In “one fatal keystroke” Rose Zory, the Chief People Officer at Carat Media sent a “for top management only” email on the messaging managers should use when firing (oops, rightsizing) some employees.

She sent that email to every single person in the company. Carat is Europe’s largest media group, by the way. It provides advertising and public relations services, expertise it badly needed at that point.

Now comes the flood of advice (again!) about how to avoid such email embarrassments and what to do when they happen. What would you do?

I am gratified by the 249 comments to this post I wrote for Harvard Business Review and seek your specific tips on quotability, the first step to connecting in this increasingly complex, information-flooded, and connected world:

You can feel the tension in the compressed smiles, quick nods and pointed questions at the annual Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare conference. Schedules are packed as the high-stakes finance crowd gathers to hear 20-minute rapid-fire talks by CEOs of start-ups and public companies who seek funding or favorable stock analysts’ reports.

Presenters speak fast, using complex medical and financial terms.

In contrast, my client, the CEO of a new biotech company walks on stage, rolls up his shirt sleeve, and stops at the center of the stage. As he turns to the audience, he pauses briefly to smile. He raises his bare forearm, pointing at a patch. “When patients put on our medical patch they will feel the pain-relieving effects faster than the latest Porsche can go from zero to 90.”

By linking the speed of the medication’s effect to a Porsche’s acceleration, he evoked the “Compared to what?” conversational cue. We are wired to draw connections between things, even where there aren’t any.

This makes the world seem more understandable, familiar, even safe.

If your “Compared to what?” connection grabs people’s attention, you have set the context in which people will view it and decide upon it, just as a general chooses terrain favorable to winning a battle.

Here are some examples of different ways to craft such a message:

Use a familiar slogan in a fresh way: After a company has spent millions to make a slogan familiar, skew it in a new direction for your intended meaning. Piggybacking on the famous “Got milk?” slogan, the Redwood Hospital in Northern California launched a billboard campaign to seek blood donations with this appeal: “Got blood?”

My friend, Paul Geffner, once owned a chicken take-out joint in San Francisco called Poultry in Motion.

Startle with specifics: “Ten times as much funding is devoted to research on the prevention of male baldness as malaria, a disease that kills more than 1 million people each year,” said Bill Gates on the need for creative capitalism to serve more people.

And venture capitalist John Doerr, who has invested in green technology, likes to say, “We can bail out the economy — we cannot bail out the environment.”

In a TV commercial for outdoor gear maker REI, we see the backs of two women who are sitting atop a peak, taking in the scenery at night, when the announcer intones, “October 28th. Jenny Kruger finds out that even the finest four-star restaurant is no match for one with 4 million stars.”

Add a dash of dry humor: A Cuban, after apologizing because he could not offer his guests anything to eat, explained the consequences of Castro’s Revolution: “The three successes were education, healthcare and sports. Three failures were breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Now, more than ever, your capacity to create indelible messages is vital. More than money, smarts, social standing, or attractiveness, in this increasingly complex yet connected world, being most frequently quoted can keep you or your brand top-of-mind.

Whoever most vividly characterizes a situation determines how others see it, talk about it, and act on it.

When asked how he managed to write such gripping horror novels, Stephen King once responded, “I cut out the boring stuff,” and so can you. As a journalist, I slogged through more interviews than I care to recall, in which smart newsmakers would often drown in their own generalizations and jargon, despite being desperate to make a point across.

Don’t make that mistake.

The stories that grab us are those with the most vividly apt illustrations.

Interestingness, like a cork, always bobs up to the top of our attention.

… you may want to recognize ways to avoid such self- sabotage — not that you would need such advice, of course, yet your intelligent friends might.  According to the 15 experts cited by Yale professor, Robert J. Steinberg, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, high I.Q. people are more likely to fall into faulty thinking, yet other experts think that some of their conclusions are faulty.

”Stupid,” for example is used in the book to mean “wrong” and “smart” refers to intelligence – of a certain sort. President Clinton, for example, is called stupid because he got caught in his lies regarding the intern. Perhaps because they are “smart” some of the book’s contributors sometimes fall into the trap of sounding fuzzy and/or contradictory in defining smart and stupid behavior.

“Intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational. Thinking rationally demands mental skills that some of us don’t have and many of us don’t use,” suggests Kurt Kleiner. And context has considerable influence on what we see, feel, think and do.

It helps to think both fast and slow and to see how blind belief in ideology can make us fall for dumb ideas.

Yet others have suggested that we can make wiser decisions by sidestepping four apparently obvious yet sometimes ignored Mental Traps:

1. The Egocentrism Fallacy: Expecting that the world revolves, or at least should revolve, around you. Acting in ways that benefit your, regardless of how that behavior affects others.

2. The Omniscience Fallacy:  Believing that you know all there is to know and therefore do not have to listen to the advice and counsel of others

3. The Omnipotence Fallacy:  Thinking that your intelligence and education somehow make you all-powerful.

4. The Invulnerability Fallacy: Presuming that you can do whatever you want and that others will never be able to hurt you or expose you.

Improve your performance. Get motivated to persist longer.

