influence

Jan 4 2012

The social magician

There are so many aspects of ourselves. The good parts and the bad. The successes and the failures.

Here’s an interesting question:

How do you make people see ONLY the parts of you that you WANT them to see? How do you make them see you as a winner?

The answer given by the social magician is… social misdirection.

Misdirection

Magicians use misdirection.

There’s a classic trick (I’m revealing secrets here!!) where a magician throws a bright red ball into the air and catches it. While doing this, his eyes and your eyes naturally follow the ball all the way up and back down. Then he does it again. Up and down. And again. And again.

Then as he throws it up the next time, his gaze and your gaze move up following the… Hey wait, why isn’t the ball coming down? As you frantically search the air for the bright red ball, you realize it’s gone. You look back down to the magician’s hands, and they’re empty too. What happened?

On that last “throw”, the magician only pretends to throw the ball up while he actually still keeps it in his hand. As we look up (and we’re not looking at his hand), he takes advantage of that moment and hides the ball elsewhere. But if he didn’t throw the ball, why did we look up? Misdirection.

Misdirection is all about expectations. When we have expectations of what we’re going to see, our minds indulge us and let us see only what we want to. When this magic trick was done as a study, scientists found out that the people who watched the trick said that they actually saw the ball leaving the had of the magician! What’s more, they even came forward and pointed how high they saw the ball go before it vanished into thin air. Our minds are easily tricked into focusing on and believing something.

The magician here planted a few expectations into our brain to make sure that most of us are tricked:

  1. Throwing the ball up multiple times allows us to expect the path of the ball in the air. We know where it will go so we look there on the last throw.
  2. His gaze following the ball means that our eyes look in that direction too. Visual cues are strong ways to tell someone what is important to look at. We always look at what’s important.

With all those expectations running through our minds (subconsciously), we just have to look up.

Here are two  magician’s rules:

  1. Never show a trick until you’ve mastered it.
  2. Never repeat the same trick.

When you haven’t mastered the trick, you won’t be fluent with it, and your eyes will naturally slide over to where the action is happening. This means that you’ll look to the ball in your hand instead of the imaginary ball that’s supposed to be moving upwards. Guess what happens then? Your audience looks there too.

And kablam! The jig is up. They’ve seen your trick.

So how does this apply to social situations?

Social Misdirection

When people look at your personality, they follow your “visual cues” or in this case, they follow your social cues. What you think is important is what people will focus on. Do you make a big deal about your hair? Then even someone who didn’t even notice anything wrong with it will start to wonder. Do you focus on the pimples on your face every time? Then other people will too.

Ok, let’s bring this to the next level. Do you always focus on the problems in yourself, or the good things? Whichever you focus on, you can bet that the people around you will pick it up from what you do and say. If you focus on problems, they will also focus on the flaws and problems you have. They will always see you for the person you are. A person full of problems.  person who complains day in and day out about how life is not fair. And the most they can do is to pity you.

On the other hand, I’m sure you’ve heard of inspiring stories like Hellen Keller, (who was blind deaf and mute) but still went on to live their lives well. When you see these people who don’t focus on their problems, but rather on how life could be amazing, it naturally shines through from what they do and say.

It’s not like they don’t have problems. They have more than their share. But the fact that they don’t focus on them makes it hard for us to focus on them too. They seem to breeze through life, overcoming one obstacle over another. We don’t pity them, we admire them. There’s a huge difference there.

When you repress yourself and refuse to see how awesome you are, at the same time you’re usually focusing on how un-awesome you are. That is, all the flaws that you have and how they’re “holding you back”. And if you’re focusing there, and putting all your effort into noticing those parts of yourself, how do you think others will notice you? Exactly, they’ll notice you the same way.

When you have a “victim mentality” and always act like a victim, others will treat you like a victim too. A person who complains tirelessly, even when it’s just a tiny problem.

Or to put it another way:

It IS a big deal if you MAKE it a big deal.

They’ll look at you and notice where your “eyes” are looking. Are you always complaining about your looks? Your money? Your laziness? If that’s the only thing you notice about yourself, you can bet that it’s the only thing that others notice about you too.

