Podcast Info
Podcast Description
Zoe Chance is a Harvard-trained behavioral scientist who draws on groundbreaking research in behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology. On this episode Zoe will show you how to effect change that’s meaningful, durable, and contagious!
Zoe is also the author of the new book, INFLUENCE IS YOUR SUPERPOWER which is as thought-provoking as it is enjoyable.
You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, follow the rules, wait your turn, and not make waves. But influence is the secret sauce that brings great ideas to life and makes people want to say yes to you. Used intelligently, it’s like a superpower that can make good things happen. And Zoe will help you develop that power.
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TRANSCRIPT
Zoe Chance
[00:04:02] Sean: Zoe, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
[00:04:05] Zoe: I’m doing fantastic, Sean, thank you so much. Glad to be here.
[00:04:10] Sean: It’s really good to see you. One of the things that I admire about you and I’m always impressed by is just the presence you bring to everything you’re doing in terms of presenting like your presence on stage. I’m just wondering, are there things you do leading up to an interview like this or the talks you give, just so that you are in a great state?
[00:04:32] Zoe: Thank you so much. I do. And music is my go-to to get myself pumped up. I don’t know if you use music before a talk. So for me this morning, before our talk, I wanted to get in the zone and be feeling good and pumped and relaxed. And so I listened to the song, Bella Ciao, which is the theme song from Money Heist, which is just this incredible Spanish show. The show itself is so exciting and the song is an Italian folk song. It’s an anti-fascist Anthem from the 1940s. I just love singing the song and getting myself ready to go.
Zoe’s Mindset
[00:05:13] Sean: I always love hearing about those little things going on behind the scenes. Everyone gets to see you do a great presentation, but they don’t understand some of those little rituals and little things you do just before, I think that’s cool. I would love to know though because you’re great about understanding how humans work, but I’m also sure you understand yourself well, and I’m wondering, is there a mindset of yours that if you could just pass on to everyone, you would love everyone to take on with them?
[00:05:37] Zoe: Yeah, Sean, there is. And, nobody has asked me about this ever, but this mindset, I find it explains at least 40% of my happiness, is the ability to have vicarious happiness for other people’s success. It not only strips away almost all of the potential jealousy, I still get little streaks of it sometimes, let’s keep it real, but it gives me an infinite capacity for happiness because you can only have a certain number of good things and amazing things happen in your own life no matter how great it is. If you get to be happy about other people’s success, then there’s just no limit. I am happy for other people every single day. And so I can’t have ultimately a bad day unless there’s a tragedy.
[00:06:34] Sean: I’m so glad you brought this to light. I feel like this is one of those things that very few people talk about. I know people talking about gratitude a lot, and one of the things I do love about gratitude is you can’t be in that state of sadness or jealousy if you’re expressing gratitude and this, your practice, you expand that out even further. And it’s just so cool to see because it’s helping you, but then also that positivity going towards others, I’m sure it’s even unlocking and inspiring them even more along the way. So it’s just great to hear about people focusing on that. Was there something that happened that all of a sudden you realized this and it started coming out more? Or are you just naturally one of those people who are obsessed with other people thriving and doing well?
[00:07:14] Zoe: It’s from my mom. My mom is like that and just grew up with her. She just gets so excited and it’s not this peaceful happiness, it’s just an enthusiastic joy for other people to have good things happen. I must have just gotten that from her and modeled it from her. I feel very blessed to have this because so many people in the world have been trained not to brag, so we don’t share our successes. So a lot of the good things that happen are kept private and yeah, there’s Facebook and humble bragging and all those kinds of things.
But I get to be someone for so many of the people in my life, friends, family, students, some people that I don’t even know that well, I’ve taught them in a workshop and they will just they’ll reach back, let me know about their good news. I love it when people brag to me about the good things that are going on and the people we can do that with are like me and your parents. It’s a privileged role that I get to have.
Chapters of Zoe’s Life
[00:08:24] Sean: Oh, that’s fantastic. One of the things that you mentioned is different experiences, I know you picked this up from your mom, and I feel like you’ve had a unique set of experiences that have shaped this unique individual who’s incredibly smart, but then you’ve been involved in so many different things, and I’m wondering if we were just kind of looking at different chapters of your life, even like certain decades, how would you title those chapters?
[00:08:48] Zoe: I’m one of those people like you, who have been obsessed with self-development and personal growth like a growth junkie. And for me, it’s intentional and unintentional. I think I’m a different person every five years. And that’s also led to the demise of two marriages, but my current husband is on a similar growth path as I am, so I think it’s going to work. When I was very young, I was so shy, and I was so nerdy that I had this theory that the reason that people talked over me and didn’t listen when I spoke was that my voice was the same caliber as the ambient sounds of the universe. So that gives you an idea of how nerdy I was.
We’ll just call those like the quiet years, the nerdy years never ended, I still am quiet, but that was beyond quiet. And then in high school and college, I rejected all of that, and I wanted to have friends and I tried to reject the nerdiness. In 10th grade didn’t read a book all year because I thought that was cool. And I was scared of not being invited to things that were happening, so I started planning social events all the time, and I was the person planning outings, parties, and things like that. So I realized you can’t be uninvited if you’re the host.
