Author: Heidi Grant Halvorson

To be a successful entrepreneur – or really, a successful anything – you need to be able to recognize an opportunity when you see one. Specifically, you need to be able to identify a problem or gap, and come up with an innovative solution. (Of course you also need to be able to execute that solution, but without spotting the opportunity in the first place, you aren’t going anywhere.)

So how, exactly, does one become good at spotting opportunities?

It’s probably innate — you’re either good at that sort of thing or you’re not, you say.

Wrong. Try again.

Well, then it’s probably a matter of practice — of getting experience.

Probably not. (Hang on and I’ll explain why.)

The suspense is no doubt killing you, so I’ll go ahead and tell you the secret to recognizing opportunities: promotion focus.

As I’ve written about with Tory Higgins in HBR and in our new book, Focus, when you see your entrepreneurial venture (or your career, or your goals in general) as being about the potential for advancement, achievement and rewards, you have a promotion focus. You are promotion-focused when you think about what you might gain if you are successful — how you might end up better off.

Alternatively, if you approach your venture focused on not losing everything you’ve worked so hard for, on avoiding danger and keeping things running smoothly, you have a prevention focus. Prevention focus is good for many things — careful planning, accuracy, reliability, and thoroughness, just to name a few. But it doesn’t lead to creativity, open-mindedness, and the confidence to take chances the way promotion focus does. And as new research by Andranik Tumasjan and Reiner Braun from Germany’s TUM School of Management shows, that’s the combination you need to be an opportunity-spotter.

Tumasjan and Braun asked 254 U.K. entrepreneurs from a variety of industries to take an assessment to determine their dominant focus, and to then demonstrate their opportunity-recognition skills. They were provided with comments from real focus groups that dealt with five kinds of problems associated with footwear (durability, comfort, performance, style, and price.) After looking them over, the entrepreneurs were told to make a list of the underlying problems revealed by the comments, and to provide solutions for those problems.

The results painted a very clear picture: Promotion-focused entrepreneurs were better able to detect opportunities — i.e., they generated more solutions to identified problems. In addition, those solutions were judged by independent raters to be more innovative than prevention-focused solutions.

That’s not all. Being promotion-focused even compensated for low levels of creative and entrepreneurial confidence, which are usually considered to be essential ingredients for success. Equipped with the right focus, even low-confidence entrepreneurs were among the top performers.

If you don’t have enough of it at the moment, there are many research-based techniques you can use to strengthen your promotion focus. Here are a few that work well:

• Write down several goals you have for your venture (or for your career). For each goal, make a list of ways in which you will gain something if you are successful. Read through these goals and potential gains on a daily basis, or before undertaking any important task.
• Picture yourself five or ten years down the road as you would ideally like to be. What are your aspirations? Your dreams? What do you hope to accomplish? Thinking about your ideal future self will put you in a promotion focus.
• Reflect on your past. Think about a recent big win or accomplishment — a time when you felt really pumped up about what you were able to achieve. A time when you felt on top of the world. Thinking about our past gains puts us in a promotion focus.

The more often you use any or all of these techniques, the more automatic the shift to promotion focus will become.

A Columbia undergraduate travels deep into the bowels of Schermerhorn Hall, home of the Motivation Science Center’s underground laboratories. (We would actually prefer to have windows, but what can you do?) He comes here to fill out a few questionnaires in exchange for $5. When he is finished, he’s told that in addition to his $5, he can choose a parting gift — an attractive, logo-embossed Columbia mug, or a disposable Bic pen. He is asked to make that choice in one of these two ways:

1. Think about what you would gain by choosing the mug, and what you would gain by choosing the pen.

Or:

2. Think about what you would lose by not choosing the mug, and what you would lose by not choosing the pen.

He chooses the mug. (They pretty much all choose the mug, because the pen is deliberately lame.) And then the experimenter asks, “What do you think is the price of the mug?” Here’s where it get’s interesting.

