BJ Fogg: Why So Few People Succeed In Changing Their Habits!

Behavior design is a set of models. And you could just write this right into the graphic. Models are ways of thinking. Oh, I already wrote it for you. Ways of thinking clearly about the behavior methods. Methods are ways of designing or doing, and then maxims. And so when I talk, when I say behavior design, that's what I mean. It's a new set of models, a new set of methods. And these maxims, and these are not summaries of past work. The book. And behavior design is not just a cherry picking of stuff that's happened since William James. This is all new stuff. And that's really, really important to know and to understand this book in the context of so many other books out there, that this is all new stuff. And so many other books out there. Inhabitants, as clever as they are packaged and marketed, are summaries of old stuff, some of which is wrong and misleading. So behavior design, that phrase is a phrase my Stanford lab came up with in 2010 in naming the new work we were doing for a couple of years at Stanford, which was no longer persuasive technology. So at Stanford, I started the Persuasive technology lab in 1998, which is about researching how computers can influence attitudes and behaviors. And then about 2008 or so, 10 years later, it was like we just weren't that interested in persuasive technology. And so our work evolved and then we named it Behavior Design. And notice it's not behavioral design. So since we came, and I should have consulted Michael Fishman for a more distinguished label than behavior design, because people have picked up on it because it's such a nice phrase and behavioral design is being used in lots of ways to mean lots of things. But the book is about behavior design and it's these models and methods with a special emphasis on the tiny habits method. I am big, big, big into systems, you know, thinking about things systematically. And as it turns out, human behavior, there is a system behind it. And the behavior model is the thing that cracked it open. That's a systematic way of thinking about behavior. And then you can go further from there, especially seeing that how it's all a system. You don't have to guess to change your behavior, change other people's behavior. There's a system, and if someone think doesn't work, then you go someplace else and so on. And that to me is very satisfying because that's how I like to think about stuff.

How do beliefs of not loving ourselves factor into tiny habits?

Wow.

That's. Wow. We're starting off with a really really tough question. Let me answer in a very practical way, then I'll get a little more philosophical from the practical perspective. For anybody who has negative thoughts or self shame or beliefs of not loving themselves, however you think of that, just dive into the Tiny Habits method and start making super simple like flossing and do two push ups and pour a glass of water. In other words, don't go after that big scary nebulous thing. Start with just practicing the Tiny Habits method and develop the skills of change. You can come back to the bigger more nebulous thing later, but the way to think about it is changing your behavior is a skill. Just like driving is a skill or speaking French is a skill, or leading a meeting as a skill. And the more you practice in the right way, the better you get in changing your behavior. But you don't want to start with the biggest hardest thing. That would be like, oh, I want to play piano and I'm going to start with the hardest concerto by Rachmaninoff. You know that would be a mistake. So if you haven't practiced the skills of change systematically, there might be some skills you're good at and some you're less good at. But don't tackle Rachmaninoff in your life out of the gate. Practice with really simple little things to develop your skills and your confidence. You can change and then you can turn those to harder challenges just like you would in other kinds of skills in piano. You start with simple little etudes and scales and Mary has a little lamb and so on. And then you work up your confidence in your capacity to do harder things. So that's how I would look at this question. There are ways. I don't have a 100% tidy answer for you, but there are ways to tackle negative thoughts by using the Tiny Habits method. I'll give you an example. Whenever I'm ruminating about something like wow, why didn't I switch to Outlook as an email client sooner? I've lived in the Apple email client world forever being frustrated and I really should have switched the outlook years ago, but I was naive and I didn't. Just so you know. Because that cut into my productivity. I know that sounds like kind of a trivial example, but it kind of is. But it's true. So rather than just ruminate like oh wow bj, you really could have been more productive had you switched to a better tool. My recipe. Whenever I criticize myself for something like that is I say you learn things when you learn things. So that is the phrase that works for me. That after I start criticizing myself for something I should have done sooner or known sooner, I say you learn things when you learn things. So that can be put in the tiny habits recipe format. After I start beating myself up for not knowing something soon enough, I will say you learn things when you learn things. And so there are approaches you can take like that. Like I said, it's not 100% answer, but it is a tiny habits approach to respond in a helpful way when you recognize that you're having these negative thoughts. I'll stop there.

Yeah.

You know, bj, like my friend Kathy Colby, even we had gaping void. Do one of the illustrations back here. It's on the wall that says that the time to quit working is when working is no longer working. So it reminds me what you just said about you learn things when you learn things. I've been thinking a lot about, I've said this. Every genius network member has probably heard me talk about this. But people say that content is king. And I actually think context is more important than content. Then there's communication because we're all communicating or being communicated too. But then there's comprehension. So the ability to comprehend things. So again, to go back to you learn things when you learn things. There are times where I just can't absorb it. I mean, I'll be talking to someone. It just sink in. What does tiny habits have to do with the ability to learn? How would you frame it in the context? Sometimes you can be reading a book. What I've noticed if I'm outside in the heat trying to read or listen to an audiobook versus if I'm in a comfortable place with temperature that's not grueling. I'm twice as capable of comprehending something if that makes sense. I even think of behavior at that level of like the environment. And when you're taking it in.

Yeah, well, there are three angles to this and I'll be brief so we can get to other questions. And Joe, you can moderate. You can select what other questions in the chat bot.

I will.

