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She’d been fidgeting for some while. Suddenly, she turned and started talking to me.  For two hours we’d sat silently, side-by-side at the airport gate, waiting for our small commuter airplane. Leaning on the narrow metal armrest that divided our seats, she looked hesitant yet determined. “Now I need to be brave for my father. I’m not sure I know how.  I’ve always leaned on him for help, you see,” she nodded briefly at the man across from us.

She continued, “We haven’t been on a plane since we flew here from Bogota last November.  My professor advised us to leave right away. In fact, he gave us the money for our tickets.” I smiled at her, not knowing what to say.

“We are going to our new home.” She nodded again towards her father.. Her father was gripping his canvas bag with both hands, staring steadily at a blank pillar.   I touched the top of her hand for a moment, and smiled again. “My mother and four brothers were taken from our home in the middle of the night. They said they’d kill me if we tried to stop them.  You see, they wanted to silence my father.”

“He stood up to them, even when they pointed guns at him, but he’s afraid of flying. We have different fears. Now I must help him.”

He was shifting in his seat.  She paused and then blurted out, “And he needs his dignity now, more than ever. “ Her eyes looked down and then up, as if for understanding. I nodded once more, trying to find the right thing to say.

Finally I smiled again and simply replied, “Looks like you are doing just the right thing for him.”

We sat in silence for another half hour until our plane finally arrived, deplaned and the gate agents asked us to board. The young woman rose, we smiled at each other, and then she followed her father onto the plane.

I started to rise when a trim man with a short crew cut on the other side of me gently put his hand on my forearm, “There’s a tornado warning where we’re going,” he whispered. “Let me ask the agent to change seats so I can sit across from her father.  I speak Spanish so I can ask him about his homeland.  Keep him talking if we wobble in the air.”

Wobble was a gross understatement for what happened later on that plane. No matter what altitude our pilot attempted, our 16-seater rocked, dropped and rolled almost continuously on that long seventy-minute flight.  But in the two seats on either side of the narrow aisle ahead of me those two men talked through most of it, tightly clutching their armrests. Only after we exited the plane did five passengers, including me, throw up, just steps from our waiting luggage.

The next morning I left my hotel room to meet the conference planner in a ballroom where I was to give a keynote. After greeting me, she said the board member who was to introduce me was just coming in the ballroom door behind me. I turned to see Mr. Crew Cut striding towards us.

As the meeting planner started to introduce us, he smiled at me and interrupted, “We have met already, at an educational session last night.”  I grinned back in surprise.  He continued, now looking at the meeting planner “It was designed to help people overcome a fear of flying and it appears to have worked for me.”

While I enjoyed several educational sessions at that conference the lesson that has stuck with me the longest is the one the crew-cut man gave me: Overcome a fear by helping someone who has the same fear.

What incidents have become stories that shaped your life? One of Mario Cuomo’s recollections has stayed with me: “I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.”

Want to understand and share the incidents of your life in ways that make them meaningful to others?  Nothing rings more real than sharing the stories that mark turning points in your life.  From what we share out loud, we can learn what matters to us and to each other. Here three ways for finding meaning, and self-understanding through pivotal life moments and connecting more deeply with others as you do.

1.   First, literally see what makes a great story stick

My favorite example is watching Wall-E and Toy Story Screenwriter, Andrew Stanton revealing “the Clues to a Great Story.”

2. Spontaneously act out scenes 

Like jumping into the deep end of the pool to learn to swim, learning improv can be a fast way to literally feel incidents that resonate with you because of an underlying truth.  TheatreSports, has evolved in an elaborate set of charade-like improv games that Drew Carey popularized with his TV show, “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?” All over the world, chapters have sprung up. It’s a fast way to see parts of yourself through other’s eyes, especially with people you are just getting to know. Melinda Blau dubs them “consequential strangers.”

3.   Bring out others’ humanity at work apt vignettes 

Pull others into your purposeful narrative so they can see a role they want to play in the story you tell, suggests Peter Guber in Tell to Win. See how stories can boost participation and performance.

