Get people to take action with these 4 phrases

We all know getting people to take action can be hard. People might agree with you — but turning agreement into action is a whole different thing.

Imagine you’re in a meeting, and now the time has come to get people to take action. Previously you’ve struggled. So now you need to do something differently.

Here are four things to try:

1. Suggest TRYING something, rather than making a permanent commitment

When you want to make something the “new way of doing it”, people may resist because they don’t agree with it. You can overcome this by suggesting a trial, which people receive a lot more easily because it’s not permanent.

Try this: “Let’s try X for 2 weeks as a temporary solution, and review.”

2. Offer three CHOICES

Another reason people often don’t take the actions you want is that they might feel the action removes their sense of agency. So one way around this is called “duelling preferences” — it recreates agency by giving them a choice:

Try this: “Out of X, Y and Z, which one do you prefer?”

3. Identify the single most CONCRETE and CRITICAL action

Often there are so many actions, we end up with action paralysis. So cut through the Gordian knot and get right to the main thing that must be done.

Try this: “For now, what is the one tangible thing that must be done, by when?”

4. Break actions into STAGES

We humans love a good story. You can even make taking action a story by “chunking” it — creating motivation to complete one stage in order to see the next. Completing a stage also gives us a burst of energy and accomplishment.

Try this: “So let’s do X, Y and Z as stage one. Then once those are done, we can move onto stage two, where we will do A, B and C.”

Hint that every parent knows: make stage two the exciting stuff.