… the human unconscious mind has an irresistible need for closure, you’d understand why you have felt an involuntary, maybe overwhelming urge to keep going after you read the title of this post.
In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin noticed that waiters has a much clearer recollection of still unpaid orders. His student at the time, Russian psychologist Blyuma Zeigarnik went on to study the phenomenon. The implications are wide (as anyone in marketing and advertising or TV series production will know), and one of them is: People remember incomplete tasks much more easily than completed ones. This is now called the “Zeigarnik effect“.Have you ever received an email marketing with an unfinished subject line (a bit like the title of this post)? Or read a headline which somehow did not seem complete? Are you familiar with cliff hanger TV episodes (the type which stops right BEFORE you finally discover who is the criminal mastermind)? If you have ever watched an Alfred Hitchcock movie, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Bottom line is: as long as the mind has not achieved closure, it will keep looking for some sort of resolution to the problem/situation/question/story etc… You forget about it, but never completely. Sometimes, you will find that some unrelated daily situations will trigger the thought to resurface for no apparent reason.
This is used in marketing and sales for very obvious reasons. We’ve all seen marketing campaigns spread through several days or weeks to announce the launch of a new product or movie for example. They usually start off as very cryptic attention-catching messages or images, and only fully reveal their message (“opens on December 18th”) after several days or even weeks of marketing blasts. By the time the full message is revealed, anticipation has built up in a way that you will absolutely need to buy the product or see the movie.
Public speakers do this all the time, and it’s called ‘opening metaphors’. The purpose here is to get your audience attention quickly, and assist them to process the information that you present to them. In the context of a classroom for example, where students have to learn and memorise information that they’ll need to retrieve later, it’s a very powerful technique!
Metaphors are stories that deliver a hidden message to our unconscious mind. You want to try it out in your next speech or presentation? This is how it works:
– Step 1: you open a story right at the beginning of your talk (it is not necessary that the story have a direct relevance to your subject, in fact, the further away from your subject the better, I’ll explain why later).
– Step 2: Build up your story to the point of maximum expectation (80-90% into the metaphor), and stop
– Step 3: for elegance, introduce a transition (a classic example of transition is “and that reminds me of…”)
– Step 4: get on with your speech as if nothing happened.
You may want to close your metaphor at the end of your presentation, or not, depending on whether you want your audience to keep learning and searching (don’t close), or to integrate the information you just gave them (close).
It is very interesting to notice that the Zeigarnik effect is strongly correlated to one of the Myers-Briggs personality group.
And that reminds me…
…that I probably ought to talk more about this in a future article, coming VERY soon! 🙂
In the meantime, if you want to know more about this technique and others just as powerful, check out the NLP Practitioner and Coach Certification training in March. This is part of what we’ll learn.