This is what I call social misdirection. You set up expectations for your audience; expectations for how to feel, how to react, and what to focus on. And your audience follows that expectation. They see what you want them to see.

This means that no matter how many flaws you have, you can always minimize its impact by not focusing on it.

But like in normal magic tricks, social misdirection also needs you to be “fluent” in feeling good about yourself. It’s something that needs to always be “on”. It’s something that you have to believe yourself. But how?!!

The answer lies in magic once again. To perfect a trick, practice it. Practice a hundred times. Practice a thousand times. Practice 3 hours a day for 6 months. Practice looking at yourself and remembering times and ways that you’ve succeeded and done well. Practice it until you do it unconsciously in your sleep.

And then you’ll be ready.

But there’s more that the social magician can do. If he does it right, he won’t just make others see him as a winner, people will also treat him like a winner. I’m going to call this social leading.

Social Leading

We influence how people feel about us and treat us.

Have you ever adjusted yourself to somebody else during a conversation? Of course you have. Sometimes it’s just about adjusting the speed that you talk. They talk slower, you’ll go slower too. They talk faster? You too.

At other times, it’s also about the mood they carry. Meeting up with a person who’s all smiles? You’ll natural make your conversation all happy too. Don’t want to ruin his day, right? And if the person you meet is all sad? The way you speak starts to reflect that too.

Now, if others can affect us in that way, isn’t it only logical to think that we affect others in the same way too?

We DO affect others. So if the people around you aren’t treating you the way you like, check your own attitude first. Are people bossing you around? Maybe you’re letting them. Do they always make jokes at your expense? You probably have strong reactions to the joke. Does no one compliment you? Perhaps you’re bad at accepting compliments.

So this begs the question, what happens when 2 opposites meet who then try to affect each other? Who wins when a sad person and happy person meet?

The simple answer is: the one whose reality is stronger.

When you have the stronger “reality“, you don’t back off. You force people to adapt to your style rather than adapting yourself to them. It can also be considered a form of assertiveness. “This is how I feel and I refuse to change it or feel guilty for it. If others want to feel differently that’s fine and it’s up to them.”

The person with the stronger reality stays in his reality. If he’s optimistic, he doesn’t adapt to the pessimistic person he just met. He’ll go on having that optimistic, winning tone in his voice and in his actions.

Again, you can only have this strong reality when you’re “fluent” with feeling good about yourself. And again, it only comes with practice.

The social magician

So, the social magician is the person who plays with how people see him, changing their perceptions and their realities, casting magic on their senses. He practices being the person that he wants others to see him as, and he practices until he is fluent with the character. Then he uses social misdirection to make people look where he wants them to look, only at the parts of himself that he is proud of. With that, he gets people to follow his lead and treat him how he wants to be treated.

This… is the social magician.

By Lutfi Torla • Communicating, Featured • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Dec 10 2011

Why we love buying but hate being sold to

Did you know that making a decision yourself is more important than making a good decision?

You would think that people want to make the best choice. Turns out that’s not true. We don’t want to make the best choice, we want to make OUR choice.

Why we love buying but hate to be sold to

We love to buy. We love to feel the rush of power and the rush of satisfaction as you get the next big item that’s supposed to fix your life and make things better. After all, that’s why we buy stuff, right? We only buy something if we believe that it can make our lives easier or improve it in some way.

We buy when we believe that the things we buy can add value to our lives, whether it be a laptop or pillow or chair (yes, i’m naming random things that are around me right now). It’s supposed to make your problem go away, whether that problem is smelling bad, or thinning hair or not being able to speak in public. We buy to make ourselves feel better.

So we love to buy.

But we hate being sold to.

The moment you sense a salesperson is selling to you just because he wants to make a sale, you immediately back off. You start saying NO. It’s because when you feel “sold to”, it feels like he “won” and you “lost”. It feels like the salesperson manipulated you and tricked you into buying something that you didn’t want or need.

It feels icky. It feels like you can’t trust the person. Now, if you can’t trust the person, how can you trust the product he’s selling?

We often and we always associate things. We look at an object and feel like it’s important to us, not because it actually has value, but because it has an emotion that we associated with it.

