Transcript
Schouwenburg: If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, is that if you want to influence people, you need to speak the language that appeals to their brain state. If you don’t, it’s like speaking Dutch to an English-speaking audience. We’re not going to speak the same language. Maybe some of you do. Probably both of us will end up frustrated.
I’m Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg. I’m a business psychologist. I’m co-founder of Bravely. It’s a learning partner for tech companies. We are situated in Amsterdam. Our mission is to bring empathy back into business. We do all kinds of learning programs. We train leaders, work with teams. We do coaching. All kinds of human-related topics within a tech situation.
What Is Influence?
We’re going to talk about influence. Influence is the capacity to have an effect on character, development, or behavior of someone. What we’re going to focus on here, and really, in business psychology what we look at, is the effect that we have on behavior and on development. Changing someone’s character is incredibly complex, very difficult, and not something I would aim at at work. If the character is a problem, it’s probably a bad hire or it’s just not a good match with the role anymore.
Then look for somebody else or try to find the person another role. Like Joy mentioned before, we have this misconception, I call it, or the myth of the people person. That’s the person that can influence people better than others. It’s almost like you were born with this. You were born an extrovert, or you were born a people person, or somebody who’s always sociable and gets to connect with people very easily. I fundamentally disagree with that. I’ve been doing this for more than 14 years. I’ve worked with thousands of people. These are skills that can be learned. Yes, they can be challenging. It’s like a muscle that you have to build, and you have to practice, and you have to continually work on. It is something that everybody can achieve, neurotypical, neurodivergent, across the board.
There’s another pet peeve I have and that’s the term soft skills. Soft makes me feel like it’s vague and it’s something that we can’t grasp. That you just feel like it’s an energy or something, and that makes it very difficult and very hard to attain. Really, at the end of the day, these are all factual behaviors. These are skills that are rooted in neuropsychology, in biology and evolution. Really, what I would love for you to understand is how these skills work. How does the brain work? What are the languages that you can speak, so you can connect with somebody? Once you do, how you can influence them.
For that, we need to go to the very source. The source of all this is something that is the same for all of us. The very beginning of communication and conversations and connection with others really lies in something that’s the same for us across cultures, gender, age, experience, and that’s your brain. We all share this organ that influences every single thing we say, do, decide. To ignore that, override that and just go for, let’s look at the behavior, that’s way too simplistic.
Timeline
What I want to go through with you, is I want to introduce the brain languages to you. Essentially, there are two that we’re going to cover that are most relevant for you. We’re then going to have a look at Chatty Cavemen. Really, where does that all come from? Why is this still relevant in today’s world? Also, I’m going to end with some very concrete influencing skills that you can use in your day to day. At work, obviously, but since our brain doesn’t really have a work or private on and off button, in your private life, just the same. We’re all humans after all, in any kind of circumstance.
The Rational, Emotional, and Survival Brain
This is your brain. I want to introduce three areas to you that are relevant. The first one is your rational brain. The rational brain in the very front, prefrontal cortex, that’s the one we’re really proud of. That’s what makes us human. That’s where logic resides. That’s the part that got us to the moon. This is where we make long-term decisions, data, arguments, finding consensus. Anything that really at work we want to use is housed here. In an ideal world, at work, you want to be in your rational brain as much as humanly possible. A lot of people think that we’re there all the time. I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s just not true. A lot of the time, we are in our emotional brain. The emotional brain is a lot older. That’s the part in the middle, and it’s like a gatekeeper. Your emotional brain is constantly checking, am I feeling connected? Am I feeling comfortable in the situation that I’m in, in my surroundings, with the people that I’m with? Do I feel that I belong? You don’t have to be best of friends, but this really is about feeling ok, maybe having a bit of a click, a bit of an understanding.
If your emotional brain is satisfied that that is true, you’re able to use your rational brain. If, however, your emotional brain does not feel connected and there’s something fishy here, don’t really feel comfortable, there’s maybe stress in the air, there’s tension, it will lead us to our survival brain. Your survival brain is at the very stem of your brain. It’s the oldest part. It’s also called a reptile brain. This is where our survival instincts are. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, they are all here. Your survival brain, since it’s the oldest part of your brain, was the first one to be developed. I need you to remember one thing from this, which is, your survival brain always wins. That’s because your brain really has two goals. One is to keep you alive. Two is for you to procreate. We’re really focusing on number one. Your brain wants to keep you alive.
