Free To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink Page A

her mind? What are her desires and concerns? What would she think of the ideas we’re putting forward?
    Try this in your own world. If you’re crafting a presentation, the empty chair can represent the audience and its interests. If you’re gathering material for a sales call, it can help generate possible objections and questions the other party might raise. If you’re preparing a lesson plan, an empty chair can remind you to see things from your students’ perspective.
    Attuning yourself to others—exiting your own perspective and entering theirs—is essential to moving others. One smart, easy, and effective way to get inside people’s heads is to climb into their chairs.
    Get in touch with your inner ambivert.
    Wharton’s Adam Grant has discovered that the most effective salespeople are ambiverts, those who fall somewhere in the middle of the introversion-extraversion scale.
    Are you one of them?
    Take a moment to find out. Visit this link—http://www .danpink.com/assessment—where I’ve replicated the assessment that social scientists use to measure introversion and extraversion. It will take about five minutes to complete and you’ll get a rating when you’re done.
    If you find you’re an ambivert, congrats on being average! Continue what you’re doing.
    If you test as an extravert, try practicing some of the skills of an introvert. For example, make fewer declarations and ask more questions. When you feel the urge to assert, hold back instead. Most of all, talk less and listen more.
    If you turn out to be an introvert, work on some of the skills of an extravert. Practice your “ask” in advance, so you don’t flinch from it when the moment arrives. Goofy as it might sound, make a conscious effort to smile and sit up straight. Even if it’s uncomfortable, speak up and state your point of view.
    Most of us aren’t on the extremes—uniformly extraverted or rigidly introverted. We’re in the middle—and that allows us to move up and down the curve, attuning ourselves as circumstances demand, and discovering the hidden powers of ambiversion.
    Have a conversation with a time traveler.
    Cathy Salit, whom you’ll meet in Chapter 8, has an exercise to build the improvisational muscles of her actors that can also work to hone anyone’s powers of attunement. She calls it “Conversation with a Time Traveler.” It doesn’t require any props or equipment, just a little imagination and a lot of work.
    Here’s how it goes:
    Gather a few people and ask them to think of items that somebody from three hundred years ago would not recognize. A traffic light, maybe. A carry-out pizza. An airport screening machine. Then divide into groups of two. Each pair selects an item. One person plays the role of someone from the early 1700s. The other has to explain the item.
    This is more difficult than it sounds. That person from three hundred years ago has a perspective wildly different from our own. For instance, to explain, say, a Big Mac bought from a drive-through window requires understanding a variety of underlying concepts: owning an automobile, consuming what three hundred years ago was a preposterous amount of meat, trusting someone you’ve likely never met and will never see again, and so on.
    “This exercise immediately challenges your assumptions about the understandability of your message,” Salit says. “You are forced to care about the worldview of the other person.” That’s something we all should be doing a lot more of in the present.
    Map it.
    Walking a mile in another’s shoes sometimes requires a map. Here are two new varieties that can provide a picture of where people are coming from and where they might be going.
    1. Discussion Map
    In your next meeting, cut through the clutter of comments with a map that can help reveal the group’s social cartography. Draw a diagram of where each person in the meeting is sitting. When the session begins, note who speaks first by marking an X next to that