Andrew Colsky on Winning Clients Through Comfort and Strategic Credibility

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Why did someone start the legal process in the first place? They started it because something happened that made them angry, upset, uncomfortable, fearful, something like that. And they want to return to a state of comfort and they don't know how to do it. They're trying everything they can, but they're still incredibly uncomfortable with the situation. So as a mediator, you have to understand what is it that they need to get to a state of comfort? Because in many, many, many cases, that answer is different from what they come in stating they need. So if you just stick with what they said they need and try and achieve that, you're often going to fail. If you understand what they truly need, and when I say they, I mean each party, what each party actually needs, then it becomes much easier to find that common ground.

Step into the world of success with your brand amplified. The ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. This is Anika Jackson back with another episode of Your Brand Amplified, and today I have a guest with such an interesting background, Andrew Kolsky. The question we should have on our minds today that should probably also bother us more than we realize is that by the time a client reaches out to us, they've already decided. According to Andrew, it's not a probably, it's not a maybe, it's they have already decided. Andrew spent more than 30 years as an attorney, a litigator, a mediator, part of building what became the largest employment mediation program in the world. And then did something a little unusual, went back to school and became a licensed mental health clinician. Anxiety, OCD, trauma, the science of fear. And somewhere in between those 2 careers, he noticed something that reorganized how he thought about business entirely. People don't hire the most qualified person, they hire the person who makes the fear stop. He calls that space left of trust, the territory between the moment a client gets scared and the moment they commit. And it's the subject of his new book, which will be coming out. Oh, I love it. a few weeks after this episode, Left of Trust: Why Clients Choose You Before They Know You. It's the engine behind his company, BePicked, and is the thesis of his podcast by the same name. So let's talk about this. Andrew, thank you so much for being here on Your Brand Amplified today.

Well, thank you for having me, and I appreciate the wonderful introduction.

Thanks. Well, I, I'm fascinated because you've had 2 careers that most people would consider very Full careers on their own. Before we get into your frameworks, talk about the version of you who decided that your first career wasn't where you wanted to stay.

Yeah. So I'm sure that people can imagine that the practice of law is not a simple, easy task. You don't just go to the office, turn it off at 5 o'clock, go home, and everything is fine. No, that's not the way it works, especially when you're doing litigation. You go home at 5 o'clock and at 4:59 you get an email, a fax, a something that throws your entire night off kilter. And then you end up staying and working and you never get time off. And it's always everything that you're doing to push in one direction. There's somebody pushing just as hard or harder in the opposite direction. So you never seem to accomplish anything. And after a while, that gets kind of tiring. So for me, it just got to a point. It's like, well, what am I doing? You know, I'm not enjoying anything. I don't have any time to spend for myself or my own life. This doesn't make sense anymore. So it got to a point where it's like, no, I think I've done what I need to do here. And then that's what brought me over into the mental health, and I can give you sort of the. the bigger picture of how it all fits together in my mind, if you're interested in hearing.

100%. Let's hear it.

All right. So why did I get into trial law in the first place? The reason I got into trial law in the first place is because I've always been interested in understanding how people think, what makes them do what they do, persuasion techniques, etc. And when you're doing trial law, think about it. You've got a jury of people there. Who can't ask you questions, they can't talk to you, they're just sitting there and you have to read their body language to understand what they're thinking and doing. You have to kind of assume what it is that they're going to want to know so that you can address that information. You have to speak to them in a way that maybe they're not experts on the topic you're bringing, so you have to bring it in a language they understand. And all of these are important pieces to help them build the picture in their mind that you're trying to help them build to win your case. So when I had the opportunity to do some more work through getting a mental health degree, the whole purpose of the mental health degree was to learn more about how the mind operates and how people think and how they decide. And it was really rewarding to do that. And ultimately, by building a law practice, by building a mental health practice, I recognized that not only me, but all of my colleagues had the same problem, which is how do we get out there? How do we build our practices? How do we get more clients? And then you said it in the introduction, which is clients are typically in a space where they're in some sort of pain. And they're seeking comfort. And this is the whole topic that I discuss in the book. And comfort comes from very specific things that you as the professional have to do. And the traditional route that most professionals take doesn't take that into consideration. And that's why people struggle getting the clients.