Number one, what does tiny have to do with learning? Well, one perspective is everything. When I think of learning, I think of behavior change. Equals, equals, like equals. In this way, you know, the triple equal sign. It's exactly the same as learning equals behavior change. That's how I think about it now. Not, you know, there's other definitions of learning too, but I have, I just think so. That's one answer. Another answer has to do with setting up the context. Since I launched the free five day program at Tiny Habits in 2011, from the very first session I taught, I had no idea it was going to go for years. And I had no idea I'd be coaching thousands of people personally through email, week after week after week. In that very first session I ever taught, I already knew or I already had put forth this idea that there are three ways to create lasting change. One is have an epiphany. Guess what? You can't make yourself have an epiphany, so get rid of that one. Two is to change your context, your environment, so you can design your context or environment, in this case for learning. And then three is to change in small, incremental ways and make those things automatic. And so tiny habits is mostly about the third way, but the role of context. And it really operates like a cycle. So you've got these tiny changes, you've got your context to your environment, and as you do these new habits, you naturally change your context. As you redesign your context, you make the habits easier to do. Now, there's a more sophisticated model I have for this, but redesigning your context or your environment is really important to do. And there still is not a great book or a program out there just on redesigning your context, at least not that I know of. I tried to get Weight Watchers to do a program that was not about behavior change, but about designing your context. It's like, hey, no willpower, no behavior change. All you have to do is redesign your environment. It's super powerful. But they really do work together. So certainly it's hard for me to talk about context without habits that help further optimize the context of learning. And then the last answer is about there are ways you can trick yourself to go into learning experiences. One of my favorites is like, say I'm resisting reading some paper I'm supposed to read or something I don't really want to. So I say, okay, D.J. set a timer. The tiny habits approach is I set a timer for seven minutes or three minutes or whatever it is, and I start. So the behavior, the habit is just set a timer. And I trick myself by saying, when this goes off, I can stop reading. But as you know, getting started is often the hardest part. So you can get yourself started. Once you're seven minutes into a paper, you're probably going to keep going. So that's three different angles to how I would think about that question.

Great.

Thank you.

So I'll just go to Bob's. I see how I could. Big new tiny habit, I guess, start new tiny habits, such as daily yoga and exercise. But is there a process us to identify an elusive tiny change that I need, but I haven't yet identified it. I think what you just said with the timer is one example.

Yeah. What a great question. I don't have a method for that to stumble across like, oh my gosh, I really should be putting MCT oil in my coffee or whatever. I think just staying well. Once you have confidence that you can create habits readily and quickly without tapping into willpower, without beating yourself up, then you actually look around for what other habits should I, you know, because then it becomes like, well, I can create kind of any habit that I want. What should I be doing? So you kind of tune in. And that's why when you're in groups like this and people suggest, like talk about their practice, you say, oh my gosh, I'm going to start doing this, I'm going to start doing that. And so I really think it speaks to community and the power of sharing best practices. And then you listening for like, oh my gosh, I could make that a habit. How great is that?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you.

Can get a copy there.

I'm going to ask John's question. How do you practice Map. Iow, I see the high motivation is good, but how does that help you get the habit created? How does that fit the important emotion?

Yeah, okay, this is a good question, but there's a lot of aspects to this. Ideally, you pick a habit. If we go back to this, you know, if we're talking about a habit, and the way I write up habit is this with this arrow. So this is my notation for habit. Ideally, you pick a habit that you already want. Okay. So if you don't want to meditate, don't pick meditation as your habit. Pick something else that will serve the purpose. So, and then you make it super simple and you make sure there's a prompt. So that's part of designing the habit. And the chapters we'll read coming up, we'll walk you through all of those. The emotion piece is not part of the behavior model because behavior model is for every behavior. So when you get down to this, then this is where the emotion matters and it's the emotional experience you have. And in tiny Habits I have people focus on the feeling of success. There's a variety of emotions that can wire in habits and one of them is the feeling of relief. The lifting of anxiety can wire in a habit, but that's very hard to hack. What is you can hack is your feeling of success. And so the Tiny habits method, through a technique called celebration, you cause yourself to feel successful. And I name that emotion Shine. And that's what hacks your brain chemistry to make the behavior more automatic. So yes, there's the behavior model, but then when we're designing for habits, you've got to wire it in to make it automatic. You've got to be really fast. You deliberately hack your emotions.

Where he teaches people to build and monetize their personal brands, Brand builder clients that have hired him include people like Lewis Howes, School of Greatness, Kevin Harrington, Shark Tank, Julia Solomon, influencer, podcaster, Mike Johnson, Bachelorette Rose McGowan, actress, activist, and Time magazine Woman of the Year and hundreds of others. Today he's going to share with you an insider method and technique that his team uses to help personal brands wrangle the chaos of social media into well organized, streamlined, massively efficient, audience building, revenue driving machines. Give it up for Rory Vaden.

