Lessons

Lesson Info

How Influential Are You?

Let's start with building your influential intentions, so this is where we start using workbook folks, so I hope you got it. At the top we want to talk about what actions behavior or emotions do you want from your mark? What do you want your mark to do? What do you want your mark to say? What do you want your mark to think? What do you want your mark to feel? And I want you to be as specific as possible. First of all, who is your mark? Is this somebody that you're trying to sell a package to? Is this is a family member? Is this your boss? Is this your coworker? So take a moment studio audience and online audience. I have a question. <v [Instructor>Yes. So because I'm just training right now, I'm getting my training. Okay first of all, here we go. I know, I know. It's fine. Right away you just diminished yourself with the word just. "Because I'm just getting my training." You're getting your training. Think of all the other people who are not getting their training, who have...

n't gotten their training. So because I'm getting my training. Because I'm getting my training. I'm having a little bit of a hard time picking my mark, but I think because I diminished myself and because I say I'm just getting my training, I'm waiting for that day to come. I know better in my mind, but what's happening in my mind is I'm saying, "Well I need to wait for this day to come," "and then I can do it." But I know better than that. What do you know better? Well I know that I can jump in and start practicing with people, and I know that I'll be better for it when I do have that final training because I'll have practiced a lot and I'll be in it. So figuring out my mark, I can still say it would be a potential client. Ideally if there's one person that you have met or seen that you go, "Angela, Angela's going to be my mark." "I think I can work with her," "I think she'll get great results" "and I want her to buy my services." If you don't have that specific person in mind then you come up with a customer avatar. So who is that ideal client, what are their concerns and all of that stuff? The only problem with that, I wouldn't say problem, the only challenge with that is when we get into the profiling. You're not coming up with a specific person and so you're kind of hypothesizing around the profile, but we can navigate through that. So if you have one person, great, perfect, yes. Great. So we've got a potential client, can you share the name or make up a new of this person? Jessie. Jessie, great, we love Jessie. So we have Jessie in mind. What do you want from Jessie? Right there, see? That's it, that is it. This is why this is so critical because people want to be influential but they don't know what they want to influence towards. This is conversation goal setting. This is the step that everybody misses and this is what's going to make everything so much easier. And I'm so happy that you did that because it helps everybody in here and it helps everybody watching is when I ask my clients, "What is it that you want?" They have to take a moment, which tells me they haven't thought of that yet. I was in a meeting not too long ago, it was kind of like a mastermind group and somebody shared that they were having problems with their marketing team, specifically said the phrase, "I feel like I've outgrown my marketing team" "and I don't know what to do." And my question to him was, now some people in the group instantly started giving advice not even understanding the situation. Which is fine, that's a choice. But one person even said, "Well just fire them and get new ones." This is where people go, and that's a choice. I asked him, "What specific behaviors" "do you want from them that you are currently not seeing?" And he couldn't share it. For a few reasons, one, he didn't know the answer. Two he had to take time and then we were in a mastermind group of a bunch of A-type personalities so they jumped in while he was thinking. But when I asked that question people next to me go, "Oh!" And I even heard one person say, "That's a quality question." And it is a quality question, and it's a question that we keep missing. So what do we want from Jessie? I want her to sign on to be coached by me through using this auto-immune protocol. So great, we want Jessie to work with you and purchase your coaching services, fantastic. Which of your coaching services? Do you have packages? Do you have one, do you do hourly? No, I'm just in my-- Just? Just, god. I'm in my like third week. It's all brand new. She would be sort of like my test subject. Sure, that's totally fine, beta tests are phenomenal. So let's just say for the sake of our listeners, our watchers, viewers, that you have three coaching packages. One is four weeks, one is three months, one is six months. So my next question to you would be, let's pretend you have those already. Which of those do you want Jessie to purchase? Three months. Three months, perfect. So we're getting more specific. It's not just that I want Jessie to hire me as a coach, it's that I want Jessie to hire me as a coach for three months. And then potentially if you build out a big sales strategy then nine months, then have you on retainer, whatever it may be. So we want her to purchase your three month services. By when do you want her to purchase that? Is there a guideline of timeframe? That's great question, that's a great question. So this was a big aha moment for me in my research. When an agent is given a mission to make contact with a mark, get information from a mark, the first question an agent asks is, "What's my timeline?" Meaning, "How