It's very interesting because my partner was also A lawyer, and he would talk to me about being in front of juries and the storytelling elements, and how you have to you know weave the narrative and craft it. And of course, now he's in he's been in film for the past twenty-something years, so he also made a career change. I love the fact, though, that you have these professions, and then you're like, this is actually the science of marketing, and that is this the storytelling, and how are we making sure? And you've also kind of when I hear be picked, the opposite almost is the pick me person, right? So you're saying don't be the person who just. waits to be picked. Take action and get yourself in position to be the only solution.

Yeah. And you know what? It is so, so timely and so important right now that if you think back to when the internet first started, most of us during our lifetimes, we've experienced that. And when the internet first started, It was sort of a land grab. People were grabbing domain names. People were setting up businesses. People were trying to figure it out. Some of them succeeded. You've got Facebook. You've got Amazon. You've got some pretty major businesses that are all here because of the internet. Google, you know, none of these would have existed without the internet. And you had plenty who started off and didn't survive. But the point is now. Everything is pretty well established for the internet the way it first was iterated. But today, just recently, the whole concept of AI came out, and that to me is the new land grab of today. And what I mean by that is you used to have to go and build a website, and you'd have to do SEO. you know, optimization for your website to get found. And then people would look up a particular thing and they'd find, you know, this long list of websites and they'd have to go through and try and decide what they wanted. And now with AI search, people just simply go to an AI search engine or even Google, which automatically does it for you. And they put in a question related to their pain, the pain that they want to solve. They will put in a question related to it. And if you are not addressing those concerns, if you are not putting out content in the way that the search engines are looking for you, you will not be the one recommended. And the more you wait, the more your competitors are doing it. And so ultimately, from here on out for the rest of time, you're always going to be playing catch-up. And I can't tell you how rewarding it is when I have clients new clients call me and I say, how did you hear about me? And they say to me, you know, I had one very particular one. He says, I went to ChatGPT and it said that you are the only one I should talk to and I do not want to talk to anybody else.

Wow.

Yeah, it's really powerful stuff.

That's very powerful. And it's interesting because there are, you know, we won't necessarily get into all of this because every LLM has slightly different ways and I have Clients who I help with their podcasts, who will show up in chat and maybe one or two other platforms. But then there are some that they're just not even ranking for. And so figuring out how you know getting into those details of then how do we make sure that they're ranking or is it even important for them? Are people even searching on these other platforms is so interesting. I want to talk about a couple of other things. You are also a podcast host, as I mentioned. Be picked is your show. You also had a radio show before that, and and these are all things that also help other people see who. We are, because, you know, being on your side versus my side, it's so interesting because I love being on this side and interviewing people and getting insights from them and having conversations. But I— and when I'm interviewed, it's a very different experience. And it's like, oh, this is kind of fun because I get to talk about things I never talk about on my own show. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that experience for you, the impetus behind the radio show and then the podcast, and if that's— Was that intentional part of your branding? Was it something that you just loved?

So yes and yes. So the radio show, I still have the radio show. Part of the work that I did as a mental health provider, or continue to do, was I call them sort of the orphan issues that most people never addressed or didn't receive training on. And so one of the areas that I focused on is called behavioral sleep medicine, which I realize is wildly different than law and whatever. But again, you got to think of my big picture here. And so I realized at the time with that, that there was not much credible information out there available to people, and people didn't know what to do about their sleep problems. When in fact, there are some real honest-to-goodness things they can do that are non-medication based that actually work. So I started a podcast about it. And early on, one of my guests was on a health radio network, and he said, we don't have a show about sleep. We'd love to have it. Would you be interested? And they put me in contact with the right people, and they were interested, and we started it as a radio show. So we now get, I think we're up to about 70,000 listeners per week, per episode.