The findings from Carol Dweck’s experiment can help us stick to a task that matters to us. Students were randomly assigned to read one of two articles, the first suggested that intelligence is “fixed”; the others argued that it was or “malleable” – open to improvement. Then all asked to do a difficult task.

Those who’d read that intelligence was malleable were more persistent in gaining mastery in that task.

Most gratifyingly, other studies found that:  “teaching students the malleable theory of intelligence not only aided their performance in the face of obstacles on an individual intellectual task, it actually raised their college grade point average and their commitment to school.”

There’s more good news.

Since, as Malcolm Gladwell and others suggest that mastery of a subject requires 10,000 hours of learning and practice, this strengthened desire to persist on a task (or subject) could evoke a self-fulfilling prophecy of mastery.

To further hone your performance, understand the Incentive Caused Bias, other decision making traps we all fall into – and how to argue better.

Give customers the bragging rights that spur them to tell others about their experience at your place or event.  I wondered. Was it the butterscotch-colored walls, light coconut scent wafting through the door as I opened it or the cushy island of deep 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 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.

Hint: Positive sensory cues multiple their emotional effect when we feel more than one at once or 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. Further, since the “closing 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.

That’s why it behooves anyone who wants their guests, customers, conferenceattendees or families at home to feel welcome, brag about their experience and act nicely to storyboard the sequence of multi-sensory experiences that those they serve or love experience in their “place.”

Even apparently small physical experiences make a big emotional and even learning difference. Adapt these multi-sensory cues to emotionally engage with others:

1. 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.

2. Actors recall lines better when moving and we remember more when walking, gesturing, eating or physically working on something.

3. “People are more generous after holding a warm cup of coffee and more callous after hold a cold drink,” discovered Yale University psychologist John Bargh.

4. Patterns, whether on the walls or floor or upper part of one’s clothing, break up the observers’ attention span and, like ambient noise in a room from the heating or air conditioning system, make us more agitated and inclined to become irritated by each other’s behavior.

5. Scent is the most directly emotional sense and thus a two-edge sword. If the evoked memory is positive it hits deeply and, if not….well, we are more likely to project bad characteristics on the scene and individuals around us.

6. Enable people to engage in the scenes or objects around them and gain bragging rights as a consequence. Have a “What’s next for you?” sign on a large bowl of positive sayings or fortunes near places where they must wait or pause, such as check-in areas.  Staff can encourage them to read theirs aloud. (The more actions we take on behalf of something the more deeply they believe in it, identify with it and will share it with others.)

7. Encourage colleagues to stand and walk side-by-side with those you serve this “sidling” is more likely to evoke a convivial  “us” feeling.

8. Create a story about your region, place, interactive object or monument or event, hopefully involving humorous, heroic or otherwise emotional incidents andindividuals, where you can invite those you serve to become a part of that story, asPeter Gruber suggests.

They may become a part  of “our” story when they can participate your custom ritual, receive your souvenir as a gift, eat the snack that’s part of the story or you take a photo of them in front of the scene on the wall that represents a highlight of our story – and email it to them after they leave.

9. Continue to keep them involved with “our story.” Use geosocial apps that enable them to connect with each other – and your staff – as they walk through your store, hotel, hospital, sports arena or event. That’s what DoubleDutch did for TED conference attendees. And use augmented reality apps, as in Tuscany, yet to enable people to discover more about your area, place or meeting.

What multi-sensory cues have you used to involve people in your place, event or other experience?  Also share your favorite cues to bring us closer via Twitter. I am @kareanderson.

We women generally worry more than men.  For example, “While men are bearing the brunt of the job losses, women report much higher levels of fear and worry about their families’ financial security than men do” and women worry more than their husbands about prostate cancer coming back.

Yet it is vital to recognize the difference between worry and fear.

How, for example,  can we know when a fear for personal safety is justified and when a worry is sapping our spirit and making us see the world simply as a dangerous place?

“Our fears are fashioned out of the ways in which we perceive the world,” wrote Gavin Becker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.

Better to learn how to recognize when someone’s hostile or other less apparently dangerous actions are, in fact, a danger to you, so you can act to protect yourself, and not let unfounded fears and worry contaminate your life.

What can we do?  Revise FDR’s advice, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” by using our gut instincts well, with this variation:  “There is nothing to fear unless and until you feel fear.”

Whenever you’ve felt profound fear, it was linked to the presence of danger, imminent pain or death.

Said DeBecker in a National Public Radio interview, “When we get a fear signal, our intuition has already made many connections.  When you feel fear, try to ‘link’ it back to a past situation where the feeling that was similar to see if your fear is, in fact, justified.”

When you feel it, take notice to find the link back to see if you need to take action.  How rational are our fears?  In the 1960s a study was done on what single word evoked the greatest psychologically strong reactions of fear.  The study included words like spider, snake death, rape, murder and incest.  Shark evoked the strongest reaction.

But why?  Sharks rarely come in contact with us.  Three reasons:  the seeming randomness of their strike, the lack of warning for it and the apparent lack of remorse.

