Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a strategy each week to change minds, shape decisions, and drive actions from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

…

I spent over an hour a few weeks ago talking to a woman who puts EEG caps on people's heads for a living.

Dr. Carmen Simon has two PhDs and studies exactly what survives in someone's brain after you stop talking. She is an author, speaker and consults with the biggest brands in the world. Her finding will change how you walk into your next meeting: almost everything you say disappears within 48 hours. This issue is about the sliver that doesn't, and the specific moves that help your message survive.

(If you want the deep dive, keep scrolling 👇🏽)

Here's the uncomfortable part. People forget 90% of what you tell them within two days. Doesn't matter how eloquent you are. Doesn't matter how good the deck looked.

The brain isn't failing you here. It's simply protecting itself. Remembering every conversation, every email, every slide from every meeting this year would make you useless at your job. Forgetting is actually the brain’s primary function, not a design flaw.

So the real skill isn't getting people to remember everything. It's deciding what survives.

Dr. Simon calls this controlling your 10%. Before any presentation, pitch, or performance review, she asks one question: if someone is asked in 48 hours what you said, does their answer match what you wanted them to hear?

Most professionals never ask that question. They walk into the room with twelve points, four slides of context, and a hope that something lands. And nothing does. The brain doesn't grab the most important point in the room. It grabs the clearest one.

When Simon's team pitched a construction firm bidding to build Louis Vuitton's new towers on Rodeo Drive, designed by Frank Gehry and watched by the entire luxury and architecture world, they didn't lead with capabilities or timelines. They picked one line: build like the world is watching. Everything else in the pitch existed to support that single sentence.

That's designing a 10% message. Saying one thing people can repeat back to you.

The takeaway: before your next meeting that matters, write your 10% first. One sentence. If you can't write it, you're not ready to walk in.

If people can't remember what you said, you might as well have not been in the room.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

The brain doesn't work that way. It works in three stages, and almost every communication failure happens at one of them.

Stage one is encoding, the moment someone hears your message for the first time.

Stage two is consolidation, the gap between hearing it and needing it later, when the brain quietly decides what to keep.

Stage three is retrieval, the moment days or months later when someone has to act on what you told them.

Stage one gets all the attention. People polish their slides, rehearse the pitch, nail the delivery, then leave the room and lose all control over stages two and three, which is exactly where decisions actually get made.

Controlling your 10% across all three stages comes down to four moves, in this particular order:

1. Write the 10% sentence first. Not the deck, not the talking points. One sentence, before anything else. If you can't compress it, you're not clear enough on what is it you want the audience to remember.

2. Cut to three supporting points. Dr. Simon's research found three or four points is the ceiling for what a brain can retrieve without effort. A fifth point doesn't necessarily make it better, it actually buries the first four.

3. Make it a verb, not a feature. "We have 15 years of compliance experience" describes you. "Build like the world is watching" tells the brain what to do. Use verbs to help the brain pay attention to it.

4. Plant a retrieval cue. A message doesn't get resurfaced just because it was good. It resurfaces because something in the environment triggers it. Tie your sentence to something they'll see again, their calendar, their commute, a common problem, a phrase from their own industry, because the brain needs a trigger to recall a message.

The first three moves protect encoding. The fourth protects retrieval. There's a stage in between worth understanding too: consolidation.

Dr. Simon's research shows sleep is what locks a memory in place. Which means the dinner and drinks after a big client pitch, the thing every sales training tells you to do, might be working against you. Who knew?

If the message matters more than the relationship that night, let people go home and sleep on it.

Move four, the retrieval cue, is the one almost nobody plans for. Dr. Simon worked with a compliance software company and instead of explaining governance frameworks, they built their pitch around a pattern: the Lululemon CEO, the United Airlines CEO, the Boeing CEO, executives who got themselves in trouble because no governance process stopped them in time.

Now, every time a board member reads about a CEO's comments blowing up in the news, their message resurfaces on its own. They built the retrieval cue into the world the buyer already lives in.

Hardly any pitch gets built with this in mind. You can have a brilliant 10% message and still lose, because nobody built a way back to it.

Here's where this gets specific for you.

The next time you're in a performance review, don't list everything you accomplished this year. Pick the one outcome you want your manager repeating in their meeting with their boss, that’s the meeting you're not in the room for, then build the conversation around getting them to say it back to you before you leave.

When you're introducing yourself at a conference or a new role, don't list your background. Give people one sentence they could repeat to someone else in the room five minutes later, because that's the only version of you that exists once you walk away.

If you are working on closing a deal, resist the dinner and drinks. Send the recap the next morning instead, after the brain has had a chance to consolidate it without competing against wine and small talk.

These small changes will help you win big. The intention to help your 10% message land, be remembered, and retrieved is where it all begins.

The brain is simply being efficient. Give it exactly one thing worth keeping.

Dr. Simon told me something that stuck with me more than any framework: if you can't imagine saying your message a hundred times and still meaning it, it's not your 10%.

That's the real test. Sure it might sound smart once time in the room, but the question is whether you'd still stand behind it the fiftieth time someone asks what you do, what your team is building, or what you stand for and you’re prepared to give the same line.

Love that you made it all the way to the end! Since you did, I have something interesting for you. After we wrapped the episode, Carmen asked if I'd like to be part of something she's running: a neuroscience study for Allego on what makes sales and marketing messages memorable. She's calling it "light" because it's just eye tracking and voice this time, no EEG caps.

Takes about 10 minutes, fully virtual, all you need is a quiet corner and a decent internet connection. Interested? 👇🏽 (please let me know if you took it!)

[Take the 10-minute study →]

If you know anyone else who'd find this interesting, send them the link too.

Alright, people of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday.

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

​Follow me on LinkedIn

P.S. Carmen's team runs neuroscience studies using EEG, eye tracking, and skin response sensors on real buyers and sellers. One of their strangest findings: showing someone's face in an ad isn't always a win. Sometimes it costs more brainpower than it earns back.