Wow.

And we're educating people with valid scientific information about their sleep. So that allowed me to hone my skills as a host. And then when I moved into what I'm doing now with Be Picked and started that, the other thing that I realized that is beneficial, and I encourage any of your listeners if they're interested in starting a podcast, one of the things or some of the things that a podcast lets me do is number one, I get to talk to other experts. So I get to learn from them when I'm recording a show. So not only am I recording a show, but I'm learning. I also get contacts with them. Now I've spent a half hour or so with them, and so I get to know them, and I've made a lot of really, you know, positive contacts with some people who I otherwise would never have had the opportunity to connect with. And then when you're trying to build your own brand, You have a podcast where you have all original material because it's your own conversation, the opportunity to turn that into a blog, the opportunity to pull Shorts from that, the opportunity to just use that information over and over in multiple different ways, and it's all new information. It's not going to AI and saying, write something for me. It's your information. I don't know of anything else that makes it as easy as doing the podcast to do all those things.

Yeah. Well, of course, I completely agree with you there. So it's not why I started necessarily, but it's been one of the biggest benefits is all of the new people I'm speaking to every week and all of those new conversations and connections and things I can take back to my students. Right, because I'm also a professor and it's just a very enriching and rich experience. So take me back to being an attorney. You're mediating perhaps an employment dispute. You're in a room, 2 people are frightened and angry, but what was actually happening in the room?

Yeah, so there's 2 ways to answer that. I can talk about the overt things that were happening in the room, but I think it's more important to talk about the Covert things that were happening in the room. Because as a mediator, you're trying to find common ground and you're trying to help the parties address their concern. Well, same exact issue as what I talk about when I talk about marketing and what I talk about in the book is this desire for comfort. Why did someone start the legal process in the first place? They started it because something happened that made them angry, upset, uncomfortable. Fearful, something like that. And they want to return to a state of comfort and they don't know how to do it. They're trying everything they can, but they're still incredibly uncomfortable with the situation. So as a mediator, you have to understand what is it that they need to get to a state of comfort? Because in many, many, many cases, that answer is different from what they come in stating they need. So if you just stick with what they said they need and try and achieve that, you're often going to fail. If you understand what they truly need, and when I say they, I mean each party, what each party actually needs, then it becomes much easier to find that common ground. So just want to share one little anecdote here that I think makes this all meaningful. And again, I go into this in more detail in my book, but There's a professor. His name was Harry Harlow, and he did a study back in the, in the '50s. He was at the University of Wisconsin, and he did this study where he took baby monkeys and they were orphans, and he created 2 surrogate mothers for them. One surrogate mother was made out of wire and it provided food and nourishment. The other surrogate mother was made out of cloth. And it provided comfort. And then he did several different experiments with this. And what he found— I'm giving you the brief version here— was the babies would spend pretty much all their time with the comfort mother, and they would only go to the other mother to get their food, and then they would go back and seek comfort. And another piece of that was he experimented. He put them out in a field to play with others. And in one case, he had the comfort mother available, and in one case, he didn't. When the comfort mother was available, whenever the baby got upset or whatever, they would run back to the comfort mother and stay. When the comfort mother wasn't available, what they would do is they would go off to the side somewhere, sort of curl up in the fetal position and suck their thumb because they had no, no No other comfort. So the whole purpose of the experiment was to show how important comfort is to us above all else. You know, food, we get the food, we eat it, but then we go back and we seek the comfort. So it's just a, it's an innate thing in us. And you really need to understand that as your basis of anything that you're going to do from an outreach marketing trust perspective.

Yeah, that's really powerful. And it's very true. I mean, and you can use so many different examples. It doesn't even just have to be about that kind of comfort, right? I think about even in the classroom, how the professor teaches can draw different kinds of students and get the best out of them or the worst out of them.