In that packet of questionnaires our Columbia undergrad filled out was one that measured his motivational focus — whether he tends to view his goals as ideals and opportunities to advance (what researchers call “promotion focus”), or as opportunities to stay safe and keep things running smoothly (“prevention focus“). While everyone has a mix of both to some extent, most of us tend to have a dominant focus. (To find out yours, try this free online assessment).

And as it turns out, if the way you ask him to make his choice fits with his motivational focus — thinking about gains for a promotion-focused person, or thinking about avoiding losses for a prevention-focused person — he thinks the mug is worth more. About 50% more, to be precise.

You might be saying to yourself, “But what if he actually had to spend his own money to buy it? Would he really be willing to pay more? Would motivational fit have such a big effect… or any effect at all?” The researchers wondered that, too.

So they brought in more undergrads, and ran the experiment again: gave each of them $5 just for showing up, and then asked them whether they would prefer the mug or the pen by thinking either about what they would gain or lose with each. Once again, everybody preferred the mug.

Then the researcher did something different. They showed the subjects an envelope containing a fair price for the mug. The researcher explained that the subject could now buy the mug if he wished to, but only if he offered an amount that was equal to or higher than the price in the envelope. (The idea is similar to a silent auction — you make your best bid and see what happens.) If he offered an amount less than the price, he would not get the mug. If he offered an amount equal to or higher than the price in the envelope, then he would get the mug for the price that they offered. The table below shows how much of their own $5 they were willing to pay to get the mug in each condition.

So the answer is yes: Even when people are spending their own money, they perceive an object to be worth much more — this time, roughly 70% more — when they make their decision in a way that creates motivational fit. It’s an experience that creates real, honest-to-goodness cash value.

Findings like these have emerged with many other kinds of products, too, as Tory Higgins and I found while researching our book (Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World For Success and Influence). For instance, when consumers were allowed to evaluate bike helmets in a way that created motivational fit, they were willing to pay about 20% more for one. In another study, consumers offered to pay more than 40% more for the same reading booklight if the way they made their choice created motivational fit.

Here’s the best part: Study after study shows that consumers who choose products while experiencing motivational fit are later significantly more satisfied with their selections. So you aren’t just tricking people into paying more — by taking into account your audience’s promotion or prevention focus, you are giving them the opportunity to experience of a genuinely better product. It just all depends on how you ask.

At the very end of 1998, NASA launched a much-anticipated robotic space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter. Its mission was to collect data about the atmosphere, and act as a communications relay for the Mars Polar Lander. Nearly ten months later, it arrived at the red planet, only to disappear just as it was supposed to establish an orbit.
It had come, unintentionally, 100 kilometers closer to the planet’s surface than originally planned, which was 25 kilometers beneath the level at which it could properly function. Instead of orbiting Mars, it plowed right through the atmosphere (possibly disintegrating) and was lost to us forever, taking $125 million in American taxpayer dollars with it.

The problem, it was later discovered, was one of unit conversion. The team of engineers at NASA worked in metric units (the standard they had adopted in 1990.) The engineers at Lockheed Martin who helped build the Orbiter and its navigation systems, on the other hand, worked in English units of measurement (pounds, inches, etc.)

When asked how an error of this magnitude could have occurred (particularly one that seemed so simple to have gotten right in the first place), Tom Gavin, chief administrator of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said “Something went wrong in our system processes, in checks and balances, that we should have caught this and fixed it.”

When an organization (or an individual) makes a big, expensive and embarrassing mistake, it attracts loads of attention. But do you know what almost never attracts the attention it deserves? When things go the way they are supposed to. And because of this, roughly half of us — people we call prevention-focused — rarely get the credit we are due.

As I’ve written about before, prevention-focused people see their goals in terms of what they might lose if they don’t succeed. They want to stay safe — to hold on to what they’ve already got. As a result, they are diligent, accurate, analytical, and go out of their way to avoid mistakes that might derail their success. They excel when it comes to keeping things running smoothly.

