How to Get People Interested in Change
This is gross, but every time I reach under my desk chair, my finger presses into something soft and gooey. I’m pretty sure it’s food. This has been going on for weeks. I have done nothing about it. It bothers me, but not enough, I suppose.
Perhaps this is one reason why it’s hard to get people to do things that would be good for them: Status quo usually just doesn’t bother people enough.
This is also why, if you want to influence someone to change, they have to be sufficiently interested in doing it.
In my last article, I described the need most of us have to influence others. That post explored the first step to doing it: getting their attention.
That icky goo under my desk chair gets my attention every day, but I’m not changing. So in this article, we’ll look at the second step of influence: interest.
Encouraging an Interest In Change
There are two key things to know about interest that inform what you and I need to do whenever we want to influence after we’ve gained the person’s attention:
- Interest is rooted in emotion, not logic. Neuroscientists explain that human beings make decisions emotionally and justify them logically. Emotion primarily resides in the limbic portion of your brain, which is located in the back of your brain near your spinal cord. The direct link between your limbic brain and nervous system, through chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and norepinephrine, allows you to feel emotion in your body.
Research by Antonio Damasio at USC shows that people who have lost function in their limbic brain (perhaps due to brain trauma) remain fully capable of analyzing decisions, but they can’t make them. They understand the rationale of choices presented to them, but they don’t have an interest, or even an ability, to commit to action.
To engage the back of someone’s brain, then, requires trustworthy and empathetic listening, because emotions often take on a more ambiguous and guarded quality than logic. They require questions like, “How do you feel about that?” or “Why is that important to you?” and they demand careful attention to non-verbal cues that may convey more personal interests.
- Interest comes by realizing how different things should be and why that matters. We rationalize, justify, and ignore most limitations and frustrations in life because it’s painful to acknowledge them. The human brain is wired to survive and therefore avoid pain. At the same time, we don’t dream big enough about how much better things could or should be because we’re busy enough dealing with what’s in front of us.
While you can try to tell someone how different things should be, it usually works much better to get them to have the insight. Studies have shown that people are five times more likely to buy into a decision when they come up with the idea themselves. And the best influencers are often the ones who ask the most thought-provoking questions. Try coming up with questions that will get people to say, “Hmmm, I hadn’t thought of that,” as they reflect on how different things could be and why that matters.
Positive, relationship-based influence requires very good listening and questioning that’s built on trust. Ask insightful questions and draw out the emotional reasons why they might be interested in change.
In my next post, I’ll address the third stage of relationship-based influence: belief. Each of these steps — attention, interest, belief, and urgency — build momentum into the next to develop a stronger relationship and more productive action.
Where could you generate more interest for positive change?
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