Invisible Influence: The Power to Persuade Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

46

Recapturing Attention

It’s not unusual for events to occur while you are communicating with someone. We’ve talked about deliberately creating interruptions, but now let’s talk about what to do with unwanted interruptions.

Perhaps you are about to ask someone out.

Perhaps you are about to ask for the big deal.

Perhaps you are two-thirds of the way through a critical presentation.

You are interrupted and it wasn’t your intended interruption. At this point you must recapture attention.

Laurent Itti, University of Southern California, Pierre Baldi, University of California, Irvine discovered there are five factors that determine what captures our attention. They are:

1. Surprise location

2. Surprise observation

3. Surprise event

4. Salience (importance to you)

5. Entropy (message fading or randomness in moving experience)

There is a difference between who gets attention and who gets picked, but if you do not get attention, you cannot be picked!

You must recapture attention when it’s been lost, and you don’t have long to do it.

The scientific research showed that surprise is the most important factor in attention, followed by salience (importance to you) and entropy (unpredictability, randomness of events or experience).

Write that down. Tape it to your computer.

Always be prepared for the implementation of something surprising or remarkably salient to put you back in control of the discussion at hand.