Promotion-focused people, on the other hand, see their goals in terms of what they might gain if they succeed — how they might advance or obtain rewards. Their strengths, relative to the prevention-focused, are creativity, innovation, speed, and seizing opportunities — exactly the kinds of qualities that the business community (and our culture as a whole) tends to admire and praise.

But what the story of the Mars Climate Orbiter so compellingly illustrates is that there isn’t (or at least wasn’t) nearly enough prevention-thinking going on in the NASA labs. It’s not really surprising — these people, after all, are rocket scientists. They devote their lives to exploring space — if there is something more promotion-focused than that, I don’t know what it is. These folks pretty much own the phrase “going where no one has gone before.”

The heroes of the business world always seem to be the risk-taking promotion-focused innovators. But you see, it’s really not that there are no prevention-focused heroes — it’s that they are so often unsung. You rarely get the credit you deserve for averting disaster when it never happens. No one says “Way to convert those units from inches to centimeters, Bob. You just saved us $125 million dollars and a boatload of humiliation. You rock!” Instead, the prevention-focused toil away, quietly and carefully, making sure that things work the way they are supposed to. They see to it that the airplane you are flying in won’t fall apart at the seams, that the medication you are taking wasn’t contaminated in the factory, and that your large skim mocha latte really is decaf so you won’t still be up at 4 a.m. watching The Weather Channel.

When what you’re good at is keeping things running smoothly, and things do run smoothly, your contribution is — sadly — less likely to be noticed. So you probably won’t get the praise you have in fact earned. (Unless you are the immediate successor to someone who let things go to hell in a handcart — then people will appreciate you, at least for a little while.) So pay attention when things are going right, as well as when they’re going wrong. There are two ways of looking at our goals, and these result in two sets of distinct strengths — both of which are critical to the success of any team or organization.

Portions of this post were adapted from my book with Tory Higgins, Focus: Use Different Ways of Perceiving The World For Success and Influence.

Editor’s Note: Due to a production error, this was initially published with the wrong author listed. It has since been corrected.

Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to “follow your passion” or “do what you love,” but as Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it.

We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It’s not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In fairness, how are you supposed to know if you will be happy as an investment banker, or an artist, or a professor, if you haven’t actually done any of these things yet? Who has ever, in the history of mankind, taken a job and had it turn out exactly as they imagined it would?

So if passion and expected happiness can’t be your guides, what can be? Well, you can begin by choosing a career that fits well with your skills and values. Since you actually have some sense of what those are (hopefully), this is a good starting place.

But a bit less obviously — though just as important — you also want to choose an occupation that provides a good motivational fit for you as well.

As I describe in my new book with Columbia Business School’s Tory Higgins, Focus and in our recent HBR article, there are two ways you can be motivated to reach your goals.

Some of us tend to see our goals (at work and in life) as opportunities for advancement, achievement and rewards. We think about what we might gain if we are successful in reaching them. If you are someone who sees your goals this way, you have what’s called a promotion focus.

The rest of us see our goals as being about security — about not losing everything we’ve worked so hard for. When you are prevention-focused, you want to avoid danger, fulfill your responsibilities, and be someone people can count on. You want to keep things running smoothly.

Everyone is motivated by both promotion and prevention, but we also tend to have a dominant motivational focus in particular domains of life, like work, love, and parenting. What’s essential to understand is that promotion and prevention-focused people have — because of their different motivations — distinct strengths and weaknesses. To give you a flavor of what I mean:

Promotion- focused people excel at:

• Creativity & innovation
• Seizing opportunities to get ahead
• Embracing risk
• Working quickly
• Generating lots of options and alternatives
• Abstract thinking

(Unfortunately, they are also more error-prone, overly-optimistic, and more likely to take risks that land them in hot water)

Prevention-focused people excel at:

• Thoroughness and being detail-oriented
• Analytical thinking and reasoning
• Planning
• Accuracy (working flawlessly)
• Reliability
• Anticipating problems

(Unfortunately, they are also wary of change or taking chances, rigid, and work more slowly. Diligence takes time.)