We’ll just call those the party planning years. And then I had a big period where I was doing sales and marketing as a practitioner, and I was obsessed with influence, but it was in a very selfish, transactional sort of way. We could call that the transactional period and then academia. I didn’t care enough about selling things. I was selling Barbie dolls and we were selling two Barbie dolls a second. And it was like, what does success look like? Is it selling three Barbie dolls per second? And already girls were getting five Barbie dolls a year and they’re going into a landfill.
And I was like, well, if I sell them six Barbie dolls a year, is that even a good thing? Does it even matter? And so I came to academia and those were the exponential nerd years of just learning how this all works. And now I would say I’m in a phase of my life where I’m in contribution mode and it feels amazing to be at this phase where I’m not worried about what’s coming or not coming to me because I have just total confidence that there’s plenty. I’m just going to be fine. And so I can focus on what I can bring to other people. And I feel blessed about that.
[00:12:04] Sean: In terms of that final, that abundance stage, how does that come out? Is that you just have to live through so many of those experiences or do you think that could get sped up where you can get to that state of wanting to give back and being abundant even earlier?
[00:12:16] Zoe: I’m sure that someone besides me could have gotten to that stage even earlier. And when I look at many of my students, so I teach in an MBA program and there are students from across the university who come, but they’re primarily people in their late twenties and as a generational thing, my daughter is in her teens. So as a generational thing, there are many more people in Gen Y and Gen Z than in my generation, Gen X who are demanding meaning from their work.
And this is a big part of what’s going on in this great resignation right now. People are saying a paycheck is not enough for me. Of course, I need a paycheck, you have to pay me, but you can’t pay me enough to sell my soul. I’m not going to prostitute myself for dollars. And I think I had some fear, I grew up poor and that gave me some fear about financial stability that probably kept me in a fearful state of being self-focused for longer than I needed to be.
The Service Mindset
[00:13:13] Sean: I’m wondering, what was the major turning point for you where the comfort set in? With clarity comes confidence, and where you are able to feel more at ease and comfortable with your authentic self and allow that to shine through. I’m even thinking about the course at Yale. What’s great about that is you created the course that only Zoe could teach. You designed that specifically, and I’m wondering how that evolution occurred for you.
[00:13:50] Zoe: This was a service mindset where I had done an MBA at the University of Southern California thinking I was going to go be an entrepreneur. And then I met all these entrepreneurs who were so unhappy. And I know that people listening to the podcast, many of you are entrepreneurs, and I have all kinds of admiration for you because I just couldn’t be you. My husband is a social entrepreneur. I couldn’t hack it because of all of the work and all of the uncertainty. And so I said, I can’t deal with entrepreneurship and I’m just going to take a corporate job. That was when I took a job at Barbie Mattel working in Barbie marketing.
I had done sales. I worked in door-to-door sales and telemarketing, not glamorous sales, but I learned a lot. And I had worked on political campaigns and I had done a lot of theater and some movies, and when I came to Yale to teach, I just asked myself, what is the best that I can offer? What’s the best I can offer of myself and my knowledge and my experience practically? And then my training and research and behavioral science and behavioral economics, and I decided I just wanted to invent this course based on everything that I knew to help MBA students and anyone else who wanted to join to do the thing that I could help them most with, which was to become a more influential person.
And I had through that trajectory somehow learned to become a person that a lot of people want to say yes to. It’s an incredible blessing, and it’s also taken a lot of conscious effort because of growing up so nerdy, as I told you. Many people are born blessed with charisma, charm, and privilege, maybe also that has them feeling more entitled and they’re more comfortable with advocating for themselves and also ridiculous charm, but I didn’t have any of that. I had to learn what it takes, and I had to practice, and that makes me better equipped than someone for whom it came naturally to teach other people what it takes to get there.
Little Routine Habits
[00:16:16] Sean: Zoe, I know you’re so thoughtful, and as you mentioned a minute ago, you put conscious effort towards these things. I’m wondering, is there anything you do now that you think helps get you further along with your practice, in your process? Are there any little routine habits you do that bring more of you out?
[00:16:34] Zoe: I’ll share with you a weird one.
[00:16:35] Sean: I love the weird ones. This is so great.
[00:16:38] Zoe: Okay. So nobody else does this because it’s just something that I invented and it’s not something that I teach. It’s just so far been for me, but I have this journal that I write in before I write when I was working on the book or at papers, anything that I’m writing, and this practice is called my nature journal and Nietzsche’s philosophy is that the purpose of being human is to become someone who does not deny. And part of my research background is I’ve done a lot of research on self-deception so, I’m keenly interested in and keenly aware of the degree to which we deceive ourselves by just not seeing things that we don’t want to see.
For me, the process of stripping that away is becoming someone who does not deny it. And my nature journal is just one or two pages that I sit down and scribble out a stream of consciousness before I write. And every line begins, I do not deny, I do not deny. And what comes out are good things, shameful things, exciting things, fearful things all the stuff that’s crowding and clouding my mind so that I can have a clear mind when I start writing.
[00:18:04] Sean: Is that the first thing you do in the morning? I’m thinking of the creative practice of the morning pages, which is just three pages nonstop, freehand flowing. Is it the same similar practice, just using that prompt instead?
[00:18:13] Zoe: For me, it helps to do it immediately before I’m writing my other thing. Because that’s the moment of truth when I need to have a clear brain. So if I did it right when I wake up in the morning, my brain is clouded again by the time I sit down to write.
