Sharing my Notes from Chapter 4 of the Influencer Book as a Way to Start the New Academic Year

Chapter 4:  Make the Undesirable Desirable (Personal Motivation)

Shift from.... Shift To....

• stop asking "how can I get people to do things that they currently find loathsome, boring, insulting or painful?" to asking " how can I change how humans (myself and others) experience a behavior?  In specifics "how can I change the meaning of a behavior itself from loathsome to gratifying; from pleasurable to disgusting; or from insulting to inspiring?
• using perks and wisecracks to finding ways to make the activity itself more inherently attractive (in other words find the diamond in the rough or the pearl amongst the swine).
• fixating on my likes and dislikes to focusing on understanding where my likes and dislikes come from so I can transcend and transform.
• a fixed mindset about myself and what motivates me to a growth mindset about my intrinsic motivation.
• classical conditioning (aka Pavlov's salivating dogs) to direct experience with the phenomena (the classic 'try it you'll like it' mentality.
• telling people how to change behavior to modeling how I changed my behavior
• saying this is really hard! to making it a game so others can enjoy the "flow" or the felling of enjoyment that comes with losing yourself in an engrossing activity.  WHERE AN ENGROSSING ACTIVITY = any activity that has reasonably challenging goals and clear, frequent feedback.
• relying solely on direct experience and games to creating new motives by:

1. connecting to a person's sense of self like the Russian mathematician who solved the Poincare Conjecture;
2. engaging in moral thinking unlike Robert Lund the engineer who 'put on his manager hat' to make a decision to launch the Challenger; 
3. connecting behavior to moral values which is how Mimi Silbert maintains decorum at the Delancey center by using a clear moral code of family, home, beliefs, actions, reasons for our actions, mentoring others and taking responsibility for the actions of others;
4. spotlighting human consequences by striking one-word labels the minimize a group's humanity such as "bean-counters", "gear heads", "corporate", "the field", "them" and "they" and replacing those labels with actual names of people.
5. winning hearts by honoring choice like William Miller did by finding out that successful counselors helped patients figure out what they wanted rather than what their fed-up friends wanted out of life AND that you can influence even a resistant group of people if you are willing to surrender control.

Chapter Summary (excerpted from pages 108 - 109)

Helping people extract instrinsic satisfaction from the right behavior or feel displeasure with the wrong behavior often calls for several influence strategies.

1. With individuals who believe that the required behaviors won't be pleasurable, simply immerse them in the activity.
2. As you experiment with new actions, focus on the sense of accomplishment associated with the result.  Reveal in achieving for the sake of achieving.  Tap into people's sense of pride and competition.  And when it comes to long-term achievement, link into people's view of who they want to be.
3. When dealing with activities that are rarely satisfying or unhealthy activities that are very satisfying, take he focus off the activity itself and reconnect the vital behavior to the person's sense of values.  Don't be afraid to talk openly about the long-term values individuals are currently either supporting or violating.
4. As people slip further into inappropriate behavior - even causing severe damage to themselves or others - help them reconnect their actions to their sense of morality by fighting moral disengagement.  Don't let people minimize or justify their behavior by transforming humans into statistics.
5. Finally, when facing highly resistant people, don't try to gain control over them by wowing them with logic and argument.  Instead, talk with them about what they want.  Allow them to discover on their own the links between their current behavior and what they really want.

In short,  as you think about the problems you're trying to resolve, don't be afraid to draw on the power of intrinsic satisfiers.  As Don Berwick so aptly stated: "The biggest motivators of excellence are intrinsic.  They have to do with people's accountability to themselves.  It's wanting to do well, to be proud, to go home happy having accomplished something."  Berwick recognizes that people have a powerful desire to do what's right.  Harnessing that intrinsic desire is a far more powerful influence tool than using extrinsic rewards or even exacting punishments.