Who knows? “You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift,” wrote Erin Morgenstern in The Night Circus.

This column also appears at Forbes.

1. Adopt the Counter-intuitive Approach to Becoming Well-Liked

Legend has it that British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his political rival William Gladstone had a date with the same woman on different nights. When asked her impression of the two men, she said, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.”

Disraeli’s talent is echoed in what Jack Nicholson’s character famously said to Helen Hunt’s character in the movie, As Good as it Gets: “You make me want to be a better man.”

Counterintuitive Likeability Hint: People are more likely to be drawn to you and act admirably when they like how they feel and act when around you. That’s even more vital than how they first perceive you.

2. Craft Scenes That Make Us Feel important and Cared for

Was it the butterscotch-colored walls, light coconut scent wafting through the door as I opened it or the cushy island of azure blue carpet under my feet as I stepped into the boutique hotel? I don’t know yet I instinctively sighed with relief. And that was before I saw the smiling doorman walking towards me, saying, “We’re glad that you’re safely out of that storm. Let me help you with your coat, if you like, and your bag.”

The lobby was light with the soft, full-spectrum lights that store make-up counters have, making us all look and feel our best.

Feel Good Hint: Positive multi-sensory cues multiple their emotional impact when we feel more than one at once or three in quick succession.

In fact, without my knowing it at the time, that doorman looked more handsome and caring than I would have experienced him if the entry to that hotel had shiny metal railings, an elaborately patterned carpet and/or a dark colored wall.

 3. The Scene That’s Most Often Neglected Has the Biggest Impact on How We Feel About Our Experience

Further, since the last “scene” when I left the hotel the next morning was as a positive as the opening scene, I tended to forget the slow room service or cramped bathroom, according to research on the power of the sequence of events within an experience – from a vacation to a colonscopy. Yet that last scene we have in a hotel, hospital, restaurant, store or conference is often the most neglected. No small farewell gift? No smiling staff saying “We look forward to seeing you again.” These “peak end” moments have the most impact on how we recall the whole experience.

Even apparently small physical moment make a big emotional and even learning difference. Adapt these multi-sensory cues to pull others to you, your place or event.

Leaving Hint: The last thing you remember is often the most memorable.

4. Get Us Motion Together to Feel Togetherness

Children “are better at math when using their hands while thinking,” found to Josh Ackerman, a MIT psychologist. Further, the weight, texture and hardness of objects we touch affects our opinion of the people and the situation.

Moving Hint: Get people in convivial motion together, walking down a hall where the walls have a sequence of captioned images that build interest, suspense and conversation, Burma Shave-style, to collectively discover the “punch line” or answer in the last captioned image. See the rest of the tips at my Forbes column.

Taxi Mike, Geek Squad and Vanderbilt University Medical Center take the same successful approach to stand out from their competition, and you can too. Like you, they realize that traditional selling is dead in our digital world.

Potential buyers can quickly compare products, as Daniel Pink eloquently suggests in To Sell is Human. Yet, unlike these three very different organizations, surprisingly few others have turned this truth into an opportunity to become the top-of-mind choice for their kind of customers.

What is their secret? Simply this.

They understand that extremely relevant helpfulness is not only the most human way to attract customers but it is also the best way to keep them loyal as Jay Baer demonstrates in his new book, YOUtility. 

As Baer suggests, “Sell something, and you make a customer. Help someone, and you make a customer for life.”

 Adapt one of these partnership-based ways to be more helpful than your competition, on-line and in-person:

1. Coddle Your Biggest-Spending Customers

Offer a gift with the purchase of a “bundled” collection of your services or products. Your gift is provided by your partnering business. Your clients can receive it by taking the gift card you give them to the partner’s outlet. You reciprocate providing a gift of equal value to your partner’s clients who walk in your door to receive it. Of course, you can replicate this method online. With this approach, you give customers more reason to buy more at one time and you get introduced to your partner’s biggest spenders.