Self-deception
[00:18:28] Sean: I know exactly what you mean. You mentioned self-deception. I know you’ve done a ton of work around this and I want to hit on some self-deception and even a little bit more around decision-making. But I would love to know if there was just some like aha for you around self-deception, which you discovered through your research, where most people aren’t aware of, just how deceptive we are to ourselves. Is there anything like that you’d want to share?
[00:18:49] Zoe: One of the interesting studies that I did that I haven’t published because it just didn’t fit into a paper but I was intrigued about is when you ask people about what they deceive themselves about, and you ask people about what other people deceived themselves about. We tend to say that we’re deceiving ourselves about romantic things more than anything else. That’s almost the only domain in which we notice we have self-deception going on because self-deception is not something you can perceive at the moment. After all, you’re deceived. But we think in hindsight, damn, I didn’t realize. And it’s always going to be something bad about the other person, not about ourselves.
Like, oh, there were these red flags at the beginning of the relationship, and in hindsight I see them, but I was deceiving myself because this person was hot or I was in love or whatever it was. But when we ask somebody what your close friend deceives themselves about, it’s usually about their competence and they’re overconfident, and they think that they’re better than they are. And we’re like, no, no. You’re not as smart as you think. You’re not as hot as you think. You’re not as good as you think, but we never see those kinds of things in ourselves.
[00:20:18] Sean: I’m wondering for you as a researcher when you come across a finding like that, what do you do? How do we even make that actionable and start to realize these other ways we’re deceiving ourselves?
[00:20:30] Zoe: It just helps me have some humility to know I’m worse than I think that I am, and I’m not going to perceive those flaws that other people are perceiving. I can ask for advice about things that I want to improve. And instead of just asking, like, okay, what’s wrong with me? Because nobody who cares about you wants to answer that question, asking questions like, okay, on this specific thing how can I do better? Or here’s a list. I love working with executives and I’ve done this some with myself as well. The list that Marshall Goldsmith has in his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
He has 20 or 25 things that are specific mistakes that leaders make that they don’t realize are mistakes. And they might even think that it helped them on the path, but if they keep doing them, it’s career-limiting. One of my big ones, for example, when you give this list to other people, so it doesn’t help that much to introspect, but you give the list of other people and you’re like, Hey, on this list, can you pick one for me? And that’s easier to give feedback on than just like, Hey Sean, so what do you think is wrong with me? And you’ll be like, oh, I think you’re great, right? But if I give you a list and say like, Hey Sean, out of this list, I know I’m great, I know you love me, but to help me do even better at my job, what’s one of these?
So the feedback that I have gotten is that I add too much value. I have a lot of ideas and a lot of enthusiasm. I love it when people ask me for advice. When you can tell you’re like, Hey, what? And I’m like, oh, blah, blah all this stuff. But to help other people be successful, mostly the advice needs to come from them, especially if it’s a specific situation that they’re working on. So if you come to me and ask for advice on your specific situation, I need to acknowledge this is something that you’re asking me for advice on because you’ve already been thinking about it. You probably already have better advice for yourself than I do.
And if I tell you something that you’ve already thought of, then I’m just undermining your enthusiasm because it doesn’t feel like you get to get credit for this good idea, then I’m taking credit for your good idea. So if you come to me and you ask me for advice on your specific situation, I will remind myself to say, well, tell me about what you’re thinking about. And instead of saying, well, here’s an idea, I might say, so tell me what you thought about this particular domain. I’m not at this ninja level, but when I get to the ninja level of inception like Leo DiCaprio where I have some idea, but instead of me giving you the idea, I’m seeding the idea in your mind and it pops up and you feel like it’s yours. That’s like triple quadruple black-belt level.
Changing People’s Minds Vs Influencing Their Behaviors
[00:23:54] Sean: I’m just smiling because it’s so funny, we seek those masters because we’re looking for that, Hey, here’s the simple answer. Social media does this all the time, but the best teachers and mentors in my life, they’ve gotten me further because they’ve posed in my mind better questions. If we want better answers in life, we’ve got to ask ourselves better questions. And I know you bring that to light a lot in the book.
One of the things that you read about in the book is changing people’s minds doesn’t necessarily influence their behavior, which is always like our goal. And we think if we change someone’s mind, their behavior is automatically going to be influenced and changed. And I’m wondering why that’s not the case. It’s like we have a new epiphany, mind’s changed, why don’t we act on it? Especially now it’s the new year, why isn’t our behavior changing?
[00:24:36] Zoe: You and I are talking right now on January 6th and half of the world has just made a new year’s resolution and half of them have already failed it. And almost all of the rest of us are going to fail it by the end of the month. Changing somebody’s mind, let’s just start with when it’s already successfully happening, and then we’ll talk about how it’s almost impossible. When you’ve successfully changed somebody’s mind, or when you’ve made up your mind about something that has almost nothing to do with whether you’re going to follow through on those intentions because motivation and process are just completely decoupled.
The biggest obstacle to us following through on our good intentions is ease. Ease is the best predictor of behavior. And it’s a stronger predictor of behavior than motivation or satisfaction, price, quality, intentions. What matters is how easy something is or how much effort we have to put in. And so if you are changing somebody’s mind, but it hasn’t gotten any easier for them to do that thing that you want them to do, it’s likely, their behavior won’t follow. And we can see this in examples like the five-a-day campaign to get people to eat more fruits and vegetables has been, as far as I know, still the most expensive public health marketing campaign that had anything to do with nutrition.
