It’s Easier To Make People Cry Or Gasp Than Think

Nothing like a commercial that tugs at your heart strings, or a shrewd comment from the peanut gallery that tears through your armor.

Emotions, whether they’re pleas towards OR triggers against, get people’s attention.

And so we want to remember, in the words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir,

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

The emotional response is the easy part. Anybody can do it with a little thought and crafting.

But, if we want people to think after they emotionally react, that will take some real planning.

Take Meir’s quotes and these questions as a prompt to connect emotional responses to logical thinking. It’s especially helpful when thinking about how we’re connecting the two at work.

What are we doing to generate which emotional response?

What are we doing to lead from the emotional response to some type of thoughtful reflection?

Ex. Are we making people feel happy and then see the logic behind their confidence? Are making them upset and then feel like they need to think through what would give them confidence? What’s the from-to we’re engineering?

We can’t have an approach until we have an awareness.