Thanks to Performance Development Group and TLG I had the pleasure of speaking to business owners in the north of England today.
Tweets about this talk:
11th May, 2012 by @FinisherCre8ive: “Had the pleasure of seeing and meeting @RichEnion today. One of the best speakers I have seen in a LONG time!!”
11th May, 2012 by @EurekaCorporate: “Inspirational talk from @RichEnion from @BassToneSlap at this morning’s breakfast seminar hosted by @PDGTips”
11th May, 2012 by @charlottebritto: “Great talk by @RichEnion this morning. Good #inspiration for self belief & values!”
My motivational talk is based around the themes of creating leverage and having tenacity. In the talk I draw from my personal experience leading up to and during the successful pitch of BassToneSlap in the BBC’s Dragons Den.
One of the references during this talk was Jim Rohn when he said: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” If this is the first time you’ve heard of Jim Rohn I highly recommend you check him out!
Here are a couple more photos for you while the video footage is being edited…
“Many factors contribute to rising obesity rates. Among them: The abundance of low-priced, high-calorie processed foods and sugary drinks. Incessant food marketing to drive people to eat more, even when they are full” Harvard (2012)
Rich Enion training CrossFit in Medellin with Fuerza CrossFit.
Quite possibly the best weekend of the year so far! We trained all weekend, competed at training (CrossFit) and I had the great privilage of interviewing two of Colombia’s Olympic Weightlifting team. Check this video out and leave a comment when you’ve watched it!
Some people will be wondering – how do you get to meet these people? How do you find people that are at the top of their game and get them to stand in front of a Flip cam and answer your stupid questions?
Easy – ask. With a silent and confident subconscious messages of ‘this is what we’re doing right now. Welcome to my reality.’
This interview is with one of the current models in the fitness industry, Tom Dyer. Food, Nutrition, Psychology. And, two guys (me being one of them) that probably should have been cast for Zoolander…
Growing up as a chubby/fat kid working in my parents newsagent I would see fitness magazines almost every day, wondering how the cover models created their physiques. Slowly and surely I’ve learned more and more, finding knowledgeable people to learn from.
Once upon a time In a Borough market Tea & Chocolate shop
Customer (wanting dark chocolate): “Is this chocolate really dark?”
Cashier: “It’s actually quite mellow…”
Customer: (thinks very hard contemplating his important decision)
Cashier: “It’s nice”
Customer Instantly replies: “Yes. I will buy it”
So what?
I reference a story in the book ‘Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion’ by Robert Cialdini. Why? Because we’re more susceptible to the Jedi mind tricks of others than we think, particularly in this world of information overload!
Check this out…
So, Cialdini (pronounced Chal-deen-ee) writes about this experiment to test animal and human behaviour when exposed to certain stimuli. Put very crudely, the experiment is designed to test influential behaviours & language patterns to see what ‘works’.
The first part of their experiment involved a turkey.
Apparatus:
1 Turkey
1 Live Pole Cat (turkey’s innate predator)
1 Stuffed Pole Cat
1 Turkey penn (test environment)
1 Tape player.
1 Tape recording….
They put the live Pole Cat inside the turkey’s penn, just out of reach of the turkey and recorded the turkey’s response. It’s response was, as you can imagine, to completely freak out, fear for its life and do anything it possibly could to try to change this unimaginable (for the turkey) situation. They recorded the results, took out the live pole cat and let the turkey relax.
(In hindsight, on an psychological level for the turkey this is kind of cruel really. Animal cruelty is something I am very much against. Though I’m told turkey’s are the same as Gold Fish and can only recall information for a matter of seconds*)
Next, they put the stuffed pole cat in the penn. What do you think happened? The turkey completely freaked out again! In the same way it did with the live pole cat! Bizarre!? What’s going on here then? The turkey doesn’t know the difference between a live or a stuffed predator – pretty stupid really. Yes. Kind of. Turkeys have really poor eyesight and so it recognises what it thinks is a threat and freaks out.
Wait to see what happens next… this is when it gets REALLY interesting…
They take the same stuffed pole cat though this time they play a tape recording of the ‘cheep cheeping’ of a baby turkey from the stuffed pole cat.
The turkey calmly wanders over and treats the stuffed pole cat just like it were its own offspring.
What!? How can this be?
The turkey hears the sound of a baby turkey and like a robot snaps into auto-mode. In his book Cialdini calls this ‘click whirr’. ‘Click’ is the trigger, ‘Whirr’ is the automatic response.
So, how does this affect me you might be thinking?
Ever tried to convince someone of something? To do something you want them to? Like, wash the dishes, give you a discount, give you a massage, let you in the queue… or any of the other hundreds of things you might wish to have more influential control over in your life.
They took this finding and projected it onto humans, we are animals after all. What is it that humans do that might be similar?
The next part of their experiment:
Apparatus:
- 1 Photocopy shop (Xerox shop for Americans)
- 1 queue of people
The subject went to join the queue, they pushed in at the front by saying something basic like: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” They recorded the results and found that 60% of the time people said ‘yes’.
Then they added another few words to their script: “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”. This rose to 94% of people saying yes.
So that’s a pretty high incidence rate of ‘Yes’. But wait for this… When they changed the script again to “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”. The success rate was 93%, which is quite phenomenal because there was no new information and because, well just because.
Ridiculous I hear you think! Perhaps so but it’s true. Try it. As humans we thrive on reasons, closure and solutions. Particularly reasons. We just don’t like that dissonance of not knowing, you know that feeling you get at the end of a great movie when it doesn’t conclude it fully.
Just like the turkey hearing a baby turkey’s chirping, the word ‘because’ is our own click-whirr. And, so long as the information that comes after the ‘because’ is related and doesn’t jolt the conversation pattern we are highly susceptible to the orator’s desire.
Use it with great care, and be aware when you hear people giving you ‘reasons’, make sure their reason makes sense and is valid. And, remember this kind of thing is natural for humans to use in conversation. We, as humans started using ‘because’ naturally before we found out that its a tool in persuasion.
* I made that up. Who knows if Gold fish can only remember a couple of seconds into the past. And if they can I have certainly done no research into finding out if turkey’s have a similarly poor memory.
** (‘heaven forbid’ I hear the English reading this say – get over it. No one wants to queue and I for one will do almost ANYTHING not to. This is great for me because I get into very interesting and potentially vulnerable situations through not being able to queue and also revolutionary because having a knee-jerk-freakout reaction to queueing is a great indicator that you might need to become aware of a little thing called ‘instant gratification’ and how it affects your life. Read up on it).
One of the things I’ve come to learn is that the better way of eating and ‘dieting’ is to eat real food. By that and for the most part I mean food that does not come in a brightly coloured packet. Rather, food that either had parents or grows in the ground.
What is this nonsense they’re telling us to buy from supermarkets day in day out? That the supermarkets are enticing us to buy with offers like buy one get one free, half price, save… Playing on our emotional desperation in this ‘economic climate’. There is something profoundly wrong with food the marketeers are telling us to eat, hence why I interviewed my Nanna! Because, when she was younger marketing was at the very most – lame, and they ate REAL food, they chose to eat without influence.