Yeah. Yeah.

After you decided to go get licensed, what made you decide to stay in that lane and decide this is one of the next career paths? I'm truly— I'm not just getting this to get more information for my law clients, but this is actually something I really feel invested in helping people with.

So are you asking once I got my mental health license?

Yeah, mental health.

Yeah. So that was sort of a matter of being in the, I'll call it the right place at the right time in a way. So I got the degree because I wanted the information, but now that I have the degree, I'm like, well, I might as well just go ahead and finish and get the license. You know, I didn't have any particular reason, but it's like, I'm already there. I might as well just go ahead and get it. And in order to get the license, you have to do an internship and then a residency of a couple years. So I do the residency, and initially I have no idea what I'm interested in, and I'm taking any type of case that comes in. Then you start to kind of hone your skills, and I came across— first I came across having to deal with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Hmm.

And it's something they don't teach you in school, and I had to go start figuring it out myself. And as I did it, I started to learn a lot about it, and I started to learn that there are effective treatments and they're very relatively quick, where you see a major shift in a very short period of time. And to me, that's really rewarding. And so I started to hone my craft there. That was actually the first podcast I started was dealing with OCD. And as I did that more and more, I focused my practice in that area. No particular reason why, but I actually kind of enjoyed doing it because I enjoyed seeing the progress that patients would make. And then a couple years into that, I came across a, a continuing education conference at a conference I had gone to where they were talking about sleep.

And I—

they don't teach anything about sleep in school, didn't know anything about it. And I listened to it and I'm like, you know, The treatment here is similar in ways to OCD in that it's a brief treatment and you see major shifts, but nobody's doing this work. So today, if you look, there's about 750 members of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine in the country and pretty much in the world. It's a very, very, very small number of people, but the information and the progress is really You know, it's fascinating what you can do. So I started, I added that, you know, piece onto the practice. Again, just because it was interesting to me at the time, I enjoyed doing it and I enjoyed seeing progress from people. So that's kind of how I fell into that. But then this overwhelming conversation that I would have with attorney friends and with mental health counselor friends was always the same, which was. How do I get more clients? What am I doing? I have a website, but you know, it's kind of slowing down. Am I doing the right thing? And so I had learned since I said I started with OCD, I started a podcast there, started the radio show with sleep, started to learn about how to do these things, how to film things, edit things, SEO terms, all the things that you need to know, get it out on social media and all these things. And so now, by now, I had several years, more than several years of experience doing everything manually the hard way. And it just sort of clicked for me one day. It's like, you know, this is necessary for me to be able to build my practice, but at the same time, it's taking multiple hours a week every week, and I can't keep doing this and run the practice. and have a life. It was just overwhelming. And so me being the ever-present entrepreneur, I said, I, I gotta automate this. There's got to be ways to automate this. And that was the genesis of the credibility generator that I built. And what that does is it was designed for me so that I could do my own stuff automated. And I realized, well, All of my colleagues could probably use this too. It's the same concept. And so that's something that we're actually beta testing now, getting ready to launch very soon. And it's based upon all the concepts in the book. And it takes all of the difficult administrative parts of everything that I had to do to build videos and build content and blogs and posts and all these things. And it Does it for you automated. Now it's still your own voice, you still create your own words, but it gives you a first draft so you don't have to start from scratch, and it gives you the opportunity to kind of put your own language in there. But it took what took me several hours in a, in a week, it literally takes 5, 10 minutes.

Wow.

And It's so— seeing your career trajectory, right? There are people who go into marketing who come up with these kinds of products usually are coming from— maybe they have a degree in marketing, they have— they've done other experience. They don't start out all of the credentials that you have. So, but you are exactly right that you're— you identified the pain points for yourself and then realized these also can help others. And it seems like that's kind of what you've been doing. With every career switch that you've had?