And it was radically successful by their metrics and replicated in, I think, 32 countries around the world because they were just looking at awareness. They were measuring awareness. When they started in 1990, only 8% of people knew that they should eat five vegetables a day. And by 1995 it had quadrupled and 32% of people knew that they should eat five fruits and vegetables a day. But if you looked at behavior, it was 11% in 1990 and 11% in 1995, it did absolutely nothing. And then during the later part of the decade, it declined. The campaign had cost in those years, $250 million. This was a colossal waste of money, but a perfect example of changing minds that didn’t do anything to change behavior.
You’re a healthy guy, so I’m sure you eat plenty of vegetables, but when you think about it, it’s not easy to eat vegetables. It takes effort at all stages, planning, preparation, shopping, all of these. It also takes resisting temptation when you open up the fridge or the cupboard you’re hungry and you see something else. Let me ask you, you do eat lots of vegetables, right? I’m just guessing.
[00:27:36] Sean: Correct. Yes.
[00:27:37] Zoe: Okay. What do you do? What practices have you put in place to make it less effortful for you to eat vegetables?
[00:27:46] Sean: Thinking on my feet here. This for me is a multi-decade practice where it started with a vision. So I played elite sports, professional sports, so my drivers wanted to be the best in the world, what do I have to do? For me, it was so much easier resisting certain things, but I also realized how flawed I am. So to get to your point, the path of least resistance, right? If you were to look in my fridge, I do not have all of these tempting things that would take me away from selecting a vegetable.
I’ve cultivated my environment and it’s lucky my wife’s the same, our kids eat similarly, so I don’t have all of these temptations. Two things, the path of least resistance, like I just said, but then also I generally want to be vibrant, I want to be fulfilled, I want to be able to attack life, and I just feel different if I don’t eat that way. So for me, it’s like a no-brainer. I’m not making a choice every time I go to eat, it’s just part of my identity. So there’s no decision to be made. There’s probably more than you needed there.
[00:28:44] Zoe: No, it’s exactly perfect and helpful. So the two things are part of your identity. When we’re able to make a transition like that, to internalize some decision as I’m just not a person who does that. I’m a person who doesn’t do that, then it becomes easy and that’s super rare. And I’ve talked to people, for example, who go from smoking to non-smoking by internalizing the identity of I’m a non-smoker and a non-smoker just wouldn’t do that.
[00:29:14] Sean: When someone offers you a cigarette, people will be like Nah, I don’t want one other people will be like, no, I don’t smoke. And there’s a clear difference. There’s a difference between identity and then having to make that decision every time.
[00:29:24] Zoe: Yeah. And what you’re talking about about the path of least resistance is, well, of course, you’re going to eat healthy food because it’s impossible for you not to. And, that is exactly how most healthy eating people have organized their lives. They’re not resisting temptations. So a lot of us who resist temptations and we have things that call to us in the fridge or the freezer, the wine cellar or whatever it is, we don’t understand how does somebody resists it. And the fact is they don’t. They don’t have the temptation around and that’s what makes it easy.
How Structure Creates Behavior
[00:30:08] Sean: We were talking about food and getting people to change their behavior, I would love for you just to illuminate what you did with Google in terms of shaping how they eat. I think this is just so fascinating and just shows the impact you’re able to have.
[00:30:20] Zoe: I worked with Google for years and my consulting project with the food team that expanded to the center for customer insights at Yale, with other faculty and other students. I created this partnership with Michelle Hurtado at Google and she’s now left Google I’ve left the project and it continues. It’s been a very fruitful partnership. So many things that we’ve worked on, but some of those include encouraging people to eat vegetables, and discouraging people from snacking. So here’s an example and a bunch of other ones to eat more sustainably, reuse water bottles, and things like that.
One of the ones that had to do with mindless snacking that’s so simple to implement in your own house. That’s exactly related to what you just said, we had research assistants go in and just spy on people in a break room where there were two coffee beverage centers, and there was a snack area that was closer to one of them. And all they were doing is noting how many people took a snack if they went to the one beverage station and how many people took a snack if they went to the other beverage station. And then we interviewed people to say, why did you go to one beverage station or the other? And it had nothing to do with the snacks.
50% more people were taking a snack if it was close by and it’s in your field of vision. You’re not planning to take a snack but it’s there and you grab it. This wasn’t even an intervention, it was just an observational study with over a thousand people. But it was so powerful that when we presented these results to Google a team member from the architecture firm that was working with them on their food areas immediately during the conference, after this presentation calls back to headquarters and says, listen, we need to redesign all of the corporate break rooms that we’re making for all of our clients so that we don’t have drinks and snacks in the same area. This is a no-brainer.
What Drew Zoe Into Influence
[00:32:28] Sean: What I love so much about this is I’m fascinated with system design and how structure creates behavior. You’ll see the same or different people entered in the same environment, and you’d think that, oh, these are the high performers, they’re completely different, no it’s the structure. Just these little subtle things can influence behavior so much. I know when we were talking about the different decade chapters, you mentioned getting intrigued by influence. What was it for you that drew you in to influence and now this has become your life’s work?
[00:32:31] Zoe: I guess after theater, which I was just really excited about, and it was lots of fun and taught me to connect with people emotionally. I became really curious about influence when in college I started working in sales. My first job in sales was door-to-door sales where it’s so cringe-worthy on all sides. Everyone hates door-to-door salespeople, but I’m telling you door-to-door salespeople are also cringing when they start this job because it’s so uncomfortable to interrupt you when you’re eating your dinner and they’re coming to try to sell you something and ask you for your money.
