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Share your failures
I think most of us think that we should share positive things about ourselves, talk about our achievements, talk about the ways we’ve succeeded and sort of shove the negative stuff under the carpet. And indeed, if you look at social media these days, it’s a veritable greatest hits of people’s lives. It’s all the good things that happen to them, but it turns out that just sharing the positive things may actually be a mistake, because there’s a good bit of research that shows that in many situations, actually sharing some negative things about ourselves can be beneficial.
There’s some really nice research, for example, on what’s called the pratfall effect, which shows that when people interact with someone, as long as they think they’re generally competent to begin with, but once in a while a negative thing happens to them, it actually humanizes them and makes them more relatable. Whether we’re leaders, whether we’re employees, whether we’re talking to clients or colleagues, it makes us feel like we’re real people and makes others relate to what we have to say. It makes our lives seems a little bit more similar to their own, and it helps build that connection.
Beyond just revealing things about ourselves, though, negative things can be a great and effective way to tell stories. How do we tell more effective stories? So to answer this question, we actually looked at tens of thousands of movie scripts. We measured a variety of different features of those scripts and the language that was used throughout the movies to understand what made them more impactful, and it turns out that emotion is really powerful here as well. What we did in all these different movies is we took their scripts and we plotted the emotional arcs, and we looked at the relationship between those arcs and success. We found that stories that looked a little bit more like roller coasters with big ups and big downs were much more effective.
If you think about it, the top of a mountain is really beautiful, really powerful, really impactful, but if you got dropped off there by a helicopter, it’s nowhere near as impactful as if you worked your way from the ground and you walked all the way up. If you think about “Harry Potter” or you think about “Star Wars,” they tend to follow a similar pattern. There are these moments of depth and despair when you don’t know if anyone’s going to win, and then they work their way up to powerful, positive moments, and then go back down to negative ones, and then work its way up again, and work down again.
And so whether we’re telling our own stories as leaders, as professionals, or whether we’re building stories as creators, as content designers, we need to use these roller coasters because, again, if all we know is someone succeeded, we can’t really relate to them, but if we see the failures that led to the successes, we feel like those things are achievable, that we can do those things in our own life. That person is more relatable, that story’s more engaging, and so I’m more likely to give it my attention.
Invite others to stay tuned
As communicators, we don’t only want to grab people’s attention, we want to hold their attention. If we’re writing an email, if we’re making a speech, if we’re crafting a pitch, we don’t only want people to dig into the beginning and then tune out for the rest, we want to stay tuned for what’s going to happen throughout.
So how do we hold people’s attention? And so to study this question, we did a big analysis of tens of thousands of pieces of online content, everything from sports to today’s news to fashion and style and lifestyle pieces, and we had data on how far down the article everybody read, and we looked at what leads to longer reads or what types of language kept people engaged throughout the article, and one key thing we found was the power of emotion. More emotional content held people’s attention. It led them to continue reading throughout the pieces of the article. But it wasn’t just any emotion. Certain emotions had more impact, and it wasn’t just positive emotions or negative emotions, it was what those emotions evoked in the reader. In particular, how uncertain they make the reader.
Think about two negative emotions, for example, the difference between anger and anxiety. Both of those are negative emotions. Neither of them feel good, but when you’re angry, you’re often pretty sure what you’re angry about. When you’re anxious, you may not know exactly what you’re anxious about. You have this generalized sense of anxiety, but you don’t know what it’s towards. Similarly, on the positive side, usually if you’re excited about something, you know what you’re excited about. If you’re hopeful about something, you’re a little bit more uncertain. Yes, you want that thing to happen, but you’re not sure that it’s going to happen.
And so what we found in our work is that these more uncertain emotions, hope instead of excitement or anxiety rather than anger, lead people to stay tuned because they want to figure out what’s going to happen next. One great way to hold people’s attention is to build uncertainty into the content that we’re creating. If we give away the main ideas all at the beginning, that can be a good way to communicate those ideas, but it’s not going to lead people to stay tuned.