In case of threat, in case of something that’s challenging, something that may actually threaten your survival, your survival brain is turned on. It’s something that’s completely out of your control. It reflects reactions. This is super useful still today. Because if you’re crossing a street and there’s a Waymo that doesn’t stop, it’s not great to think, “There’s a car. I’m here. Let’s see, what’s the best long-term solution?” If that happened, we probably all wouldn’t be here now. We would have ended this race a long time ago. The survival brain has absolute use, and it’s necessary. In today’s world, it’s not always great, because sometimes, or quite a lot of the times, it’s activated without there being an actual threat. However, your brain is just a blob in a black box. It doesn’t really know that that email that you received that stresses you is not actually able to kill you.
Brain Languages
Having a look at the brain languages, your rational brain asks the question, what can I learn? How can I develop? How can I be creative? Think outside the box. How can I improve? That is also the part that goes along with long-term decision-making. That’s where we want to be. That is where influence happens. If you want to influence and instill lasting behavioral change in people, not just them doing something that you want because they fear you, or they just fawn, they just please you to get out of that meeting room. If you want people to change consistently, you will need to appeal to their rational brain.
That is where change happens, not in the other parts. The emotional brain is all about the ask for connection. Do I feel comfortable here? Is this ok? The survival brain is asking the question, am I safe? How do you know which brain state somebody is in? There are a few key takeaways. Of course, yes, it’s also a thing like intuition and energy. There are also things that you can actively look for. Your key one is eye contact. Especially when these are people, for example, in your team that you work with regularly, if their eye contact is different to what it normally is, when they are relaxed, when they are ok. This can be more avoidant, that can also be staring, or very intense. That will be more like a fight survival strategy. If the eye contact is very different, big signal.
Also, you sense a lot of emotion in the words people use. They can be talking about their emotion a lot. Maybe you hear it in their voice. “Really not stressed. Super chill”. Feels very congruent, doesn’t it? Sometimes we use words to say that we’re great, but our body, maybe the tension in our body, our voice, our eyes, they betray us. This is also what you want to be looking for. If somebody is very silent or zoned out, feels like you can’t really connect to them, they’re probably in another part of their brain or very tired, but fair enough.
Also, if you get the response, yes, but, a lot. Anybody familiar with that? Trying to convince somebody lately of the best solution? Whatever you suggest, it’s like, yes, but that doesn’t work with this team. Yes, but we’ve tried that before. That didn’t work out. Yes, but we don’t have the time for that. We don’t have the manpower. When there’s a continuous, yes, but, you’re not appealing to their rational brain. They’re not in their rational brain right now. There’s no point in continuing your efforts to convince, give data and argumentation and ask content questions. No point. When you’re going in circles, meeting anybody? Can’t make a decision? It’s an endless, yes, let’s postpone. Let’s have another meeting on this. Yes, probably not only them, but also you are in your emotional survival brain.
How do you know that somebody is in their rational brain? It’s when you notice that they’re listening to understand and not to respond. When there’s a flow in the conversation, when they don’t interrupt you or ask questions that are totally out of context. When you sense that they’re taking information from your answers or your introduction or what you’re saying, and they’re embedding that in their own response, you know they are actually working with the information that they got. They’re processing it. You know they are working with their rational brain. They’re looking for solutions.
Also, when you notice that somebody is able to reflect, when they’re maybe being critical about themselves or they can apologize for something or they evaluate how something went. Obviously, the relaxed body and voice. Once again, here, look for typical traits. Your relaxed may look different than one of your report’s relaxed, and that’s fine. As long as it’s their normal, that’s what you want to be looking for.
Three key things I want you to take away from this. Influencing lasting behavioral change, not just survival strategy, but lasting behavioral change happens in a rational brain state. Only make the effort to try and influence if the other person you’re trying to influence is in that rational brain.
Otherwise, waste of time and energy. You can’t be in your survival brain and your rational brain at the same time. The rational brain is not that important. When you’re running from a wolf, who cares about flying to the moon? Also, long-term memory storage only happens in your rational brain because, let’s be honest, doesn’t matter if you remember the exact path that you ran when the wolf was behind you. You just want to survive. If you make agreements with somebody while they are in their emotional or survival brain state, guess what happens? They don’t remember. Then you get these emails, how? What? Did we decide on this? You get super frustrated because, yes, we discussed that yesterday. They don’t remember. The survival brain always wins, for you as well, not just the person you’re talking to, for all of us.
