Introduction

Societal, environmental, and political issues jostle for your undivided attention everyday. If it’s not eye-grabbing, it’s instantaneously background noise. Easily tuned out. Filtered out of our consciousness. Are you apathetic, or just busy?

Sometimes, the internet is in an uproar over some event that impacts the world while other events barely make front page news. Filtering things out is a survival mechanism. We need to focus on only the salient points and ignore the rest, even if it’s important people or organizations who need our attention. But why? How do some social media, tweets, blog posts or videos nudge us out of our apathy and get us to care?

1. How to get people to care when they have short attention spans

Our attention reaches its limit pretty quickly. “I’m not apathetic. I’m just busy” is what you might say. To get people to care, don’t test their patience.

Sometimes paragraphs have to be limited to a few sentences, and sentences have to be limited to a few words. You have mere seconds to catch their attention, so don’t waste those precious seconds.

Don’t meander like you’re taking a leisurely stroll around the block. Get to the point fast.

2. Do not lose your audience within the first fifteen seconds

Ever had the experience of drumming up business for your company or pitching to a client, but they don’t engage your services right away? How many times have you been rejected, or told, “Sorry, I don’t have the time, I’m not apathetic, I’m just busy”?

Getting people on board with your projects or services, and getting them to care, is an art that you have to perfect. Those first fifteen seconds, maybe less, are crucial. You want to start off with a bang and keep the momentum going. So make sure you have a hook in your introduction and don’t lose the momentum.

3. How to make your cause their priority

People have to prioritize and if it’s not going to impact their today, their tomorrow, they will likely not pay attention. So how do you make your cause their priority? Rely on empathy to make someone care.

As you know, it takes effort to sort out your priorities. You choose the most important items on your agenda and throw out the rest.

To stop others from putting your cause in the trash pile, give them a reason to care. This starts with making your message relatable. Convey deep emotions to trigger a response from them. Then use that to push them into taking action.

4. Be mindful of their time by making it worth their time

Ever had meetings where at the end, you are wondering “so what?”

Sometimes your intended audience won’t listen to you or pay attention to you because if it doesn’t serve their purpose. Or it doesn’t help them in some way. Stop your message from collecting dust. You want your message to be seen and heard. So don’t take up too much of their time. Make sure that every word counts. If it’s not worth their time, think twice about saying it.

5. Show passion and enthusiasm. It’s infectious

Have we gotten complacent?

Sometimes, we’re desensitized to flashing images and loud sounds. Sometimes we have to tune out just to stay sane and not overwhelmed by it all.

It’s difficult to make people care. So much so that you wonder if what you’re doing has a purpose. Maybe you have a project, a cause, that you’re passionate about. But you’re baffled when everyone else doesn’t have the same passion as you do.

Rather than resorting to shouting louder than our neighbours just to get your audience’s attention, motivate them to be enthusiastic about your cause. Get them fired up about it as you are.

Get them to find the same passion and enthusiasm to care deeply about what you are saying.

Conclusion

Our lives are saturated with bright technicolour images, text, and video. Everything must be louder, shinier, brighter, more colourful, and more clever to have an impact. The list goes on. You really have to outdo yourself each time you post a new piece of content.

Sometimes, your target audience’s time is taken up with a lot of distractions and busy-ness without getting anything done. Inefficiency and being distracted are ways of coping with stress. To care more, they have to make time for it, and time is a rare resource.

Not everyone can muster up the interest to care about societal problems, the planet, their health. They can’t sit up and pay attention because they’re not thinking about the future. They tend to block out anything else except for the here and the now, and what can give them instant gratification. Most of the time, they want to care, but their lives and the busy-ness of work, family, and relationships, prevent them from engaging and taking action. It can be disheartening.

So be brief. Every word has to have an impact. Think about it for a while before you start posting or speaking. This way, you are more conscientious of how you use your words. Competition is really a numbers game. You have to throw a lot of darts before you hit the bull’s eye. Once you’re on target, you’ll find easier ways to grab their attention.

It’s useful to control what people think. It can solve a lot of problems.

Exercising the power to control what people think is the end goal of a lot of individuals, companies, and entities. They do it to convince you to make a purchase, change the way you think, or motivate you to take action. Controlling what people think is not done spontaneously. There’s often great forethought and an agenda taken towards achieving this.

So you may not even know that external forces are influencing your thoughts. Further, you may not even know that you’ve given up your autonomy of thought. You may not know that you no longer have the power to make your own decisions.

If a company was trying to perfect the art of controlling what people think, how do they achieve this, and by what means?

A company can control what kinds of emotions you feel when you think about their products or services. It’s called brand perception. It’s a cleverly curated concept that takes a large team of people to shape and craft. And because of how powerful it is, perception is everything, even if perception is far from the truth.

People have a natural tendency to bias because they don’t have enough information to make a good decision or a good judgment call. This is used to control brand perception, which can work strongly in favour of the brand.

