In these challenging times, it’s more important than ever for your employees to access their “Warrior Spirit”—the term Southwest Airlines uses to capture the optimistic, can do nature they seek to cultivate.

One of the ways companies like Southwest Airlines bring out the best in their workforce is by utilizing the power of priming.

Through the application of priming, you can increase the odds that your workforce will:

- Respond to challenges with courage, optimism, and resourcefulness
- Think and act like leaders
- Demonstrate a “Can do” and “Whatever it takes” attitude
- Work well as a team
- Generate productivity-enhancing and cost-saving ideas

In a moment, I will share with you some ideas on how you can use the phenomenon of priming to elicit more generous, altruistic, and even heroic behavior in your employees.

First though, let me share a few fascinating experiments that illustrate what priming is and the power it has to shape how people think and act.

The studies I will be sharing come from Dr. Dan Ariely’s outstanding book Predictably Irrational.

Rude or Polite...It Depends On What They Were Thinking About

In one study, participants had to unscramble a group of words and put them into coherent sentences. For one group, the words centered on an uncivil theme, such as:

- rude
- annoying
- intrude
- aggressive

For the second group, the words used in the exercise centered on a theme of courtesy and civility. This group’s exercise included words such as:

- honor
- considerate
- polite
- sensitive

After completing their task, subjects were instructed to go to another laboratory and get their second assignment from the experimenter. When they arrived, they found the experimenter trying to explain an assignment to an uncomprehending participant (who was actually a confederate working for the experimenter).

Whatever They Were Thinking About Determined How They Acted

The waiting participant’s patience depended on which exercise they participated in. Participants who worked with the words related to the civility theme waited an average of 9.3 minutes before interrupting and asking for their next assignment.

Those given the aggressive theme word exercise waited an average of 5.5 minutes.

Thinking Old Thoughts—Even When You Are Young—Can Make You Act Old

In another experiment, college students were given sentence unscrambling puzzles that included words related to the elderly, such as Florida, bingo, and ancient.

After they finished what they thought was the experiment, they left the building. What they didn’t realize was they were being timed to see how long it took them to walk down the hall.

Sure enough, those who had been primed to think about the elderly walked at a considerably slower pace than those involved in a neutral theme word puzzle.

In another fascinating experiment, researchers explored the effect of priming on influencing ethical behavior.

Thinking About Being Honorable Triggered Honorable Behavior

In this experiment, one group of subjects was asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. Another group did a different “warm up” activity. Then, both groups engaged in an exercise that provided the opportunity to cheat. While the second group cheated, the first did not.

In another study, one group signed a form agreeing to their college’s code of honor prior to the experiment while a second group did not. While both groups had the opportunity to cheat, only the latter group did.

We Become What We Think About

The above experiments and others like them reveal that you can prime the mind to think a certain way by what you “feed” it. This sets the owner of the mind on a trajectory to acting in a way congruent with their thoughts.

These experiments confirm what many ancient wisdom traditions have taught for millennia:

“We become what we think about.”

If we continually focus on what we can’t do, how helpless we are, how overwhelming the problems are that we face, we will prime our brains to perceive the world this way and will therefore act as if our perceptions are true.

Conversely, if we focus on what we CAN do, if we remind ourselves of past challenges we’ve overcome, if we listen to stories of other people overcoming major obstacles, we will prime our brains to see things through a more optimistic, courageous lens. This will in turn lead us to act in more optimistic, courageous ways.

Employers with Strong Cultures Do This All The Time

Let’s return to Southwest Airlines. They, and other great companies like Ritz Carlton, FedEx, and Nordstroms, have created strong cultures that elicit greatness from their people by using stories as a priming device.

By continually sharing stories of employees going the extra mile and demonstrating jaw dropping displays of customer-centricity, they prime their employees to do the same.

In the excellent book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath identify why stories are such a powerful vehicle for eliciting desirable behavior:

“The story’s power is twofold: it provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).”

The brothers Heath liken stories to flight simulators. They provide a safe context to learn new skills and try out new behaviors. In the case of stories, the listener does this vicariously.

Because stories told well capture the imagination, they activate neural circuitry consistent with the unfolding drama of the story. Thus, a story about a shy person speaking up to someone in power activates the listener’s neural circuits involved in courage, speaking up, and challenging limiting self-definitions (e.g. “I’m too shy to speak up. I could never do that.”)

With these neural pathways activated by the story, the listener would have an easier time accessing the courage to speak up right after the story. Thus, the story acted as a priming device.

Let me give you a silly example of how activating your neural circuits can shape a subsequent response.

Q. What type of tree grows from an acorn?
A. An oak.

Q. What five letter word starting with “B” is a British slang word for “Man”?
A. Bloke

Q. What four letter word starting with “J” would a comedian would tell you?
A. Joke.

Q. What do you call the white of an egg?
A. Albumin.

This works better orally. When I do this in seminars, almost all the participants say “Yolk” at first. Why? Because their minds were primed by the previous questions to think along a certain trajectory...the answers all rhymed. So of course, the answer to the “egg question” would rhyme, too.

That is an example of priming activating specific neural circuits, that then increase the odds of your thinking in a way consistent with that circuitry.

How to Use the Power of Priming to Access the Best In Your Employees

1. Share this article with your management team and discuss the power of priming to influence our thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors.

2. Discuss ways of creating a more positive, uplifting, inspiring work environment. The more positive the ambient mood in your organization, the more likely this will be the default response of your people. Also, because emotions affect perceptions, the more confident and optimistic your workforce feels, the more likely they will see challenges as opportunities rather than something to be feared and avoided.

3. Discuss the value of collecting and sharing stories that remind people of the power to overcome that we all possess. You can prime yourself and others to think and act in heroic ways by sharing stories of people overcoming obstacles. These challenges can resemble those facing your employees, as well as other life challenges.

4. Collect these stories by asking your employees to think about and share with you stories of overcoming adversity from their own lives and the lives of people they know. These can include stories related to work or just overcoming personal challenges. Create a story database.

5. Make it a regular practice in all meetings to share these stories.

6. Better still, do what Ritz Carlton does. They start every shift with a brief (15 or 20 minute) meeting that focuses on a core value and what that value looks like in action. These meetings often include a short story or example of an employee doing something exemplary. Doing this not only keeps Ritz Carlton’s behavioral norms and values fresh in employees’ minds, it also primes their employees to view situations and act in ways consistent with the values and behaviors highlighted in those stories.