Thank you, Joe. Yeah, so it's really interesting. I had an interesting thing happen to me a couple years ago. We exited a business in 2018 and all of my personal social media profiles were involved in the exit. So I had to start completely over from scratch here in the last year. And we've been doing it for our clients as well. And, and so, you know, I have always had a love hate kind of relationship with social media, but it's this thing that, you know, we need to do and we need to grow. We needed to kind of like grow our businesses and reach out to people. And I think the frustration comes from like one of the pieces of frustration is managing all of the different outlets, right? Like just literally trying to keep up with all of these different profiles and all of these different places and do we need to be on there and how much time should we be on there and are we having the right strategy, et cetera, et cetera, on each one. And so that's what I'm going to share with you is just a super straightforward idea about how we think about it and how we manage it for clients. And part of it is just a mindset is being open to learning new ideas and being uncomfortable with the awkwardness of doing things a little bit different. And so for that, I told Joe, I have, like a little video here that I thought I'm going to play for you all so that you can get a sense of the mindset of always being, learning. I remember when AJ and I got married and we first moved in together because she would ask me to fix things. And my wife, aj, you need to understand, she grew up in a home with a father who is literally a lumberjack. Her dad, Ronnie, is 6 4, 250 pounds. He hunts, he fishes, and he fixes stuff. Me, on the other hand, I was raised by a single mother who sold Mary Kay cosmetics. I know more about makeup than I do about cars. I mean, guys, you won't appreciate this, but ladies, every single morning when you wake up, you stand in front of that mirror and it goes, wash, toner, moisturizer, foundation, wrinkle free eye cream, base, eyeshadow, dark eyeshadow, blush, eyeliner, mascara, lip liner and lipstick. Notice how all the women are laughing and clapping. They're like, oh, he's so funny.

We like him.

There's this whole row of guys up here in the front row looking at me like, you know, this dude was a high school cheerleader. Feel free to participate in the laughter. And I'll never forget, AJ Asked me one time, she says this. She says, honey, can you replace the air filter? And I remember thinking to myself, huh, Air filter. I know I've heard that term before. So I go onto Google.

And I.

Look up air filter, and I say, okay, great, babe. Do you want an air filter for the car or for the house? And she says, she points to a metal crate at the wall and she says, just go to Home Depot and get the thing that fits in there. And I remember thinking, huh?

Home Depot.

I know I've seen that store before. So I go to Home Depot and I'm walking around for probably two or three hours, and this young woman walks up to me, she says, sir, can I help you? I said, yes, I need an air filter. And she says, okay, great, we have those. She says, what size? I say, they come in sizes. Don't judge me. So I had taken a picture, she gives me the air filter. We go home, and I'm working on installing this air filter for, no kidding, at least 45 minutes. AJ walks over to me, she says, honey, what in the world are you doing? What is taking so long? I said, babe, you don't understand. Our air filter, something is wrong with it, is broken. I cannot get this air filter to stay up. And she looks at it. And she goes, that's because you tore the cardboard off around the edge, you ding dong. So that is a true, 100% true story about me. And you know, I think social media, I realized as foreign is changing something like an air filter might be to a pretty boy, mama's boy like me. The idea of wrangling all of this and making it function for many of you is probably feels the same way. It can be frustrating, awkward, uncomfortable.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So the, the simple process that I want to share with you is what we call the content diamond. It is a detailed checklist and a visual that allows you to consistently create one piece of content that is easily distributed across multiple platforms. And here's how it works. First of all, you pick one question to answer. So like every week, the idea is you pick one question to answer every single week. You spend two minutes preparing what you're going to say. Not two hours, not two days, but two minutes using formula pspa, this old information marketing formula, right? Problem, solution, problem action. And so you're going to outline, don't just talk about the answer, talk about the question. Don't just talk about the solution. Make sure you talk about the problem. And so you do that for three minutes. You go record a three minute video just right on your, you know, right on, right on the iPhone is how we do, how we do ours, how most of our clients do theirs. Three minutes on the problem and three minutes on the solution. Now if you do this right, you will be done as the personal brand, as the thought leader, as the face of the business. You would have to do nothing else the rest of the week. And this process would fill the entire social media calendar across all the major platforms. And hopefully you have a team or an agency or a marketing coordinator or someone to do this for you. So we take that video and a lot of times, so that first video, if you want to go live, you would actually go live and that is how you would take advantage of the live algorithm, is to do that first draft live. If you're not comfortable going live, then just record it as a video. But what happens here is you're going to take that video and you're going to divide it up into two paths. So the first path is text and imagery. So somebody on your team preferably is going to log into, let's say Facebook, they're going to download the video and then they're going to upload it to like Rev.com or Temmie T E M I dot com, a transcription service. They're going to automatically transcribe it. You can use Otter AI, there's a bunch of them. And then they're going to take that full length article, okay? They're going to take the full length transcription, which is all in your voice, it's in your words. So we don't have to worry about, you know, you, you know, it's sounding funny in the written word. And somebody is going to just edit that as a full length article for LinkedIn, for Pulse on LinkedIn, which is LinkedIn's blogging platform and medium. Then they're going to take, let's say, one or two of the catchphrases out of your transcription and they're gonna convert those into image quotes. You can either do nice backgrounds or you can just put the quote on black and white and we're gonna use those quotes for Pinterest and Instagram. Now, simultaneously, while that process is running, somebody else is gonna, or your marketing assistant is gonna send the video, that raw video to a video editor and an audio engineer. And a lot of times that can be like the same person. First of all, they're going to take that five minute video and they're just going to polish it up a little bit. You know, it's five or six minutes. So they might drop in some royalty free music on it underneath. They might put in some royalty free imagery in there, probably a lower third title, introducing yourself, put some on screen captions on there and then usually one standard intro and outro, sometimes called a bumper. So you have one little nice maybe 7 second stinger designed or something for the front and the back of each, you know, of every video that's the same and they polish up that video, they post that polished version of the video in full to YouTube and then they strip the audio from the full length version of that video. They upload it as a short form podcast. So now you, now you are a podcaster without ever having to podcast. And then they create a 60 second version of that full length video that you're going to use for TikTok and Instagram. So the concept here is that you've got one piece of main content which is A five or six minute video every week that they're just going to subdivide into micro content that is going to fill the calendar on all of these social media outlets. So you're playing the game of adding content on social media platforms in their native environment, in the medium that that platform desires. But then the key is that you're going to take all of those pieces and you're going to bring them all together back on your blog. So the only place that people can get all of those assets, the nice polished YouTube video, the full length edited article, and you know, the two or three image quotes all in one place, is going to be on your blog. So that's a reason, it gives, it gives people a reason still to subscribe to your blog, which is a big part of the problem. And the strategy here is when we run into clients, some of our clients have millions of followers on social media and 0 people on their email list, which all of you know is a massive, massive problem. And so we got it, we want to build social, but we also got to get it off of rented real estate. You know, you don't want to build your audience on rented real estate, you want to build it on real estate you own, which is the blog. So, you know, it looks like this in actual form, this is a full length polished 5 minute video from YouTube. This is what the 60 second version looks like that is posted on Instagram. Or a two and a half minute version, you know, can be up to like two and a half minutes. If you do it as an IGTV it can be longer and then 60 seconds can be uploaded to TikTok and then the full length article would go to our blog. So here's the video, here's the article, and then you can kind of see down here, this is like the image quotes we drop in along and then of course we have our lead magnet and all of our funnel opt inside right here down the side. And you know, this is something that if you watch closely, you'll see a lot of the big influencers do. So this is Ed Mylett. Ed is not one of our clients, but he's using this exact same system. Full length video on YouTube, two and a half minute on Instagram, 60 second version on TikTok. And you're just pulling it all together and thinking about it and teaching your team and thinking about the tasks that you need done along these two paths. So the point is repurpose existing content before you spend all your time creating new content and get people off of the social media sites and on to your website or your blog specifically. And the two kind of fears that we run into with people doing this, number one is they just go, gosh, I just don't know if social media is worth my time. I don't know if I should invest the time and the resources to set this up. My one thought on that is, it is true that if you suck in real life, you will suck online. So you have to have good content to start with. But assuming that you don't suck in real life, here's something that you want to do. Save the best for first. Save the best for first. Give away your best stuff first because you may not get another chance to capture that person's attention. The other fear that people have, which is the last thing, is just a lot of times people have a fear that the fear of giving away too much. And you don't need to worry about that because people, at the end of the day, don't worry about giving away too much. People don't really pay for information. They pay for organization and application. So save the best for first. Give the best of what? You know, one question, one byte, five minutes at a time, and follow the content diamond. And hopefully that will help you streamline and organize all your social media.