much time do I have?" Because the techniques you use in a short time frame are completely different than the techniques you use in a long time frame. Translating that into the con-artist world, it's the short con versus the long con. The short con generally will yield a smaller take. Whether it's $50 from somebody on the street or $200, the long con is where you can get six figures to ridiculous amounts. So the results are different based on the timeline and the techniques are different based on the timeline. So your question of, "Is there any sort of guideline for it?" The answer is no. That depends on your relationship with her, that depends on your needs, it depends on her needs, so there is no wrong answer. So if you start with, "I would like her to purchase within the next three weeks," great, if those three weeks and it hasn't happened yet, guess what, the world hasn't ended. We'll just change the deadline and we'll trying something else. But for now by when would you like her to purchase? Well and I do have a question as I'm looking at the timeline. Obstacles of the holidays because this is actually like an elimination food plan so there's an obstacle of the holidays and so my initial thought is starting beginning of January would be easiest for her. Is that ... I want to make sure I'm not making excuses or extending the timeline needlessly. But I do think that's a real obstacle that if you're starting something that is fairly strict to start right at Thanksgiving is setting yourself up for a lot more anxiety than starting in January. I'm curious, Chris has a thought to that. I was gonna say though it might dictate how committed they are though. If somebody's committed to do it now then maybe it's a better long term habit, right, because they're willing to do it even with those obstacles in the way. That could be a selling point. A few things that come to mind is I like how you're evaluating your view of the obstacle. So first it'd start off, I'm looking at the obstacles which I was going to come back with, maybe those are opportunities, and you've kind of talked your way over into that area in evaluating it, so that's great, and there's no wrong answer here. Those can be obstacles that you want to work around or these could be opportunities. If you use those as obstacles that right now these are obstacles and I just don't think that she's going to get the success that she wants because the holidays, not a problem, you still probably could sell the services and say, "Our initiation date is January 1st," "buy now and you get these bonuses" "or you get a discount," that's totally up to you and how you want to do. What I'm showing here is the scarcity technique that we're going to talk about on session three, so it could be almost like she's going to enjoy these holidays like they're her last days on earth (laughs) because she knows what's coming up and actually she may enjoy the holidays more or whatever it is, but the initiation date is this, so she can buy now and start later so you still could get your outcome of her to purchase by ... Two weeks. Two weeks, great, fantastic. So we got the who, we got the when, and the where, is this something where she needs to write a check to you one on one, or what's your potential purchase process. Yeah, one on one. One on one so she hands you the check right on the same day where you are pitching her? Yes. Okay, all right, so write that down and we'll work with that. So who else has come up with their mark and their goal, their influential intention? And I want to say for one thing real fast is I call it influential intention rather than a goal because I feel like in the world of goal-setting goal-setting feels like either you did it or you didn't. And my personality type personally doesn't like that very much. But when it comes to whether you hit your, you know, "I sent out 10 emails a day," "10 cold emails prospecting or whatever," Either you did that or your didn't. I feel like okay that's fine, but in the world of communication as I mentioned before there's so many dynamics, there's so many unknowns that can happen that I like the idea of influential intention and this actually does come from my acting days because when you dissect a script in each scene, in each sentence you're asking yourself, "What is my intention?" "Why am I saying this to this person?" And that's how you figure out subtext. For our purposes in the real world it's, "What is my influential intention," because maybe after you've had the fifth meeting with this person you realize that the three month package isn't a good fit, the two year package is really what they need, so there's room for adjustment without judgment, that's why I like influential intentions. Okay, what other marks do we have? Chris? Sure enough, still going with that whole community thing. I'm looking to build a tribe of explorers who choose their own path. That's my way of describing it, right? So it's basically, we've got these predefined paths in life and I'm trying to break free of that to say, "There's a lot of paths." I meet entrepreneurs, I meet a lot of people and there are all these paths you can take, so it's in finding these people and pulling them together in a connected way so that they can share their stories but also hopefully influence each other and push each other out of their comfort zones. Great, so that's pretty broad. Exactly, so this is where I'd like to get more specific with it. Perfect. That's okay, my first question is when wanting to create a movement like you talked about, you want to figure out who are already kind of the leaders, movers or shakers, not necessarily