2.    Serve Those in Difficult Situation Better Together 

After watching her mother staining clothes while taking her dialysis treatments several times a week, Megan Stengel and her partners began designing functional yet attractive clothing with hidden zippers and other alterations. Their firm, Libre Clothing, now partners with grateful dialysis clinics, hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation to make it easier and more comfortable for their “mutual market” of patients to undergo chemotherapy, dialysis or other treatments requiring intravenous lines, catheters or infusion tubes.  Hint: when you provide a first-of-a-kind combined service you are often a magnet for media coverage, especially if your helpfulness supports those in a dire situation.

See three more ways to pull in appreciative clients over at my Forbes column.

Tension was inevitable. The stakes were high. We all wanted to be accepted into this coveted fellowship program, yet only 20% would. After a series of intensive interviews, much depended on how we played this game. The rules were odd. Eight strangers, all high-achievers, were seated at a round table, with five flat cardboard pieces in various shapes in front of each of us. Ten other just-formed teams of applicants sat at different tables in the same large meeting room. Observers with notepads were standing right behind us around each table.

Become More Beneficial With Savvy Prosocial Support

When the bell rang we were to give a piece to someone else in the group who would then be expected to give some piece back.  We could not ask for a certain piece from someone else. All of us could be giving and receiving at the same time. The goal of each team member was to create a complete triangle shape out of the pieces they received. The winning team would be the first one in which every member had a completed triangle of pieces in front of them. Soon after the bell rang one team member was grimly grinning at me as she took one of my pieces and gave another back. While not violating the rules like her, most of us were also looking at everyone’s pieces to find the ones we needed.

Yet the man on my left was on a different path. He carefully looking around at each teammate’s set of pieces and then at his own. He would then give one of his pieces to someone, and put the one he received to one side. I was slow to understand his strategy but when I did I felt a surge of warmth towards him and imitated his approach. You see, instead of figuring out how fast he could complete his triangle by pulling the right pieces from others, he was helping them complete theirs by seeing which if his pieces would help each of them. Inevitably the leftovers in front of him would eventually form a triangle too.

Give and Become  Sought-After

Our “team” won because of him, and I am certain I got accepted to the program on his coattails of connective leadership. Meeting him was a life-changer for me. That was years ago and Jim remains a hero and a friend of mine to this day. Organizational psychologist and Give and Take author Adam M. Grant would call him a successful giver and he has certainly proven to be.  Jim is widely admired and sought-after in many realms of work and life. From his studies, Grant would say that Jim, with practice in strategically helping others, has strengthened that selfless “giving muscle” we all have, thus also boosting his willpower and focus, becoming more productive in the use of his time and energy. (See the chocolate cookie/handgrip squeeze test described in Grant’s book).

Not all givers are successful. In fact some are the least productive, most unhappy people, according to Grant’s research. Most of us learn that lesson the hard way, and keep re-learning it.

Become the Kind Of Giver Who Gets the Most Success and Satisfaction

The priceless core lesson of Grant’s extraordinary book (my favorite on behavior since Quiet) is that we can become successful and lead a satisfying life with others if we learn the right way to give. This talented, widely-liked and introverted social scientist divides the world into givers, takers and matchers:

• The majority of us are givers, according to Grant, yet “are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success.”

• “Takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf.

• Matchers expect some kind of quid pro quo, “with a master chit list in mind.”

What makes some givers successful and sought-after is that they have both a deep, evident caring for others, yet they also attend to their own self-interest. They are not “doormats.” Grant cites three relevant behaviors for being productive, happy givers:

1. Be judicious about giving to takers
2. Give in ways that reinforce and support your most vital relationships. (You can’t serve everyone extremely well and care for yourself)
3. Consolidate your giving into chunks of time with an individual or group so your support has a more substantial, meaningful impact

From my experience a fourth point is also vital to delivering the most helpful value for others, and yourself:

Recognize the Need to Feel Needed and Connected

In art as in life it is often a matter of where you draw the line, the saying goes, and to succeed at work you need to draw a line to create healthy boundaries. Sacrificing your precious time with closest friends, colleagues and family members because you are devoting it to too many others may not be judicious choice for the self-care that Grant advocates.

