Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence

Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence [Hardcover]

Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. (Author), E. Tory Higgins Ph.D. (Author)

Release date: April 18, 2013

We all want to experience pleasure and avoid pain. But there are really two kinds of pleasure and pain that motivate everything we do. If you are promotion-focused, you want to advance and avoid missed opportunities. If you are prevention-focused, you want to minimize losses and keep things working. And as Tory Higgins has found in his groundbreaking research, if you understand how people focus, you have the power to motivate yourself and everyone around you.

Showing how promotion/prevention focus applies across a wide range of situations from selling products to managing employees to raising children to getting a second date, Halvorson and Higgins show us how to identify focus, how to change focus, and how to use focus exactly the right way to get results. Short, punchy, and prescriptive, Focus will help you see not just what’s going on around you— but what’s underneath.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Focus:

“Insightful, thought-provoking, and highly practical, Focus is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants more deeply to understand how to motivate others.”
– Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

“Focus is an exciting and important new book that brings motivational science to life in a remarkably practical way.”
– Daniel Gilbert, Ph.D., author of Stumbling on Happiness

“In Focus, Tory Higgins and Heidi Grant Halvorson explore the difference in motivation orientation between those who are optimistically going for the win (Promotion) and those who are pessimistically avoiding the loss (Prevention)–and how the difference in focus plays out in their work, family, and decisions. The key to focus: find the motivational fit. For leaders and managers of people, this is must reading: it’s like finding the missing link in human evolution or the Rosetta Stone in language translation.”
– Ken Shelton, editor, Leadership Excellence magazine

“In anything-but-routine fashion, the authors describe a fundamental difference in the way we seek and achieve success. Their description is so wide-ranging yet integrative, so entertaining yet instructive that I am able to offer an assertion of my own: If you are one of those people who want to be successful, you should read this book.”
– Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D., author of Influence: Science and Practice

“Every once in a while a book comes out that changes the way you see yourself, other people, and the world. This is one of those books. Read it.”
– Peter Bregman, author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

“Most people think that motivation gets them energized to act.  Focus lifts up the hood on the motivational system and shows how competing motivations to achieve positive outcomes and avoid negative ones influence work, love, and parenting in unexpected ways.  The book is filled with practical examples that make it a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why they behave as they do.”
– Art Markman, Ph.D. author of Smart Thinking:  Three essential keys to solve 

About the Author

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D., is a social psychologist, speaker, and author of Succeed and Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. She is the associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School.

E. Tory Higgins, Ph.D., is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and professor of management at the Columbia Business School, where he also serves as director of the Motivation Science Center.