By now you probably have a sense of your own focus in the workplace, but if you don’t, try our free online assessment.

Knowing your dominant focus, you can now evaluate how well-suited you are motivationally to different kinds of careers, or different positions in your organization. More than a decade of research shows that when people experience a fit between their own motivation and the way they work, they are not only more effective, but they also find their work more interesting and engaging, and value it more.

If you are promotion-focused, look for jobs that offer advancement and growth. Consider fast-paced industries where products and services are rapidly changing, and where the ability to identify opportunities will be essential, like the tech sector or social media. To use a sports metaphor, look for a career where you get to play offense — where boldness, speed, and outside-the-box thinking pay off.

If you are prevention-focused, look for jobs that offer you a sense of stability and security. You are good at keeping things running, at handling complexity and always having a Plan B (and C and D) ready at a moment’s notice. Consider careers where your thoroughness and attention to detail are valued — for instance, as a contract lawyer or data guru. You work best when you are playing defense — you can spot a threat a mile away, and protect your company or client from harm.

But what about entrepreneurs? you ask. I’m thinking of starting my own business — which motivational focus is best for that? For any successful venture, the truth is that you need both promotion and prevention. An entrepreneur who is all promotion may get her business going, but she probably won’t keep it going for long, since she’ll be unprepared for the obstacles that will inevitably come her way. And the prevention-focused entrepreneur will get so bogged down worrying about obstacles that his business may never get off the ground at all.

This is one of the reasons that good partnerships can be so invaluable — it often takes a Steve Jobs to see a product’s potential, and a Steve Wozniak to actually build it and make it work. So if you are starting a new venture, make sure that you’ve got a healthy balance of promotion and prevention thinking in the right places.

For years, I’ve been trying to convince people that success is not about who you are, but about what you do.

Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” which became HBR’s most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each “Thing”? (After all, we’re terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it’s a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.

I now have responses from over 30,000 people who’ve logged on and completed one or more of the Nine Things Diagnostics. The results are fascinating, and a bit surprising even to me. First, each of the Nine Things had a significant impact on success. (That actually didn’t surprise me, for obvious reasons.).

But which packed the biggest punch? To find out, I recently took a look at the responses of about 7,000 people who had completed every Nine Things Diagnostic, along with a brief measure of how successful they felt they had been in reaching their own goals in the past.

In order of effect magnitude, the most impactful strategies were:

1. Have Grit — Persistence over the long haul is key
2. Know Exactly How Far You Have Left to Go — Monitor your progress
3. Get Specific — Have a crystal-clear idea of exactly what success will look like
4. Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals — Know in advance what you will do, and when and where you will do it
5. Focus on What You Will Do, Not What You Won’t Do — Instead of focusing on bad habits, it’s more effective to replace them with better ones.
6. Build your Willpower Muscle — If you don’t have enough willpower, you can get more using it.
7. Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself
8. Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles
9. Don’t Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don’t push your luck

Notice how persistence is at the very top of the list? While we marvel at people who’ve shown incredible perseverance — Earnest Shackleton, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony — I wonder how many people have ever thought to blame their own failures on “not hanging in there long enough”? In my experience, very few. Instead, we assume we lack the ability to succeed. We decide that we don’t have what it takes — whatever that is — to meet the challenge. And we really couldn’t be more wrong. Grit is not an innate gift. Persisting is something we learn to do, when (and if) we realize how well it pays off.

Or take “knowing how far you have left to go.” Even someone with a healthy amount of grit will probably find his or her motivation flagging if they don’t have a clear sense of where they are now and where they want to end up. How much weight would a contestant on The Biggest Loser lose if he only weighed himself at the beginning and the end, instead of once a week? How well would an Olympic-level athlete perform if she only timed her official races, and never her practices? We can see how essential monitoring is for others’ performance, and yet somehow miss its importance for our own.

