We believe a conversation has impact when we find the right arguments.
🐾 I’m Nara, the mascot of HR professionals.
A few days ago I came across the story of Apollo Robbins, an illusionist known for a very peculiar skill. He could take a person’s watch or wallet while talking to them, without them ever noticing.
For years it was thought his talent lay in the speed of his hands. But what he really did was direct the other person’s attention to where he wanted it. While their brain was busy watching a gesture, answering a question or following a conversation, everything else was happening.
That made me think about many conversations that take place every day in HR.
Sometimes we believe a conversation has impact when we find the perfect argument. However, the difference between a conversation that only informs and one that manages to change something often isn’t in the arguments. It’s in what the other person pays attention to.
That’s why, this week, I want to share with you three skills that can help you shift the focus the other person interprets the situation from and, with it, increase the impact of your conversations.
Skill 1
How to get a person to stop defending themselves and start thinking
One of the fastest ways to block a conversation is to ask questions that force someone to justify what has already happened.
When we ask, “Why did you do this?”, attention usually turns toward the explanation or the defense.
Instead, when we ask, “What would it have taken for this to have turned out differently?”, attention shifts. The conversation stops looking at the past and starts building new possibilities.
Questions don’t only serve to obtain information. They also determine where the brain starts looking for answers.
Psychological insight: the question doesn’t change the answer; it changes the place the person looks for the answer from.
Skill 2
How to keep a single problem from defining the whole conversation
Our brain gives more weight to whatever it perceives as a threat.
That’s why, in a conversation, it’s easy for one mistake to end up taking up all the space, even though around it there are also advances, resources or lessons that could help solve the situation.
That doesn’t mean downplaying the problem. It means keeping it from monopolizing attention.
When we manage to widen the focus, alternatives appear that we simply didn’t see before.
Psychological insight: whatever takes up all the attention ends up seeming like all of reality.
Skill 3
How to make a conversation change more than an opinion
There are conversations that seem to run out of steam because the arguments repeat over and over.
In those moments we usually try to explain our point of view better.
However, change often doesn’t come when we add one more argument, but when we help the other person look at the situation from a different perspective.
That small shift in perspective is usually what allows decisions to appear that previously seemed impossible.
Psychological insight: people change direction before they change their opinion.
Attention is present in every conversation. The difference is that we’re almost never aware of it.
That’s why, in one of our most requested learning experiences on communication, we have a professional magician and illusionist who helps teams discover, through experience, how small shifts in the focus of attention can transform the way we communicate. In this way, the psychology of attention stops being a concept and becomes something teams experience firsthand.
It’s a different way of training a skill we use every day.
If you’d like to know more about this approach for your organization, we’ll be glad to tell you about it.
— Nara