I was in college and I needed some money and there’s a lot of money in sales, so I took this job and was terrified. I just thought that I was going to die interrupting strangers to ask for their money. And what I learned was how kind and warm people are, how much more patient and tolerant and friendly they are, and how much it depends far more on how you ask for something than what it is that you’re asking for. I got to learn this from practice. Approaching people with warm enthusiasm and kindness, and a good sense of humor meant that nobody was slamming the door in my face.
A surprising number of people are buying, I was selling discount dry cleaning books in this random job. Plenty of people buy them, plenty of people don’t buy them, but it’s a comfortable conversation either way when you approach someone as a human being rather than a means to your ends. And so that got me curious to study more and I read Cialdini’s book, Influence, which I loved. That was a big influence on me stepping out of the corporate world and joining academia to study this stuff and do the kind of research that Bob Cialdini was doing.
[00:35:05] Sean: You mentioned Professor Cialdini. We’ve been lucky enough to have him on, so we’ll have that link up here in the transcript, but you mentioned the how, instead of the what, and I’m wondering just because I know you’ve done so many research projects, are there any concrete examples of how people can see that play out in the real world?
[00:35:20] Zoe: Could you say again? I didn’t quite follow.
Misperception Around Asking
[00:35:29 Sean: You mentioned there’s such a difference in terms of how you ask something as opposed to what specifically you’re asking for. And I’m just wondering what that looks like.
[00:35:35] Zoe: I’ll share a misperception that a lot of people have that is hurting a lot of people, and it’s explaining, I believe a significant part of the gender wage gap. Women are believing that because they get judged sometimes and there’s backlash sometimes around negotiating and advocating for themselves, and we can talk more in detail about this if you want, but women believe that they shouldn’t ask for too much. And there are plenty of men who believe this too, but it’s just more pervasive with women. So we believe that we shouldn’t ask for too much. And so lots of us are trying not to ask for more than we think we deserve or more than we think that we’ll get.
And so we ask far less often and we ask for far less than men do. But the reality is that when women are not just in lab studies, but large scale, real-world field studies of labor markets, when women ask for as much as men do, they get paid as much as men do. So there’s no question that it’s not how much you’re asking for that’s making people uncomfortable with you, that there is a backlash against women who are perceived as selfish or entitled or greedy or not warm, it’s more common for women to experience that than for men to experience that. And then there’s also, unfortunately, the sort of double whammy of women being more uncomfortable negotiating, especially for themselves.
And when we’re uncomfortable, that comes out more. And when we’re uncomfortable and we’re needy and we’re scared and we’re asking for something that neediness has this repulsive edge to it. So this is why I’m passionate about just helping people get to practice so that when you’re in that high-stakes situation, like negotiating a job, you’ve gotten a lot of practice, you’ve gotten rejections, you’ve had successes so that you don’t have that feeling that makes people want to say, no.
[00:37:23] Sean: I was going through the book, I made a private note on pushing back on resistance because I think this is like a superpower. And you had a line, I have it right here, “But I learned how to ask for things and how to survive when people said no. I learned how to get curious about resistance instead of pushing back.” That’s just one small little line, but so important. Instead of pushing back on that resistance, how do you get open? How do you get curious? I thought that was just a superpower, and I would love it if you could just illuminate more on the thought process behind that.
[00:38:32] Zoe: Interestingly, you’re asking about that because you’ve been super successful in the world of sales and I’m a hundred percent sure that you had to master that to be as successful as you were in that.
[00:38:47] Sean: Yeah, I agree with that.
[00:38:50] Zoe: Okay. People like you are some of the only people on the planet who understand and practice that. And that’s what distinguishes a successful master salesperson from the rest of us and also from unsuccessful salespeople. And so for people who are listening, who are not in sales, a lot of nice people, a lot of my favorite people hate the idea of working in sales and it feels cringy to them because they don’t want to be aggressive, manipulative, or like those sleazy kinds of salespeople that all of us have interacted with at some point in time. But those are not the master salespeople. Those are not the most successful salespeople.
The most successful salespeople are people who when you’re interacting with them, it doesn’t feel like a sales conversation. It just feels like a conversation. And instead of pushing you and giving you something to resist, they’re stepping back, opening up so that you feel inclined to step in. And when we reject someone, when we say no, or when we criticize or express some discomfort, we’re always anticipating that that person will resist us because that’s been most of our experience. So when we say no to somebody or express some concern or objection or whatever that is, we’re expecting that they’re going to be defensive.
And so it’s a master level move to say something like, so tell me more about that or help me understand, or what I think of hearing you say is this in and to have that openness is just it’s disarming and it’s very hard to resist somebody who has so little pressure against us. We feel ourselves leaning in.
How Can Influence Have A Positive Impact?
[00:40:00] Sean: You mentioned a minute ago, just in terms of so many people perceive sales as cringe-worthy, and a lot of people have the same feeling towards influence. Like this is just this highly manipulative thing. You and I are on the same page in terms of how you view the influence and its importance. I would love for you just to shed light on what you think about influence and how it can have this positive impact.
