Book Club: Magic Words by Jonah Berger and Switchwords by Liz Dean

Join hosts Garrett and Nolan for a special "Book Club" episode of ThinkBiz.Solutions as they explore the profound impact of language on business and personal success. This insightful discussion dives deep into Dr. Jonah Berger's "Magic Words" and Liz Dean's "Switch Words".

From "Magic Words," discover:

• The power of direct, confident language (e.g., "definitely," "clearly") for better audience reception.
• When strategic hedging can surprisingly build authority.
• How the "-er" suffix (e.g., "runner") helps build identity and consistency.
• A framework for defining your business identity: "What do I do?", "What do people think I do?", and "What do I want people to think I do?".
• The timeless five-part storytelling framework and the strategic use of emotional vs. utilitarian language.

From "Switch Words," Nolan introduces powerful affirmations from the American New Thought movement:

• Master switch words like "Together" (for everything), "Divine" (for miracles), "Divine Order" (for efficiency), and "Bring" (for attracting desires).
• The importance of personal switch words that resonate uniquely with you for authentic branding.

This episode connects how these linguistic philosophies intersect, discussing the fine line between persuasion and manipulation, why businesses often sell a "miracle", and how positive emotional language primes your audience (and yourself) to focus on the good.

Tune in for an organic, insightful conversation that promises valuable learnings for enhancing your communication, branding, and overall approach to business. If you enjoy these unedited episodes, please leave a five-star review – it helps us reach more listeners!

// Thank you for listening to the show!

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Podcast is produced by Hammonds Media. For assistance with you digital marketing needs, visit https://www.hammondsmedia.com

