How do you catch people’s attention?

All the marketing books will tell you:

• speak to the problem: talk about eliminating pain
• speak to the problem: talk about gaining pleasure
• trigger curiosity: dangle the new, the mysterious, the juicy.

Post about eliminating pain, gaining pleasure, or about something new, and you will catch people’s attention.

But what makes some posts go viral?

Posts go viral when people share with their friends.

We share things with our friends to strengthen our relationships.

Is it a gift? Is it entertaining? Valuable? Useful? Important? Is it something that will make my friends like me more if I share it?

Catching someone’s attention relies on a skill I call: ‘edgework’.

Edgework is a concept and practice I learnt from Processwork, the process oriented psychology developed by Arnold Mindell.

Real quick: Processwork is an approach to understanding our experience and working with it. It is a toolkit that can help reveal the meaning and power in disturbing experiences like body symptoms, addictions, dreams, relationship issues and even world events.

Edgework is the tool that helps you turn trouble into gold.

Our edges are where we get stuck. Edgework is how we grow.

If you want a deeper dive after this blog post, I wrote all about edges and edgework in my Masters thesis called … Growing, Dying and Relating: Exploring the Concept and Experience of ‘the Edge.’

What are edges?

Our edges are the place in our experience where our identity stops us from feeling or acting authentically. We get blocked at our edges.

Edgework is how you get unstuck.

“You are not that!” Says my edge. “Turn back!”

And I get shy. I stop myself. I refuse that experience. I reject the direction. I find myself blocked.

• Edges are the source of pain.
• Edges make us shy, fearful, irritated and angry.
• Edges block us with unprocessed trauma, grief, rage or just the absorbed conformity of living in a social field.
• Being blocked and stuck is not fun.

In psychoanalytic terms you might say that I repress the feeling or thought at an edge. But repression is a linear concept that does not fully describe the dynamic, creative, entangled experience of the edge and edgework.

The concept of an edge highlights the dynamic of identity. Our edges map the boundary between what is me and what is not me.

Edges are also the place where personal and social collide. Our identity is created within a social field. What is me and not me, as a woman, as a professional, as a 30-something, as a racialized person. The facts and experiences of my identity are constrained by the context and our social norms.

For example, feeling joy at work might not be ok to express. It might make me feel shy or even unsafe. To be professional, especially as a man, you must certainly marginalize your impulse to skip down the hallway, or risk ridicule and worse. Impulses to skip after the age of 8 have to be tucked away.

Edges create culture

Edges are not all bad. Edges can even be useful. I sometimes joke that frankly, I wish people had better edges!

Edges create culture. They create our identities.

They define who we are. This is us. This is me.

They create a context for safety and stability.

We literally create legal and policing systems, not to mention morality and ethics, to produce and maintain certain very useful edges like ‘be a good person.’ We reduce harms and create safety with an edge that says: “harming someone makes you a bad person.”

(Yet our legal and policing system often fails to enact justice and the entertainment industry thrives on cruelty and violence).

Edges do not make an experience go away.

But at least we know what happens on this side of the edge.

Over the edge is unknown. Scary. Threatening.

And it is also very interesting.

Attractive or repulsive but either way compelling.

Over the edge is the prospect of pleasure. The pleasure of being your more authentic self, of living your wholeness. The pleasure of having access to what Arnold Mindell called your secondary process.

Over the edge is unknown. It is new, mysterious and juicy.

Edgework helps you capture attention

The point for capturing attention is that edgework makes your communication more compelling.

Edges are a place of unresolved conflict.

An interaction that has not been completed.

And that’s why they attract attention.

That is what makes them interesting.

To make your difference, use your empathy and imagination to understand your person’s edges and catch their attention.

Do it with love. Do it because you love them.

Give them the gift of edge work and help them get unstuck.

One big reason that some posts go viral

But why do some posts go viral? What catches people’s attention so powerfully that they share it with others?

Hotspots. Hotspots are edges in our group experience.

Hotspots show up when there is an unresolved conflict between roles in the field.

You can feel the charge.

Social media rage-fueled virality exploits this.

But it doesn’t have to be big or nasty to make a difference.

Taking a stand – standing for something – puts you in relationship to other roles and voices. It creates tension.

Here is an example.

See if you can identify the hotspot and the unresolved conflict in the background that gives it a charge.

I posted this quote for the Process Work Institute and it got 10 times more attention than previous quotes.

“I am saying …” Standing for something, in relation to another role.

Claiming your position.

You can invoke the hotspot of a conflict that is trying to happen, a conflict that needs to go further.

We experience it as juicy.

It is real and it is important.

So how do you capture people’s attention?

Speak to the pain.

Offer the possibility of pleasure.

Trigger curiosity.

And show your courage by taking a stand.

Do courageous edgework and get your message across.

You’ve got this.

And the world needs you.