there. And it's really hard to say no. find the words. But if you're the person on that side who wants to say no, slowing down the interaction so you can mindfully decide what to do. So that's my number one suggestion is making sure that you're able to be mindful about whether you say yes or no, that you're making the decision mindfully. You don't feel rushed into it. And one way to do that is to get through that

face-to-face interaction and get back to them another time, often over email. So you could say, let me get back to you on that, let me check. But you don't want to feel cornered in that moment because you just can't think straight in that moment. You can say like, can I just think about it or can I check? I'll get back to you over email. And then you also can put in that email, whatever makes you feel okay saying no. The things that we really worry about when we say no, we're worried about rejecting the other person. We're worried about how that's going to make us look. We're worried about how that might impact the relationship. We're worried about letting that. person down. So whatever of those concerns is sort of most salient, or all of them, you can address in an email saying no. It could just be, I'd love to do this another time. I just can't now, showing that I still really care about you. It could be telling them that they can go to this other person instead so that you're still kind of taking care of them and thinking about them. It could also just be a no, I can't. And you just needed that space to be able to say it. And that's fine, too. We don't always need an excuse. The other thing I find really helpful,

is remembering that every time you say yes to one thing, you are implicitly saying no to something else because we don't have all the time in the world. If you're overcommitted because you can't say no, that means that eventually you're just not going to be able to do certain things that you maybe want to do. And it could just be things like taking care of yourself, spending time with your like pets and family, whatever it might be. But being overcommitted means you can't do that other stuff. So keeping a running tally of like these are the things I want to have time to do. These are the things I'm committed to. And even using that sometimes as a way to say no, here in my job, I get asked to be in a lot of committees. So I have my list of committees so I can say like, sorry, I'm on this, this and this committee, which is why I can't be on this one. So it's like I'm already committed to all these things. So I feel okay saying no. You can even picture like the faces of the people on your committee, the faces of your kid, the faces of your partner, the faces of your pet as if you said no to them as a little motivator. It's like you have the face of the person you're actively saying no to in front of you. But if you can picture those other faces

that you're implicitly saying no to, I feel like that could be really helpful. I love that. Like just having a picture of your dog with puppy eyes on your computer where it's like, if I'm going to say yes to this, I have to look at his little puppy eyes and say no to him. That's so good. You also had some really interesting research about how people were willing to essentially give us more money than we would think that they would be willing to give us. I would love for you to explain that in a nutshell. And then I was very curious if you thought that would apply to something like asking for an initial salary or asking for a raise. Like if we should always be asking for more money at our jobs than we think we should. So this really comes from

this idea that if we assume that other people are sort of wired to say no to us, we have this assumption that other people are wired to be disagreeable, to shut us down, to say no, to not give us things. And that's a misperception. Like people find it really hard to say no. They're actually wired to want to connect with us and be agreeable. It's a lot easier to be agreeable, right? But because of this misperception, when we go in and we ask for something, we'll often negotiate ourselves down before we actually start to negotiate with that other person. We assume, oh, they would never say yes to this much. So I'm going to ask for less because I'm assuming that that's what they're going to say yes to. And that is often wrong. They're often willing to say yes to a much higher

number. So my piece of advice when it comes to that is not always ask for more. But instead, it's assume that this person's default is to say yes to you. Now, it's not always going to be true. But if you start from this assumption, assume that they're going to say yes, mentally knowing they're going to say yes. now what do you want to ask for? So that what you ask for is what you really feel like you deserve or what you really want. And you're not basing it on this assumption that, oh, they would never say yes to that thing. That's the most effective way to manage that. I love that. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment? One way we can tangibly feel a benefit in our lives based on all of your research and findings? One of my favorite exercises that I talk about in the book is gratitude letters or just expressing

gratitude in some way. One thing I talk about is just testing out your influence. So it could be asking someone for a favor and just seeing maybe they'll say yes to it or giving someone a compliment. But the gratitude letters are where you actually, you think of someone you really truly feel grateful towards who you haven't told that to because you feel like it might be weird or awkward and you don't know how to put it into words. And you try to ignore all those doubts, all that worry about like, oh, it's going to be weird or I don't know how to say it. And you just say it. You just send them a little note that says, I just want you to know, I'm grateful for X, Y, Z. Because it gets us out of our own head, our worry about, like, being perfectly articulate, about making

things weird. And I think anyone will wind up having a positive experience from that. So I did this actually recently with a professor. I was working on a syllabus. And I recalled this professor that I had taken, now it's 20 years ago. And I was remembering how great this class was. And I was like, I want my class to be like that professor's class. And I was like, I'm so grateful to him for having taken this class, but I've never told him. So I tracked him down. I sent him an email. And it was just like a really quick like, I'm a professor now.