Yet man is a potential predator with far more abilities to approach, disguise and deceive.  While the media often portray human violence as random, de Becker points out how it seldom is, and how you can anticipate the patterns in most cases, if you listen to your instinct of genuine fear and take action.  DeBecker’s book describes how you can better protect yourself by learning to recognize and act on the intuitive signals you pick up but reject as unfounded.

Worry, on the other hand, is the fear we manufacture.

Worry, anxiety, concern and wariness all have a purpose, but they are not fear.  Any time your dreaded outcome cannot be reasonably linked to pain or death and it isn’t a signal in the presence of danger, then it really should not be confused with fear.

Worry will not bring solutions.  Worry distracts from finding solutions.

See it as a form of self-harassment.

To free yourself from worry sooner, understand what it really is.  Most people worry because it provides some secondary reward such as:

• Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter.

• Worry allows us to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something.  Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.

•  Worry is a cloying way to have a connection with others.  Worry somehow shows love.  The other side of this is the beleif that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about that person.  As many people who’ve been worried about know well, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action.

• Worry is a protection against future disappointment.  After you complete an important project where the success of your approach won’t be known for some while, for example, you can worry about it.  Ostensibly, if you can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens.

But how would you want to spend the time while you find out:  worrying, playing or initiating another action on another endeavor?

For some people, worrying is a “magical amulet”, according to Emotional Intelligence author, Daniel Goleman.  Some people feel it wards off danger. They truly believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening.

Most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur.  This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen.

The connection between real fear and worry is similar to the relationship between pain and suffering.  Pain and fear are necessary and valuable components of life.  Suffering and worry are destructive and unnecessary parts of life.  Worry interrupts clear thinking, wastes time, and shortens your life.

When worrying, ask yourself, “How does this serve me?”

To be free of fear and yet still get its gift, consider these techniques:

1. When you feel fear, listen.

2.  When you don’t feel fear, don’t manufacture it.

3. If you find yourself creating worry, explore and discover why.

We choke on anxiety.

Anxiety, unlike real fear and like worry, is always caused by uncertainty.  it is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence.  If you predict you will be fired and you are certain that your prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired, but about the ramifications of losing a job.

Predictions in which you have a high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever you need to do.

You can reduce your anxiety by improving your predictions, thus increasing your certainty.  It is worth doing, because the word anxiety, like worry, stems from a root that means “to choke,” and that is just what it does to us.

Our imaginations can be fertile soil in which worry and anxiety grow from seeds to weeds, but when we assume the imagined outcome is a sure thing, we are in conflict with what Proust called an inexorable law:  “Only that which is absent can be imagined.”  In other words, what you imagine — just like what you fear — is not happening.

Years ago a candidate for California Superintendant of Schools repeatedly insinuated that his opponent was lying on her business tax returns and had an affair with a student intern. His charges were immediately disputed by her accountant, the student and several co-workers at her firm.

Not surprisingly, the attacks generated considerable interest in their first televised public debate that provided an unexpected akaido-style lesson for anyone who gets publically attacked.  The debate was moderated by three seasoned reporters who sat at a table in front of the studio audience, facing the candidates who stood on stage behind podiums about ten feet apart.

When the first reporter asked the candidates about their budget priorities, if elected, the critical candidate answered first, emphatically reiterating that he would be transparent and accountable, unlike his opponent, when spending public monies and then repeated his two charges against her, with the TV camera coming in for a close-up of him as he concluded, then swiftly swinging over for a tight reaction shot of his opponent.

Instead of looking upset, she had a mild smile on her face and began by praising him for placing a high priority on public accountability, but she didn’t stop there. She went on to laud him for one of the educational reforms he’d advocated, with which she agreed – all while walking over to stand within two feet of him, alternatively facing the reporters and her opponent.

He looked flummoxed. Because of their close proximity, the camera could easily cover both faces — and did. She went on to say she presumed, because he was so conscientious about transparency, that it was the press of his campaign schedule that had prevented him from reviewing the records she’d sent to him in response to “the issues” he’d raised about her. She then walked calmly back to her podium, with the camera following her, then swinging around to pan across the smiling audience.

When you throw mud you get dirty ~ Adlai Stephenson

As you might anticipate, this videoed interchange became the most viewed and discussed part of the debate.

Let’s delve into the anatomy of what happened and how you can turn false or simply heated attacks against you into opportunities to shine—especially in contrast to your attacker.

This phenomenon is akin to product positioning in advertising. In situations where your critic acts badly towards you, provide a side-by-side comparison. Start with your authentic praise of some aspect of their past actions, followed by your vividly specific characterization of your main differentiating benefit stands in sharp contrast to their behavior and attributes.

Warning: When under attack our first instinct is to flee or retaliate, leading to the possibility that oour behavior will also look unbecoming too.

Still many seasoned politicos say negative campaigning and ads, for example, are effective in attracting votes so they are forced to run them. Some are sleazy and real nasty.

Yet, some researchers disagree with this conventional wisdom, and their findings lend support to the notion of genuinely praising an action or admirable character trait of someone right after they have behaved badly towards you or someone else.

Here’s some recent reinforcement for you to praise the part in someone you genuinely admire — especially when you are tempted, in a heated situation, to “go negative.”

