Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence
Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D.
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0142180734
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A must-read for anyone who wants to understand why they behave as they do.” —Art Markman, Ph.D., author of Smart Thinking
Do you play to win? Or do you play not to lose?
As Tory Higgins and Heidi Grant Halvorson have discovered in their work at Columbia University’s Motivation Science Center, everything we do is motivated either by a desire to be better off or to simply hang on to what we’ve got. And understanding the simple but crucial difference between the two can empower you to motivate yourself and influence everyone around you. Examining how promotion/prevention focus applies across a wide range of situations—from selling products to managing employees to raising children to getting a second date—Halvorson and Higgins show us how to identify, change, and use focus to get the results we want.
yourself about your own behavior, choosing to believe that you are living up to your guide when you really aren’t. This is basically denial, and it is not recommended, since it is at best a short-term strategy and doesn’t lead to real improvement. You could also decide to disengage from the self-guide—to belittle its importance and more or less ignore it. In this case, you are basically weakening your self-guide. And as we shall see, that’s usually not a good idea. Are Strong Self-Guides a Good
If, however, you make it possible for people to vote against someone or something, then the prevention-minded start showing up in droves. They are more than willing, for instance, to show up for referendums. Most referendums make a “no” vote possible, by asking citizens to either support or reject a change to current law. Voting against something is a vigilant behavior—it keeps something bad from happening, and that’s what prevention is all about. This is perhaps why so many conservative
Because they lack power (relatively speaking), they have nowhere to go but up. The status quo is not working well for them, so they want change that will advance their position in society. The journey to getting power, to making progress, is a promotion journey, but once you’ve arrived, staying in power is all about preventing other people from taking your power away. There are times, however, when members of the minority group shift and aren’t so promotion-minded. Being treated unfairly because
instead saw an advertisement featuring team sports (football, basketball, baseball, soccer) became more prevention-focused and preferred the ad that touted avoiding pain to the one on increasing power.10 So if you want your employees, your students, or your customers to adopt a promotion mindset, keep the emphasis on the individual: You can reach this goal. You can master this material. You can benefit from this product. If, on the other hand, a prevention mindset is called for, talk about what
they can be with another person in the same place at the same time, seeing the very same things, yet experience them so very differently. Your life is more empowered once you have learned about promotion and prevention focus and what fits with them. This is true, in part, because you realize how you can be much more effective in just about everything you do—by working with what fits your focus, capitalizing on your strengths, and compensating when you can for your weaknesses. Your life is also