To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?

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

By making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing (or not). And when people summon their own reasons for believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on it.

In most circumstances that involve moving others, we have several ways to accomplish a task, most of which can make our partners look good in the process.

Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance that’s abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that it’s concrete and personal—and not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.