Yeah, I'm, I'm a big believer in, at least for myself, of not being pigeonholed. There's no reason why I can't learn a new thing. So I can learn law, I can learn counseling, I can learn marketing. And there's many other things that I've done that we haven't even talked about, but I enjoy learning new things. I enjoy problem solving and I enjoy seeing actual results. So I figured, you know, Yeah, there's plenty of great marketing people out there who do a great job. No complaints about that, but they don't come from the background that I come from. I understand what it's like to be a lawyer, what it's like to be a counselor, what it's like to be a professional, and the struggles to try and market while you're trying to run the business and what the needs are and how to position that and what the client's needs are. You know, if I'm just a marketing professional, I've never practiced in the area, I'm not going to understand the client's needs as well as someone who has. It's just a matter of fact. So I think that puts me in a really unique position to be able to help the professional service providers, especially because I get it. I understand all the sides of the story.

Yeah. And we already talked a little bit about searching for that comfort with the Harlow's monkey example. But you talk about how the client's already decided before the first call. Right? They're not leaning into figuring out a decision. They've already made a decision. So I want to talk about this term that you've coined, left of trust. So what is that space? What is left of trust? Where is it? What's happening there? And what is a client doing living in that left of trust space?

Yeah, yeah. Really, really important question. I describe it like this. If you think of the internet as a whole, it's kind of like thinking of space. There's just this massive, you know, space with all sorts of stars or all sorts of bits of information all over the place. And we use a search engine to try to find the stars that matter to us or the information that matters to us, but there's just stuff everywhere. And so left of trust means before someone trusts you, they start off in this massive open space and they start looking for things. But what do they look for today with AI search engines? Someone who used to maybe go in and say, find me a divorce lawyer near me. Now they go on, they get into bed, it's 3:00 AM, they're wide awake because they're worried about the fact that, you know what? My partner just said they want to divorce me and I want to make sure I keep my kids. So what do they do? They go onto their phone as they're lying wide awake. And if they talk to the sleep professional for me, I don't do that. But this is what they're doing because of the anxiety. And they start searching, how do I keep my kids in a divorce? Can my spouse take my kids away from me? These types of terms. And the professional who understands This is my ideal client. This is the pain points they have. And then they start generating content that addresses those questions. Not, I'm a divorce attorney, I have this degree, I'm licensed, whatever. That's great. It's important. That doesn't answer any of the questions that they're searching for. So when they're searching on AI, if you have spent time, and this is kind of like if you invest money and you get compounding interest, it grows and grows. Same thing with your credibility online. And so if you're putting out blogs and you're putting out LinkedIn posts and you're putting out YouTube videos and you're putting out stuff on your Google Business page and so on and so forth, as long as it's all related to the same types of questions and concerns and pain points that your ideal client is going to have, it starts to compound over time. And what happens is eventually when someone goes to an AI search engine, And they say, "Can I keep my kids in a divorce? I live in you know the state of Virginia. What are the laws there? Whatever." And if you've done it right, it'll come up and it'll say, "Oh, you should talk to Annika. She's an attorney in this space, and she's written about this. Take a look at her articles." And you go and you read the articles like, "Oh wow, that's really helpful information. I didn't know that. Let me look for some more stuff. Oh, she's got some more." Links here. Oh, look, she's got a YouTube video. Oh, that's interesting too. And they start following it and now they're getting this feeling of comfort. It's like, this person understands me. They get it. They understand my pain point and they've expressed to me and shown to me that they have the experience helping other people get from pain to comfort. I want to get from pain to comfort. There's no— I mean, this is the person for me. So by time they reach out to you, if you've done all this work the correct way, left of trust to get to trust, they've already decided. They're not calling you to decide whether they wanna use you. They've decided, I need this person. Let me get in touch. I hope she'll take me as a client.