All of us go there a couple times a day. It’s not a strange thing, but maybe one positive note on this is that when we are in our survival brain state, it’s not a really comfortable place to be in for us. It takes up a lot of energy, a lot of calories, and it makes your body start all kinds of functions. Your adrenaline goes up, your cortisol. Your stress hormone goes up. Your heart rate goes up. Your muscles tense. Your breathing goes up. Your digestion stops, cell renewal stops. Loads of things stop that are very vital for our functioning. Our body doesn’t want us to be there any longer than absolutely necessary. If there is no continued threat, there’s no continued trigger or stimulus, normally the survival state ends after about 90 seconds. If you have a conversation with someone and they’re crying, and you’re just, I don’t know what to do, count 90 Mississippis. Try and stay with them, it will pass.
What do we want to do? We want to help the other person to come back from their survival or emotional brain state, if it’s where they are, to their rational brain. Because that’s the point where we can work, where we can influence, where we can be effective. That process is called emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is something that, ideally, we learn as children through co-regulating. The people, our caregivers, they help us, show us, demonstrate to us how we can deal with big emotions. When we learn that well, repeatedly thousands of times, by the age of 21, 22, hopefully we’ve grasped the concept. I’m sure that in your day-to-day life you know plenty of people who aren’t that great at that. Maybe you’re struggling with that as well, which is perfectly fine. It’s a skill that you can learn later in life as well. There are loads of techniques for emotional regulation. Emotional regulation really is a process where we’re helping ourselves and also others to regulate the brain and come back to the rational brain.
Chatty Cavemen
To tell you a little bit more about how this process works and why, in my humble opinion, it’s one of the core elements to our survival as a human race, I’ll take you to the Chatty Cavemen. This is Ock. Ock, the caveman, setting the scene. We are 300,000 years ago in a cave. Ock has his tribe there. He trusts them. Every day, Ock takes the same path to the berry bush where he picks a few berries for his tribe and himself to eat. Of course, our brains don’t like change because, remember, goal one, I need to keep you alive. If you didn’t die yesterday, let’s just do the exact same thing today. Chances are, you’ll stay alive.
Unfortunately, he’s at the berry bush and there’s a bear. Now, what happens? His brain goes into survival in a quick second. His body tenses. His breath quickens. His heart rate goes up. Reflex kicks in, and thankfully, Ock, he manages to run back to the cave. He gets there, and there is his tribe sitting around the campfire, eating meat, whatever. He comes in and he’s all out of breath. “You won’t believe what just happened. It was a bear. It was really big. I just managed to get here”. His tribe’s like, yes, just like tone it down on the emotion and stuff. Can you just calm down? It’s kind of like weird. Or, “What’s that? I didn’t hear you”. If that happens, will Ock feel safe and connected? Obviously not. What actually happens then is one of two things.
Either his brain starts to absolutely go berserk, so he will amp up his emotions further and further, really to show people how dangerous, how scary that bear is. Or he may zone out, feeling that he’s no longer safe with his tribe, and he may actually seek another tribe to connect to. It’s so important for us as humans to make our tribe, the people that we relate to and we feel safe with, to make them realize what the fear, what the threat really is. Because we are herd animals. When we’re alone, we die. If none of these people realize how dangerous this bear is, chances are massive that they’re going to just tally out to the berry bush, go for a little walk, and they get eaten. That not only are they going to die, and probably my children and offspring, but I’m going to die as well, because I’m alone.
This process of emotional regulation, it’s not like a little bonus. It’s a core element of the survival of the human race. This has been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s not something that suddenly showed up. It’s also not something that, because we have the Industrial Revolution now, and the world is very different now, is suddenly going to change. Evolution takes a lot longer than that. In the day-to-day business, working with your teams, this will happen again and again. Sometimes you may feel like, this fear is irrational. Or, really, why are you so upset about this? Realize that for the person coming in, it’s a bear.
If they’re not taken seriously, if they’re not heard and acknowledged, you don’t have to agree with them, but if they’re not acknowledged, that fear will grow even bigger, or they will remove themselves from your tribe. That’s where all these interesting factors that really apply to team performance play a big role. Trust is affected, psychological safety is affected, sense of autonomy, purpose, all of these beautiful measurements gone. Emotion is information, and it’s relevant and real for the person who feels it. Denying, ignoring, downplaying, whatever, discussing it is not going to help anybody. Focusing on it, giving the person space, being curious, what was the bear like? What happened? How big was it? What did you do? That is going to help the person to emotionally regulate.
Once they have, that’s when we can form strategy. This is the part that sets us humans apart. Because then we can come up with solutions to the problem. Next time we go out to the berry bush, we’re actually going to hunt the bear, we’re going to eat the guy, even better. Great for the whole tribe. This is what I want you to be doing with your teams. Formulate strategies to fix it. This is where lasting behavioral change happens, in this stage.