in the full scope of your vision but in the different funnels or columns. So who's a leader in this entrepreneurial world? Who's a leader in this seeking adventure world? Who's a leader in, so now you have your marks to reach out to discuss with them and get them involved. Does that sound like a good first step? I understand. I started before with creating avatars of the people to be influenced, but what you're saying is an alternate way to go about that is find the leaders that those avatars might look up to and use that as kind of a top-down approach. Right, because what you've described to me is a big movement, so rather than finding one person, one person, one person, one person, one person, into the movement, I want to leverage people who already have who are at the top of pyramid with a ton of followers and then get those guys, because when they come, when the leaders come into the movement you're bringing in a whole nother community. Interesting, okay. So can we go down that path to workshop with you? Yes, yes we can. So to choose one we'll go down the adventure path. Adventure great, I know nothing about that. We can do entrepreneurial-- No, no, no, no, I want to do the adventure, I'm curious. So do you have somebody who is an influencer in the adventure world? Yes, so we'll call him Jules. Jules, Vern, awesome. Not Jules Vern but yes, Jules Vern. (laughs) All right, so Jules. And so do you already have, first of all, what do we want from Jules? If we're going down this path it would be to share his stories of his path in life, how he goes on his adventures and maybe how he breaks through some of the barriers that prevent other people from accomplishing the same thing. Okay, so share his stories and how specifically is he doing that? Is he getting up on a soapbox in the middle of Time Square? So I have a platform now of podcasts, I'm wondering if I can use that platform to share those stories. Great, so we want Jules to be interviewed on your podcast, great. So we have a tangible. And by when do we want Jules to do this? I want him to do it in three weeks. You want him to have the podcast or you want to have an agreement in three weeks? I want to have an agreement with him in three weeks. Great, okay. And then to do the podcast at a mutually agreeable time. Okay, so with yours of what you've discussed thus far I'm going to take a little bit deeper. To what end do you want this podcast? What is the podcast serving beyond that? I think what the podcast is serving is to promote action an to get people to get out of their comfort zones. So the message is choose your own path, and it's to push people out of their comfort zones to try new things. This is beautiful. My question is, so if I listen to the podcast and I go down my own path and I'm doing things my own way and I never have any further connection with you, your brand or your business, are you okay with that? Yes, yes I am. It's to affect action, and I don't need necessarily a direct relationship. But then I'm not part of your tribe. (sighs) That's a good point. (sighs) So maybe to turn that back around say, "Go down your own path," but then the funnel back is to share your experiences back into the group so it becomes self-fulfilling. Love it, love it love it. Okay, great. Okay. Gamification. (laughs) Could be, could be absolutely. So you kind of become your own leader of sharing that back in. It gives you worth I think but also builds the community. Right, and people love to talk about themselves. There you go. So we want Jules to agree to do the podcast and somehow perhaps in that podcast the two of you, and I'm assuming you want Jules to promote the podcast once it goes up because you want people in his tribe, and then the goal from the podcast is to get people, the listeners to engage by sharing their story of some sort. Yeah, to affect action from them they can share their story. Right, okay. The end goal if we want a tribe is to get them to share their story. Great, so that's going to be what we're going to workshop throughout out time together. Yes it is. Perfect. Yes. So with that scenario are there like two levels of influence? There's the one with Jules and then there's the one with the people who are listening to get them to a community. Right, yes. So this is where to me this gets fun. So with your situation we have one person with one action, which is phenomenal and great. With his situation we have multiple influential super intentions and sub intentions that lead up to that which frog leap into another super intention with sub intentions below though. So we have a big strategy to build with his which is phenomenal and great. I love that we have these two options here because this exemplifies the different influential paths that people can take. Sometimes influence in and influential strategy can happen within five minutes. Influence in an influential strategy can happen within five years. No good or bad, just depending on what your intention was behind all of it. Anything from our online world? Yeah we have a couple examples that came in here. Now I know it's hard to do that one one one direct workshop in here but I'd love to get your thoughts on some of these influences. It says, "I'd like to be more influential" "with upper level managers at work." "This includes people who I work with" "and others that I don't work with directly." "When will I want to do it all the time?" "Maybe when I'm dealing specifically with office politics," "because I don't often get facetime with these people" "so a lot of the influence I'm" "unable to do face to face." Oh, yeah. Any insight for influence on that? Yes I do. So