That was such a great detailed explanation. It's funny when you think about search, there are so many websites you can go to now to also help you see what people are searching for. To help you define, oh, these are this is my area of expertise, and these are the questions people are asking. So how do I incorporate them into my content and answer the questions? Exactly what you're saying. And it's something I don't think enough people do for their businesses.

You know, well, I think a lot of them just don't understand it yet.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that person has already made the decision. You gave a great illustration of yourself being. The person in chat, the only person that was recommended for this specific client's needs. So talk about the client deciding before the first call, because I think a lot of people may have done the research, but sometimes, like anybody, people will try to set up time with me, right? And they'll have an objection of, oh, I don't have enough money, or I'm too busy, or— I mean, and I think we do the same things probably when people are trying to sell us stuff if we haven't made that decision. So you've done the work to make sure you're answering the right questions. What else can somebody who's listening do to make sure their business is that business who's already the decision?

Yeah, great question. So let me answer it this way. There's 2 types of trust. There's cognitive trust and there's affective trust. Cognitive trust is the things based upon How long has this person been practicing? Do they have a license? Did they go to a decent school? Have they, you know, got a good track record? What are the reviews online about them? All of those types of things. So sort of factual statements, let's say. Affective trust is, have they put out material and information that when I look at it and when I consume it, I feel that fear Alleviate over to comfort. And so I'm thinking for myself, I had a rental property and I had an issue with a client, with a renter. And I'm realizing, okay, this is to the point that I need legal work. And typically you don't do legal work for yourself as a lawyer because the phrase is a lawyer who has himself, who represents himself has a fool for a client. Because you're too close to it. You can't look at it. And so I needed to find somebody. And so through, through this process, I found someone who talked about the issues and showed what the options were and so on and so forth. And I could feel as I'm reading and consuming that information, my level of distress is going down and I'm feeling more comfortable to the point that I'm like, okay, this person knows exactly what I need. Let's just get this over with. And I contacted that person and hired them and got it going. Now, there's a difference here in terms of how painful the pain is. So if I have a legal problem that is really serious, if I have a dental problem where I've got this major toothache and I need to address it right now, That's going to cause me to more quickly make my decision and hire the person. If I've got a thought about, you know, I should probably do better marketing my business, but it's not this immediate throbbing pain, they're going to be a little bit more selective. They may contact you and ask some more questions and compare A and B. But, but how did they, or why did they contact you in the first place to even give you the opportunity. It's because they found you through the searches they were doing online, or in some cases, somebody, a friend referred you or something like that. But assuming, you know, there was no connection, they're going to start off looking online. So this is, you know, kind of the, the, the whole process.

I want to talk a little bit because we, we mentioned AI and you've talked about The work that you're doing. So I want to get into that a little bit more and the idea of digital twins. Now that can come in many forms, right? I know people who've worked with Synthesia to be virtual professors or, you know, put their whole, like, do the 360 and get in there. And it still looks kind of like AI. It's not perfected. There's things like HeyGen. I have a Delphi clone, which isn't really a clone necessarily. It's just, I, in everything that I've ever done, interviews I do, classes I teach, everything's input. So people can ask me questions 24/7 without having to find time on my calendar, which can be really difficult to do, right? Or they, they are sitting in bed at 1 in the morning trying to figure out a solution to some issue. They can have a whole conversation and they can have it over text. They can have it over phone. So what are some of the things that you do to create that digital twin? And also, in a time when we're seeing more people use AI, but also people want authenticity, trust, comfort from real humans, how do you marry that juxtaposition?

Yeah, it's a great question and one that I spent a lot of time thinking about in the design of the credibility generator. So what I learned through all of my work and then also talking with potential clients and all, Is this. Number one, let's talk about an attorney who needs to advertise their practice, get out there more, needs to make sure they're going to be found by AI search, and they don't have the time to do it. Most of the time they hear about all the different social media channels and this and that, and they get overwhelmed. And when you get overwhelmed, you tend to do nothing because you don't know where to start. So most of the people who need to be doing something are doing nothing because they're overwhelmed. So I designed the credibility generator to take that element away, to make it simple and easy for them to do. Now, part of that, part of the things that are helpful is YouTube videos. YouTube is the second biggest search engine out there after Google.