In discussing David Meyer’s book, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, Gretchen Rubin writes in The Happiness Project, of this rule of human behavior, it “gave me another reason to stop being so critical.”  She adds, “In ‘spontaneous trait transference,’ people spontaneously and unintentionally associate what you say about the qualities of other people with the qualities of you yourself. So if I tell Jean that Pat is arrogant or stupid, unconsciously Jean will associate that quality with me. On the other hand, if I say that Pat is brilliant or hilarious, I’ll be linked to those qualities.”

“Ever wondered why people want to kill the messenger who brings bad news? Blame it on trait transference. Conversely, by specifically and vividly praising others’ actions that you admire, you’ll build your own reputation as well as theirs.

Here’s what also happens.

Whatever behavior you most remark upon in someone else is the trait that person is most likely to exhibit when around you.

We tend to act out the behavior that people have shown they expect to see in us, for good and for bad.

Compliment your husband on his planning that weekend trip (never mind that it is only the second time he has done so in years) and he is more likely to plan more.  If he does something that peeves you and you remain silent, rather than commenting, then those irritating behaviors are most likely to dissipate, rather than increase.

Talking or acting against a behavior is akin to underlining a sentence on the page.

You give the thought more energy and memorability. “Underlining” the actions of another with your reactions motivates that person to react to you.    That deepens the rut in the memory road for both of you.  It reinforces a behavioral script you meant to erase.

Such action evokes the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Amy Sutherland wrote about a variation of this effect in her New York Times article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage. “ For weeks her article remained the most popular one the newspaper ran, then resulted in a book deal for her.  In conducting research for her book, Kicked Bitten and Scratched, she sat watching exotic animals trainers work with wild birds, dolphins – and Shamu.

A light bulb went on her mind.  Why not try the same successful animal training techniques on her husband?

Wrote Sutherland, “I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.”

She began what trainers call “approximations,” “rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior.” (Parents and teachers have been taught to use it with kids, others to overcome phobias — and one person even suggests it for shaping behavior in church.)

Even more startling, perhaps, two studies conducted at the University of Wisconsin seven years ago found that when women spoke generally and positively about a trait that their husbands had not exhibited, at least recently (“Thank you for being so thought as I go through this stressful time at work”) the husbands began exhibiting caring behavior, often using the words she used in praising him.

“Honey, want to talk about your day and let go of some of that stress?”

Here’s the funny thing.

Even though most of us human beings long to be understood and loved for who we are we instinctively put up barriers.  We praise and give others what we like in ourselves and would like to be given. That’s the Golden Rule, after all.  Do unto others as you would have done unto you.  Yet the devil’s in the details – because other people are not you.

Consider, instead a Golden Golden Rule: Do unto others as they would have done unto them. Praise the parts of others they most like in themselves and support them in the ways that most matter to them.

Result?

They will go out of their way to compliment and support you. Rarely will they also follow the Golden Golden Rule back with you however.

That’s not instinctual.

Yet their well-intended positive energy towards you is more likely to bring out the happier, higher-performing side in both of you over time.

Simple put, people like people who like them.

And, as you build trust with that person, you can bring up the Golden Golden Rule and describe the traits (temperament and talents) you most like and value in yourself.

Ask for that person’s support in exhibiting those traits. Describe the kind of verbal and behavioral support that you find most helpful and gratifying.

Now that step represents a golden, golden oppportunity for you both to support and enjoy each other more over time.  I’m not promising that this will be a smooth path towards mutual understanding and appreciation.

Yet it seems to be easier and more authentic and rewarding than any other alternative I’ve found thus far.  This approach can reduce the misunderstandings that lead to resentment and reaction against others.

It enables you to bring out others’ best side so they can see and support yours. That’s no small achievement, even if it happens just some of the time.   Consider it one more step towards your Learned Optimism and to Stumbling on Happiness.

And, since opportunity is often inconvenient, why not try one of these approaches at your first opportunity — with the next person you encounter —  and tell us what happens?

After a priest moved to a new parish he approached his superior one afternoon to ask, “Would you mind if I smoked while praying?” and was, not surprisingly, turned down.

Yet how one makes a request has a huge impact on whether it will be  granted. For example, the priest might have said, “Would you mind if I pray while I am smoking?”

Setting the context with your initial comments is akin to dressing in the fashion that the people you are going to be around will approve or even admire, while still being true to yourself.

Why?

Because people like people who are like them.  Like all animals, we are most comfortable with those who act and look right – like us.  In fact, the more you look familiar to me, the earlier in the conversation I will literally hear your words, absorb their meaning and be more able to accept them, and you.

The more you look and act different than me, the more my peripheral vision narrows initially.  Further my skin temperature goes down and my heart beat goes up in anticipation of the face of the unfamiliar.

That is because the primitive triune part of our brains has not changed. We are forever hardwired to respond to new, unfamiliar situations with the “fight or flight” syndrome.  Our vital signs literally shut down when we are first around a person, setting or situation that is radically different, unfamiliar thus initially potentially dangerous, until we have decided how we feel about our situation.

You can pull people closer, and bring out their better side so they can see and appreciate yours. In fact, this is probably the most meaningful gift you can give someone else, other than the present of your warm presence.