A lot of fun. And thanks for having me here today. Today I'm going to talk about how to become a key person of influence, because I actually figured out I had been doing this for a long time, but when I met a bunch of the other sharks, and there's now 10 of us, and each one of these, you're going to see some new ones. John Paul DiGiorio on the end there, and Steve Tisch. This year coming out, Jeff Foxworthy was a shark for a season. I did three seasons, 175 segments. I learned a lot from these sharks. Learned that they were key people of influence in their industry. And so I said, you know what, Let me write down how I became a key person in my industry. And it was really kind of simple when you think about it. It's the old 9010 rules. 10% of the people make 90% of the income. But actually, really, today it's almost 2% of the people are making 98% of the income. So, you know, that's, you know, this middle 10% actually have 90, but it's now becoming even closer to a 98.2percent ratio. So there's five things that I say that you need in order to become this key person of influence. We're going to go into each one of these very shortly today because of the time constraints. But get a perfect pitch, publish your ideas, productize your value, raise your profile, and also then seek great partnerships. And I think that's one of the reasons why many of us are here today is to seek great partnership. So the perfect pitch I have a formula I use for this tease, please and seize are the three steps of that. And the guy that gave me the most unbelievable perfect pitch the first time I realized it, his name was Arnold Morris and he was at the Philadelphia home show with the knife he's cutting through a Coca Cola can, then a hammerhead and a muffler. And then he said, it's so powerful, this knife that can still cut to a tomato and you can read the Sunday newspaper through it. This was called the Ginsu knife. I said, arnold, that pitch you just gave, I'm going to put it on tv, take a camera, capture it and take it to millions. Because he'd only been taking it to 10 people at a time for 30 years. He had a perfect pitch. But I said, let's take it to the masses. That was the perfect pitch. Not somebody like this that came on Shark Tank and couldn't even talk. Okay, so that makes a bad pitch when you cry. All right. In fact, you know, when I got done with Arnold, we went back to the Philadelphia home show and watch this. Billy Mays, I'd like to introduce to you the Washmatic International. It's the only washing system in the world that works direct from a bucket. Who cares? All right, all right. That was not a good pitch. All right. That was Billy's first infomercial. God bless him. I did that infomercial. Fortunately, I didn't lose a lot of money, but I learned early on you need to create a perfect pitch. And here is Billy's last infomercial.

The dull saw is no ordinary saw. It uses counter rotating technology to cut through all types of material with unmatched.

Safety, speed and precision. It's a process that took eight years.

And cost millions of dollars to develop.