As Susan Dominus observed in her New York Times article, Grant has a traditional marriage where “his wife “who has a degree in psychiatric nursing, does not work outside the home, devoting her time to the care time of their two young daughters and their home” and “works at least one full day on the weekend, as well as six evening a week, often well past 11.”

As an alternative model of healthy giving that reflects Grant’s definition of also taking care of oneself and “chunking” the helpful time with others, serial investor, Brad Feld has often written about how he gives and sets boundaries, becoming a role model in productivity. Feld helps many in the locally-based TechStars start-up communities, the start-ups in which he and his business partners invest, and boards on which he sits. He also scales his knowledge in his blog and co-authored books, and by providing open “office hours” to help most anyone.

In his self-caring approach to giving, he resolutely and publically sets aside specific vacation and other times with his wife, and for visiting with his parents, and closest friends – and for reading and running. A core theme running through Brad’s approach is connective, collective giving. That often means apt teams help others. This models behavior for those who receive to emulate, spurring them to enjoy the camaraderie of collectively giving, using their complementary talents with and for others an each other.

Help Others to Become More Helpful

We can feel that heady, immediate hedonic high each time we help someone who seeks our advice or an introduction, yet there may be surer ways to both support others and ourselves while also spurring them to emulate the giving behavior they receive. Those who continue to keeping getting the help they ask for, without any explicit expectation of reciprocity, may become habituated to asking for help; and thus inadvertently be turned into takers. Over at Forbes, see the rest of this column, including  three kinds of behaviors that I have experienced that spur a natural balance of give and take…

Even with the priceless brand-building glow enjoyed by a few celebrity CEOs like Richard Branson and Tony Hsiehisn’t it strange that so few CEOs attempt the same success? Odder still, few companies tap the scalable, brand-building power of their employees. In fact, it may be their biggest missed opportunity in our increasingly connected yet complex era.

Four More Reasons Employees are Key to Reputation and Sales

1. 41% of us believe employees are the most credible source of information regarding their business. “Employees rank higher in public trust than a firm’s PR department, CEO, or Founder,” according to Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer.

2. “Customer engagement must start with employee engagement,” notes Steve Farnsworth. The more responsibility, recognition and training that companies provide employees for engaging smartly with stakeholders the more connected and adaptive the company becomes. And the flip side can cause much more brand damage in our digital world.

3.  “Corporate learning and capability is now the #1 challenge in businesses around the world,” according to Josh Bersin. What better way to create relevant, efficient, collective and iterative learning than by establishing a customer-centric employees-as-brand ambassadors program?

4.  We know that people increasingly compare and share product experiences, giving them game-changing power over your brand reputation.  Turn this growing threat into a great opportunity by using your best asset: your employees. IBM, Ritz Carlton, Zappos, Harley Davidson, GORE-TEX, L’Oreal, LEGO, Virgin and a few other companies discovered years ago.

Declare Great News About “My” Company to Deepen Belief in it

“Publicly declaring your support and affiliation motivates you to back it up with real loyalty and engagement. It’s loosely like telling yourself, ‘I can really do this,’ before trying to shoot a free throw, wrote InformationWeek editor David F. Carr: “Pepsi discovered that over 50% of its employees already wanted to share news about Pepsi with their networks.”  That’s a priceless opportunity since emotions and behavior are contagious to the third degree, according to Connected co-authors James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. .That means your employees not only influence the views and behaviors of those with whom they interact but others as far as two more interactions away from them. That’s a huge multiplier of a negative or positive brand reputation.

Four Vital Skills for Becoming Valued, Visible Brand Ambassadors

1. First, step into their shoes and be helpful in ways they find helpful. Be a productive and successful giver, gleaning ideas from Give and Take. Recognize the value of building real relationships, not just “hooking up” as Whitney Johnson dubs the one-way entitlement some feel in asking for help.