[00:41:02] Zoe: Yeah, absolutely similar cringe-worthiness about influence. And I think it’s partly because of social media influencers that a lot of us are annoyed by, but when we reject influence or influence tactics or influence techniques, we are leaving power to the power-hungry because influence ultimately is power. And it’s not that I believe influence is a good thing, I don’t. I also don’t believe it’s a bad thing. It’s power like electricity, and you can turn on the lights in your house or you could power an electric chair. So it’s something that I believe all of us have the responsibility to cultivate an understanding and a knowledge of and learn how to practice it because that’s the only way that we can get things done in the world that we want to get done.
And of course, I want to empower people who have good intentions, more than bad intentions, but power-hungry people are already studying influence and they’ve read every other book. And the way that I’ve written this book is so that it will be palatable to people who haven’t sought out all of those other books, and people who wouldn’t find it pleasant or comfortable or wouldn’t even be willing to use some of those very heavy-handed, hard sales techniques and things like that. I don’t like them either. I wouldn’t use them. And, they’re not successful in the long run. It’s just only in the very short-term transaction that they can work.
Willingness To Ask
[00:42:44] Sean: One of the cool things that you write about is just the impact this can have for the students at your course, the mastering influence and persuasion course at Yale. And you talked about some of the difficult conversations they have even around like the dinner table or with distant families whose relationships have been lost. So I know the listeners are can read further than that, but I’m wondering for you, what are the biggest “aha” for your students that after they leave the course, they’re like, wow, this foundationally changed me, and how I view things. Is there anything like that just comes to mind for you?
[00:43:13] Zoe: Yeah. And I’ll share the thing that is boring and obvious because this is the truth. What students get out of the course is what I expect readers will most get out of the book that you’ll think you shouldn’t have to take a course or read a book for, but it’s really to just ask. And it’s so obvious and it’s one sentence, and I can tell you just ask and you’re like, okay, I kind of knew that already. I didn’t need somebody with a Harvard Ph.D. to tell me this, but it’s the practice. And what happens when we start practicing, asking more often is that all of a sudden it’s like this veil is lifted from our eyes and we realize how much we haven’t been asking and all of the opportunities that have passed us by leading until this moment where there were so many things we could have asked for, so many people we could have asked things from, but we were playing small because we didn’t want to be greedy or manipulative or to inconvenience someone.
And when we start practicing asking, and we do it in a warm, genuine, and good-humored way, we realize people are happy for us to ask. The world is happy for us to ask and they don’t have to say yes all the time. Being someone willing to ask is the most life-changing shift that you can make. And for all the entrepreneurs who are listening, this is absolutely the thing. And the book will teach you tons of other practical, specific types of things, and you’ll find the one thing that’s the most important for you. But asking is just the fundamentally most important thing for everyone. We don’t know how much we’re not doing it until we start practicing it more intentionally.
[00:45:04] Sean: Zoe, that’s the key there, right? As you mentioned, it’s so obvious, and I have to agree. I feel like I’m someone who has kind of built up that muscle of asking, I was revisiting that chapter this morning, and it was like, you know what, Sean, you’re not that good at that. And you missed so many opportunities and there were so many better ways you could have structured this. So I found just tremendous value in that. You just say it was so obvious and I’m like, you just went so many layers deeper where it was so actionable. And I just appreciate that, when you can take a book, you can take a specific chapter that unlocks you or opens up certain things.
The Impact of the Subconscious Mind
Any entrepreneur out there or anyone in general, I do think there’s tremendous value in that. And then one of the other things I’m always really intrigued by, and I know you’ve studied previously and even wrote a lot about is just our subconscious mind and the impact. So I would love to just start high-level understanding from you, how you think about the influence and the impact our subconscious mind has on us. When we all think we’re rational human beings and making all these conscious decisions.
[00:46:05] Zoe: For listeners who might have done some reading in behavioral economics, this is going to be related to what you have heard of as system one and system two. And if that’s not familiar, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to memorize those names, but the idea that I find to be the fundamentally most important idea in influence is from behavioral economics. And as you just said, Sean, it’s about how our subconscious mind is vastly more powerful than our conscious mind in determining our behavior. But because it’s unconscious, we’re not perceiving it. We think of ourselves as being these conscious, rational people making deliberate decisions, and then we project that on other people as well.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The proportion of influence that these two systems have can’t be measured. It would be impossible. But researchers who study this estimate that maybe 95% of our behavior is driven by the unconscious system. These are our gut reactions, visceral responses, quick judgments, and habits. Anything that we’ve done through practice eventually becomes habitual and we’re not even thinking about it. So when we’re trying to influence someone else, it’s more important than we think about how to influence the unconscious mind and gut reactions, emotional responses, and mindless habits than making the best persuasive case with the perfect argument and facts and data.
That’s also important, but, within the interplay of these two systems, it’s super important that the unconscious reaction happens first. It’s fast, it’s instantaneous, it’s always the first response. And then the conscious reaction is the second guesser and it’s only sometimes, and it’s only if we have enough bandwidth. And if our mind thinks that this is a sufficiently important situation for us to use our limited conscious resources and in the book, I go so far, nerds, and even if you already know about these two systems, I go deeply into the interplay between them.
We don’t need to get all that complicated, but what happens is the unconscious mind is influencing the conscious mind a lot and not vice versa. And so the conscious mind thinks that we’re making these objective rational decisions, but we’re doing a lot more rationalizing the desires and preferences and opinions and assumptions that our unconscious mind has.