But does that mean that the items further down the list aren’t as important? Not quite. For instance, #7, “focusing on getting better, rather than being good,” actually predicted using each of the other eight things! People who focused on “being good,” on the other hand, were less likely to use the other tactics on the list. In fact, if you do a lot of “be good” thinking, you are less likely to be gritty or have willpower, and you are more likely to tempt fate. You’re also, not surprisingly, less likely to reach your goals.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was the extent to which people weren’t using these tactics.

Respondents answered each of the diagnostic questions on 1-5 scale, with 1 being “not at all true of me,” 3 being “somewhat true of me,” and 5 being “very true of me.”

If your average score for a particular tactic falls between Not at all and Somewhat, then you really aren’t doing what you need to do to be effective. Here’s how the percentages break down:

So about 40 percent of responders aren’t being realistically optimistic, or focusing on what they will do, rather than what they won’t. And 50 percent of responders aren’t being specific, seizing the moment, monitoring progress, having grit, and having willpower. An astonishing 70+ percent of respondents also don’t bother avoiding tempting fate. (Apparently, people just love to put themselves in harm’s way.)

Here’s some good news: an incredible 90 percent of responders report pursuing at least some of their goals with Get Better mindsets. But here’s the Bad News: 80 percent of responders are also pursuing goals with Be Good mindsets. So there’s still way too much I-have-to-prove-myself thinking going on out there, and it’s sabotaging our success.

If you have a few spare minutes, I encourage you to take the Nine Things Diagnostics yourself, assuming you haven’t already. It’s a quick yet powerful way to target your weaknesses (and learn about your strengths). Remember, improvement is only possible when you know where you’re going wrong, and what you can do about it.

You are stressed — by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever-increasing workload, and your life in general. If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you’re feeling — worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life.

This might sound a little crazy, but what if it’s the very fact that we assume stress is bad that’s actually making it so bad for us? And what if there were another way to think about stress — a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale’s Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage.

Let’s take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress?

Generally speaking, it’s the experience — or anticipation — of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activation of the sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”), inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”), and the release of adrenaline and cortisol. But what does all of that do? In short, it primes the pump — we become more aroused and more focused, more ready to respond physically and mentally to whatever is coming our way.

Kind of sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But wait, you say, can’t chronic stress make us sick? Can’t it take a toll on our immune functioning?

Yes…but there is plenty of evidence that stress can also enhance immunity.

Well then, you point out, can’t it leave us feeling depressed and lethargic?

Yes… but studies show that it can also create mental toughness, increase clarity, result in greater appreciation for one’s circumstances, and contribute to a sense of confidence built on a history of overcoming of obstacles (which is the best, most long-lasting kind of confidence you can have). So stress is bad, and somehow also good. How can we make sense of the paradoxical nature of stress?

I’ll bet right now you are saying to yourself, it’s the amount of stress that matters. Low levels may be good, but high levels are still definitely bad. (i.e., What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger….but too much stress is probably going kill you.)

The problem with this theory — which was once the dominant theory among psychologists, too — is that by and large, it doesn’t appear to be true. The amount of stress you encounter is a surprisingly poor predictor of whether it will leave you worse (or better) off.

As it turns out, your mindset about stress may be the most important predictor of how it affects you. As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress. Some people — arguably most people — believe that stress is a bad thing. They agreed with statements like “The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,” and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that “Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth” had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.

In their studies, Crum and colleagues began by identifying stress mindsets among a group of nearly 400 employees of an international financial institution. They found that those employees who had stress-is-enhancing mindsets (compared to stress-is-debilitating) reported having better health, greater life satisfaction, and superior work performance.

