Does it matter that some people see the glass as half empty and others view it as half full? YES!
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a social psychologist, speaker, best selling author of Succeed, and the co-author of Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World to Power Success and Influence.
Heidi joined me in 2013 to help us understand how people focus. The two main types of focus in her research are promotion and prevention. When you understand the different types of focus, you can motivate yourself and everyone around you by using language that resonates.
Promotion focused motivation means thinking about your goals as a way to advance areas of your life. People who use this type of focus are often creative, good at thinking outside of the box, and great at seizing opportunities.
Prevention focused motivation means thinking about your goals in terms of what you can lose if you don’t succeed. These people are good at being thorough, careful, and accurate. They don’t take things for granted and are sometimes more reliable than their promotion focused counterparts.
We all do both, but most people have a dominant style. Which one do you identify with?
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LISTEN HERE
WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER
- Success and its relationship to reaching goals for yourself
- Types of focus: promotion focus and prevention focus
- Focus in relationships: marriage, workplace, hiring employees
- Strengths + weaknesses of each motivation skill set
- How our focus shifts as we age
- The cultural reverence of different types of success
- How to motivate others and yourself
- How to speak in the language that others understand
RESOURCES FOR YOU
- Book: Focus
- Book: Succeed
- Heidi’s Website
- Interview we mentioned: Dan Pink on Motivation