I loved your class and I want my class to be like, thank you so much. And he wrote back this lovely email and we had this back and forth exchange. And now we have this connection that was started just by reaching out and saying, thank you essentially. I just thought of you and I was grateful. Instead of just keeping that to myself, I put it out and through the world. So you never know what that can do. I just immediately thought of my high school English teacher. And I'm coming out with, I have two cookbooks, but it's my first, like, written book.

And she was really my first person who encouraged me to be a writer. And I was like, I should write her a little note about that. That would be really lovely. I love that tip. Can you tell us a little bit about your book and your own words and any other research or work that you'd like to spotlight? My book is you have more influence than you think. And the general idea is that we don't need. to get all these tips and tricks for getting influence that we really have it all the time.

And essentially that means we just matter to other people more than we realize and that we should use that as we talked about at the top for good. My website is VanessaBonds.com, Vanessa, B-O-H-N-S. I'm on Twitter and Instagram at ProfBonds and I'd love to connect with people anywhere. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. I love this conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciated it. Okay. How are we all doing with our newfound power? Are we feeling good? Are we going to use it for good? I am trusting you with this knowledge, so do not make me regret having Vanessa teach us about all this stuff. If you're new here, make sure that you're following the podcast on whatever platform you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page.

It's the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes and you'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. Then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcast. That way, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on one. And you are definitely going to want to be in the loop because we have some amazing episodes coming up, including an episode about unexpected ways to live a happier life and another one about diving into the best research-backed daily habits and routines. So make sure that you are following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you and I will see you next Wednesday on the next episode of the Healthyer Together podcast. When it comes to wellness, you're going to get the best results by focusing on the big needle

movers. A lot of us spend a lot of time trying to optimize that last 1%, which creates a ton of stress and it actually doesn't help our health that much. At the top of the needle mover list, sleep. And one of the best ways to optimize your sleep is to optimize your mattress, which is why I love avocado green mattress so much. First of all, this mattress is so comfortable. I have the one with the pillow top, which is medium firm, and it's just a dream.

I miss it when I travel. It's better than even the fanciest hotel beds. Having a mattress that supports your joints and your body and feels good is going to help you get more sleep and better quality sleep. But then, on top of that, avocado mattresses are made with certified organic cotton, wool, and latex. And they are made safe and green guard gold certified. They're also Okotech certified, which is the gold standard. I look for it in any mattresses, sheets, or towels that I buy, which means the materials have been rigorously tested for harmful substances. You can actually look for the Okotech standard 100 label right on the product, and I love this part. It includes a traceable certificate number and the name of the testing lab so you know exactly what

you're getting. There are no toxic chemicals. There's no harmful off-gassing. It does not smell like it's going to kill you when you unbox it. This is what I mean. I'm not going to swap out all of my clothing, which is that top 1% of optimization. But by making sure that my mattress and my bedding are as good for me as possible, I literally reduce my exposure during a third of.

of my life, which is a huge needle mover for a one-time swap. I will also note, and this is a me thing, but I sleep super hot and avocado's materials are really breathable and it makes me sweat the least of any mattress that I have slept on. And avocado is a certified B-Corp and a 1% for the planet member because caring for yourself and caring for the planet do not have to be separate things. You can get up to 20% off organic mattresses and more by shopping Avocados Presidents' Day sale right now at avocado greenmatress.com. That is avocado green mattress.com, no code needed.

When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out are good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that

that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient, more get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your recovery and your

resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement mitopure does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondere increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine,

it's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithin-A keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A, which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz.