Category: motivation
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #13–Talk to the unconscious
“We want them to type in their email and click on the “Join” button”, was the response from my client as I asked him what was the one action he wanted people to take on his landing page. Good. That was clear. But now the question was what else should be on the landing page…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #12 – Give them a warm beverage
You have an important meeting with a client first thing tomorrow morning. The main contact, Jeremy, is unhappy with some of the deliverables on the last project. He has been a little cold and distant with you on the phone and through email recently. This is the first time he is coming in to the…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #10 Pitch When People Feel Regret
Of all the situations and feelings that motivate people to take action, regret is one of the most powerful. People don’t like to feel regret and will do a lot to avoid it. That’s not surprising, but you might be surprised to find out that the more opportunity people feel they have, the more regret they tend to…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #9 Give Feedback Without Praise
During this series on 365 Ways To Persuade and Motivate I’ve had a few posts about rewards and also some about the desire for mastery. One way to reward people is to give them praise (“Wow, you did a great job on that report”). And because we want to motivate people, and we think praise…
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365 Ways to Persuade And Motivate: #8 Use The Right Reward
Since starting to write the last few blog posts on rewards I’ve had some questions on what is a reward. So I thought I’d take this blog to write about what makes a reward a reward and how to pick the “right” one. When B.F. Skinner researched rewards he didn’t call them rewards. He called…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #7 Give Rewards Unpredictably To Sustain A Behavior
In the last blog post I wrote about using a continuous reinforcement schedule when you want to establish a new behavior. And I hinted that you should change that schedule after the behavior is established. One of the reward “schedules” that BF Skinner researched is called a variable ratio schedule. It’s called “variable” because you…
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365 Ways To Persuade And Motivate: #6 Reward Every Time To Establish A New Behavior
Rewards are one of the most common ways that people think of to get other people to do stuff. In the talks that I give on the topic I tell people that rewards are actually one of the least effective ways to get people to do stuff! Rewards are one of the seven ways I…
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365 Ways to Persuade And Motivate: #5 Point Out How People Are Connected
When people feel connected to each other then they are more motivated to work together. Even pointing out how people are connected in small ways affects behavior. Gregory Walton is a professor at Stanford who has studied the effects of belonging on behavior. In one of his experiments, Walton found that when college students believed…