6:43 pm | 1 recommendation | 3 comments

The Leading Edge - For Crying Out Loud Hillary

She cries, she wins. What's going on?

Prior to Hillary Clinton's crying episode, we knew more about her experience, than about how to experience her.

When she cried and showed vulnerability, she demonstrated more accessibility than fragility.

We want and need out leaders to be accessible or as Bill George describes, "to be authentic," because if we can't get where they're coming from, we have difficulty believing that they'll be able to get where we are coming from.

And if we believe they don't get where we are coming from, we are hesitant to let them take us where they would like us to go.

What is going on here is that people are more drawn to experience near language (i.e. which gives you an emotional experience as soon as you hear it) than experience distant language (i.e. which you need to think about first). Part of the reason for that is that most people's minds are already overloaded with things they already need to think about and it's tough to find the additional bandwidth to do that (that's why I used to be able to remember two page poems and now I can't even remember a telephone number without writing it down). Another part of the reason for that is that we have heard people be so convincing and turn out wrong and we have also had many occasions when we thought we knew something and we turned out wrong. That causes us to doubt and distrust pure logic, because we believe facts can be manipulated.

So as a result many people more often trust what they feel than what they think. The unfortunate thing there is that feelings are just as easy to manipulate as facts.