That’s already rather amazing, but here’s the best part — your mindset can also change! If you have been living with a stress-is-debilitating mindset (like most of us), you don’t have to be stuck with it. A subset of the 400 employees in the aforementioned study were shown a series of three-minute videos over the course of the following week, illustrating either the enhancing or debilitating effects of stress on health, performance, and personal growth. Those in the stress-is-enhancing group (i.e., the lucky ones) reported significant increases in both well-being and work performance.

Yet another study showed that stress-is-enhancing believers were more likely to use productive strategies, like seeking out feedback on a stress-inducing task. They were also more likely to show “optimal” levels of cortisol activity. (It turns out that both too much and too little cortisol release in response to a stressor can have negative physiological consequences. But with the stress-is-enhancing mindset, cortisol release is — like Baby Bear’s porridge — just right.)

Taken together, all this research paints a very clear picture: stress is killing you because you believe that it is. Of course, that doesn’t mean you aren’t juggling too many projects at once — each of us has limited time and energy, and people can and do get overworked.

But if you can come to see the difficulties and challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than as your “daily grind,” then you really can be happier, healthier, and more effective. Maybe you don’t need less stress — you just need to think about your stress a little differently.

What makes a person good at — and comfortable with — persuading others?

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend, a brilliant and hard-working VP. I had just finished Dan Pink’s excellent new book, To Sell Is Human, and was eager for my friend’s take on it. In a nutshell, Pink argues that moving people (i.e., selling, but also persuading or influencing) has become an essential component of nearly everyone’s job in the modern workplace. Everyone is in sales. Like a lot of people, I found Pink’s argument to be radical, surprising, and undeniably true.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone likes this argument. I thought my friend would find it interesting, but instead he seemed profoundly uncomfortable. “That’s crap,” he said, more to himself than to me. “I’m not a salesman. My job is strategy, not manipulating suckers.”

On the surface, it seemed like the salesmen-are-slimy stereotype was at work here (something Pink’s book tackles head on and does an admirable job dispelling).There might also have been a touch of aversion to the idea of selling — many of us wonder if it’s right, ethically-speaking, to persuade someone to buy or believe something. We’re uneasy with the power that effective persuasion gives us. But, as Pink points out, it’s impossible for human beings to avoid influencing, and being influenced by, other people’s words and deeds. People are going to be moved — the trick is to make sure that the ideas and products with genuine merit do the moving.

In my friend’s visible discomfort, however, I sensed something more. Something like what happens when you give an unsuspecting person a set of algebra problems and they literally back away from you stuttering, “Um… I’m not a math person.” (Believe it or not, in my job I actually do things like that.)

I spend a lot of time writing and speaking about the pervasive — and false — belief that our success depends upon the possession of innate, immutable abilities. I drown my readers and listeners in data, showing beyond a reasonable doubt that reaching goals and mastering skills is about strategy, effort, and persistence, and that these things are learned. The abilities I have usually focused on are intelligence, creativity, self-control, and, of course, mathematical skill.

But until I read Pink’s latest book and witnessed my friend’s reaction to the idea that the ability to move people is essential to success, it really hadn’t occurred to me that a lot of people might think that’s innate too. Oh no.

To find out more, I turned to Google. I searched the internet for the expression “natural born salesman.” Over half a million hits. To be fair, many of these were attempts to dispel the myth of the naturally-gifted mover, but the need to dispel the myth speaks volumes about its ubiquity.

Selling, moving, persuading, influencing… many of us may resist the idea that this is part of our job description (or avoid taking positions for which it would be) because we believe we lack that ability, just as we avoided calculus in college like the plague because we weren’t “math people.” My friend doesn’t want to believe that sales is a part of his job because he doesn’t believe he is good at sales, and more importantly, because he doesn’t believe he can be.

(A quick aside: There is research suggesting that successful salespeople have particular personality traits, including conscientiousness, humility, and as Pink points out “ambiversion” — being neither an extreme introvert nor extrovert. But it’s important to not assume that personality traits = innate ability. Personalities can and do change as a result of our efforts and experiences. You aren’t “stuck” as you are.)