Transcript

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right we are here with another episode of you think biz podcast ladies and gentlemen welcome to the day we started off a little low energy but now we are better energy and uh we have uh We, ourselves, and I. Welcome to a book club episode. a professor named Dr. Jonah Berger. He is a big guy in the large language model research space. He's studied a lot when it comes to how people use words in specific contexts and he's literally across all of his different studies looked at millions of examples that he used puts together his findings on. And so he's got some pretty cool takeaways that we'll mention a few notes from today. Excellent. And I over here have a book called Switch Words by Liz Dean. Its tagline is how to use one word to get what you want. And this is a book in the span of what's called the New Thought Movement in American spirituality. And so if you've read Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, looked into any of Norman Vincent Peale's work, all of this is part of the American New Thought Movement of changing your mind Love it. I definitely think we are going to get some That's a weird– I definitely think– I know we're going to get some cool crossover today when it comes to some of these things. And I actually– that's a perfect transition to one of the facts is Dr. Burgess talks about hedging as a– a way that we can either dissuade the people we're talking to or actually have a positive effect. And hedging, you know, when I say hedging, it's words that are could, I think, unlikely, in my opinion... kind of, those types of words. Anything that gives that hesitation or lack of confidence inside of our language. So what Berger's found is that when we use more direct language that does express confidence, things like definitely, clearly, absolutely, we see a big difference in our audience's intake of what we're trying to be able to bring to the table. Which, a lot of these things that come from magic words, some of it is surprising and some of it feels like, oh yeah, that's common sense. But when you put it into practice, the amount of difference that it makes in our communication is shocking. So that's my first one, is when we Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We want to be sticking to those more definitive and confident statements. Right. Well, then there's a curiosity for you, Garrett. Whenever you're dealing with clients, how often do they, shall we say, definitively state that their problem or their needs are one thing, but you know they actually mean something else? Sure. How often do you think those definitive words actually mean what they mean when someone says them? So I think we maybe... talking about two different things though is that one is is how do we uh intake you know more confident words and the other is how often do we mean the the things that we say exactly because that's what i notice all the time is there is this Break, shall we say, between the confidence of delivery versus what someone truly means as the definition of that confidence. And you lose out in that situation because you weren't using the right language. Precisely. And it's very difficult, especially in the industry of spirituality or religion or what I do on a day-to-day basis that I've done to actually help a lot of my clients is a number of practitioners will say, well, there's lots of different ways to come to the same conclusion. There are personal practices that you just need to feel out. Where I've had to recognize that a lot of people, whenever they're dealing with very deep spiritual problems, they want me to tell them, I get results. And I do. And if I wasn't willing to state that, then they're not actually going to be prepped for an experience that is meant to get them results. And so my curiosity then, especially with how definitively we state results, We say I'm great at this. This service or product is excellent. It then gets into something else you kind of mentioned in your notes as we were discussing this episode of kind of persuasion versus manipulation. And that's where the definition question that I had kind of comes in is do we think that just using definitive language is manipulative and that's why we don't use it? I I would argue that most of the time we just aren't confident. And in this case, I'm actually using a hedging statement and that's the most of the time. And one of the interesting things inside of the book was that there are instances where it's better to use hedging language and if you go in fully confident in, you know, a financial prediction on something or some sort of numbers statement, and you're like, this is the thing, and then it goes horribly wrong and it has nothing to do with it, then you are, you're coming out with a lot of egg on your face, as opposed to if you have some hedging statements, it can actually build your, your authority. But in this case, um, I would say most of the time we as people have some type of imposter syndrome or we're taught to be humble, whether that's from a religious standpoint or just the morals of our upbringing. And it makes it harder to say, yes, this is what's happening. And I agree. and going to deliver X, you know, going through inside of our language. Okay. Well, and that's interesting because when your book starts off with this hedging language versus definitive language, my book starts off with just a few words that Liz Dean says are kind of the manifesting switch words. And those are together. So supposedly this is the master switch word for everything. We then have divine, which is for asking for a miracle. We have divine order as a phrase that is supposed to help you do anything efficiently and restores order from chaos. And then bring, which is for bringing you whatever you ask for. So it's almost as though my book over here is utilizing some kind of hedging language definitively. It's like we're going to do this together. We're asking for divine order to bring us whatever it is that we want. And I think that's a degree of surety that... kind of begins and prefaces a conversation either with yourself or with clients or anything else. Because I don't actually remember the last time I've talked to a client and said, hey, we're doing this together in the explanation of what I do. I don't think I've actually used these switch words to describe what I do. Nolan, you've got to take your own book. I know. I'm the exact same way, though. And that's the beauty of, I think, good books is that they give you a lot of information, but you have to go back and just... read them again periodically. Cause I, same thing. I have a lot of things from this book that were just cool takeaways and you know, but it sounds like that first, that first touch point is focusing on the relationship of language and how it connects not just concepts, but people themselves. Exactly. I love that. Well, and it's also one of the problems a number of people have whenever they're on a spiritual journey or they're trying to find themselves is they presume they need to go to an ashram in India or they presume they need to do like five grams of mushrooms or they presume they need to have this grand spiritual experience. But all of those spiritual experiences just encapsulate together. It's this grand process and a quest just to realize that, oh, everything's connected. We can do that just on a linguistic, logical process. Before any of that questing needs to happen. So tell me again, what are the actual words that were the switch words on this one? So the supposed master switch words in this book are together. Together. Divine, which is separate from divine order as its own phrase, and then bring. Okay. And arguably, I think that kind of fits what I've heard termed as the four industries, health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.

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it just seems like these four things are hitting on what we are actually asking for. Because I don't know if whenever we're doing business that we're actually selling the product or service. I think we're selling a miracle that we just so happen to be skilled at bringing to somebody else. Because someone else doesn't know necessarily what Hammonds Media does. They don't know all the coding languages or the tools or anything else going on behind the scenes. But they're asking you. to grant them a miracle over the things that they don't understand. Yeah, the language there, too, about, you know, you and I, I think we would maybe describe it differently. Miracle, to me, has very specific meaning, but in some sense, that magical feel behind what the output is, I think, is that end result of People may have a concept of what parts or parts of things that we do, but they're not going to know all of it. And if they do know all of it, then they also if they're hiring you, they don't have the time to do it. And so there's some piece that they need this end, you know. Here's point one and point two, everything in between they need us to do. Exactly. And yeah, but it has to be relational. So that's really interesting. My second tidbit from the book, and I'm kind of going out of order in the chapters, so I'm not necessarily going linear here. But I really like... a concept that Berger talks about related to suffixes, particularly ER. Adding an ER at the end of words can make people more likely to take action on those things. Okay. Let me elaborate. So say that I want to incorporate running regularly in my life.