Yeah.

And having a YouTube video, there's many different purposes that people have YouTube videos. There's some people who are doing YouTube videos to entertain, and those are the ones that typically get lots and lots of views and likes and things like that. So obviously you're going to be, want to be a live person doing that if you can. Now, other, look, there's artists out there that do great things with AI. So I'm not, you know, taking away from that, but the purpose of a YouTube video for a professional service provider. Is to be putting out basic information that's going to be answering the pain point type of question that a client's going to have. And the reason that a client is searching is not to be entertained, but to get an answer to their question. So by using a digital twin, number one, it means the attorney doesn't have to spend any time in front of a camera. They don't have to edit. They don't have to upload. They don't have to do anything. It's all done for them, but it's, it's them. It's their twin. And it gives basic information related to the question that someone is asking. And what I tell my clients is you're not there looking for 10,000 views on your video.

Right.

You're looking for 60 to 100 of the right views on your video. And then that video is one piece of the puzzle because Your description and other things will lead them to go read your blog or go find other information that you've put out. So it builds to that thing I was talking about of building trust by all these pieces. And when AI goes to search for something, it searches, are you in information in multiple places giving a consistent message? Because that builds your credibility for AI. So it's done for a very different reason. And therefore the digital twin concept is really not relevant to the, to the users who are looking for it because they're looking for the information.

Yeah. You've said that in— it's funny because I'm thinking about some of the things that my students are going through right now is picking what kind of content they're going to use for their projects. And we talk about user-generated, professionally produced, and AGC, AI-generated content, and how there is an underpinning of AI under everything now. But the way that you just explained a really great use case, I mean, it's excellent. So I'm, I'm gonna have to use this clip in my class because I think the framing from somebody who is a service provider, who's seen all of the different sides of things, is something that we really have to value rather than just hearing it from the marketer's perspective who started out and has had their whole career in marketing but doesn't have that understanding.

Yeah, and you know, look, all of this stuff is getting better and better and better and better by, by the week. Even this platform that we're on, this particular software— I happen to use the same software for my podcast— it's loaded with AI features that help to take care of a lot of the administrative tasks that otherwise you just have to sit there and click and drag and do all these things. So I don't think there's really anything out there that you can really do today that isn't using AI in some form or another. It doesn't matter what website you go to, that doesn't matter. It's, it's, it's just part of things. I use AI to develop workflows for myself to just help cut down on some of the spam email that I get because 90% of email is spam in my inbox. So it's everywhere. And, you know, that brings us back to the point that I made before, which is this is the new land grab. In my opinion, this is the new land grab on the internet. And this is the time right now to jump in on it. Not tomorrow, not next month, not after you figure it out, because everyone else that's competing with you, not everyone, but some who are competing with you, They're already doing it. They've been doing it for a year. And if you want to stand out in your field and be the one recommended by AI search, don't sit around and wait. This is not the time to wait. This is the time to be the front runner and get yourself out there because then you solidify your position from here on out.

With everything that you've done, a book is clearly the next thing. to check off your list of tools that you can bring to the world that will help them. So talk a little bit about the book. We know it's coming out soon. I'll have the links for your website for all of your tools, the credibility generator, and the pre-launch book link as well in the show notes. But talk to us a little bit about what else we can expect in the book.