If you want to become good at influencing others, then you simply need to learn how. It’s not magic, and it’s certainly not innate. It may sometimes feel innate, but that’s because people are often able to pick up on effective strategies implicitly — without conscious awareness — through experience and observation. Not realizing you are learning makes your abilities feel innate, even when they aren’t.

Do you want to be a people mover? Pick up one (or more) of the many excellent, data-driven books on the subject. To Sell Is Human is a good place to start. Robert Cialdini’s Influence and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational are also filled with strategies of effective persuasion. (My forthcoming book with Tory Higgins, Focus, offers a few useful pointers as well.)

Then, armed with the knowledge of what works, practice. Everything gets easier, more automatic, more “natural” with practice. You don’t need to be afraid of this brave new people-moving world — you have what it takes, you just need to learn to use it.

If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode. It’s incredibly frustrating. This kind of advice is surely well meant, and it certainly sounds good. After all, you probably don’t relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong — at minimum, it’s a little embarrassing for everyone involved.

But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Wrong-headed because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating. Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes he or she is making, no one can possibly improve. Staying “positive” when doling out feedback will only get you so far.

Hang on, you say. Can’t negative feedback be discouraging? Demotivating?

That’s perfectly true.

And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident? Doesn’t that help them stay motivated?

In many cases, yes.

Confusing, isn’t it? Thankfully, brilliant new research by Stacey Finkelstein (Columbia University) and Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) sheds light on the seemingly paradoxical nature of feedback, by making it clear why, when, and for whom negative feedback is appropriate.

It’s important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Positive feedback (e.g., Here’s what you did really well….) increases commitment to the work you do, by enhancing both your experience and your confidence. Negative feedback (e.g., Here’s where you went wrong….), on the other hand, is informative — it tells you where you need to spend your effort, and offers insight into how you might improve.

Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times. For instance, when you don’t really know what you are doing, positive feedback helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing — something novices tend to need. But when you are an expert, and you already more or less know what you are doing, it’s negative feedback that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.

As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information. In one of their studies, American students taking either beginner or advanced-level French classes were asked whether they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what they were doing right (focusing on their strengths) or what they were doing wrong (focusing on their mistakes and how to correct them). Beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor. Advanced students, on the other hand, preferred a more critical instructor who would help them develop their weaker skills.

In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions. Their “experts” were members of environmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace), while their “novices” were non-members. Each participant in the study made a list of the actions they regulatory took that helped the environment — things like recycling, avoiding bottled water, and taking shorter showers. They were offered feedback from an environmental consultant on the effectiveness of their actions, and were given a choice: Would you prefer to know more about the actions you take that are effective, or about the actions you take that are not? Experts were much more likely to choose the negative feedback — about ineffective actions — than novices.

Taken together, these studies show that people who are experienced in a given domain — people who already have developed some knowledge and skills — don’t actually live in fear of negative feedback. If anything, they seek it out. Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.

But what about motivation? What kind of feedback makes you want to take action? When participants in the environmental study were randomly given either positive or negative feedback about their actions, and were then asked how much of their $25 study compensation they would like to donate to Greenpeace, the type of feedback they received had a dramatic effect on their motivation to give. When negative feedback was given, experts gave more on average to Greenpeace ($8.53) than novices ($1.24). But when positive feedback was given, novices ($8.31) gave far more than experts ($2.92).

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you never tell the rookie about his mistakes, or that you never praise the seasoned professional for her outstanding work. And of course negative feedback should always be accompanied by good advice, and given with tact.

But I am suggesting that piling on praise is a more effective motivator for the rookie than the pro. And I’m saying, point blank, that you shouldn’t worry so much when it comes to pointing out mistakes to someone experienced. Negative feedback won’t crush their confidence, but it just might give them the information they need to take their performance to the next level.