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Okay.

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I may talk to somebody and they ask me, what do you do on this weekend? I say, well, I went running. I like running. I'm a person who, you know, I'm getting into it. It's a hobby. You aren't making that a part of who you are, right? But if you say, I'm a runner. I love running because I'm a runner. it turns it into an identity piece for us. And so when people did that in these studies, they were far more likely to be consistent at taking action on those things. If you're doing something related to drinking coffee, you don't just say, I like drinking coffee. You say, I'm a coffee drinker, right? So all of that, it's fascinating how our brain processes just two letters at the end of a word differently than saying the same thing but without it. Exactly. Well, and that's where, so my clients kind of have an opposite problem. They've used ER too much in their lives. And so generally by the time someone comes to me for assistance or for guidance or clarity, they've been in ER for too long. And something's happened and that identity is now gone. And they don't know actually how to build back a new identity for themselves. Because they've generally confused the thing that was a verb, an ing, with themselves as an er, a doer of the thing. And so it then comes to me where I have to actually work them through distinguishing those ers as roles versus their identity, which is them. And so I would have to talk to Garrett as you are now a Garrett role. You were a, you were a Garrett that is a Garrett or whatever the verb of Garrett is. That's who we need to start identifying as rather than some of these roles. But from just a linguistics perspective, that ER is super powerful because when those ERs are gone, when we can't run anymore, when we can't do accounting, when we can't be a reader because our eyesight fails, we lose a lot of our sense of self. And that's how powerful that ending truly is because one, They do it more, they're more confident, but then as soon as it's gone, they don't know who they are anymore. And I think that's why it's important that we don't just put so much weight on one part of our identity. Because then, say you break both your legs. Yeah, you're not a runner anymore. You are a roller, you know, and my, you know, that can be just as enriching, but in different ways. One of the happiest people I've ever seen in my life is my grandpa. And, you know, from the time I was, I can remember, he only had one leg and he was in a wheelchair. He was one of the happiest people that I know. You know, it takes away some of the things that you can do in your life, but it opens up a different perspective. And so you can't just put weight into one part of your identity. But if you're building a new thing, if you identify with it and use that ER, it'll help you be able to do it consistently long term. Well, this might actually be a decent example piece because we were just talking about this before we hit record is I asked Garrett, what do you think? Be completely honest. What's the biggest problem I have? And my identity piece, my ER is really hard for me to get across still. And so how would magic words solve my problem as an identifying statement that would allow people to do business better with Nolan? I don't know. I don't know. Because it's, yeah, that, that context wasn't one that, um, he talked about necessarily inside of the research, but he did give some other instances of identifiers that we can chat more about. But I think in general, when we are constructing our business identities, we have to be able to distinguish what exactly do I do What do people think I do? And what do I want people to think I do? Well, no, that's a great trifecta right there. So roll through that one more time for us. What do I do? Do I do? What do people think I do? What do people think I do? And what do I want people to think I do? What do I want people to think I do? So the first one is really just your product and services. The second one... Mm-hmm. But yeah, kind of interesting exercise to go through. Yeah. Well, and I can't help but study the history of propaganda. I think it's really important. Sure. Whenever we're talking about words, we're talking about these techniques, we're talking about strong definitions of things. There's a really bad famous propagandist that said, make the lie simple, but tell it often

