Kelly connects with Joshua Bandoch, Senior Vice President of Policy Research at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. He has a new book, “How to Get What You Want: Mastering the Art and Science of Persuasion.” 

You write in the book about taking improv classes at Second City which helped you become a more persuasive person. 

“So much of what you need to know about persuasion and getting what you want, you learn through improv. And there’s so much there, from connecting to your audience, the sort of left brain, right brain stuff, and how it’s actually those emotional connections that are foundational to persuading people; to the quick nature of things, to the confidence conveying your ideas in the moment in front of other people.  Just big picture: anyone who wants to be persuasive should take improv classes. And I had no idea going in. I just did it because my speaking coach said. ‘I think you would profit from improv.’ And I thought, sure, why not? I’ll take some improv classes. And five full sessions later, I mean, it has shaped me, not just in my thinking, but in how I interact with people in more ways than I could ever recount.” 

So, what do we get wrong about persuasion? 

“Well, I think there are three common misconceptions of persuasion that get us in trouble. The first is that a lot of people think that persuasion is about winning. I had an intern a couple summers ago, not my intern, but he was at my institution. The very first day I said, ‘Why are you here?’ And he said, ‘I like winning.’  Well, Kelly, if I win against you, what does that make you? It makes you a loser. That’s terrible. You don’t want to work with somebody who makes you feel like a loser. The second misconception is that persuasion is about convincing someone to think like you. And the Latin root of the word convince actually means to vanquish or to conquer. And conquest is barbaric. And the third misconception of persuasion is that it’s all about logic and reason and data. And this is one of the areas that improv has been just super instructive for me. It’s like, no, no, right? We don’t connect with other people reasonably; we don’t persuade them based on logic and data, that’s not how the brain is wired. We’re wired to feel first. And improv is all about how we’re connecting at an emotional level way before we’re connecting to somebody at an intellectual level. But those three misconceptions tend to get people in trouble.”

This book really puts feelings first in the persuasion game. 

“Yeah. And this is where, maybe more than anywhere else, improv just liberated me. It was so beautiful that, you know, looking at my former life, I was an academic and I was trained in the peer review process. So, you do all that research, you’re hyper logical, you present your data, and of course nobody could disagree with you. And even in the peer review process, that doesn’t work. The real problem though is that it’s not how our brains are wired. All the neuroscience and all the psychology say that we feel first, before reason. In fact, my first improv teacher would say to me, ‘You’re too left brain.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ But in improv, you are really in that kind of right brain, emotive space. And that’s how you connect with your scene partner, with the audience, and ultimately with yourself as well. And this is where improv liberated me. You just do it week after week after week. And then you realize, no, no, we really do feel first. That is connection. And that’s how you get what you want by operating first with feelings. When I say that we feel first, then reason, we do reason. It’s just that feelings come first in everybody’s cognition.”