How Marketing Taps Into The Subconscious
[00:48:46] Sean: Oh, I love that. Do you have any examples? I know your work within marketing any brands that you feel like have really tapped into this and understood this and influence our behavior basically at a subconscious level here.
[00:48:58] Zoe: It’s funny because what good brands don’t do it, right? This is something that consumer marketing and advertising have understood for a long time that we just haven’t mapped onto leadership. So television advertising, when you look at which television ads are more effective, a market research study looked at 1400 ads to say, was this a campaign that was more appealing to the conscious rational part, or the unconscious emotional part? Or was it a mix? And they found that ads that appealed to the unconscious emotional part were vastly more successful than ads that appealed to the rational part.
And actually, it didn’t help to mix them. It was less helpful to try to do both things at the same time. And when you look at most television ads, they’re trying to appeal to your emotions, many of them telling stories. This is not rocket science cutting edge “Aha” for consumer marketing. The “Aha” thing here is that as a human being interacting with other human beings, your employees, or your bosses, your friends, your family, your partner, your kids those people are just like consumers, where we need to consider their emotional reactions and their gut check immediate responses just as much as we do with the consumers.
It’s just that we don’t want to use marketing techniques. We don’t want to use consumer marketing techniques with those people that we care about, and so the book goes into a lot of other kinds of practices and strategies we can use with them.
Big Influences Who’ve Shaped Zoe
[00:50:53] Sean: You had some really good insights into that, which is just so important for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a leadership position because we’re all essentially in certain leadership positions within our family, our teams, anything like that. I am curious though, just mentioning kind of the certain people who unlock you and have an impact on you, who have been those biggest influences on you to shape who you are today?
[00:51:15] Zoe: I’ve mentioned already my mom and I dedicated my book to her because she’s been the biggest influence on me. I mentioned briefly, I grew up poor and she was a single mom and she was an art teacher and a summer camp director. She was so fun. She was the funniest person I knew. And she embodied being someone that people want to say yes to. And I shared, she has this vicarious joy for other people’s success. When I was little, she ran this summer camp in the summer to make money when she wasn’t teaching, and she would do things like that were just absolutely crazy.
She would blindfold us put us in a car and then drop us off in the middle of nowhere with a compass and a topographical map and be like, okay, kids find your way back. And like, who does that kind of thing? Like when we would go on a treasure hunt, she would have had gone through the woods and hidden all of these puzzle pieces. And then you put the puzzle together and you get a map that takes you to a pond. And she’s buried at a Footlocker full of like gold-painted, fake jewelry, treats, and stuff. That’s like legit Pirate’s booty. She had people so inspired, counselors and collaborators that they were writing their songs, or the camp had its folk songs.
When we were in a campout and we’d had to build our teepee, there was no rain, but we’ve just built a teepee. And it’s just my mom’s spontaneous thought that we should do a rain dance to try to make it rain. And so she’s having all of us make up this rain dance and song. And as we do the rain dance and song, it starts raining out of nowhere. There was not a cloud in the sky. So my mom brought this joy and this good influence and also the sense of magic to things in life that weren’t necessarily going to be fun.
Like we’d have no money for ice cream, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment, my sister and I shared the bedroom. My mom slept on the couch and even just having ice cream wasn’t something you go and do. So she just says like, Hey, let’s go on the bike trail, walk on the trail and look for change from the universe. And so we just find change on the bike trail until we had enough money for ice cream and then we would go buy it. So it’s this level of quietly exuberant optimism that probably had the biggest effect on me, was my mama.
[00:54:13] Sean: Zoe, thank you for sharing that. It makes me think of two things. First off, I have someone in my life view them as a mentor and what they try to do is bring magic and delight into every interaction they have with someone else. It sounds like that’s very much like your mom, but then I was coming across another bit of interesting research. I’m a parent to two kids. They did this research around what children remembered the most about their parents, and you think maybe it’s they did this thing for them to get them in a certain school, something like that.
And it was nothing like that. It was all these spontaneous interactions where these like joyful moments came out of nowhere. And it sounds like you’ve got these incredible memories because of what your mom was able to do. So I’m saying this out loud because I’m thinking now I’m going to go create a treasure map and me and my son, we’re going to go look for it, but then other people can do that as well. So I just appreciate you bringing light to that.
[00:55:05] Zoe: That’s beautiful. I didn’t know about that research.
Foundationally Game-changing Books
[00:55:06] Sean: I’ll have to pull the specific study. I know you’re fascinated with the studies there and send it over your way, but I would also love to know besides your mom who had such an impact, were there any foundationally game-changing books or things you’ve come across that you go back to, or just really shaped your thinking today?
[00:55:25] Zoe: Yeah. I’m a nerd so books are pretty much my life.
[00:55:33] Sean: A well-coordinated bookshelf there.
[00:55:39] Zoe: You can see, yes. I would say, one of my absolute favorite books of all time was recommended to me by one of my students. Let me see if I have it easy to grab right here. I do one. One sec, this one.
[00:55:59] Sean: Is that Love Does?
[00:56:00] Zoe: Yeah, Love Does by Bob Goff, and this is the spiritual version of the message that I teach and preach. Bob Goff is deeply Christian, I’m not religious at all. There’s a lot of Jesus in here, but as a non-religious person, I didn’t find that uncomfortable at all. And he’s writing about his adventures in audaciousness and he does things like, this is a chapter that I read to my daughter’s third-grade classroom when she was in third grade because it was so inspiring. And every chapter is so inspiring. It’s called the interviews and this was after 911, his kids were upset and they said, what can we do?