instead of upper managers we need to break it down into manager A, manager B, manager C, manager D. And you build out your field guide and your profile of each of those people because your intention let's just say for conversation's sake, conversation with a camera, that you want to get a promotion. So if you have that intention how you present that influential message is going to wrapped differently for manager A, manager B, manager C. Now manager A and C may be similar so you can present it the same way but going through this homework to figure out how to present it for them is the best way to go. Your intention, can you tell me what it was again? I want to be dealing with office politics? Yeah, she says the intention is to be more influential with these upper level managers and the she specifically says when dealing with office politics. Okay, so I need a little bit clearer intention for this particular situation so if you can focus in on one thing that you can be influential on for now. Like I want them to give me the budget for this project, or I want them to promote me, or I want them to give me the support that I need for this project, whatever it is. Focus on that one intention for this workshop and you'll easily be able to see how it can translate into other intentions like office politics and things along those lines. The beautiful thing is, especially in your situation is that once you profile these people you have all that information already, so you'll be able to be more influential on the fly because you already know the hooks, you already know the influential vibes, you already know what you need to know and then it's just a matter of adjusting your message accordingly. So I hope that help. That was great, yeah, thank you. Awesome. Questions, any other, yes? If you can clarify something for me it might be helpful. What's the difference between what your desired outcome is and what you want someone to do? Okay, so in the influential field guide you have the main heading of your desired outcome and I give you a little bit of guidance about what that means. What you want them to say, feel or do. So the desired outcome is kind of like, "I want money for this project." "I want to get a budget for this project." So what I want them to say, it's basically how to break it down just so you can get more specific. "I want them to say that they are going to support," "I want them to write it down." "I want them to agree to it in public," "I want them to," whatever that is. I've got this stuff all worked out, I'm just kind of hoping. I want Julie to commission a collaborative heirloom piece for $3,500 to be completed by Christmas. Okay great. And for that one I would say, on the feel I might write something down for that. I have a lot of words for that. Perfect, I knew you would, you're kinesthetic, we'll talk about that later. On do I would say either one thing that could be a sub intention is the specificity of the project. If she needs to be very specific or not. So the say, feel and do part is basically more of a brainstorming prompt for your desired outcome. Because these are areas that most people miss, that desired outcome for them to do coaching with me, or what specifically what does that mean? So that's one of the prompts for those. Thank you for asking that question, excellent. Okay, we have three. Either of you want to share some of your marks or influential intentions? I can. Mine is actually pretty similar to the one you were just talking about from online. Great. I tend to work a lot with people who are older than me which I think causes perceived lack of knowledge and of them, of me. I want to influence them to listen to what I have to say so I can help them to accomplish whatever it is that we're trying to work on together. Okay great. So these are people that you work with daily. Weekly, yeah. Weekly. And they are superiors to you in the organizational structure. And they're older than you which, so the question is, sorry I'm reading, I don't know if you can see it, her body language is telling me so much. We'll get to it in a little bit. So have they overtly said in their actions or their words or in writing about this lack of knowledge or age or any of those? It's not overt at all. It's more, it's more I guess, that they don't seem to actually take action on most of the suggestions that I make. Do they give you lip service like, "Oh that's a good idea," and then not take action? Yeah, yeah. So that acknowledge it politely, but no action. Yeah. When they acknowledged it did you get confirmation, did you get agreement? Verbally yes, but everything else, no. How is their agreement being said, give me an example of what they've said. So I guess I have a specific person in mind who I think his business model is very outdated and I want him to be open to learning about other options that might be a better fit for his business. And so I'm trying to suggest ways for him to find that information because I don't necessarily have the details on every single business model there ever is. And he'll say things like, "Oh that's really interesting." "That sounds like it could work," and then clearly nothing ever happens from it, and nothing changes. Beautiful. So let's talk about what just happened. We drill down to the specific conversation and interaction and from drilling down this perceived perception of age has completely been debunked. And I'll tell you why. It's because in that conversation you're getting lip service, you are not getting agreement or confirmation. You are not getting agreement to I'm taking this action by this date and I will report back at this time. These