That's a perfect pitch. $100 million in sales. God bless Billy Mays. His family still gets a royalty to this day now that he's passed away a few years ago, but that when he passed away. 62 products on television when he died. God bless him. So, yeah, there's other people we can talk about. Lazo Freeman, a personal trainer over in the uk, came to us and I said, what's your perfect pitch, Lazo? I get a kick from Motivating individuals to be the best they can be. That sounds a little bit generic to me. Not a great pitch. But this is what we turned it into. I only do exclusive radical 12 week body transformations with business leaders, celebrities and public figures who achieve amazing things at work. But ordinary things. Naked. Okay, how about that one? All right, this guy has a 12 week waiting list now for people that want to use his services. That's what I call a perfect pitch. And by the way, you should have a 32nd perfect pitch. A 62nd, a 92nd, 122nd. You, you never know when and who you might have to make that pitch to. T's please. And C's publish now. There's a lot of people here. I've seen a lot of people have their own books already. So yes, having a book is great. I had my own book and that helped me get on Shark Tank. Actually, I can talk a little bit about that afterwards maybe. But books and blogs and newsletters, trade journals, newspaper articles, magazines, publishing creates credibility. And without a doubt, I know there's, I see folks here that go on the Today show. We know who we are here and things like this. So everybody knows they need to get the publishing credibility because, you know, you keep your customers. If you have a newsletter that comes out, you get new customers. We talked about credibility. You stand out from the competition, you enhance your reputation as an expert, you build your brand. And it has a longer shelf life than other marketing because you can give your book out, your newsletter continuity. You can do clubs, et cetera. So yes, publishing is very, very powerful. And this lady, Hadi Hassan, she was a struggling female plumber. And she said, what can I do? You know, I don't know. What do you have for me? I said, well, let's come up with something. We've now published over 350 books for people through our organization now. And what we did with Hadi is we said the Joy of Plumbing. And that book now has taken off. It's a best seller over in the uk. This book has positioned her now she started her own association. She does radio talk shows, television shows. She's got a 16 DVD set of DVDs that she sells on an ongoing basis. And she now is a rock star plumber. So publishing has put her into a whole new league. Third step, productize. Because a product never sleeps. I have friends that are chiropractors, doctors, lawyers. They can't bill while they're sleeping. All right? So I say you've got to productize your assets. We live in A product, global idea, economy right now. And productizing is what it's all about. In fact, when I met Tony Little, he was a bodybuilder, personal trainer. All right, look at Tony. He looks a little different today, but Tony Little, I said, how do you make money, Tony? I get $40 an hour. I start at 5 o' clock in the morning and I work people out all day long. So at the end of the day, he made a couple hundred, 500 bucks maybe if he had 10, 12 sessions like Tony. How can we unpack your valuable IP? He said, Kevin, he said, what I do, I can target train women primarily if they got a little bit of arm fat here. Love handles, glutes, you name it, I target train them. I said, boom. Okay, brought him into the studio. We shot six one hour DVDs, created the target training DVD set. Here it is. $300 million in sales for Tony Little. He was getting a check for about a million dollars a month actually at one time. So this was all. By productizing his valuable ip, Tony's done billions. We went on to do the Gazelle with Tony Little, which actually has now done over $1 billion in sales by productizing. Here's another guy, Jack Lalanne, he's a healthy old fitness guru. Another guy that's passed away, God bless him. But I said, jack, he hadn't made any money. This is about 20 some years ago. And I said, what do you do to stay so healthy? I drink juice every day. Okay, Jack, here it is. We're going to make you now a healthy and wealthy old Fitness Guru. Okay, $1 billion in juicer sales. Jack Lalanne, unpack your valuable IP. Fourth thing, profile. Raise your profile. So important, you know. Let's talk about the evolution of the industry. It took radio 38 years to get to 50 million people. Took television 13 years. The Internet four years. IPod three years, Facebook two years. But guess what? This guy, he did it in six months to a billion people. Sigh. Okay, the Gangnam guy, this guy just blew the market away because what did he do? He didn't use the old media. A few channels broadcasting to millions. He used new media, which is millions of channels broadcasting to a few. And that is the new big. Small is the new big. Big companies have a harder time competing against you because just like this right here, I have a 35,000 square foot studio. I shoot my infomercials. I can shoot the same quality on this little iPhone that I do in my studio. And that's where we're going with this because Here's a guy. Phil Gear. 810 million views. What mattered to me today? Michelle Phan, 580 million views. She gets seven figure sponsorships from companies that pay her to show how to put makeup on for Asian girls and Jenna Marbles. Over a billion views. How to trick people into thinking you're good looking. So you know who would want me on tv? A lot of people say well if a blanket with arms can become a TV sensation, so can you. The Snuggie. $400 million in sales, 26 million units. Last thing, partnerships. And I'm out of time. So I'm just going to wrap it up here. I went to Guthy Ranker. They do beauty, I do hard goods. I said let's form a venture. We'll take people that come to you with hard good products, bring them into the venture. People come to me with beauty products. We formed a 50:50 joint venture, very successful. Everybody in this room has the ability to partner. Just like invent help which helps inventors. They come to us. We have a program where we line up 7,000 companies to invest in inventors ideas. And that's because we have engineers, we have manufacturing companies, we have every kind of company that can help an inventor with his idea. It's all about partnerships. And that's what everybody hears here today, this week to do.

Well, I'll tell you something, this is an interesting thing. We talk about 25 years that like it was yesterday because it feels like yesterday that we were at the Wigwam having dinner with Evan and Bobette and hanging out. But I had an experience a couple of summers ago. I had somebody come to one of my breakthrough blueprint events. And she was 30 years old, young, you know, bright young, you know, go getter marketer. And I in that moment I realized, you know, she was born in 1990 is when she was born. And I thought, wow, we've got a whole new generation. I bet a lot of the people that are listening that's even on zoom here are you know, 30ish type of people who weren't around when the first, when influence first came out. So I think it'd be good if you could maybe tell a little bit about the background of your work because it's been kind of defined your life's work since then.