Continuously praise others’ specific actions you admire, however small they may seem to you. People eventually warm up to your evident warmth. Authentically praise to inspire happier, high-performing behavior in others and yourself.

1. Praise  them directly. Whatever you praise you want to flourish. The more specific your words, the more memorable your message.  Describe the actual act in as much rich detail so you honor the person in acknowledging how vividly it affected you.

2. Even more powerfully, compliment the person to one or more people who are very important to them.  My client, the CFO of a Berlin-based maker of wireless portal equipment named Punjabi, has had a rugged and quite successful third year of operation where everyone has worked long hours.

Instead of handing out the ten top team awards in the traditional way, at a company event, the CEO took the time to find a significant group related to each of the winners.  For those winners the groups included a place of worship, a rugby club, a college alumnae organization and an antique car association.

With the permission of these organizations, the CEO arranged to give the award and an eight-minute speech, describing both the winner’s accomplishments at Punjabi and a specific incident where the winner exemplified the heroic character of a true team player.  Thus each (surprised) winner got to bask in the spotlight in front of valued people in her or his non-world world.

The CEO’s greater effort also put his company in a genuinely positive light in many new places.  Although it did not appear that any of the people who saw their friends receive the award were immediate, potential customers of Punjabi, they were sufficiently inspired to stir some positive word-of-mouth buzz about the awards ceremonies.

A month after these ceremonies a feature writer for the equivalent of the “lifestyle” section of the main Berlin paper heard the story through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who was a rugby player with her husband.  Not one to be interested in business stories, she was nevertheless touched by the way the ceremonies had rippled out to surround the winners’ lives.

She tracked down the CEO and interviewed him, thus affording him another chance to speak glowingly about specific examples of his winners’ dedication and ingenuity.  As he praised each person, the glow of the values he admired reflected back on him and his company.  The reporter also interviewed the winners and several of the people at the organizations where the awards events occurred and then wrote a human interest story that appeared, with photos, in a Sunday edition.

The article generated several glowing letters to the editor by people who witnessed the ceremonies, the winners and others who were also moved by the story. Mr. John Sunui, vice president of sales for Singapore-based construction management company happened to read some of the letters in the paper while eating his breakfast in a hotel while in Berlin on business.

Sunui emailed the reporter to request a copy of the original article that the reporter emailed back the next day and he received when he returned to Singapore.

That December holiday in Singapore — and 14 other countries where Sunui’s company has offices, both the office director and one person in each office who has done an outstanding job at their work, as voted by their co-workers, will be happily surprised when they walk in the door at some place that is special to them to be greeted by a company representative who will give them a present and tell a story about another side of the winner that their friends in that organization may not know about.

How can you give a lasting and perhaps the most widely-known gift that ten people you admire can receive?   For each person think of the specific incident where that person has exemplified the quality that you most admire or cherish.  Re-play the situation in your mind so you can describe it in all its story-building, touching detail.

Practice saying the story, then notice how you now feel about the person. Begin with the specific details before you end with the general statement that summarizes your admiration.  That way, you make the story, and the person, more vividly memorable to others who read or hear it.

Next step: for each person envision what group to which they are affiliated (family, religious organization, hobby or other interest or professional group, etc.) would be most significant for that person if you were to praise them among the members. You have several ways to pass along your praise about the person you love or admire.

Call, email or write to someone in that person’s valued affinity group and share your story of praise.  Or you may, like the people in the story above, ask for permission to confer a gift on the person at a gathering of their group.  In advertising this method is called a “third party endorsement.”

For example, when customers praise a product in an advertisement they are providing a credible third party endorsement.  Because we are all instinctive voyeurs, naturally interested in the stories of each other’s lives we are more drawn to third party endorsements than to advertisements.  Further, when we hear a positive story about someone, told by another person we find it more credible and compelling than if the person was to “boast” about it in telling it himself.

Here are other ways to offer heartfelt, long-lasting third party endorsement gifts to those you hold dear:

• Donate money or another gift to a charity or cause in which that person is active, and ask that your story about them be included in any acknowledgement of the gift.

• Seek out places that person frequent and see if you might buy a needed piece of equipment or repair one in that person’s name.

In our Sausalito church, for example, you can pay for a hymnal and dedicate it with a related phrase, to someone you love. So every Sunday, someone at my church opens up a hymnal with this hand calligraphic message on the inside front, dedicated to my mother who loves piano music, “To Lestelle whose piano playing washes away the dust of everyday life.”

• On an object that person might uses frequently (coffee mug, bath towel, key holder) imprint or monogram a positive nickname or one phrase characterization of the “hero’s” action.

To my English rugby-playing friend, Richard, we’re giving a glass beer stein with these words etched on the bottom, “Great giver of bone-crushing hugs.”

• Make a large, colorful postcard on which you write a description of the positive incident involving your hero, then ask your colleagues who agree to join in signing it before sending it to that person’s home.  Give a gift to the person’s partner in work or personal life, as an acknowledgement of your admiration.