Once again, what we need to do is we need to regulate emotions in order to get back to the rational brain as quickly as possible, and that’s when we can speed up and we become effective. Emotions are information, don’t ignore them. Don’t downplay them. They are valid and real for the person experiencing them. Listen to understand and not to respond. Slow down for emotional regulation so you can speed up on rational communication. Rather slow down a little longer on speaking to the emotional and the survival brain rather than rushing to the rational. The person will show you when they’re ready. They’ll say things like, yes, but how can we move on? How can we do better next time? Of course, in today’s day and age, we have loads of technologies and lots of things that can make life easier. Of course, you can use AI in this process to a certain degree as well. You can use technology.
For example, by helping the people in your team to find ways to regulate their own emotions better, take ownership of their own emotional regulation, because you don’t want to be co-regulating them all the time. You want ideally for people to be able to regulate themselves back into their rational brain. This can be things like finding personalized meditations, visualization exercises, breathing exercises, videos, articles, things that can help people to improve their own emotional regulation. There’s also exercises from cognitive behavioral therapy that people can do. You can use AI as a bonus.
At this point in time, personally, I don’t believe that it can replace the highly complex processes that are ongoing when we are in a communication, when we are in relation with somebody else. Because it’s not only what we say, there’s a lot more going on. There’s mirror neurons. There’s hormones coming through our skin that co-regulate the other person. It’s a lot more complex than just words. It’s also in the tone of voice and so much more than that. See it as an add-on. Really, the talent, the expert here is you.
It’s not really the most modern of computers, is it? This belongs in the Stone Age as well. At the end of the day, what this picture does highlight is that in the office, in your work environment, essentially, you’re dealing with a room full of cavemen. Their brains really are still there. We need to find strategies to deal with that and be as efficient as we can. I want to introduce an emotional regulation strategy to you. It’s a paraphrase. Paraphrase essentially is a summary in your own words. You start with, I hear you say, or if I understand you correctly, and you summarize, you give back as many facts and emotions that you heard from the person in front of you. Then, you check, is that true? This, essentially, is a brain language strategy. There’s many more. This one really nicely covers both the emotional brain and the survival brain.
For example, I hear you say that you’re very stressed about that deadline next week, and you just don’t know if you’ll make it, is that true? Ideally, you want to match it with the tone and the intensity of what you’re getting. When someone is completely upset and you’re like, I don’t know. Here you say that you’re a bit like, uncertain, is that true? You try to want to kind of match it.
Let’s practice. Chat to your neighbor. Person A tells about their perfect day at work. Paraphrase is not only for what we might coin as negative emotions, but any kind of emotions. What’s a perfect day? Talk about it for a minute, then person B paraphrases. Then you switch roles.
Brain language. You’ve just practiced a key element to emotional and survival brain language. You can use this with angry neighbors, upset mother’s-in-law, your spouse, co-workers, people in your team, anybody, strangers. Usually works really well. It’s something you need to practice, but it’s also really nice because this immediately invites you to listen to understand rather than listening to respond, because you’re really focusing, you’re really paying attention to what somebody is saying. That leads me to that second point of curiosity.
Since emotion is information, it’s great to be curious about, where does it come from? Why is it an issue for this person? What can we do about it? Try and understand rather than fix. You want to slow down, once again, slow down on that emotional regulation first, if, of course, somebody is in an emotional or survival brain state. Doesn’t have to be the case all the time. If you’re unsure, my advice would be to rather stick with another minute or another 30 seconds on this brain language to make sure that you’ve covered your bases before you move on to solutions. The rational brain language is solution-focused. It’s content-driven. It’s really about logical, data. It’s work. It’s where we can move on.
Influencing Skills
Now, influence, third part of what we’re going to look at. Three steps are vital here. Step one, detect the brain state. First, try and gauge, where’s this person at? If they are in a survival brain state or an emotional brain state. Step two, regulate the emotions. If it’s very clear for you they’re in a rational brain state, skip that step. Then we can move on to influencing. How do we do that? First of all, I want to introduce the principle of more to you. A little thinking exercise for that. I do not want you to think of yellow tennis balls. Please don’t think of this room full of bouncy, yellow, Wimbledon-style tennis balls. Don’t. Who had even the tiniest little yellow tennis ball in their brain? Love the people that go, no, pink elephants.
Our brain isn’t made for no. Scarcity is something that we will always focus on or look for. It’s like when you don’t have a car and you want a car and you’ve looked for cars and there’s this Subaru, or Mercedes, or whatever that you want, suddenly you’d see it driving around everywhere. It’s like, what? It’s magic. That’s because your brain is very focused on things it doesn’t have. If I tell somebody what not to do, they’re actually going to pay a lot more attention to doing that. Remember the tennis balls. Tell people what you do want from them, what you want more of from them, because that’s a lot easier to implement than a not.