It’s like in The Little Prince when he says that his rose is special, not because it is special in itself, but because caring for it all these years and being close to it has made it special. When you attach emotion to your teddy bear, it becomes valuable to you, but only because you gave it value.

“You’re lovely, but you’re empty,” he went on.

“One couldn’t die for you. Of course an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than you altogether, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass. Since she’s the one I sheltered behind a screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except for two or three for butterflies). Since’s she the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”

– “The Little Prince” By Antoine De Saint-Exupe’ry

So these products you buy from Mr. Person-you-can’t-trust will also just leave you hanging because you attach the idea of distrust to his products. You don’t trust his product to solve your problems either.

So here’s the thing; even if that product actually was the best product to solve your needs, you still might not buy it anyway.

We hate being sold to.

But there are other examples of when we’ll make bad decisions just because we don’t want to follow someone’s orders.

Why we’ll stop when someone tells us to do what we’re already doing

Has this ever happened to you? You were just about to do something when someone suddenly told you to do exactly what you were about to do anyway. Don’t you feel a sudden urge to just stop? It’s just like being a teenager all over again when your parent told you to do something and you’d go against them just because you didn’t want to do what they said.

It’s honestly a little ridiculous. You were about to do it anyway. You were going to do it for your own reasons to benefit yourself. But then they told you to do it and now you JUST… CANT… DO IT!

You can’t show them that they own you and that you’ll do what they say. It’s worse when it’s someone you hate. Then you’ll just start doing the exact opposite of whatever it is they say.

Sometimes, you’ll even go out of your way and do something that’s bad for yourself just to prove them wrong. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Unfortunately, it’s normal. It’s the basis behind the whole idea of reverse psychology.

The story goes that Winston Churchill would convince others that an idea he had given them had actually been an idea they had come up with in the first place, in order to make sure that it was implemented.

A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.

– Father Strickland, 1863

Would you prefer to make people believe that it was your idea at the risk of not having people implement such a great idea? Or would you rather go Churchill’s route and make people believe it was their own decision so that they would freely implement it? The truly great ideas need to be spread out so that people buy into the idea and make it their own. One of the greatest winning movements of this generation is the environmental movement.

People have joined this movement not because it was someone else’s good idea, but because they felt it was their own idea to go out and help save the world. But we still might stop if someone told us to do what we wanted to do anyway.

So the question that pops up is why do we stop?

We stop because when we make a choice… we want to be sincere.

Let’s deal with the idea of sincerity later on. Before that, let’s look at teenagers.

Why teenagers rebel

When we’re children, we’re at a stage where we fully trust our parents and trust them to make all our decisions. In fact, we usually feel so strongly attached to our mom or dad that we define ourselves through them. We don’t really have a strong self-identity yet.

But as we grow, parents, peers and society tell us and teach us that we need to make our own decisions and that we need to be responsible for our own life. So we tentatively try it out. We try to make our own decisions.

However, we’re still young at the time, and still not fully able to make decisions properly, so our parents always try to guide us and tell us what to do. At that point, a choice appears; do you follow the decision of your parents or do you make your own decision? Also, what happens when you both decide the same thing? Unfortunately, there’s no option there that says you can both come to the same decision because the very definition of it being your parents’ choice means that it’s not yours.

So we rebel.

Oh, not always, but we rebel. Whenever our parents tell us to do something, we feel like it limits our ability to grow into adults and make our own choices. The only way to feel like we are living our own lives instead of someone else’s is to rebel against our parents’ decisions.

So we have a dilemma. People tell us that teenagers should start to “grow up” and be more responsible. The meaning of responsible means that we should be responsible for our own decisions. And how can that happen when adults keep telling teenagers what to do?

Teenagers rebel because they don’t know their own identity. Yet.

Identity is the reason

Identity is the reason for all these things we do. Or, more accurately, the idea that we want to have a solid understanding of who we are and what our choices are.

When you make a choice, something happens. You start believing that you own that choice. That it’s part of you. That it’s part of your identity.