• Create a banner or poster, with a celebratory sentence and an enlarged and flattering image of the hero and hang it in a prominent place (wall or door of the person’s office, home or event). Find a place the person frequents (dry cleaner, golf club) and offer the business manager at that site your credit card number with a set dollar limit. Ask the manager to pay the next bill of your hero, fax you a copy of the bill, and hand the manager a gift card with your inscription on it to be given to the hero at their next visit.  You’ll create your own variation of this method, I’ll bet.

Two years ago I learned that Janice, a skilled meeting planner who had hired me to speak at her association several times over the years, and who was exceptionally gracious and generous with me, had contracted leukemia. I learned this from her assistant who called to confirm some details regarding my next presentation at their annual meeting.

On a long plane flight back from another speaking engagement, I looked out the window, thinking of Janice, and conjured up this idea for a third party endorsement of the Hawaiian-born meeting planner which would reflect one of her most passionate interests, gardening. I called the association’s executive director to share my idea and he immediately agreed.

Two months later, just after I was introduced to speak at that association’s convention’s opening breakfast, I moved to the center of the raised stage, signaling the 500 attendees to also rise from their seats as the board president caught the elbow of our surprised meeting planner, Jana, who at the bottom of the stage steps, still focused on making sure the room lighting would be alright for my speech.

He guided her up the steps as I stepped back to the side of the stage and the first person in the audience, roving mike in his hand told a vignette of how Jana had guided him at the beginning of his career.  As Jana reached the center of the stage, in front of the people she had served for 14 years, eight other people in various parts of the room lifted their mike and told their brief story about her.

Then a tenor saxaphone player stepped out from the side of the stage to serenade Janice with a fragment of her favorite Kenny G song as the screen on the stage was filled with purple words on an emerald green (her favorite colors) background, “Jana is a special flower” followed by a swift changing set of images of Janice in several situations.

As the song ended, on cue, all 500 people pulled from out of their pockets and purses the fragrant Hawaiian-grown white flowers, the gardenias, tuber roses and pikaki and held them aloft towards Jana.  The board president handed Jana a bouquet of the flowers and asked Jana to speak, which she did, briefly, through her tears.

Even several of the hotel waiters were standing still, crying by then.  My speech had, of course, been moved to the luncheon so people could drop by Jana’s table to say their warm greetings through the ensuing breakfast.

Simplify.

It’s clarifying.

Only then can one can focus. Focus on what is really going on. From the inside out

What do you feel right now?  What most matters to you?

What is happening, truly happening with those in the scene you are playing out right now?

What best serves the situation?  My friend Nate says, “What would love do now?”

Gratefulness. “First things first” will be apparent. After all, “Life is short, and many of us tend to clutter our lives with things that we do not really want to do.”

Smile.

Focus next on proven self-esteem. We earn self-esteem when we learn self-confidence and self-respect. That may be the first step towards living a happier life.

Self-confidence comes from our feeling of competence in responding to the difficulties and the opportunities we encounter in our work and personal life. Self-respect means we feel worthy of being happy.

That’s what psychologist Nathaniel Branden’s believes. He wrote, “Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.”

Self-esteem helps us become independent thinkers, according to Tal Ben Shahar, author of the practical new book, Happier.

Paradoxically it also enables us stay open to hearing others’ differing views, I believe. This path towards a positive and resilient outlook begins with giving oneself the permission to feel.

“Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.”

Want to grow up into happiness? Here are two tips I’ve found especially helpful from, “the teacher of Harvard University’s most popular and life-changing course. One out of every five Harvard students has lined up to hear him.”

1. Sweat it out. Enjoy an immediate, free mood elevator by getting in vigorous motion more often. A Duke University study showed that working out for 30 minutes three times a week” is equivalent to popping Zoloft.”

2. “Accept life as a roller coaster. Optimistic people have ups and downs like everyone else, Ben-Shahar says. “The difference is that happy people realize that if they’re sad, they’ll get over it,” he says. “There’s a misconception that being happy means being on a high and having positive moods all the time. That’s not what happiness is. If you’re happy, you have a life — overall — that you find both meaningful and pleasurable.”

Methinks Gretchen would agree.

There’s more to the growing popularity of the practical application of positive psychology to everyday life and its “cash value.”

To this day I’m mortified when I see a box of chocolates. Perhaps sharing this story may save you from embarrassing yourself in a similar way. I was in the Antwerp airport, heading back to San Francisco. Before settling into a seat at my gate I bought two indulgences for the flight home, John LeCarre’s Our Kind of Traitor, and a box of Pierre Marcolini truffles,  one of the most popular brands in Europe.

Within minutes I was swept into LeCarre’s masterful spy mystery. But I promised myself I would savor my truffles, eating each one slowly.  At some point the motion of the man’s arm next to me caught my attention. He, too, was reading – as he casually took a truffle out of my box that was on the narrow table between us.

Flummoxed, I made a throat noise, which went unnoticed. I was angry and cowed, so I just move my box closer to me. He took three more by the time my row was called to board. I grabbed the box, got up quickly, as did he, and gave him a thin-lipped smile that he returned with vague warmth. It was only when I was in my seat, with my book and box of chocolates opened that I looked down and saw my unopened box buried in the side pocket of my commodious purse where I’d absentmindedly put it right after buying it. As you’ve anticipated, the box I was holding was his.