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and

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loudly. Yes. And so part of this always wraps into the issues of sales and marketing of, well, how are we manipulating people? Well, part of that problem is that we need to kind of manipulate ourselves to be the best version of the business owner or the brand or the market. And we have to be able to sell ourselves on that again and again. And I think what's interesting, the difference between magic words and switch words over here is switch words would just start off the problem by saying, together we bring divine order. That works. That's the knowledge of understanding that the more I am entrenched in connections to myself, to everyone else, to clients, to people completely outside of my own sphere, the better things get and the more we just rise out of this chaos, which I find interesting because not a lot of people just start from that. There's almost a lack of faith when people talk marketing or they talk branding that everything's going to be okay. They think they have to get it perfectly the first time. So what's kind of the magic word's take on that getting it right problem? Yeah. Well, and I think I have a couple of different things that could be useful here from the book. One is just the storytelling piece, which you and I have come back to storytelling in. So many different contexts. We've had a full episode about it. We're nerds. Yep, yep. And if you haven't heard that episode, go back, go listen to it. Me and Nolan did a full episode talking about just fun things revolving around storytelling and its importance. That was a five-star episode, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. They should leave a five-star review. Leave a five-star review because it helps us get out there and helps more people find the podcast. But the book, the book tells... five different characteristics of storytelling that can be used in a variety of different contexts. We'll just think of it in business context for what I'm throwing out there. But in taking a survey of hundreds of different people, Berger looked for specific language that people use to describe themselves and a variety of different stories. And he found these five themes that he went along with. One was an introduction. Second is rising action. Third is climax, falling action, and the resolution. So this isn't a new framework, but it kind of affirmed a framework that we already have within within our society. And that's important, too, to make sure that what we're doing is still correct even years later. And as we are trying to get our own stories correct, we need to break down the different pieces and parts of what makes up what we're offering. So if we have a marketing agency that we're trying to sell, We need a way to be able to get people's attention, build up what the story of their lives are and what we're helping them solve. When we get to a climax, it's what may happen to their businesses if they don't take action and then start to help them be able to ease that by what solutions that we're offering until finally they have this picture of success. the resolution and the results that they're going to see. So, and that can take all kinds of different contexts. You know, it doesn't have to be trying to do a cell. It could be, could be anything, but that's one thing that, that came to mind when you were talking about that. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I had a little bit of a breakthrough on getting more comfortable with figuring out how to present myself was I got a little smash critique over a business card that I've been working on, turn it into a little magazine, but I gave it to someone and I said, Hey, rip this to shreds for me, you know, thinking that they're going to give me some feedback on it. They literally ripped it to shreds. And what I found interesting was it made me think of all these broken tablets of ancient languages or archeological finds or everything, where we have all these dead languages that we don't know how to translate. And we didn't know that. specifically Egyptian, because we didn't have anything that was self-referential. We didn't have what was said in one language and the next to it in another language and the next to it in another language. But it's the same meaning that's trying to be expressed across all the words, shall we say. What I noticed about myself is that how I was describing things wasn't self-referential. I wasn't able to have on one page the repetitive desire to say, and this is the main thing that we focus on. This is what we care about regardless of any aspect of my business that's going on. And so in my book, switch words over here, it really talks about finding your own personal switch words. So if you're a Harry Potter fan, then you'd put Quidditch as a personal switch word. If you are, you know, a fisherman, then you need to put rod real different things that actually speak to yourself and who you are, because a lot of times they don't know that across that five step story structure, that they're still present. They're not suddenly not existing anymore. And so I think a lot of good marketing and branding and just figuring out the right words to use for an individual come from making sure that we know the individual's words to be able to repeat that to them. And through this difficult part of the process, you still exist. And as we're resolving things, you still exist. And so there's this understanding of, sure, there might be some objective magic words that are going to be best for everyone and all things at all points in time. But our own personal magic words are really important to have nailed down as kind of the guidepost, making sure that our meaning is being gotten across. And I know that a lot of people talking about marketing