Well, as your very gracious introduction suggested, I started out as a traditionally trained and traditionally practicing academic doing research on my college campus with college sophomores pretty much as the students in laboratory settings and recognized there was something missing there. And I needed to get away from those academic constraints into the environment where the influence wars are being waged every day. After all, we're always either sending out influence appeals or receiving influence appeals of one sort or another every day. And there are certain people who know how to do this because their economic livelihoods depend on. On using the influence process properly and effectively. And it seemed to me that those professions, sales management, recruiting, fundraising, marketing, advertising and so on, those were the people who really knew what I should be focusing my thinking on. So I began to infiltrate their training programs with disguised identity, disguised intent to learn what they had done that produced yes from people regularly. And I spent two and a half years in that undercover activity to learn something beyond the college campus where I had been studying this process.

And I remember you saying how it was initially because you wanted to learn about these things, not to be a practitioner of them, but to protect yourself from them or to help people protect themselves from the sort of illicit use of these, of those principles so that people could recognize them.

Exactly. Recognize, resist, deflect, defend. But it turned out soon after the publication of Influence, that a lot of people were interested, besides that, in harnessing the process in ethical ways, in morally responsible ways, to move people into positive choices that they could make that they were hesitant to make. They were sitting on the fence, they just were dithering. They weren't thinking through what exactly the costs and benefits might be. The merits of one's case were simply not being presented to them in an optimal way. And so they wanted to know about optimization of the persuasion process for that reason as well.

That's what I found when I first started studying it. Like I've always told you, from the moment I read your book, just the understanding was like having a pair of 3D glasses all of a sudden that you see the mechanisms that are at work and why things are turning out.

The way they are.

And this kind of underlying understanding of influence has really helped me in applying to the marketing principles then that you can overlay on top of that, when you've got an understanding of why people are reacting, how our brains are responding to things. And one of the greatest phrases that you used in the description is that when these are presented, they trigger this click were pattern that it's just. It's almost like an autopilot thing. When somebody is presented with this, with, under the right circumstances, one of the elements of influence, it's almost like instinctual. We can't even. It's not a. They're not reasoning or thinking it. It's just happening automatically.

And you know the thing about the click that you were talking about, the thing that triggers their response? It can be a very small thing. I like the metaphor of a light switch. Suppose you were in charge of lighting a stadium for a night match or game of some sort or another, and you're down in the bowels of the stadium and there's a switch that you just flick, and suddenly everything is illuminated. All of a sudden things are possible that weren't possible before. It didn't take a lot of strength or effort or time on your part. You just had to know how to locate that switch. And then it's just a little bit of effort. And all of the power that's stored in the. In the power system of that. Of that arena flows because of that small thing you did. It goes against the rule of proportionality. There's a belief that in order to get big effects, we need to do big things to change people in substantial ways. It's just not true. There are big power sources inside people, and our job is to locate the switch that flicks them on that then drives their behavior.

Now I'm going to ask you. So when Joe Polish and I did our first I Love Marketing conference, it's all about our eight profit activators. And he asked me a question that was just funny because he asked me, do I know all the eight profit activators? Like, we're not looking. And I'm going to ask you, just for fun, to just maybe quickly name what the six elements of influence are so we can set the context for what we're talking about here.

Sure. Would you prefer that I just label them and how they work or give an example?

Let's just kind of name them first and then we'll pick kind of. And go through some of them because we've got so many stories.

Yeah.

So the first is the rule of reciprocation. People want to say yes to those people who have given to them first, done a favor, a service, provided a gift. People want to give back. So you go into a room where you want to be more influential. Your first question should not be, who can help me here? It should be, whom can I help here? Whose circumstances can I elevate? Whose outcomes can I increase? They will stand on the balls of their feet wanting to do the same for you. Next principle is liking. Nobody's surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we like. But there are two small things we can do that substantially enhance the feeling of rapport that people feel with us. And one is to point out genuine similarities and the other is to give the genuine compliments or praise as warranted. Next principle is social proof. This is a term by the way that's used, we coined it back in when with the first edition. Influence. Social proof didn't exist before. I'm so glad because I was thinking of using people proof. Right. What's happened with social media now? Yeah, about social media, I'm so glad that I use the term social. Social proof, where the, the fact that a lot of other people are doing something, especially people like us, is the proof that we should do it too. It's not fact based proofs, it's not scientific proof, it's not logical proof, it's social proof. So that's the other thing, simply letting people know of the others who are around them, like them, who are choosing or have been choosing our recommended step forward.

Robert, what year, before you say, what year did the first book come out?

The first book came out in 1984.

Okay. So this was well before anything with the Internet. I mean it was really okay because I was turned onto it in 1996, as you know. So it had already been out for 12 years. But that was just at the very beginning of the Internet. So I'm sorry for interrupting your train, but.

No, no, that's exactly the people say to me, you know, Bobby, your book is called the Bible of Digital Commerce. There wasn't digital commerce. How did you see, how, how did you foresee this? How did you look forward and see this 40 years, 35 years later?

Yeah.

And it was by looking back, right, at what were the factors that have always driven behavior in our species. Look back at the evidence to be able to predict how we as a species will behave in the future.

Yeah, love it. Okay, so social proof then.

Carry on.