As soon as the safety belt light went off I managed to find him and apologize, arousing several disgusted expressions from nearby passengers. His low-voiced, gentle “It was a delight to see you enjoying them, truly. I’ve been in your place in other situations so thanks for the opportunity to play this role this time as you undoubtedly will in the future. Now go enjoy your chocolates and your book.”

Don’t let somebody else determine your behavior

It is humbling to get glimpses of how blind we are to what is actually happening, especially if we feel wronged or irritated when others appear to be acting badly. When driving we are irritated at pedestrians who dawdle in the crosswalk or walk against the light, yet our righteous feelings reverse when we are pedestrians.

Put plainly, context deeply influences our perceptions and actions.

That’s why, as Snopes reported, commuters rushed past renowned violinist Joshua Bell when he played, incognito, one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars, while standing in a Washington, D.C. subway.

He may have been just another street performer panhandling for spare change.

That’s why, when asked to count the times individuals pass a  basketball back and forth in a video, we miss the man in a gorilla costume stroll through the scene.

Situational blindness can be self-sabotaging. It can sour relationships. It may turn everyday encounters into bruised transactions rather than opportunities to enjoy a moment that might blossom into other possibilities.

When asked what they see when looking at an aquarium, for example, Americans and Western Europeans usually comment on the school of fish swimming to the right, and one fish swimming left.  Japanese observers, on the other hand, usually describe the arrangement of plants and color of the water as well as the swimming formations.

Western cultures appear to, “notice and consider context in a way than many Americans do not,” writes psychology professor Sam Sommers in Situations Matter.

To mitigate such blindness and turn more situations into opportunities to connect rather than conflict, consider adopting these two mindsets.

Go slow to go fast

We are hard-wired by our survival instinct, to respond sooner, more intensely and longer to what we perceive as negative behaviors than positive ones.  Simply knowing this, when you start to feel upset, — and that you are blind to the other person’s true feelings and motivation – can give you pause to learn more. Someone’s apparent abruptness, for example, may be a delayed reaction to the people who had just acted badly towards them.

Your natural instinct is to either leave, which solidifies their upset, or escalate, mirroring the other person’s offensive behavior which will cause you both to spiral up in intensity. As that person acts badly toward you he may resent you for seeing him behave that way, quickly rationalize his rude response to preserve his self-esteem, and retaliate for his perceived grievance.

Instead, know speed and loudness increase tension, so adopt the calming Slower, Lower and Less Effect.  While maintaining a genial facial expression (slightly elevated eyebrows), speak and move more slowly, lowering your voice level and the amount, speed and level of your gestures. As the stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee once said, “Anything worth doing well is worth doing slowly.”

Look to their positive intent, especially when it appears they have none

Even if someone is intentionally rude, de-escalation makes life easier for your both. Speak to the side of that person you genuinely like – and that he likes in himself. In so doing make evoke the appearance of that trait.

People like people who like them. The more he enjoys how he acts around you, the greater the likelihood he will see a trait in you he admires – even if you haven’t exhibited it. That’s an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error where, for example, if we see someone cheat, we presume she would cheat in any situation. The upside of such contextual blindness is that once I see you in a possible light, I tend to project onto you the blanket assumption that you are always that way.

Wrote Malcolm Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw, “In the late 1920s, psychologist Theodore Newcomb analyzed extroversion among adolescent boys at a summer camp. He found that how talkative a boy was—say, at lunch—was highly predictive of how talkative that boy would usually be at lunch.… But told you almost nothing about how he would behave in a different setting.”

We assume that personalities are fixed yet they aren’t. As Multiplicity author, Rita Carter discovered we have diverse facets to our personality, some unbecoming as you discover in Out of Character by David DeSteno, Ph.D., and Piercarlo Valdesolo.

The upside is that while positive traits may be less entrenched than we imagine, our negative ones are also less fixed. Consequently, it is easier than we think to evoke a better side to someone, even when they are acting badly. The truffle-eating gentleman spoke to my kind side rather than referring to my rudeness in taking his truffle box.

In so doing, he reinforced a positive quality I value in myself. He also evoked my admiration for him, and modeled behavior I have since tried to emulate.

What could have escalated into an even more embarrassing incident instead served as an indelible lesson in paying it forward – in practicing bonding behavior so needed in our increasingly complex yet connected world with a steep rise in anxiety and loneliness.

Every situation with strangers can be an opportunity to bring others’ better side. Then they are more likely to see and support yours. Also, times with strangers can be opportunities to practice latent parts of your personality or interests, as Melinda Blau notes in Consequential Strangers.  My friend Arthur is consumed with software coding at his crowdsourcing start-up yet he still makes time to play the tenor sax with pick-up groups. They see an emotive side of him that does not appear as much at work.  Despite having a three year-old and twins who just turned one, my friend Claire takes night classes in advanced biology, not just to keep up with her career, but to exchange ideas with her peers that are not possible at home.

Don’t let somebody else determine your behavior

Simply recognizing how I can easily leap to wrong conclusions, biased by context, sometimes enables me to adopt these two mindsets. The indelible remembrance of that gentleman’s warm, affirming response to my halting apology is a recurring nudge for me to act similarly, not that I always manage to do so.

