Baffle your rivals with polite trash-talk trick
I’ll be completely honest from the start here: I follow essentially zero professional sports. Which means I had never heard of ex-Colts quarterback Andrew Luck before today.
But I have spent 15 years writing about psychology and performance — so I do know a great mind hack when I come across one.
And it just so happens that Luck is the poster child for a clever trick to throw your rivals off their game and increase your chances of success — not just in football, but in business too.
Why being surprisingly nice can help you win
As you might have guessed from the intro to this piece, I didn’t stumble across this trick while reading about retired NFL players in my free time.
Instead, I stumbled across Luck while browsing Scientific American.
Recently, the magazine featured an interview with Rafi Kohan, author of the entertainingly titled new book “Trash Talk: The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage.”
In the conversation, Kohan drops all sorts of interesting info about trash talk, from how our bodies respond to it to how to resist it (deep breathing should be your first line of defense).
But one insight stuck out to me as particularly valuable for business owners looking to get the upper hand in negotiations and other tough conversations while maintaining their standing as decent, upright, likable members of the community. Kohan calls it polite trash talk. He explains that the goal of all trash talk is to distract an opponent from focusing on their own game.
You can do that by saying something rude about their abilities or their mom. But you can also do it by being surprisingly nice.
“Polite trash talk is effective simply because it is so surprising. Attention is critical to performance, and one terrific way to steal someone’s attention is to do something unexpected,” Kohan explains. “Complimenting someone on their shot or their serve or just congratulating them on a good play or being generally charming and asking them how their offseason has been — these things can also cause people to downregulate and relax.”
Wait, this can’t work, can it?
My response to this bit of interview was to scratch my head and wonder, this can’t possibly work, can it?
Kohan’s logic seems sound enough, but in a high-stakes environment like the gridiron of the boardroom, certainly tough professionals can’t be thrown off their game by something as simple as unexpected kindness, can they?
But a little research turned up at least one walking, talking example of this idea in action. You guessed it: Andrew Luck. Multiple articles from his time in the NFL mention his oddball strategy of being super nice to opponents and the surprising way this unexpected kindness worked to his advantage.
“Luck has become famous for congratulating — sincerely and enthusiastically — any player to hit him hard,” the Wall Street Journal’s Kevin
Clark reported back in
2014. “When New England pass rusher Rob Ninkovich pulverized Luck last month in a Patriots 42-20 win, he got the customary congratulations. As Ninkovich tells it, he found himself paralyzed with confusion by the well-wishes.”
Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Nolan Carroll sounded equally perplexed by the tactic, saying: “You know if you hear a quarterback get mad, you are in his head. With Luck, you thought you hurt the guy, you hear ‘good job’ and you just say, ‘Aw, man.’ ”
“Luck seems like a good guy, so he is probably very genuine when he praises opponents during games. However, he also went to Stanford. That means he is smart enough to know this kind of trash talk can mess with a defender’s head, which can give his team an edge,” Bleacher Report speculated at the time.
Polite trash talk can work for entrepreneurs too
All of which points to the fact that polite trash actually works, even on hardened NFL players. When rivals are expecting hostility and power plays and are instead met with kindness, their mental scripts for the interaction are scrambled. This provides an opening for the canny sportsperson. It also suggests that the technique is worth considering in business settings.
In particular, I wonder if this strategy might benefit women, who are often more harshly penalized for coming off as “mean” or “overbearing,” research shows. Other studies suggest that niceness is expected from women, so their kindness might not come across as such a destabilizing surprise.
But Luck’s example is enough to suggest that the tactic is worth trying for entrepreneurs of either gender. Next time you’re faced with a high-stakes interaction that both parties expect to be contentious, try throwing out a genuine compliment and see how it is received.
If Luck’s experience is anything to go by, you might find the shock of kindness enough to shake up the situation in a way you can use to your advantage.