Johnson cites Judith E. Glaser, author of Conversational Intelligence, “As we reciprocate, we build trust and relationships, flooding our brain with oxytocin that is essential not only to collaboration, but to innovation.” For employees and thus for the company, that approach can create a virtuous circle of well-being and high performance.

2. Be a deeply responsive listener who demonstrates you heard what they said, and does not immediately revert the conversation back to yourself. Instead seek to serve them their way, based on what they said, exhibiting The Golden Golden Rule, doing unto others as they would have done unto them. Offer a relevant, concrete scenario that explicitly shows how they will benefit by doing what you suggest. Craft what Peter Guber calls a purposeful narrative where they can see a role they want in the story you tell, reshaping it to make it their own to share with others.

3. Be so vivid that others tend to remember and repeat what you say, using the A.I.R. method and other communicate-to-connect cues. See more connective behavior tips from my talk (bottom of page) at BusinessNext. See the rest of the column at Forbes’ Quotable and Connected.

Breandan and Emma, the couple up the hill from me in Sausalito have been married 54 years, they proudly told me last year.  They walked, hand-in-hand past my home each morning, usually laughing, smiling and pointing out things to each other along the way. Originally from Ireland, they listened, in bed, to BBC News at dawn so they usually had a tidbit of news to share with me if they happened to pass my home when I was finishing my lame attempt at morning exercises in the back yard.

When Emma died suddenly, Breandan stopped walking. He stayed inside their home and ignored my knock on their door. Several times. Later, when he started walking again, he told me his son, a motivational speaker on leadership, suggested that he start saying positive self-affirmations every morning “to lift his mood.”

He retorted, “My mood doesn’t need lifting!  It’s right where it’s supposed to be.” So his well-intentioned son then mailed him a card pack with cheery faces on one side and, on the other, a series of upbeat daily affirmations.  The card pack was entitled  ”Yes, I Can!” to which Breandan hotly responded (to me, but not his son, I gather) “No I won’t!”

Write Yourself Through Your Journey to a Better Emotional Place

That gift inspired Breandan to get out of the old chair he sat in most days, with a morose look on his face, and take action, but not in the way his son intended. He wrote his own collection of “realistic affirmations.”  I figured that the sentiments reflected his way of responding to grief, his stubborn resistance to being told to feel better and his core attitude about living life as it happens. Some were darkly funny. Yet his basic resilience started to shine through as he finished writing his sayings by the end of the year. “Not every cloud has a silver lining so start liking the clouds.”

I thought of Breandan when I read that Norman Vincent Peale may have been wrong, at least for some people, when he advocated saying positive self-affirmations to lift one’s mood. That’s a startling revelation for many of us Americans who have been bombarded with self-help messages based on the belief that positive affirmations are entirely beneficial.

“Repeating positive self-statements may benefit certain people, such as those with high self-esteem, but backfire for the very people who need them the most,” concludes social psychology professor Dr. Joanne Wood. Even those with high self-esteem felt only slightly better after repeating a positive self-statement.

The news gets worse for those with a low self-image Wood and her colleagues found:

• People with high self-esteem are more likely than those with low self-esteem to try to improve their moods when they are sad, as well as to savor their moods when they are happy.

• Those with low self-esteem sometimes even try to dampen their happiness, and engaging with others on Facebook seems to reinforce that reaction.

Don’t Fight Those Feelings. Instead, Notice Them, Then Choose What to Feel

Like obsessing more about the elephant in the room after being told to ignore it, being told to repeat “get happy” sayings, when sad, can make us feel even more sad. As Ed Yong concluded, “Statements that contradict a person’s self-image, no matter how rallying in intention, are likely to boomerang.“ “Don’t believe everything you think. “Thoughts are just that – thoughts,” wrote Pocket Peace author Allan Lokos.