Yes, our minds are pretty easy to trick. In fact, we deceive ourselves all the time. In this particular case, because we’ve made the choice ourselves, we cling to it as part of us. If somebody tries telling you that you shouldn’t buy something that you want, or that something you bought isn’t good, you’ll feel at least a little bit insulted. WHY?

You feel like they insulted your choice and taste in products. You’ve actually attached your emotions onto this choice. In fact, you’ve attached yourself to that choice. That choice now defines part of who you are. And so, you want to make that choice yourself, because you want to define your identity by yourself.

What happens when you do what someone tells you? It’s as if someone is choosing your identity for you. Someone is deciding who you are for you. And that’s just wrong. Or at least, that’s how you feel.

So when you’re still at the stage where your self-image is fuzzy, like most of us are, you can’t take any chances with your identity. When you haven’t figured out who you are, you don’t want someone else to decide for you. When you haven’t found yourself or chosen who to be, you can’t let someone else decide for you.

Let’s get back to the teenagers we were talking about before.

When teenagers are entering their teenage years, they’re still testing the waters of their own identity. They’re still figuring out how to make a decision and whether they will actually like that decision; that is, whether that decision fits in with who they want to be. And normally, they won’t know if they like it until after they make the decision.

But what happens when your parents tell you what to do (even if it’s the best decision), is that even if you like it, it’s still not your own decision, so it’s not really part of you yet. Because of that, the only way to make sure that it’s your own personal decision is to do the exact opposite of what your parents tell you to do.

I know, it’s weird and twisted. But us humans are built that way.

Let’s move on to the idea of sincerity.

It’s also about Sincerity

As humans with relationships, we really really feel that sincerity is important. We always want to be ourselves. And when our self-image is fuzzy, it’s always best to remove all doubt. It’s that moment when you want to do something for a noble reason like love or gratitude, then one second later, your doubt kicks in and you start wondering whether you’re doing this because YOU want to or because someone ELSE told you to.

To remove that doubt, we immediately say no.

Imagine a country that was still in a time of war, where its borders were fluid and changed every day, to the point where even the leaders of the country are fuzzy about where the line is on the map. That country is you and the border is the border between your own self-image of your own choices and the influence of other people in your life.

When your border is fuzzy, the moment an influence (invasion) comes anywhere near your borders, you HAVE to push it back. You can’t accept anything nearby because you don’t know where your border is either. To be on the safe side, and to make sure that the influence didn’t cross your borders and get into your mind, it’s easier to reject all possible action that might come of it.

But what if the country were at peace? What if the border was clearly defined on a map? Then, wouldn’t you be able to place a proper immigration control at the borders? Any time an influence came near the borders, it would be fine. You could watch it from your side of the fence as it came closer. And closer and closer.

When it reaches your border fence, you can calmly allow it entrance to your country, but only under your conditions.

When you know exactly what entered your mind from outside, then you know exactly which thoughts are yours and which are from others. That way, you can always be sure that you are sincere when it’s your own thoughts that lead you to a decision.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

– Aristotle

This is when you can take peoples’ influence, advice, peer pressure, social hype, etc, and stop it at the borders of your mind, extracting from it only the information that you find useful.

Did you know that right now I’m influencing you too? I’m trying to get you to see my perspective. If you can allow my words into your mind, and still feel calm and assured that YOU are still in control, then congrats; that’s exactly the feeling I’m trying to explain. It’s the same feeling I want you to have every time you feel pressured to do something. You are in control and you can reject or accept my words however you like.

Now, this might be easier to do in a low-pressure situation where I’m not actively or rudely pushing myself on you. The question is, could you cultivate yourself so that even if somebody is rudely or aggressively trying to convince or pressure you into something; you could still calmly choose with your own mind instead of automatically pushing back (or giving in)?

You can.

But it means you have to define the borders of your self first. You have to define who you are. This is slightly different from finding yourself or finding your life purpose. You often can’t do that until you stumble upon that one thing you can do that really makes you passionate. Defining yourself is more of defining the ground rules for what you feel are important in life and what you would most regret.

Don’t give yourself reasons to regret.

(I’ll deal with avoiding regret later in a post called [The mistake you can learn from and the mistake you can't] which I’ll post by the end of next week. This post seems to be long enough.)

Conclusion

The idea here, is that you want to be able to accept ideas from others and integrate them into yourself without feeling that you compromised your borders. We hate being sold to, and that includes selling us ideas, but that only makes sense if you forget that ultimately you have the power to decide to buy.

Remember that you always have the power to buy into any idea that comes your way no matter how much someone tries to sell you on it.

Nowadays, every time someone advises me or tells me what to do, I take it as just that; advice. If I follow it, it’s because I chose to do so.

If you can always choose to buy (or not buy) no matter how much pressure is pushed on you, then you will always make your own decision. And I hope that at that time, you can also freely make the best decision.

Make the best decision for yourself, no matter if it comes from you… or from someone else.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Understanding Behaviour • 4 • Tags: , , , , ,

Jul 12 2011

Filtering the world

A sudden thought popped into my head:

In a time where we get a lot of our news online, we also have search giants trying to tailor their results to our liking. Why is this happening? And an even better question, could it actually be bad?

The growth of content

It’s happening as a response to the fantastic growth of online content. With millions of pages appearing every day, it’s impossible to find what we’re looking for. We turn to google and yahoo and bing (who users bing? Seriously?), and they say ok ok, I want you to keep using my services so I’ll help you out. The reason why people started liking google so much was that it worked! It filtered out the crap and gave you what you wanted.

Then they started personalizing searches as well as ads. This was where the internet started to work for us. And against us. It worked for us because now we could get to the content that we WANTED. The content that was relevant to us. All the irrelevant content was being filtered out by google or blocked by our ever-present adblockers. And that in itself is the inherent problem in filtering results. We are removing information that we don’t want.

We are slowly (and successfully) blocking ads, filtering and personalizing search results & blocking friends and twitter feeds that annoy us. What’s worse is we don’t just block out what annoys us, we block out things that we don’t already have an interest in. And our excuse (and it’s a good excuse) is “information overload”. With hundreds of updates on our news feed every day, we don’t bother with them all and block links on topics that we aren’t already obsessed in.

No more discovery?

Yes, we still discover new things online every day, thanks to news sites and blogs and facebook shared links. But it’s limited to the circle of friends we choose (and whether we block their links from showing up on our news feed). We are consciously limiting our own horizons. And ideas don’t come from empty brains. They come from brains exposed to and stimulated by (inspired by?) a multitude of ideas. To create a rich soil from which ideas can grow, we can’t simply limit ourselves to only ideas or blogs or circles of friends that we are comfortable with. How can you think about solutions on “the shortage of clean water” when you don’t even know it’s a fast growing problem that is already affecting the developing world and will affect the developed world soon as well.

A future of 12 year-olds

If the internet starts getting any better in “personalizing the web” or “predicting relevant search results”, our online information exposure will be limited to things that interest you when you first came online. Imagine the kids nowadays who come online at a young age. Imagine a 12-year-old. Now, what if his main source of information isn’t TV or the newspaper, but rather the internet? Not so hard to imagine is it?

That 12-year-old will have an internet that only ever feeds him what he is interested in. If that happens for a year, at 13 he will still only know about the topics that interested him at 12. If it happens for another 3 years, at 15 he will still only know those topics. He won’t get exposure to politics, or extreme ironing, or coding. Fast forward 20 years, you’ll have a person whose age is 35 but has not much more world exposure than that 12-year-old. Simple because the internet was waayyyy too good in “personalizing search results”.

Real Life

That was obviously an extreme example. But that’s where the internet collective is headed unless we introduce a way to get new (and possibly disruptive) ideas to come into our line of sight. Currently, that purpose is served by “real life”. By having friends and family, we are often forced to expose ourselves to their ideas and viewpoints as well and this can serve as a trigger for us to learn about a new topic.

But the internet has given us access to millions like us. In our own geographical area, we might find 1 or 2 people who think the same. You make friends with them and make a clique. On the internet, there are millions like us. There is no end to people who have the same viewpoint. Under those conditions, why would you hang out with someone who is completely different from you? We already pick our friends in real life. This is easily magnified in our virtual lives.

So what should we do about this? Is it even a real problem in the first place?

By Lutfi Torla • Reflections • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

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