Having widespread influence is a way of controlling what people think.

If one person is convinced about something, it can trigger a chain reaction and speed up the process of getting the right number of people to reach critical mass. This is the usefulness–and also the drawback–of having one person hold as much power over others in controlling what they think. Instead of convincing a multitude of people, you only need to convince a select few.

Subliminal messages, and bias, carry great weight; for example, how many times have you trusted a brand even though you’ve never tested it or tried it out yourself?

Because of our hyper-interconnectedness, what used to take months or years to change perception, now takes as little as a few seconds. What used to be the slowest to change is now the fastest. Beliefs and convictions are no longer steadfast. Our thoughts are like chameleons, changing colours because influence is rapid and people are quick to catch on.

One can yield the power to control public perception, and hence, the amount of sales and the money that follows, to great effect. Building a public persona that might not necessarily be close to the truth is the aim, the end goal.

Why is it important to shape the image that the public has of you or your company?

Your aim might be to change people’s minds about a certain belief, or to introduce new ideas.

It’s the job of the marketer to convince people that a business is worth your time. They put an enormous amount of effort to convey to you why their product or service is the solution to your problem and why you should shell out the money to pay for the solution.

They also put in the effort to find the right people to amplify the message. Because messaging relies on a hierarchy of influence, you need the right people in the right positions of power to move a crowd into taking action.

How do companies and influential leaders control what people think?

How are mass movements created, and how can social action overcome resistance?

It helps if you have a person of authority. someone who is respected and thought of as an expert in their field.

The best companies have a person of authority as a weapon in their arsenal. As they fight for territory and for space in your attention, their power in swaying public opinion must be enough to reach critical mass. Herd mentality can be a good thing. If the message is of some benefit to society, having it spread like wild fire to goad people to take action without having to convince each of them individually can be a good thing. It saves time and effort.

We don’t have any autonomy. We’re not independent thinkers. When there’s an emergency, it doesn’t work for everyone to have their own personal direction. There must be a leader telling people to move one way or the other, instead of a million different independent movements. Otherwise, their action as a whole is inefficient. They move nowhere.

When fast action is required, when we need to do something quickly, and when  we need to cooperate to succeed, it’s useful to count on the ability to control what people think.

How to control what people think:

1. Be careful, and intentional, about your image, personal brand, or business brand, that you project to the outside world.

2. Get on board a person of authority or expertise to amplify your message.

3. Use words that have emotional connotations attached to them, moving them into action and making decisions faster.

Messages are everywhere. Some can get to the point in just a few words, like a slogan. Others take more time, whether it’s an email memo, resume, or job posting. So how do you make the most of the types of words that you use? How do you immediately answer the question, “What’s your point?” in a message that is clear and impactful?

We are bombarded by messages, every second of every day. Which do we pay attention to the most? Do we pay attention to the professor who’s droning on without noticing that students aren’t listening to a word they’re saying?

It’s the messages that grab your attention that are the most impactful. Sure, the message might be simple, and echo a lot of what is already out there, but you can be certain that they are impactful because they are packaged in a way that is easy to digest, and memorable.

When writing your message, you will wonder, how can you grab your audience’s attention when no one wants to pay attention to you?

In this blog post I will suggest several ways to get your point across so that your message is clear, impactful, and memorable.

1. Why no one is paying attention

If you find that you are not getting engagement with your message, there may be several reasons why no one is paying attention. For example, your message is too vague. Or, your message is too cliched, and not new.

Other reasons as to why you’re not getting your message across are:

You’re not clear on what you want to say.

You don’t know how to say it.

You don’t know why you’re saying it.

To solve these problems, really examine what, why, and how you want to say it. What is your intention? Every message needs a purpose and intention, or there’s no point in saying it.

Sometimes you are trying to communicate what you are trying to say, but run into the frustration of not getting your meaning or point across in the best way possible.

You could be crafting a script for your sales pitch, or trying to get your brand messaging perfect.

2. Less is more

The most famous slogans are short and to the point. There are numerous examples.

Ever see your audience nod off after your opening lines, or have your reader glance at your article without reading it? It may be because you are using extra words that obscure the point. Solve this problem by using fewer words. Use the minimum amount of words you can get away with while still getting your point across.

Pithy is the word.

Unless you’re writing some sort of oeuvre with a lot of flourishes, bypass the rhetoric. It would be best to hone down the main key words for more impact. Don’t bury your meaning underneath extra words.

It makes the reader have to work hard to find your hidden meaning, and by then they would’ve given up if they haven’t figured it out and moved onto the next shiny new thing. People aren’t going to dig deep to find your meaning because it’s too much work for them. That’s why you have to be straightforward and state it plainly and clearly.

3. Is your message garbled?

When your message is garbled, it’s like playing a game of broken telephone. No one can understand what you’re saying so they ignore you and move on to the next thing.