Yeah, great. So the book is something that I wrote that actually helped me think through the process to getting to where I'm at. Because in order to build the tools I built, in order to do the things that I do, I had to have a clear understanding of what is it that builds trust? How can you do that given the opportunities today with the different types of tools and things that are available? What's happening from a psychological perspective in the client's mind? How do you capture that? How do you focus on that? And so I walk through sort of the, the process from beginning to end that gets you to the point of, oh, I can see exactly why he built Credibility Generator. It takes all of this information and it puts it together. In a meaningful format, and I don't have to spend, you know, 2 years getting up to speed trying to do this stuff. So, you know, we talk about the concept that comfort is really the root of everything that goes on. And why is that? And we talk about the Harry Harlow experiments and those types of things. We talk about trust and the different types of trust. We talk about sort of pre-conversion. You know, this left of trust moving you to trust. I talk about this concept when I was describing this big, you know, huge black hole of space in the internet and stars and all. When you put out your information, I call them TICs, T-I-C, which stands for Trust Is the Inevitable Conclusion, because the more TICs you have out there, the more they start to come together as people start searching. And there's another concept in the book I talk about, which I call vocabulary seeding. And what that is, is if you and I both worked in the same field, maybe we're both dentists, I don't know, we're each going to have our own words that we use to describe things to clients. Same concept, we're doing the same work, but you call it red, I call it maroon, whatever it may be. And so when we draft material that we put out on the internet and we do it in our own voice, we're going to be using the words that we use. And so let's say I call it maroon and somebody comes across my video and they hear me talking about this maroon thing. Huh, I want to know more about that. Let me look that up. And they go and they type, you know, tooth maroon. Guess what comes up? Me, not you, because you call it red. And so now they see me again. I just saw that guy on the video. Now he's got a blog. Let me read more about this. Oh, wait a minute. Now he's on LinkedIn talking about this. And they see me over and over and over because of this vocabulary seeding, which then brings them to the inevitable conclusion. Well, obviously this is, this is the expert on this.

Right.

Because no matter where I go, there he is. So those are some of the types of, of things that they'll find in the book. And then I go into things like the comfort audit and scaling comfort and those types of things. So it kind of walks you through so you have a really solid understanding of what's necessary to build that trust.

Fantastic. Andrew, this has been really fun. I enjoyed the fact that you started in one place and you've taken it in so many others to provide value for yourself and for so many others. Whether it is through your mediation, whether it is through helping people learn to sleep better. And by the way, I'm like, that's a resource I need to share with all of my girlfriends right now because that's something we talk about every day. Okay, who got sleep last night and who didn't? And what time were you up to? And all of the fun things of being a Gen Xer of a certain age. And for everything else that you're doing and then moving into, well, I've done this for my own marketing, Let me help others do this. And I need to refine how I do it. So let me provide that for others through my podcast, through my book, through my blog posts, through my tools that I'm creating. So thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate that. And if it's okay with you, I'd like to offer, you know, one tool to people that I've— that I built for this reason. You know, if you're someone out there, and you're listening to this, and you're wondering, Wow, where, you know, am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Where do I start? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? You can simply go to my website, which is www.be-picked.com. And on the front page, you're going to see a gold button there. And you press that button and it asks you 15 questions about where you are now. And when you complete it, it will give you a report that tells you, here's your strength areas, here's your weakness areas. It kind of rates them and it helps you figure out where you need to start if you want to start down this road and build this process. So it's totally free. It doesn't cost anything, but it was a way to help people figure out where to start.

Fantastic. And we will absolutely link that. Andrew, of course, I always ask, Every guest, one last question, which is, do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, poem, family motto, words that continue to inspire you to be you?

I actually do. And this, this is something that was a favorite quote way before any of this stuff happened. And it's a quote from Maya Angelou. And it's, people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. And that goes right back to the point that everybody's looking for comfort. So I've always loved it.

Yeah. Truly amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. And thank you to everybody who's listened to this episode or watched it on your favorite platform. So many great things for us to think about. And how are we providing comfort to others in our businesses, but also in our lives? Right. So Let's think about that. Let's use Andrew's tools, and I'll be back again with another amazing expert to share some of their expertise with you very soon. Thanks for listening or watching to this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.