How To Get People to Listen To You
You can get people to listen to you if you change the pattern of what you’re saying.
I read a sentence recently by Chris Gayomali in an article about Olympic runner Noah Lyles that struck me. It said, “Meanwhile, Noah Nyles is a sprinter who seems to have more fun than anyone else and isn’t afraid to use his platform to advocate for Black lives mattering.”
Black lives mattering.
If you live anywhere other than alone in the woods, you’ve heard the phrase “Black lives matter” hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the course of the last year plus. But Gayolami turned it into an active verb by adding the “ing” ending. And it sticks out.
This reminded me of a billboard I saw in San Francisco a few years ago. It said something like “Homelessness is an experience, not an identity.” Then it went on to encourage people to help “people experiencing homelessness.”
The human brain uses patterns and groupings to make sense of the world. When you read, you aren’t reading each individual letter and then adding them together to find out which word it is. Your brain simply sees the shape of the word, and matches that with a pattern of similar shapes you’ve seen in the past. If we didn’t, our brains would have to start from scratch with everything we experienced. We wouldn’t be very productive that way.
We all have a certain perception of “Black lives matter.” We have a certain perception of “homeless people.” They live in our brains as a storyline that we can plug and play to understand our contexts more quickly. The trouble is, you can’t control someone’s perception or storyline about a particular topic. Your definition and understanding of something could be much different from someone else’s.
But you can get others to consider things a different way by breaking the pattern of how these things are usually said. Mix it up. Rearrange the words. Use an alternate description. This is the best way to get people to listen to you.
Thanks for reading! Please share this with a friend or coworker. It helps me a lot!
For more articles on copywriting, click here.
