Read To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others for Free Online Page B

the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much. The process can be different, too. “The challenge,” says Ferlazzo, “is that to move people a large distance and for the long term, we have to create the conditions where they can move themselves.”
    Ferlazzo makes a distinction between “irritation” and “agitation.” Irritation, he says, is “challenging people to do something that we want them to do.” By contrast, “agitation is challenging them to do something that they want to do.” What he has discovered throughout his career is that “irritation doesn’t work.” It might be effective in the short term. But to move people fully and deeply requires something more—not looking at the student or the patient as a pawn on a chessboard but as a full participant in the game.
    This principle of moving others relies on a different set of capabilities—in particular, the qualities of attunement, which I’ll explore in Chapter 4, and clarity, which I’ll cover in Chapter 6. “It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,” Ferlazzo says. “It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”
    For example, in his ninth-grade class last year, after finishing a unit on natural disasters, Ferlazzo asked his students to write an essay about the natural disaster they considered the very worst. One of his students—Ferlazzo calls him “John”—refused. This wasn’t the first time he had done so, either. John had struggled throughout school and had written very little. But he still hoped eventually to graduate.
    Ferlazzo told John that he wanted him to graduate, too, but that graduation was unlikely if he couldn’t write an essay. “I then told him that I knew from previous conversations that he was on the football team and liked football,” Ferlazzo said. “I asked him what his favorite football team was. He looked a little taken aback since it seemed off topic—it looked like he had been expecting a lecture. ‘The Raiders,’ he replied. Okay, then, what was his least favorite team? ‘The Giants.’”
    So Ferlazzo asked him to write an essay showing why the Raiders were superior to the Giants. John stayed on task, said Ferlazzo, asked “thoughtful and practical questions,” and turned in a “decent essay.” Then John asked to write another essay—this one about basketball—to make up for previous essays he hadn’t bothered to do. Ferlazzo said yes. John delivered another pretty good piece of written work.
    “Later that week, in a parent-teacher conference with all of his teachers, John’s mother cried when I showed her the two essays. She said he’d never written one before” during his previous nine years of schooling.
    Ferlazzo says he “used agitation to challenge him on the idea of graduating from high school and I used my ears knowing that he was interested in football.” Ferlazzo’s aim wasn’t to force John to write about natural disasters but to help him develop writing skills. He convinced John to give up resources—ego and effort—and that helped John move himself.
    Ferlazzo’s wife—the Med to his Ed—sees something similar with her patients. “The model of health care is ‘We’re the experts.’ We go in and tell you what to do.” But she has found, and both experience and evidence confirm, that this approach has its limits. “We need to take a step back and bring [patients] on board,” she told me. “People usually know themselves way better than I do.” So now, in order to move people to move themselves, she tells them, “I need your expertise.” Patients heal faster and better when they’re part of the moving process.
    Health care and education both