Instead, of trying to change your feelings (as cognitive therapy attempts to do) change how you choose to view your thoughts. That approach calls on us to be mindfully observing what we are thinking and feeling from a calm pool, so to speak, without getting repeatedly sucked into the downward swirl of them. As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

Practicing this way we can notice what we are feeling in the moment without immediately reacting, thus becoming better at choosing how we want to act. This approach is called ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  To reinforce that practice, “think of yourself as a kind friend,” suggests Duke University psychology professor Mark Leary. That bolsters your self-compassion and thus your happiness. “One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt,” Alan Watts wrote.

Breandan, by the way, has begun writing his memoir, describing some of the adventures he shared with Emma, the people they met and the joy of living with her “through thick and thin.”  His writing enables him to take the ACT approach, to observing and accept his sadness at his wife’s passing and to choose to focus, instead, on the many of the happy times they enjoyed together. He showed me the quote he chose for the first page:

“In the end, just three things matter:

How well we have lived

How well we have loved

How well we have learned to let go” ~ Jack Kornfield

As Byron Katie would say, he is “loving what is.”  See more ideas at my Quotable and Connected column at Forbes.

How does a news reporter morph into a paid public speaker? By stumbling around several times, in my case. That’s because Dorie Clark had not yet written Reinventing You. She could have saved me some time, effort and self-inflicted frustration. Perhaps you, too, want (or must) change professions. Soon.

We Can’t Support Your Career Transition if We Don’t Understand it 

My desire to jump into a new line of work seemed perfectly obvious and natural to me because I wasn’t changing my strongest, underlying interest, human behavior:

• Why do we sometimes behave in contradictory ways?

• What makes some take heroic stands while others are bystanders?

• Why do apparently smart people self-sabotage, some repeatedly?

• Why do we seldom say what’s actually on our mind?

As a reporter I could feed that curiosity. I always had the excuse to ask questions directly and persistently, in ways that are considerably different than casual conversation. As a speaker I have the opportunity to share actionable insights on those same topics, gleaned from social scientists I deeply admire.

Yet we can’t expect others to be mind readers. In my case, I didn’t adequately articulate that continuing thread to my work life when explaining my shift to friends, colleagues or strangers. Many of them could have smoothed the way for me as I attempted to turn the page to the next chapter I wanted for my life adventure – if they had understood more clearly why I was making the change and how I was suited for it.  Dorie cites Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”

Again, Dorie’s very concrete steps for making that change — and explaining them in credible, vivid ways — would have helped enormously. For me the big step into the stream of work life happened in high school. A high school counselor diagnosed me as “phobically shy” yet actually I was an introvert with a proclivity for reading and daydreaming.  That suits reporters who must get others talking. And paid speakers, like reporters, must share messages, wrapped in stories, which people want to hear.

It’s Stressful Enough to Change in Public. Get a Roadmap to Guide You.

Again I could have used Dorie’s eleven-step roadmap for redefining and living my personal brand so it was obvious to others. As an ardent believer in specificity I especially value Dorie’s bulleted pointers and questions for close self-examination. They are buttressed by relevant stories and examples.

Dorie writes from first-hand experience, going through several distinguished chapters of professional reinvention that included being a political journalist, and a former presidential campaign spokesperson to her work today.  She is a strategy and communication consultant who supports organizations in marketing and brand reputation. She, too, writes for Forbes and Huffington Post. We met at a Renaissance Weekend, where the ethos of generous, mutual support makes fertile ground for testing reinvention.

Some Re-Invention Tips from Dorie’s Book

• To launch her new consulting business: “I honed my narrative (what am I bringing to the table?), crafted my content (so clients could get a taste of my ideas and approach), and began using every vehicle possible – from speaking to writing to enlisting ‘validators’ – to spread the message.”

• Conduct a 360 focus group of friends and colleagues to see how they perceive your brand. “If three people tell you you’re a horse, buy a saddle,” advised angel investor Judy Robinett.

• Encourage candid responses in that focus group with what executive coach, Michael Melcher, calls “paired questions” such as “What’s my strength? What’s not my strength?” Of course, you would take a personal inventory, as well, as Meghan M. Biro suggests.