are the elements that we're searching for. Saying something sounds interesting is a polite way of saying, "I have heard what you have said." That is not acknowledgement that I will take action. I have been to many a cocktail party where I said the words, "That sounds interesting," and I smile beautifully and I don't believe a word I'm saying. So we do have the capability to lie. Not that I'm saying your ideas are not interesting, I'm sure that they are. So that's the first thing I want to spotlight is that you have not gotten agreement which is why you're not getting action. So it's not the action part, it's the agreement, we need to take one step back. Going even further is you are currently lacking specificity in your influential intention. I want him, what you described to me was, I want him to miraculously, this is my editorial version, I want him to miraculously acknowledge that his business model is outdated. Right there we're going to talk about that. And I know you might have said it out loud, but even if you haven't that perspective is shading your communication, so we got to play with that. Second is you have suggested him to look into various business models that require so many steps on his part, you have said, "I want you to find" "the needle in the haystack," "but you deal with the haystack." So we need to bring it down to, "Here are five suggestions of" "business models that I think are great." "I would like for you to review them" "and next week we will discuss," "and two days after that I want you to choose one." That's a clearer influential goal. So with that information how can we adjust this? What sounds like a good plan to you? What do we want from Charlie, let's call him? I guess ... I don't know, it's hard for me to articulate because I'm a very visual person, so I can see, Great, describe what you see. So let's use his website as an example. It's got a lot of really good content but it's impossible to find anything. His system of organizing his information is very difficult from a user perspective and I think that is preventing him from accomplishing a lot of the things that he wants to accomplish, and I'd really like to be able to get him to see that that is what the problem is. All right, we are gonna have so much fun while you're here. (students laughing) So one thing that we're going to talk about later today is visual, auditory and kinesthetic communication. I'm not going to go into it right now, but heads up, you are gonna love it. You are very visual. Yes, I know. Right. One of my questions would be is your mark visual as well or not? And I don't know if you'll be able to tell that right now, but it seems like you might have an idea. Maybe? It's okay, we'll teach how to figure that out later on. In your meetings with him, are you articulating, are you describing, are you using your words for this structure idea that you want him to buy into? I haven't really approached this particular issue in depth yet because I wasn't sure how to since everything else seems to not-- Hasn't worked so far. Exactly. Okay. So my initial suggestion is you are highly visual, based on what you said before you said, "It's difficult for me to articulate," so I'm gonna say you don't feel comfortable or strong enough right now yet in your words. Therefore, know your strengths. Present the visual to him. So show him a visual of his current website, how it's structured and the clicks and all this stuff, and then give him three options of what you see, because you see it, you envision it, I see you seeing it. But it's not getting communicated through the words. Through the words. So present him with a visual. First of all that plays to your strengths. We don't know yet if that translates into his communication style but it's already going to be much improved than the past. Okay? Yeah. So for your influential intention we want him to change current website structure, choose one of three options by what time? Two weeks. Two weeks, great. So. So three weeks, two weeks, three weeks, Christmas. We need to sign before then. Right. We need to sign, she's coming home from the South in two weeks so we need to sign by November 10th. So two weeks, two to three weeks, okay. And tell me about your influential intention. I'm photographer and I work mainly with women. So my intention is, when I meet a potential client I want to convince to buy a session with me at the day when we have a conversation. When we have the meeting. Then, I want to influence a person I am photographing and help her to build her own confidence. Okay. And see that confidence, and by confidence I mean I work with women, not the girls, but mainly women who start complaining about extra pounds, extra wrinkles and all that stuff, so I want that confidence that a woman is beautiful regardless of these external conditions. And I want my client to become a repeating client so she will be coming back periodically. Phenomenal. And I want her to be a referring client. Okay, so we've got multiple. I have multiple things. That's great, that's beautiful because you have a long term plan. So may have like a one week goal and then we have a three month goal, and I'm so happy that you did that because we were working in a short time frame with many of these and I wanted to have an example of a longer engagement towards a bigger goal. Because somebody who's trying to sell homes probably isn't going to sell a home in one meeting, this is going to take time and rapport building. So thank you for that. One thing I want to touch on is your second goal of the confidence. That is a phenomenal illustration of your question from before about