How People With High Emotional Intelligence Use ‘the Mayday Rule’ to Become Exceptionally Persuasive

When readers ask about emotional intelligence, I like to think of a British radio officer in the 1920s.

His name was Frederick Stanley Mockford, and he worked at Croydon Airport — the first international airport in the United Kingdom. In 1923, he was asked to come up with a single word that pilots could use on the radio to announce emergencies. 

It had to be something fast, clear, and unmistakable. His solution? You’ve probably seen it in a dozen disaster movies: “Mayday.” 

Why pick Mayday? Because most international flights came from France, and the French expression for “help” is, “m’aidez” (literally, “help me”). 

Today, most people who hear “mayday” probably don’t realize its origins; they just know that it means, “I’m having big trouble and I need help now!”

So, what’s the connection to emotional intelligence? 

It’s that you can use the same idea Mockford came up with — I call it the Mayday Rule — to create simple, effective linguistic shortcuts, even if you don’t quite “speak the language” of emotional intelligence just yet.

When I first started studying and writing about emotional intelligence years ago, I realized that it comes easily to me, partly because I was either blessed or burdened (depending on the circumstance) with a natural sense of empathy.

Having empathy doesn’t automatically make me a nice person, but it can make it easier to imagine what it might be like to be in other people’s shoes, or to predict how certain words or experiences might affect them emotionally. 

But, there are people for whom this doesn’t come naturally. So, if they want to work on their emotional intelligence — a highly useful aid to become more persuasive in business and relationships, which basically means learning to leverage emotions in order to make it more likely you’ll achieve your goals — they have two possible routes:

1. The long route, which is to try to change the way they experience the world, so that they learn to see things through other people’s eyes and to anticipate their emotional reactions.
2. The shorter route, which is to follow Mockford’s example by memorizing specific things to say (or not to say), that are likely to inspire emotional reactions, even if they don’t have time to stop and think about why they work. 

I like the second route for a couple of reasons: First, because you can get started almost immediately, and second, because even though the focus is on rote memorization at the beginning, the practice of using or avoiding specific phrases seems to lead people to absorb how they work emotionally, even if they can’t articulate it to begin with.

Maybe a specific example or two will help.

This is a great memorized phrase to start with; in fact, I’d challenge you (gently, of course) to try using “thank you for understanding” instead of other things that we naturally say to end a conversation or decline to do something we don’t want to do — phrases that often involve apologizing when an apology isn’t really warranted:

• “I’m sorry we can’t meet the deadline you asked about.”
• “I’m sorry I won’t be able to make the meeting you asked me to attend.”
• “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

People with high emotional intelligence will understand that using apologetic language where you don’t actually mean to apologize opens up all kinds of unintended emotional reactions. For example, saying you’re sorry for not being able to do something suggests that you actually do want to do it, and that perhaps you can still be convinced otherwise.

Using “thank you for understanding” instead signals that the conversation is over, and also expresses gratitude for something that you hope the other person will do — realize that you’re not going to change your position.

It avoids unintended reactions, and minimizes the effect that negative emotions are likely to have on the outcome.

This is another super-powerful phrase, one that’s so potent it almost feels like cheating. 

But it’s hard to imagine almost any scenario in which someone who is trying to explain something to you, especially if there are emotions involved, for whom this five-word question won’t elicit a positive response.

• “We’re very disappointed in the service we received the last time we came to your business.”
• “I’m having difficulty deciding which one of your products would work best for me.”
• “Can we talk about a problem that I’ve had at work that’s making it harder for me to be productive?”

Those five simple words — “can you tell me more” — are almost guaranteed to provoke good reactions. I love this phrase because it does several things:

• It provides reassurance to the other person that you’re engaged, listening, and interested.
• It keeps the focus on the other person’s experience and priorities, with very little effort on your part.
• It includes a built-in reminder that you should keep silent while they respond, which means you’re very likely about to obtain some useful information that can help you achieve your goals.

These are just a few examples; there are literally hundreds of easily memorized phrases that accomplish similar objectives. (I include more of them in my free ebook, 9 Smart Habits of People With Very High Emotional Intelligence.) 

The big lesson to takeaway today, however, is that emotional intelligence isn’t just about being nice to people, and it’s certainly not about injecting more emotion into conversations and decisions.