To cut through the noise and static, say what you want to say, but only give yourself ten to twenty seconds to say it. If you limit the time you have in front of your audience, it forces you to cut out anything else that doesn’t drive your point home. Meandering or rambling messages are ineffective. Your audience is left wondering, why should I care?

4. Why should I care?

That’s why messages that are the most impactful draw upon the empathy of your audience. For your audience to be empathic, your message has to be relatable. You must guide your audience towards your message by using emotions and feelings.

You must be engaging to make your audience pay attention to you. To increase the impact of your message, use forceful and powerful words, but limit synonyms.

5. Have a logical outline

Always have a beginning, middle and end. Yes, your opening lines can start at the beginning or even the end, but always lead the listener back to the beginning and start properly from there. Without this outline, your audience is lost. It’s like wandering around in the dark without a roadmap or flashlight.

Choose your words carefully. Be concise. Make your point known right away, or as soon as possible. Don’t wear out your reader’s patience. Don’t wait until the middle of your message to let your reader know what it is that you want to talk about.

6. Your closing

In your closing, you should have a key takeaway message. The takeaway message must be clear so that there’s no confusion about what you want your audience to do after listening to you to the end.

The takeaway message must be memorable and actionable.

Tie it up with a take home message. Your closing should refer back to your opening and answer the question, what’s your point?

During the start of the pandemic, and right at its peak when the most deaths occurred, it felt like the world as we knew it was ending.

The situation was dire and it was escalating too quickly for people to get a handle on it. It led people to re-examine whether what they spent their time doing was really worth it. For instance, employees questioned whether their time was best spent working in jobs that were not fulfilling. They questioned their priorities. They quit their jobs, saw their businesses go bankrupt, or set up new ones. People hunkered down and stayed in quarantine.

The crisis of a world that was ending

During the crisis, there was uncertainty, and the feeling of not knowing whether there would be a tomorrow. No one was prepared for a world thrown in turmoil when the death count started to rise rapidly.

It felt like the apocalypse, and everyone was stressed out, waking up everyday in a life or death situation. Days were unpredictable. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers were burnt out, as well as most other people who had families to take care of and jobs to juggle (if they were lucky enough to have a job).

Just like any catastrophe that rocks the world unexpectedly, many predicted that doomsday was near. There was widespread panic as people stockpiled supplies and food, not knowing whether there would be enough for everyone to survive. Businesses that shut down had to lay off masses of employees.

We had to keep hope alive and trust that it would get better.

So if it’s the end of the world, what did people try to do?

They stocked up on supplies.

They stayed in touch with family and their loved ones.

They didn’t give up on hope.

People prepared for doomsday. It was chaos. There was panic buying as people stocked up on essentials and emptied the shelves at some grocery stores. If they imagined that the world was about to end, for several moments, it was a not-so-distant reality. School boards shuttered their schools to stop the spread of the virus and almost all travel halted. Many were unable to see their loved ones because the travel ban shut down major airports.

The post-pandemic era

Now that it’s been four long years since the start of the pandemic, the world has undergone a seismic shift and it hasn’t been the same ever since.

At the fourth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, many are reflecting and looking back at the lessons learned.

For instance, the pandemic brought to light many inequalities that plague society, such as the inequality for access to vaccines. There were efforts to make access to healthcare more equitable.

There were many deaths, but also many instances where people went beyond what was expected of them, to help out others in need. If there was ever a situation where people needed to work together, it was the pandemic.

Keep calm and carry on was advice you’d hear but didn’t pay close attention to. If there was ever a time to keep calm, it was during the height of the pandemic. It was a close call. Without people working together, the fear and the crisis could’ve been much worse.

How has work changed since the start of the pandemic?

During the pandemic, if they were lucky enough to keep their business going, employers are pressured to pay employees more, with better benefits and better work-life balance. The more unfortunate ones had to close their business.

Employees embraced remote work and a more flexible lifestyle. It allowed them to be more present with their young children, and for caregivers to look after elderly parents.

Lessons learned from the pandemic

People thought about what they regret, and what they wished they would’ve done when they still had the time.

The pandemic taught us to re-evaluate your priorities. What matters the most to you? What is most important? Are you more satisfied with your work life? Personal life? If not, it’s time to change things around.

Don’t wait for a disaster for you to realize that you have to live life to its fullest. Tell the most important people in your life that you love them. Make the most out of your short time on earth. There’s nothing like a major disaster to make you question your priorities. The things you thought were important suddenly don’t matter anymore.

The pandemic transformed the world in the space of a few days, and it could just as easily change again. Something unpredictable could happen that no one was prepared for.

It’s possible that after the pandemic, everything would go back to the way that it was. But don’t let yourself settle into complacency again. Take action and do every little thing you keep putting off. You’re alive, and it’s something to be tremendously grateful for.