Next is authority. If we're uncertain about something, one way to reduce our uncertainty is to see what the experts are saying and what they are doing. And if we have expertise, we have to be sure that the people who we are trying to move in our direction are properly informed of that before we ever try to influence them. Next principle is the principle of scarcity. Right. People want more of those things they can have less of. It's just the way we are. Right. So things that are rare, scarce, dwindling in availability, if we properly inform people of those characteristics, they get a little crazy.

I'll tell you what, that's the absolute truth. I've got some, I'm, I'm hyper vigilant. Of what's going on in my world, because I'm aware of all of these things. And so I always kind of observe the situations that I get into and I see how influences that work in my life too. And I'll share a couple of stories with you as we go on, but please continue. Yeah.

Then the next principle is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have already said or done, especially in our present, especially publicly. They don't want to say one thing, do another, or misspeak by saying one thing and then contradicting it the next time. They want to be congruent with what they have already made a commitment to. So asking people to take very small steps in our direction causes them to be much more likely to want to continue, continue to take steps, even outsized steps in our direction in the future. And then finally, there's a new principle.

I was going to ask you about. So now this is exciting that you got to the point these. That's masterwork of the six. And then in revisiting now, you've discovered a final. A new one.

Yes. And I'm calling it Unity.

I love that.

But it has to do really with membership in a particular group, a tribe, some in group that defines us. And if a communicator can arrange for us to see him or her as inside that group, one of us.

Yes.

All the influence barriers come down for that communicator. We say yes to those people, we cooperate with them, we believe them, we trust them. Those people who are of us become people who we want to favor and follow.

So the good quote, it's all about positive positivity. How would we use this in very medieval ways and do just like the opposite version? If you're like, if the joker was in this room. I'm totally kidding. What strategies did you guys use to build your following? I mean, you got over 14 million on Instagram right now. Is there even more?

It's even more. It's between 23 and 20. But on our biggest page has 14.6 million and we get about 800 million impressions a week. And we grow about 10 to 15,000 new followers every week as well. Yeah. So I leave it down to the fact that it was an original idea that is nearly eight years old now. We've grown organically. We. Wow. In the beginning, we used to communicate a lot of our audience feedback. Somebody was doing a. Was it listen or die?

Yeah.

Yeah. That was incredible because that's literally what we did. We used to talk to our audience all the time through, like, Google sheets or questions. You know, these things really helped us create better content. And then sharing, people would share. We would change our captions to tag friends or tag whatever, and people would tag more. And that's. That's what literally grew our platform as well. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really care about algorithms. You know, when people ask me those things, I'm just like, it doesn't impact me because of how much followers we have and all the formulas that we've created.

Well, you kind of. You kind of have your own because you created your own following, literally.

I was in New York one time for New Year's and it was the first of Jan, maybe one or two o' clock in the morning. I was going back to the hotel with my friends and I noticed that a lot of the barbershops and convenience stores are still open. And I walked into one and I was heavily drunk and I was like, guys, it's New Year's close up. Go home, enjoy yourself. And one woman, a vendor outside, she said to me, where are you from? And I said, london. And she goes, okay, do you work 9 to 5? And I was like, yeah. And at the time, I was blogging 9 to 5. And she said, over here in the states, we work 24 hours a day. You know, you could work nine to five, then five to three, then three to nine. And I went back home and I checked. I changed the way that we distributed content, so I was only distributing it when I was awake. And now it's 24 hours. And that literally changed the whole thing, you know. So overnight we were growing. While I was sleeping, I was making money. And these are.

The little thing, what you just said there.

Yeah, you didn't pick up on that.

These are all the things, like just talking to people, Honestly, a lot of the reasons why we've grown so fast, everything has been organic. Not just the idea, but just the communications and just the advice that we're getting. And we just. We literally eat, breathe this, you know, So I could. I couldn't recreate it. I couldn't. Not now. You know, I'm glad that we started when we did. So. Yeah, well.

And of course your main strategy is consistency.

It's. Well, okay. Speaking of algorithms, when I flew to Vegas two months ago to attend DEF con, one of the largest hacking conferences.

What'S really funny about Sam, if you actually knew all the weird shit that he does, it's like you just got back from WIM HOF training. I mean, for the Umpteenth time, I don't even know. But yeah, but anyway, let's go to defcon. I won't try to throw you off.

No, no, no. But just to comment on that, one of the interesting reactions I get was when I say, when I was in Japan last year training with a ninja in the woods, that always stops people.

Yeah, yeah.

Which actually did happen. But yeah. So I was sitting next to a British hacker who happened to be one of the speakers at DEFCON. And it's a 10 hour flight. So we had about five, six hours of talking about different things. And I mentioned Instagram and I told him what I did with the Instagram stories because that was my secret sauce. I really kind of tried to understand it psychologically. So he was listening, he was like, what exactly are you doing? I mentioned a couple of things. I have like 10 or 11 things that I do, but I mentioned like three of them. And he paused and he's like, you need to give a 10 minute. You need to give a talk at next year's defcon because you just hacked the Instagram algorithm. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, you found the vulnerabilities, you exploited the vulnerabilities, and now you're exposing your content to more people, and now they're following you because they like your content. But once you do that, the Instagram representatives at DEF CON are going to patch it up. So you need to make a choice. If you want to give the talk next year, you need to give away the secret sauce. I'm like, that's not going to happen. That's not going to happen. So that's regarding the Internet Instagram story. Yeah. Because we had this conversation.

