Let’s say you are a leader having to give a speech persuading people to change in some way.  Maybe you need them to leave some old behaviors behind, or address a new market challenge, or launch a new division of your organization in a new locale.  What are all the levers you can use to persuade people to move in a new direction?

And to make the task a little more challenging, let’s say your people are overworked, overwhelmed, and overstretched in too many directions already. Their capacity is limited, and their enthusiasm is in short supply.

OK, here are a handful of less-typical ways to get your team headed in the right direction, with enthusiasm.

First, people dislike losing more than they want to win, so talk about the new program as something they could miss out on (our company could lose its competitive position) rather than achieve (we might set new records for sales).

Second, set short deadlines and small goals.  Of course, you are going to have to make it clear that you are beginning something new, so start with baby steps and near-term deadlines.  Rather than putting a man on the moon in ten years – and bringing him safely back, as President Kennedy famously did in 1960 (DATE), figure out what can be done this month, next month, and next quarter.  Get a toehold started, then take a giant step for humankind.

Third, share the endeavor with others.  We are more likely to try harder to accomplish something if we have committed to achieving the result with someone we respect.  Perhaps an industry guru, or a founder of the company, or a retired leader everyone remembers.

Fourth, use anger and fear as well as positive emotions.  We tend to forget that part of the motivation for Kennedy’s challenge to America was the Russians’ progress in space.  They put a capsule in space first, and the fear and anger in America that the Soviet Union was beating us into space was a huge part of the energy behind the first years of the space race.

Fifth, use visualization to picture the process, not the goal.  There have been many articles, books, and theories about the power of visualization, and most of them focus on the idea of visualizing the desire goal.  But visualizing the new processes you are going to try in novel settings produces better results than if you focus solely on outcomes.  And your employees will have less anxiety; it turns out that focusing on day-to-day processes in your visualization is more emotionally reassuring than thinking about those distant, hard-to-reach goals.

Finally, get curious.  We adult members of the working world spend a lot of time focusing on the urgent things that we have to get done.  But if instead we slow down and ask ourselves questions designed to make us curious about what we are doing, we become more flexible and open to change.  And isn’t that the right attitude to get us started down the road to change?