• “Research your destination” then “test-drive your path.”  Ways to do both include online searching, interviews, moonlighting, volunteering via organizations like VocationVacations and, per executive coach Alisa Cohn, serve on boards that relate to your desired new role. Such advance research and first-hand experience can both confirm (or not) that you’ll will enjoy this new kind of work and provide natural relationship-building opportunities in your new arena. Even if you simply want to confirm that your current brand is optimal for you, or to burnish it, these methods can help.

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”  ~ Coco Chanel

See more tips from Dorie in my Quotable and Connected column at Forbes.

We seek meaning in most any action, so we sometimes mislead ourselves.  Even when simply shown circles, triangles and other geometric objects randomly moving about on a screen, we tend to give them human attributes. Then we instinctively attempt to determine what their behavior means. For example, observers described the larger triangle as “aggressive, belligerent and angry.” Such quick conclusions were sometimes life-saving to our ancient ancestors. “It was safer to mistake a twig for a snake than vice versa,” suggests ”psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel. Our primitive brain still controls much of our perceptions yet analytics may alter that instinct.

1. See Real Serendipitous Connections

We can overcome our natural tendency to make the world more knowable and secure by seeking patterns and coincidences where there are none, Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger believe.  In their new book, Big Data:  A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, they describe how our increasing access, as organizations and individuals to the results of Big Data processing, helps us overcome our quick instinct to falsely see correlation and causality, famously described by Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow.

As Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier explain, we can “step back from looking at causes and instead look at correlations. Consider the what rather than the why, because that is often good enough.

That enhanced capacity for accurate insight can enable us to further harness serendipity as Frans Johannsen describes in The Click Moment.

2. Know How Big Data Begets Better Decision Making

“Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape?” is one of the intriguing questions cited in the book’s promotion, along with these: “How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?” See the rest of the column at Forbes’ Quotable and Connected.”

An anger-evoking true story that’s spreading today, “Exec loses job after allegedly slapping toddler on plane,” quickly moved Dan Schawbel to write on Facebook, “The headline should read ‘Exec gets deported from America after being a complete A@& on a plane.’” That response wouldn’t surprise Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, out March 5^th, who discovered that “high arousal” negative emotions like anger or anxiety spur us to share messages with others.

So do high arousal positive emotions: awe, excitement, and amusement or humor.  Susan Boyle’s unexpected singing performance, for example, evoked awe and 100 million views within nine days — and gave me shivers again today when I viewed it to write this column. Years later, she inked a movie deal. Les Miserables’ movie producer, Cameron Mackintosh said her success reinforced his interest in making that movie.

Who knows what far-reaching effects your contagious message might have?  To embody the core message of Contagious, I’m sharing some more tips from it that you may want to try or pass along:

1.  Surprisingly Some Emotions Stifle Our Desire to Share

“A healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier,” suggests Tom Stoppard, yet not all positive emotions that we feel actually motivate us to share ideas with others, Berger discovered. “Low arousal” positive emotions in response to a message, such as contentment, actually stop us from passing them along.

2. Tie Your Product to Familiar and Frequent Situations

What’s more valuable than clever slogans to spur sales? “Kit Kat and coffee” is a rather bland brand message. Yet sales skyrocketed. Why? Because the company tied its ad campaign to a frequent habit for many people: drinking coffee. Anyone who sees the spots with the companion message, “a break’s best friend,” may be triggered to think about eating a Kit Kat bar whenever they take a coffee break.

Conversely, GEICO’s attention-grabbing TV ads, suggesting that switching over to their auto insurance was so simple that even a caveman could do it, were not as successful.

As Contagious author, Jonah Berger points out, “We don’t see many cavemen in our daily lives. The advertisement is unlikely to come to mind often, making it less likely to be talked about,” writes Berger.

Hint:  Connect your message to a situation that your kind of customer frequently experiences so it triggers them to think of your brand whenever they are in that situation. As Berger notes, “a strong trigger can be much more effective than a catchy slogan.”  I wonder what contagious campaigns he’ll use to spur sales of his book. Over at my Forbes column, see more ways to  get others to share your idea or to buy your product.

