Selfish, Scared and Stupid by Flanagan Kieran Gregory Dan & Kieran Flanagan

Author:Flanagan, Kieran, Gregory, Dan & Kieran Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730312796
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Eat the chocolate frog

The great majority of us naturally resist hard or unpleasant work. We put it off. We avoid it. It’s a universal experience. In fact, Australians have coined a term for this kind of person: they call them a ‘gunna’. A person who is a ‘gunna’ (not to be confused with a goner, which has rather more serious implications) is simply a person who is eternally ‘going to’ (gunna) do something, but never quite gets around to it.

One of the best-known motivational speakers of the ultra-positive genre is Brian Tracy. His mantra for avoiding procrastination and overcoming inertia is famously, ‘Eat that frog!’

What he’s metaphorically suggesting is, ‘toughen up, precious, and get the most difficult part of the task over with promptly and quickly’. This enables you to start the day with a sense of accomplishment as well as making the rest of the day seem a doddle.

In truth, this is one of the theories within the self-help movement that actually suggests you deal with realities, not ideals, and is therefore quite useful. But perhaps, even in this strategy, there is room for improvement. The problem with eating a frog is that at no point does the frog become substantially easier to eat (our Gallic cousins may have found a way to make this amphibian a gourmet item, but outside France, a frog is a frog).

Eating that frog is rather like willpower. You may be able to force yourself to gulp down its slippery sliminess, but there is always another frog lurking, waiting to be eaten. In other words, as a strategy it is temporary and finite.

What if, rather than simply eating the frog, we asked a different question such as, ‘How could this frog be made more appetising?’ or, ‘What if we made the frog out of chocolate?’ In other words, how could we change or reframe the dreaded activity in such a way that it doesn’t require the eating of anything we find unpalatable?

The Fun Theory, an initiative sponsored by Volkswagen, has invested rather a lot of time and effort in seeking how to manufacture these ‘chocolate frogs’. Their remit is to influence behaviour positively by making the solution to a societal issue fun!

Some of their experiments include fitting a staircase with enormous piano keys that make taking the stairs an enjoyable distraction. They also created a way of making putting rubbish in the bin (and not on the ground) not only a good thing to do but a fun one too. They built a rubbish bin that people would walk out of their way to deposit rubbish into. Every time you drop a piece of rubbish into the bin, the sound effect of a plummeting whistle creates the impression that you have just dropped your rubbish into the world’s deepest bin. Not only do people dispose of their rubbish in the right way, they even pick up nearby litter.

We use this thinking as an exercise in some of the workshops that we run with corporations. We divide a page into two columns.

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