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Before: Interrogative Self-Talk 


Tell yourself you can do it. Declaring an unshakable belief in your inherent awesomeness inflates a sturdy raft that can keep you bobbing in an ocean of rejection.

Alas, the social science shows something different and more nuanced


Yes, positive self-talk is generally more effective than negative self-talk. But the most effective self-talk of all doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions


On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group


The reasons are twofold. First, the interrogative, by its very form, elicits answers—and within those answers are strategies for actually carrying out the task


The second reason is related. Interrogative self-talk, the researchers say, “may inspire thoughts about autonomous or intrinsically motivated reasons to pursue a goal.”...

During: Positivity Ratios 


Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina is the leading researcher on positivity—her catchall term for a basket of emotions including amusement, appreciation, joy, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. Negative emotions, she says, evolved to narrow people’s vision and propel their behavior toward survival in the moment (I’m frightened, so I’ll flee. I’m angry, so I’ll fight). By contrast, “Positive emotions do the opposite: They broaden people’s ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and . . . making us more receptive and more creative,” she writes.

The broadening effect of positive emotions has important consequences for moving others. Consider both sides of a typical transaction. For the seller, positive emotions can widen her view of her counterpart and his situation. Where negative emotions help us see trees, positive ones reveal forests. And that, in turn, can aid in devising unexpected solutions to the buyer’s problem. Other studies show that positive emotions can expand our behavioral repertoires and heighten intuition and creativity, all of which enhance our effectiveness


Fredrickson and Losada round up to 3. Once positive emotions outnumbered negative emotions by 3 to 1—that is, for every three instances of feeling gratitude, interest, or contentment, they experienced only one instance of anger, guilt, or embarrassment—people generally flourished. Those below that ratio usually did not. But Fredrickson and Losada also found that positivity had an upper limit. Too much can be as unproductive as too little. Once the ratio hit about 11 to 1, positive emotions began doing more harm than good. Beyond that balance of positive-to-negative, life becomes a festival of Panglossian cluelessness, where self-delusion suffocates self-improvement. Some negativity—what Fredrickson and Losada call “appropriate negativity”—is essential. Without it, “behavior patterns calcify.” Negative emotions offer us feedback on our performance, information on what’s working and what’s not, and hints about how to do better.

PinkTo Sell is Human
p.100-108

Related Quotes

Behavioral scientists have conducted hundreds of studies about the differences between powerful and powerless words and phrases. We are especially smitten with research led by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and by our Stanford colleague Jennifer Aaker. We draw mostly on their work to generate five tips about the kind of talk that provokes people to act, persist, and develop imaginative solutions.

Sutton, RaoThe Friction Project
p.197

As social scientists have discovered, interrogative self-talk is often more valuable than the declarative kind.

PinkTo Sell is Human
p.117

Questions, whose potency we’ve seen in both interrogative self-talk and in pitching effectively, change the rules of engagement and therefore the nature of the interaction itself. The conversation becomes more of a dance and less of a wrestling match. That’s something that Fuller Brush founder Alfred Fuller intuited years before improv was ever invented. “Never argue,” he wrote. “To win an argument is to lose a sale.

PinkTo Sell is Human
p.198

We too often think that deep conversations have to be painful or vulnerable conversations. I try to compensate for that by asking questions about the positive sides of life:

  • “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.”
  • “What’s working really well in your life?”
  • “What are you most self-confident about?”
  • “Which of your five senses is strongest?”
  • “Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?” or
  • “What has become clearer to you as you have aged?
BrooksHow to Know a Person
p.91-92

A 2012 study by Harvard neuroscientists found that people often took more pleasure from sharing information about themselves than from receiving money. The Belgian psychologist Bernard RimĂ© found that people feel especially compelled to talk about negative experiences. The more negative the experience was, the more they want to talk about it. Over the course of my career as a journalist I, too, have found that if you respectfully ask people about themselves, they will answer with a candor that takes your breath away. Studs Terkel was a journalist who collected oral histories over his long career in Chicago. He’d ask people big questions and then sit back and let their answers unfold. “Listen, listen, listen, listen, and if you do, people will talk,” he once observed. “They always talk. Why? Because no one has ever listened to them before in all their lives.

Perhaps they’ve not ever even listened to themselves.” Each person is a mystery. And when you are surrounded by mysteries, as the saying goes, it’s best to live life in the form of a question.

BrooksHow to Know a Person
p.91-92