“I could not have gotten more headlines if I had murdered someone with an ax.” That’s author Ken Auletta’s characterization of the fervent, wildly divergent and huge public response Sheryl Sandberg received after her video interview for the PBS documentary MAKERS.

What was her provocative comment? That she left the office at five thirty to have dinner with her family. Earlier, she’d spoken at the launch of Facebook Women, an in-house resource group at work. “When asked the (inevitable) question about how I balanced my job and my family,” she said that she left at five thirty and, after the children were in bed, she went online to get more work done.

1. Speak out yet stay human

Taking stands for what you believe in is core to Sandberg’s credo, in her new book that’s out March 11th. Lean In to your career “and do not leave before you leave.” Don’t hold back, as she feels that women have been conditioned to do. Instead, “we need to feel more comfortable with power.”

Yet her expressed trepidation in being bold gives her approachability: “I wanted to encourage others to personalize their schedules too. Even though I had planned in advance to discuss this, I felt nervous. Years of conditioning had taught me never to suggest that I was doing anything other than giving 100 percent to my job. It was scary to think that someone, even people working for me, might doubt my diligence or dedication.  Fortunately that did not happen.”

She advocated flex time policies just as Deloitte’s Cathy Benko and Molly Anderson recommended lattice career options to replace the traditional corporate ladder policies.

Sandberg’s willingness to be vulnerable is part of what builds bonds with others, according to Brene Brown who also believes courage, for both women and men, is borne out of choosing to be vulnerable. Yet others who emulate Sandberg’s public stands may not get the same supportive response from their work colleagues. That is what makes such acts daring.  

2. Work to deserve smart mentors who are stellar in your profession. 

Sandberg’s willingness to work hard and take strong, sometimes controversial stands may well have been bolstered by having long-time, strong, some would say alpha male mentors, including Larry Summer and Tim Geithner, as godmother to his daughter. Sandberg met Summers when taking his public sector economics class. She doesn’t indicate why he took her under his wing, yet she must have stood out in some way: “He offered to supervise my senior thesis—something very few Harvard professors volunteers to do for undergraduates.” She also doesn’t say why Washington Post chairman Don Graham “helped me navigates some of my most challenging professional situations” yet she clearly has a gift for attracting extremely successful mentors, including Arianna Huffington, Gene Sperling and Oprah Winfrey. For Sandberg that may be an undefinable capacity yet it did play a vital role in her success.

Don’t seek out strangers as mentors, Sandberg advises. “The strongest relationships spring out of a real and often earned connection felt by both sides.”

That’s been my experience too. My most transformative professional mentoring relationship sprung out of my work for my boos, a bureau chief at the newspaper where I worked. I was the first woman to work for him who wasn’t covering the society beat. He was a proudly self-described curmudgeon, often blunt, blasphemous and unbending yet extremely smart and seasoned in the news business.  My unrelentingly “Pollyanna-style questions” (as he dubbed them) initially irked him yet he eventually warmed up …grudgingly. Then proactively helped me. He gave candid and extremely specific feedback about my talents and weaknesses as a journalist.  We wound up becoming fans and supporters for each other through the peaks and valleys in our careers.  As Sandberg discovered, getting mentored well spurs us to mentor others.

3. Reduce the number of “benevolent sexists”

Men in “modern marriages” with wives who work full-time outside of the home view “the presence of women in the workplace more favorably” than men in “traditional marriages” do.  The later group “also denied promotions to qualified female employees more often and were more likely to think that companies with a higher percentage of female employees ran less smoothly.” These “benevolent sexists” were largely unconscious of their bias, according to Sandberg.

She also cites the Heidi/Howard study that shows we tend to “want to work with people who are like us” and research that shows that “success and likability are negatively correlated for women.” In response she calls for two changes: make workplaces more amenable to women succeeding and for women to act more boldly on behalf of their career advancement. See the rest of Sandberg’s pointers at my Quotable and Connected Forbes column.