Use the second yes to gain commitments

- It's very unlikely that someone will give you one of the clear answers. Most likely your partner will say something like, yeah, sure, or yeah, I'll get it done. Which, I mean, it's not yes, I promise, but it's close enough to say they're giving you an affirmative answer, they're willing to commit. But most likely they don't understand the nature of the commitment. Most of us operate in a domain of I'll try to do it, not in the domain of I just gave my word and this is very serious. So I use a technique that I call the second yes. After people said yes to me, I would check that they understand what it means to say yes. And usually what I get is a little flinch of hesitation. Because imagine you and I are having this conversation and I say, so, look, in order to finish this course, what I ask you to do is to send me an email the hour after you finish the course to let me know how did you do and if you have any questions. And, you know, you might say, yeah, sure, I'll get that done. In order to guarantee or to feel more confident that you understand what you said, I might say, so let me check something. What I understand you're saying is that you promise, and I use the word promise, you promise to write to me within the hour with your questions. Is that so? And the moment you hear or you see any hesitation from the other side, that means that the person is making a difference in their mind between yeah, I'll do it, and I promise to do it. So they don't see those two things the same. So the hesitation is a sign that it was a good thing that you're explaining what you want from the other person or what you understand the other person is doing. It's like hey, you know, you're signing a contract here. You're not just telling me you're going to do your best effort, or if you have nothing better to do you'll send me an email, or whenever you can you're going to send me an email, or maybe in the next week, it's no, within the hour, you're promising to send me an email, and if you don't, well then you're not honoring your promise. And let's just say that person says, yes, okay. Now I like to do another safety mechanism which is to tell the person, look, if something happens, and you cannot send me the email within the next hour when you finish the course, please send me an email just saying you can't do it now. So I don't sit there waiting for you to write me that email that is not going to come. So if you can't do it, we'll deal with that, that's okay, I'm not going to get upset, but can you please let me know so you don't leave me hanging because I'm trusting you to do what you are promising to do, but I understand that in the future things might come up and you can't do them, so would you let me know? And you'll see the person say, yeah, of course, sure. And of course, sure they'll say to you, but unless you say that, 90% of the time when people cannot do what they promised they were going to do, they won't call you to tell you that. They'll try to do it, and maybe they'll, I don't know, you'll write the email in two hours, and say one hour, two hours, it doesn't make a difference, and maybe it doesn't make a difference to you, but it does make a difference to me. And with an email it's not a big deal, but with the finishing of a project or the finishing of a bridge when there's a train coming and the train is going to fall on that last 10% that has not been built and everybody's on a schedule, it makes a huge difference. So the second yes, it's a way to guarantee the person understands that they're not just having a light conversation, they're having a commitment conversation that finishes with a promise that they have to honor by fulfilling the promise or by letting you know that they can't fulfill the promise, and taking care of the consequences. Let's look at a couple of examples where Johnathan and Lenetta fail to get a second yes, and that enabled the unconsciousness of their counterparts to not deliver on the promise and show up like nothing happened.