Three techniques I want to introduce to you: feedback, the Pygmalion effect, and the, what do you need question. Feedback. The feedback strategy I’m introducing is rooted in nonviolent communication, where the goal is to be tough on the content, so be clear and transparent, but soft on the relationship. Yes, soft, here we are again. Comforting, connecting on the relationship. You start with an I message: I notice, I see, I hear. You want to be as specific and as recent in your behavior as possible. Stay away from always, never, all of these terms. Immediate attack, survival brain, yes, but, the other team, and you never told Jim. Not helping. Stay to one specific, clear behavior.
Then, you describe the effect on you, and you want to include your emotion, ideally, because for a lot of us, and I’m sure most of us feel that way, when you receive feedback, it can be a bit difficult. We can have a tendency to feel a little bit attacked, or, ‘mmm,’ but I don’t know about this. That’s a normal reaction. For most of us, we will go into our emotional brain, at least, that goes, I’m not sure about this. The gatekeeper. By explaining the effect on me, so adding a bit of vulnerability in here, we’re speaking to that part of the brain. We’re making it less scary. It’s more about connection. I’m giving you a bit of vulnerability, now it’s easier for you to give me something back. Change requires vulnerability, because our brain does not like change. It’s a scary thing to do. Describe the effect on you, and then check in, how is this for you?
Once again, this step three is also for emotional regulation. You’re giving the person the opportunity to vent, to explain themselves, to go through maybe the stages of their brain. Maybe you even use a paraphrase here. I hear that it feels really unfair to you that I gave this feedback to you about being late, while Janet was also late to the meeting. Is that true? No judgment. You don’t have to agree, you can just acknowledge. Once you notice that this person is back in their rational brain, ask them what they could be doing more of. If you don’t specifically know, you can also say, how could we together figure out how to fix this?
An example, and this is more of corrective feedback, I noticed you informed me you wouldn’t meet the deadline a day before the deadline. The effect on me is that this was so short notice, I couldn’t help you anymore to make the deadline, and you were alone in your struggles. How’s this for you? When they are back in their rational brain, could you keep me updated weekly on how confident you feel about making the deadline, and what you need for that in our next project, for example? This also works in a sense where you want to encourage more of the behavior that you’re seeing in a positive notion, positive way. I noticed you asked me for the specific help to meet the deadline, as you didn’t feel confident about it.
The effect on me is really positive. This was very helpful for me, the team, and the project, because we could figure out the best solution together, and you learned how to solve it yourself in the future. How’s this for you? Could you please keep communicating to me about what you need specifically to do your job well? Feedback. The Pygmalion effect. The Pygmalion effect is essentially about labels. What a lot of research has shown is that, especially within the tribe, so within the in-group, for example, at a team meeting or a team gathering, when we label somebody’s behavior in a certain way, so especially when we make predictions about their behavior, they will have the tendency to live up to those predictions.
This works in a positive and in a negative way. Janet is never on time. She’s always going to be late. Yes, you just ruled it for yourself, Janet, and the team. She’s most probably going to be even later than she was before. Harness this in a strategic way. High expectations tend to lead to high performance, but be realistic. Don’t keep talking about your dream scenario of, in an ideal world, when this person would be working 12 hours a day, what would happen? Keep it realistic and attainable, otherwise it will be discouraging for people.
If you talk about people, especially within the team, in a positive way, they will have a high tendency to internalize the labels that you put on them and act accordingly. This is really a strategic move that you can use in the long term. Not just on short-term outcomes, but really, what is the vision that you have for this person within the team? What do you need from them in the next phase? This could be things like, Frank is going to really own this next project and he’s going to meet the deadline easily. Frank’s going to be like, me? Yes. Sharifa is going to surprise all of us with her determination this quarter, I’m sure of it. Jamal is going to fix that bug in no time.
He knows exactly how to motivate others to help him and speed things up. What do you need? Being very transparent on what is expected, what is the necessary outcome. You describe the situation that you’re looking for, the box, and then you get the person who needs to do it to think outside the box on how they’re going to get this done. This creates ownership, autonomy, and buy-in. Good chance for behavioral change.
Recap
Three steps to influencing. Detect the brain state. If need be, regulate emotions. Influence. You’re detecting the brain state first. Then you’re going to regulate, if necessary. You can use paraphrase, silence, curiosity. You listen to understand. You slow down to speed up. We want to influence, use the principle of more, think of the tennis balls. You can use feedback, the Pygmalion effect, and the, what do you need?
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