At any time we can alter the character role we play in the next chapter of the adventure story we want our lives to become. We can change scripts, pull in new characters and even enter new scenes. In difficult situations, how have you learned to bring out others’ better side?

When one billionaire CEO lambasts another, labeling his technology the “roach motel of clouds” he is bound to make news. Few corporate CEOs would be that vividly denigrating except Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison.

Fewer still would deliver a lightening-quick, equally negative label back, as Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff who compared Ellison to an “oppressive dictator” adding that Ellison’s product was a “false cloud.”  Ellison batted back, describing Salesforce’s cloud: “It’s like an airplane, you fly into the cloud and you never get out.”

That’s a rare public battle that shows the newsmaking power of quotability — and that when you throw mud you often get dirty. Yet perhaps your surest way to credibly stand out in your market or your life is by adopting their “Compared to what?” cue — done your way. Let me elaborate.

Just weeks earlier Benioff, keynoting Dreamforce, his huge conference in S.F., had boldly compared his company’s transition to a social business with the Arab Spring in the Middle East.  Benioff said customers, like the citizens in those countries, were going to revolt against traditional corporate software and towards social media. With images behind him as he spoke of Arab citizens writing “Facebook” everywhere, Benioff said, “And the signs we saw, they didn’t say, ‘Thank you, Microsoft.’ They said, ‘Thank you, Facebook.’ We need to pay attention to that at this conference too.

It’s not so long from now we’ll here about a corporate spring. We saw Khadafi fall, we saw Mubarak fall. When will we see the first corporate CEO fall?”

As Scott M. Fulton dryly noted in ReadWriteWeb, “This really endears a company to executives, comparing the boardroom to oppressive Arab dictators.” As well, some experts have said that the effect of Facebook has been overstated.

Yet consider characterizations by Ellison and Benioff as occupying one end of the continuum of quotability with most CEOs clear over at the other end, still using the mush of corporate speak which even they cannot remember without reading their notes.

Interestingness is the Instigator, the hardy pigeon that can carry your message most anywhere.

Interestingness makes a message get heard above the noise. Money can’t buy interestingness, yet vivid comparisons can create them.

The good news and the bad is that reputations can be ruined or lifted by how most anyone labels something or someone – as long the label is as vividly indelible as India ink. More than money, title or even good looks, your capacity to craft the most vivid characterization will make it bob, like a cork, to the top of the water of alternative messages. Who says it matters less and less  — if it sticks.  A janitor can have a bigger megaphone than a CFO.

Yet we are all too close to ourselves to self-label. We know too much to choose the relevant detail from the mass of knowledge we have. We need to listen to our candid, close friends, our customers and our critics. We need to seek the specific example that proves the general conclusion of what we stand for, our main differentiating benefit or talent. Then we scan the landscape for the comparison.

As in the above examples, use the “Compare to what?” cue to stick your label in other’s minds, whether they intended to remember or not. Make the comparison:

• evoke a mental picture

• unexpected

• emotional

• brief

To nudge you to start now on crafting your “Compared to what?” label, consider the staying power of these real examples.

• Disparaging comparisons may be remembered, yet often make enemies…

“If you’re watching cable TV to get the news, that’s like going to Olive Garden because you want to live in Italy.” ~ humor writer Andy Borowitz

….unless the comparison is widely believed and apt for the people you want to reach with your message.

“Patents, like plaque, build up in arteries, restrict flow of innovation in our economy. I’m worried about heart attack” ~ Venture capitalist, Fred Wilson, in a Tweet

• The more unusual the comparison the more it will stick in our minds

“Parker has access to trends and signals that are invisible to many people. For him it’s like hearing a dog whistle.” ~ Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures

• Make the comparison apt for your audience

“When we finish a storyline we let out little puff of white smoke like the Curia in Rome.” ~ Leonard Dick, a writer for the TV show, The Good Wife and, previously for House, when interviewed for his Harvard alumni bulletin

•  The stages that something or someone undergoes can be grist for a comparison

“The difference between salad and garbage is timing and chemistry. Perhaps the timing is right.” ~ My friend Gary, when discussing a woman he’d recently met.

• A pithy “if-then” boosts memorability

“If writing is a muscle, this is my gym” ~David Eaves, describing his blog

• Up the emotional wattage by tapping an emotion

Startle

“In an age when more humans have access to cellphones than clean toilets…” ~ Anand Giridharadas

Survival

“Some pictures you save. Some pictures save you.” ~ fire prevention advertisement for Tyco

Poignancy

“When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” ~ Leonard P. Matlovich’s headstone

Like many of you perhaps I am drawn to some people because they are quotable, even if their topics are outside my usual interests. Who are some of the quotable people you follow? Some of mine are Atul Gawande, George Will, Umair Haque, Whitney Johnson, Roger Rosenblatt, Peggy Noonan, Nick Kristoff, Olen Steinhauer, Michael Lewis and Jonah Lehrer.

What quotable individuals attract you?

For more ideas on quotability consider reading Tongue Fu!, Made to Stick, Tell to Win, and The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling.