How to get anyone to do anything fast
By Julia McKinnell - Monday, May 2, 2011 - 1 Comment
Say, for instance, you want to get your wife to let you skip dinner with her family…
Asking someone to do something rarely gets the results you’re after. In fact, it will likely backfire, writes Yale psychologist Michael Pantalon in a new book for anyone frustrated at not being able to entice a stubborn person to do things differently. “When someone tells us that we have to do something, it may set us up for a virtually irresistible compulsion to do the exact opposite,” notes the author.
The six-step method Pantalon describes in Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything Fast has a success rate of nearly 100 per cent, he claims, and takes no more than seven minutes to implement. “I developed it at the request of busy emergency room doctors seeking to motivate patients who came into the ER because of alcohol-related accidents and medical problems. The doctors had about seven minutes to influence semi-inebriated patients who didn’t necessarily see themselves as needing help.”
After first acknowledging a person’s resistance to change, which is a “surprisingly effective way to get people to be less defensive,” ask your subject how willing they are, on a scale from one to 10, to do the thing they don’t want to do. Take the husband who wants to skip a weekly dinner with his wife’s family so he can stay home to watch the game, writes Pantalon. “If you ask [your wife] flat out, her first response might very well be, ‘Yes, I mind. I’d rather you come with me.’ Her brain simply hears ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Instead, say something like, “I’d like to run something by you. There’s something I’d like to do, and I want to get a sense of how you feel about it. On a scale of one to 10, how ready do you think you might be to let me off the hook this Sunday so I can stay home and watch the game?’ ”
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Practical advice for young Aspergians
By Julia Mckinnell - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 9:12 AM - 3 Comments
That totally ‘efficient’ way you have of eating soup? Other people find it rude.
Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute
Growing up with Asperger’s syndrome made John Elder Robison, the bright son of a philosophy professor, a social outcast and, later, a high school dropout. But the now-successful businessman, author of the new book Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian, believes that Asperger’s actually gave him a professional advantage over normal people, just as it might have done for Bill Gates, Albert Einstein and Dan Aykroyd: “The more different you are from other people, the more likely you are to solve problems in a different way. That may be a handicap in school, where they expect you to do things the teacher’s way. Once you get out of school, though, your difference can become a powerful advantage.”
Robison, who learned the hard way that coping in the real world is really just a matter of learning manners and social conventions, fills his book with practical advice for young Aspergians, using himself as an example.
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The unbreakable rules for family dinners
By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments
Comedian Larry David’s ex-wife shares what she’s learned about eating together
Photograph by Maryellen Baker
Laurie David, ex-wife of comedian Larry David, recounts the recent “uneventful night” when she lingered at the dinner table, engaged in intimate conversation with her two teenage daughters. The story appears in her new book, The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect With Your Kids One Meal at a Time. “We talked about all the stuff that [parents] crave to know about but never get real answers to: what’s really happening in their lives; who’s mean, who’s nice; who’s misunderstood and why.” The conversation’s candidness left her feeling like she’d “done something right as a parent.” It was “a new feeling,” she confesses. “I had succeeded in luring and keeping my family at the dinner table—and talking about real issues they might otherwise have kept silent about.”
From the time her eldest was in a high chair, David insisted the family eat meals together, and now she’s urging parents to institute the same ritual, even if it’s Chinese takeout eaten together on proper plates. Meals don’t have to be pot roasts and side dishes, she says. As one career mom, too busy for dinner, tells David, a hot breakfast is their family meal every morning before work and school.
David’s book comes armed with healthy recipes for quick-to-fix meals, such as the family favourite taco recipe with cucumber salsa. Children, she says, should be encouraged from a young age to get involved. “If the counter is too tall, bring in a stepstool for them to stand on, or perhaps try working at the kitchen table.” Put on some music and, most of all, “Have fun!” she writes.
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No Dummies here
By Jason Kirby - Monday, August 16, 2010 at 4:24 PM - 0 Comments
How the ‘For Dummies’ book empire is branching out and thriving in the age of Wikipedia and blogs
PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA DARMANIN
It’s been nearly two decades since the first “For Dummies” self-help book hit store shelves, and judging by the volume of titles since then, we haven’t gotten any smarter. Consider just a few choice topics from the dizzying list of 200 books coming out this year alone, all based on the same rigid model of accessible writing, big icons and cartoons wrapped in a garish yellow cover. There’s everything from wedding etiquette and building chicken coops to photovoltaic design and quantum physics. While many booksellers struggle with dwindling sales, our stunted IQs continue to fuel a publishing frenzy that’s produced 1,600 titles and exceeds 200 million copies in print.
One might expect quirky instructional guides like the Dummies franchise to have withered with the Web, since there’s no shortage of Wiki-experts, bloggers and YouTube posters eager to share their thoughts for free. Instead, as Dummies nears its 20th anniversary next year, the brand is ambitiously extending into other industries like pet supplies and musical instruments through licensing agreements, while embracing media formats like smartphone apps. (As for fans of Wikis and social networking, there are Dummies books for them, too—four on the subject of Twitter alone.)
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A tip from ‘The Happiness Project’
By Julia McKinnell - Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 4:10 PM - 11 Comments
All sorts of people are finding that singing, alone or in a group, can be life-changing
Looking for happiness? Try singing. That’s the advice in a new self-help book that’s striking a chord with thousands of readers. Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project has become an instant bestseller with simple prescriptions such as “Sing in the morning.” “You know, I’m a terrible singer,” Rubin told Maclean’s this week. “Everybody laughs at my singing. But one of my main focuses of my happiness project was to create a more lighthearted, calm atmosphere in my household.”
Mornings are the most hectic, says the mother of two young girls. “Everyone’s racing around and there’s a lot of whining and nagging. It can be a very unpleasant part of the day and yet it’s the beginning of the day, so it’s important to set the tone. It’s very hard to be crabby when you’re singing.”
In the book, Rubin describes a morning when one of her daughters didn’t want to go to tae kwon do class: “I wanted to snap back, ‘You always say you don’t want to go, but then you have fun.’ Instead, even though it wasn’t easy, I sang out, ‘I don’t want to go to tae kwon do—you’re a poet and didn’t know it!’ After a minute, I added, ‘I don’t give a snap about going to tap.’ ” Rubin’s daughter joined in, rhyming, “I’d rather pass gas than go to science class.” “We laughed until our stomachs hurt, and she didn’t mention tae kwon do again. This technique worked better than telling her to buck up, and it was certainly more fun.”
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If Oprah says so
By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments
A Chicago woman followed the queen of talk’s advice religiously. For a year.
While preparing for her role in a satirical performance about self-help gurus, actor Robyn Okrant kept bumping up against one name: Oprah Winfrey. Her mother, friends, students, all the women she knew, were continually citing the queen of talk’s advice. “I just felt like Oprah was setting this bar for women to live up to and I was a little, I don’t know, defensive,” Okrant told Maclean’s from her home in Chicago, where she also teaches yoga. “I thought, how come she gets to do this? Does her advice really work? And why are we putting ourselves under so much duress to live up to that model?”And what would happen if a woman did everything Oprah said she must for one whole year? Two weeks before the start of 2008, Okrant decided she would find out: her new book, Living Oprah, recounts the experiment, which was originally documented on a “Living Oprah” blog. For 12 months, every time Oprah implored her TV audience, magazine readers or website visitors to do something, Okrant obliged. Vote for Obama. Stop drinking diet pop.
Take 10 deep breaths every morning and night. Get a mammogram. Dump toxic people. Consider: what can I live without? Forgive.
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The powerlessness of positive thinking
By Cathy Gulli - Monday, July 6, 2009 at 6:12 PM - 22 Comments
Self-affirming statements actually make some people feel worse
Canadian scientists have some bad news for those in the self-help business: positive thinking can actually make people with low self-esteem feel worse about themselves. Joanne V. Wood, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo who co-authored the soon-to-be-published article with John W. Lee (University of Western Ontario) and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic (University of New Brunswick), spoke with Maclean’s about why self-affirming mantras such as “I am a lovable person” may actually do more damage than good.
Q: Tell me a bit about your studies?
A: We identified people who were low in self-esteem and high in self-esteem. We invited them into the lab and assigned them randomly to one of two conditions. In both conditions, they were asked to write down their thoughts and feelings. In one condition, in addition to that writing task, they were asked to repeat “I am a lovable person.” We found that those with high self-esteem were slightly better off in the positive self-statement condition than in the other condition. They were a little bit happier. We found the opposite effect for the other group. People with low self-esteem who repeated the positive self-statement were actually lower in mood and worse in their feelings about themselves than in the condition where they didn’t repeat the positive self-statement.Q: Did you do things beyond that?
A: In another study, we instructed people to then focus on the statement “I am a lovable person.” In one condition they were told they could write down ways that it was true of them and not true of them. In the other, they were told to focus only on ways that were true of them. Again, it had the opposite effect for people with low self-esteem than you might expect. If they were low in self-esteem and were required to focus only on how they were a lovable person, they were worse off. Continue… -
I’m Linda and I’m a self-help junkie
By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment
A 40-year-old mother neglects her kids in order to read about how to be a better parent
Forty-year-old Linda Pruce confesses that her problem started in September 1998. “I was sitting on my bed, breastfeeding my newborn, and wondering whether it would be wrong to smoke a cigarette while nursing,” she writes in a new book. “As I was figuring out the logistics of this dilemma—could I reach my cigarettes without breaking the baby’s seal on my breast? Could I blow the smoke toward the window rather than up the nostrils of my daughter?—I caught the start of Oprah’s fall season.”
Oprah “was speaking to me,” writes the Maryland holistic healer in Confessions of a Self-Help Junkie. “I was a fat, tired, chain-smoking mother of two with a travelling, ‘I’m only home on weekends’ husband.” Pruce wanted change, and the plan at the time seemed simple. She’d watch Oprah every afternoon and the “experts and published authors would tell me exactly what I needed to do.”
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Out of work? Go dumpster diving.
By Susan Mohammad - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 5:48 PM - 1 Comment
The recession has sparked a self-help publishing boom. But are all these recession tips worth reading?
With economists predicting more than 250,000 job losses this year in Canada, there will be more than enough stress and panic to go around. In response, a barrage of self-help books are now available, aimed at helping the unemployed survive the tough times. Some of the books even promise to help land readers a better job. Titles include The Fastest, Easiest Way to Get Good Jobs in Today’s Economy. Guaranteed!, How To Prosper During Bad Times and Your Recession Survival Guide. But do these self-help books justify the cost, especially during these penny-pinching times? We took a closer look at No Job? No Prob! How to Pay Your Bills, Feed Your Mind, and Have a Blast When You’re Out of Work, by Nicholas Nigro. Continue…