say, feel and do. She mentioned confidence and confidence is a concept, so therefore the do question helps us break down what specifically is confidence. How can I determine what confidence is? How would she exemplify confidence to me? What are the outwards signs of confidence? And that's something I deal a lot with in my work is people come to me for, "I need more confidence." Well if you're in the marketing business people say, "What's the results of what you do?" Well you get more money, that's really easy to quantify. But when it comes to these more conceptual ideas of confidence you need to figure out what are ways in which confidence can be exemplified. And one of the questions that I always ask is how will you know that we have reached our goal? And so in my world people say, "I get better reviews from my boss," or, "I get asked less questions about X, Y and Z," or simply, "I smile more," or whatever those things may be. So for you when you set the intention I would get specific of what confidence will look like. Second is on your first goal if you want her to purchase the product on your first meeting. It's not the product, it's the session. The session. And then we have the other session after the photoshoot. And this is the time when the person is ordering the product. Right, but you want her to purchase the session in your first sit down with her. Yes. Phenomenal. So that is completely doable. My first, mm, strategic mind question, is what are you doing leading up to that first session for her to have that kind of rapport with you to be able to do that? So that's something that we'll discuss as well. Great. Some people were posting questions here, a few that have been getting several votes so I want to just touch on a couple of questions. Now I know earlier you mentioned something about being confident in what you're speaking about, and we had a viewer who wanted to know, "I understand you're supposed" "to know what you're talking about," "but how do you feel about that phrase," "fake it 'till you make it?" Yeah, so I'm all for it. One of my favorite quotes is from George Burns, "Sincerity, if you can fake that you can do anything." And so first of all there's a lot of science behind the fake it 'till you make it philosophy that people who are depressed, some things that behavioral psychologists will do is tell them to smile in the mirror for five minutes, and that is something that we will talk about in our next section actually is embodied cognition. So it's basically the way I think about it is biofeedback. If you body is overwhelmingly sending one message to your brain, then the brain will pick up on, "Okay, we're doing confidence now." "Okay, let's do confidence, rather than anxiety." If your body it amplifying anxiety with its breathing and posture intention, then the brain goes, "Yeah, let's do anxiety more, that's great." So we will talk about how to, that's the body language hacking part. So fake it 'till you make it, absolutely. I started by business all on my own when I was, 22, 23, so there was a whole lot of faking going on. And then look at me I'm at Creative Lives, so it totally works. All right well RC has a question here now. We're gonna be spending a lot of time over the next three sections, we're gonna get to know you quite a bit, but RC wants to know, "What is it that you" "have been struggling with," "and are there any communication things" "you are still in the process of learning." Oh, good one. Well this is highly specific to what I do, but in Influence HQ, which is my monthly coaching membership site program, I notice that I need to get better at prompting questions that get engagement. What works well on the platform here, I can ask more broadstoke questions and still get responses because my theory is that my body language, I'm looking right at ya, you better start talking, versus in the online format where people are not seen and they're behind their computer screens and then there's also this weird, should I go first or should somebody else comment interaction. So that is one of my new personal challenges to myself is how to be better, and I think my questions maybe need to be more specific or I need to point people out. I'm navigating that at the moment. Okay. Great question. Well let's do one more question here from Short Cinema. We talked a little bit about people kind of using these techniques to improve in their current job, kind of climb the ladder, maybe get that promotion, but Short Cinema wants to know, "Can these techniques be used in finding a job," "not clients, but just finding a new regular job?" Maybe in the interview process. Anything you can touch on there? Yes. So again the body language will play a strong part. Second is you are going to, you are communicating your worth in the job interview so a lot of those things that we talked about before are going to come into play. The one thing is that you sometimes you may or may not be able to profile your mark, which is the person that's interviewing you. Which first of all, see if you can profile your mark. Can you have email interaction with them ahead of time? Can you have a phone call with them ahead of time? And then you'll be able to pick up some of those influential vibes. If not, then you still will be able to pick up on cues in that face to face meeting an adjust accordingly. Plus, one of the phenomenal things, oh yes, one of the phenomenal things you're gonna love is the section on elicitation. So this is how to get from them the information that you need in order to be influential in the conversation. So it's not necessarily question asking, it's question asking with a twist.