and branding, they feel lost. They feel like they no longer are the thing that's being marketed or branded or what they wanted for themselves or their company isn't what's happening anymore. So what would then magic words speak to as far as how a person makes sure there's more of their own magic words through the objective part of storytelling and marketing and branding themselves? Yeah. Well, first off, I think that's interesting. It's figuring out when we're telling stories to other people in marketing, we're not the hero themselves. of those stories. You know, we are the, just to steal from, you know, Donald Miller's story brand framework, you know, in that we are the guide. We're helping other people achieve what they're setting out to do in their stories. But it's so often that we get so caught up inside of that, that we forget, one, we are a part of those stories. And two, there's a different perspective in the story where we're we are the main character and we have to understand the narrative for all the different stories that make up our businesses and our solutions, our audiences. And so I think what you were saying makes, you know, it's important to keep in mind that we can't forget who we are inside of the stories and the different parts that make up us. I really like A couple of different things. And I'll say I misspoke earlier on the survey wasn't directly applicable to the storytelling framework. I'm going through. I have notes here. All right. But listen, people. I'm not perfect. You're not perfect. Don't you judge me. Very definitive. How dare you. It had to do with positive and negative language and how that can affect people's perceptions. So in serving hundreds of people, the words, quote, best, unquote, what is that? What does this note mean? Anyway, they were talking about... you know, things using words like beautiful or, you know, exciting, things that we would put positive meaning towards as opposed to using words like dumb or repulsive. And whenever they finished those surveys, they figured out that the emotional language was different really useful in a couple of different contexts. So in a context where you're trying to sell a sports car, you are going to use much more emotional language to succeed. You're trying to be able to make people feel like they are the person who would want a sports car and the wind in their hair and you are envied by your neighbors. I don't know. But then if you were trying to sell something that was, you know, very... practical like a toolkit. You would want to use more utilitarian types of language to be able to describe its functionality and its benefits to what it's going to help you achieve. And so positive emotional language can heavily affect how we view some things, but it's not always going to be... You know, the right storytelling tactics. So that was really interesting. Emotional language versus utilitarian language. Right. Well, and it's part of the problem that a lot of people, if they've ever read The Secret or they've read a lot of the power of positive thinking type stuff, oftentimes they'll throw all of this positivity when what they really need is analysis. Their problem is not a feel. problem their problem is a numbers problem it's a math problem and it's really unpopular to say that oh we've got to do some math first when instead a lot of people they just want to feel good but what's really fun about people that do actually have a positivity problem they have an emotional issue is getting them to understand that regardless of how we think anything else works basically positive affirmations are using this positive language creates a bias in us or anybody that views it to look for more positive things. And so whenever you come out a problem and you're just talking about the competition and saying how bad they are, well, that creates a negative bias to have anybody that's listening to you only pick out the negative things that you say and talk about or might be bad about your product or service. So that emotional positive bias is really important to make sure that we are telling people emotionally what we want them to pay attention to. So in political speeches, they'll either want to use emotional language that evokes anger or it evokes fear or it evokes one thing or another. They do this in legal argumentation all the time. There's a really good book called Reptile that talks about the legal usage of fear and fear-based language in jury trials and in getting your argument across. But we can do this in business. And so that's why there's such a Focus on this power of positive thinking because that emotional language, whenever it's not a math problem we're dealing with, we're just wanting to make sure people are primed to see and look at the good things. I love it. I could talk about these things with you for a very long time. And, you know, for me, it's great conversations. But unfortunately, we have come to the end. We have come together to gain divine order in our magic words. It's been great being able to talk about these two books. And if you like these styles of episodes, let us know on the podcast. We really don't do podcasts. much of any editing on these, which probably is very apparent to you all. But we do it because we want it to be super organic and just conversations. And so let us know how you feel about that. Or if you want a more curated conversation, cut-up type of episode. We are experimenting right now, and man, we just love all of our listeners who are tuning in, and we want to make this podcast as good as it can be for you all. We've got to make sure to have more fun together. That's right. But as always, Garrett, I hate fun. Again, super definitive heuristic there for you. But as always, ladies and gentlemen, we've got to stay sharp and think biz.

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