And they have a family conversation around the dinner table about what can we do in the world right now? And the kids were just saying, I wish that leaders of countries would just talk with each other. And I wish that we could talk with them and just help everybody get along. And it’s such an innocent, sweet, and almost generic kid wish. Whose kid, wouldn’t say something like that? But Bob Goff, because he’s amazing, he’s like, okay, well let’s reach out to them. And so they start writing letters, they write letters, his kids write letters to all of the leaders of all of the countries asking if they can come and meet with them and talk with them, and be friends with them.
And this speaks to the just ask and we have no idea how likely people are to say yes. First, nothing happens, and then they start getting back a couple of letters saying, thank you kind of busy but appreciate your message. And then they start getting letters from people saying yes. And so they, Bob and his wife pause the work that they’re doing, and they go on an adventure with their kids and they go around the world, meeting the world leaders who said yes to them. And they have adventures like showing up in Russia, tea parties, the spread of all the perfect pastries for the kids. With every world leader that they meet with they give them in a little box, the key to their house.
They give them their house key and say, we would love to see you. You’re a real friend now please come back and visit us and you can come and stay any time. And he doesn’t say who it is that came and stayed with them after that. He creates this so transformative experience for his children, which is beyond even my mom. And he’s created these beautiful moments of interaction for these world leaders who are super, super busy, but they love that these kids want to talk with them and they’re hopeful about the world. And then he gets to share this with people in this book. And then I share this, I assigned his chapter to my students to inspire them. I just believe this guy is to me as inspiring as anyone else in the world for being audacious and kind and making huge asks.
Zoe’s Involvement in Climate Change
[00:59:41] Sean: Zoe, that was beautiful. I’ve not come across that book before, but I’m certainly going to order one. That was probably one of the best answers I’ve ever received about a book, that’s impacted, someone. Thank you for sharing that. And then just thinking about impact, you’re having a tremendous impact obviously with your work, but then you’re even donating half the proceeds into something really meaningful for you. So I would love to just hear about this because I think it’s so impactful and I think this is going to deeply resonate with a lot of people.
[00:01:08] Zoe: Thank you. And actually, I didn’t even realize it until this moment, but it might be that I made that decision in part, because Bob Goff donated all of his profits from this book that he wrote to his favorite charity. He does incredible charity work. My philosophy about influence is that as you’re going down the path of becoming a more influential person, it’s your opportunity and your privilege to get to work on bigger and bigger problems and work with people who are doing more and more to solve those problems. So for me, the existential problem facing all of us in this generation is the climate crisis.
I look around and I say, what can I do to help? I spend a good deal of my time working with climate activists and people working in sustainability, trying to help them learn more and be empowered with influence tools. And I was super fortunate to get a generous advance for this book. I am super fortunate to have already a great life, which some of it is influenced, and some of it is frankly, just luck. Anybody who’s super successful, luck is a piece of that for sure. I already had all of my needs taken care of, and so I decided, yeah, I can give my time and I can give my expertise and I can give my love and my platform, which like right now, the first organization that I’ve donated, the first $50,000 to just last month is 350.org.
They’re grassroots climate activists who are very active and very successful all over the world. But also we need to give money. Those of us who are in a position to be able to give money, especially if we’re working on the climate crisis, our money is much more valuable now than it’s going to be in the future because this is the moment where we have the opportunity to make game-changing world-historic shifts to steer the boat before it’s too late. So we can save a lot more lives helping and investing now than we can help in investing in the future.
Long-form Conversation With Anyone Dead or Alive
[01:02:28] Sean: One of the questions I hope people leave this conversation with is the one you just pose to yourself, what more can I do to help? I think if we all looked through life through that lens we’d be living in a much different place and I hope moving forward more people will start asking that. Final one before we link up additional links in where everyone can pick up the book, which is Influence Is Your Superpower. I would love to know if you could do this, sit down long-form conversation, just explore any topic you would want to with someone dead or alive, just not a family member or friend, who would you love getting to do that with?
[01:02:56] Zoe: Oh my gosh. Oh, it’s so fun. I think at least today it would probably be Brit Marling. She’s my favorite actress and she’s also my favorite director-writer. She’s so creative, brilliant, weird, and has more going on in her mind as I perceive her than most of the rest of us. And she’s most famous for being the star of the show, the OA, which is on Netflix. If anyone is a sci-fi fan or even if you’re not, I highly recommend it. So yeah, Brit Marling, I’m a huge fan. I would love to talk with her like this someday.
[01:03:35] Sean: That’s awesome. So I just want to make sure all the listeners are completely aware of the book, Influence Is Your Superpower, anything else you want to leave them with? And obviously, we’ll have everything linked up in terms of where they can pick it up. Just want to make sure they’re able to stay connected with you.
[01:03:52] Zoe: Thank you. You can check out my website, Zoechance.com. And also if you’re an audiobook listener, like a lot of us who are obsessed with self-improvement are, I narrated the audio. It was really fun. And it’s available on audible as well.
[01:04:05] Sean: Fantastic. Well, Zoe Chance, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
[01:04:09] Zoe: Thank you so much, Sean. It’s been a pleasure. Take care.
[01:04:13] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of What Got You There. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is by giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.