You guys should watch his story. They're actually really good. I mean, they're very thoughtful and you'll learn a lot just by watching. They're very short. What's the average length?

It's. Well, it's 15 seconds, but I try. This could be.

No, but I mean, the longer ones that when you do the. I've watched, like, I don't know.

Are you talking about IGTV or Insta Stores?

Yeah, yeah.

IgTV is about 10 minutes. I break it down into five minute segments. I try to minimize the time that I utilize. I don't try to maximize it. I don't try to use all the time that Instagram gives me so I can build the trust with the followers that I'm not gonna take all their time, just the time I think they need. So with igtv, I just do five minutes. With insta stories, I try to trim it down to 10 seconds so that when I. So they trust me. So that when I actually give them a 15 second story, a video on the story, they would trust that it is worth watching the whole way through rather than just five seconds, which is what I do sometimes. So try to. Yeah, that's. That's one thing I do. The other thing is keeping them. If we're talking about strategy on the story, it's very important to be as unpredictable in a predictable way.

So.

Be unpredictable.

You need to stop that, right?

You need to be unpredictable in a predictable way. That's perfect. So people need to have a theme in your story. So my story is about. And this ties into something else. I think it's very important for you to create a very strong contrast between the posts and the story. The post is basically what you do. The story is who you are. Don't teach in the story. So the stories about my events, magic convention, the interviews that I have just for fun, I mean, a lot of the experts that I meet are becoming friends as well. Music, singing, travel, family, they get to see who I am, which helps them trust me and listen to more to what I teach in the post. So it's very important to create that contrast. If you can get people to say, I never knew he does that, I never knew that about him, that, that helps them kind of, that's a pleasant surprise for them that they keep looking forward to in the story. Okay, I want to mention something about time. You remember the time thing? The. Okay, I think it was January or February. We were talking about different things. And then you were like, you know when you hit something like 50,000 followers? And at that time I think I was still about 17. She said, I'll take you to a venue, I'll take you to a stadium so you can actually understand what 50,000 looks like. What 50,000 people look like. And it stuck me. We never really did that. We haven't done that before. But the idea stuck with me. And about two months ago, I attended a soccer match in London. And at that time I had. Three months ago, I think I had about 85, 86,000. And I remembered Megan and I remembered what she said. And it was about 20,000 people. I'm like, I have four times that amount following me. And it was quite intimidating, grounding, humbling. And then we had that conversation.

There's just more evidence that humans are.

Monkeys that drive cars in a way. So I came across an article in the New York Times talking about how people have a hard time associating or linking themselves or having a proper perspective of numbers. So they wanted to teach people, what's the difference between a million and a billion in that article? So they did. So they said, basically, okay, so let's link it to time. So what's okay, so 11. One million seconds versus a billion seconds. And one million seconds was about 12 days. A billion seconds was 32 years. And it was just mind blowing. Mind blowing how we don't. And I think the idea of linking that was really grounding to me. And it made me feel focus more on the content. But just to add one more thing to the content. If you want to start today, growing your page, what would you do? First of all, I'd look at the bio and I'd ask myself three questions. Because these are the three questions that need to be answered in the bio. Who you are, what you do, why should they follow you? These are the three things. Why would they follow you? What are you offering them? The other thing is promote the page, not the product. A lot of people focus on the product rather than the page, and the page becomes a bridge. And if the page becomes the bridge, no one's gonna follow you. And if no one's gonna follow you, no one's gonna share your content to their friends. No one's gonna constantly see your stories and connect with you and see. So you don't have that longevity with them because they're there just to click on that link with that icon pointing down so that they would just leave. Build your page by promoting the page, not the product, and you will have loyal customers over time. And if somebody doesn't buy, they will buy eventually. Because you're investing so much. You're making the page so educational, so entertaining for them that they keep coming back. They keep sharing your posts, they share your stories. They physically talk and they show their phone. They're like, check out this guy on my phone. So I think that would be very valuable. The other thing is theme and pattern. You need to have a pattern on your page. If they don't see a proper pattern, they won't feel safe. They need to see a pattern in the first nine photos. They need to see a pattern that you keep repeating. It has to be. It has to be. It has to be repetitive enough for them to predict and feel safe, but not repetitive in a way that bores them. So the content is what is different, but the pattern is always the same. Lastly, is the Theme, you gotta have a theme. Models, photos of them, selfies the whole time, a dog the whole time. But when you see somebody that has food, a dog, a selfie, a quote, a video, it's very uncomfortable. It's not predictable. It might be unpredictably predictable, but it makes them feel uneasy, uncomfortable, and confused as to, should I follow, should I, should I not follow this guy? Because it's not clear, there's no clarity in the page. And if I need to think so hard and I need to put a lot of work in deciding whether I want to follow someone or not, then the easy decision is to not follow. I'm just going to walk away. So in a nutshell, these are like a couple of different things that I would recommend.

Very good.

Do you have anything you could say that was better than what he just said? Because if you guys could, like, I know you're very dear friends, but if I could somehow create a little bit of animosity where you're trying to one up each other, it would. Yeah, it would make for much more.

He actually mentioned most of it. Yeah. Honestly, I was sitting there and I was thinking, can you not say anything else?

Right.

So, yeah, I would say. Next question.

How often do you like slapping him or like, shut up, Sam? Do you say that a lot?

No. I mean, we meet. We meet once once a week.

Sometimes once a week for about five, six hours.

Yeah. And I guess we just exchange. I mean, Sam's teaching me a lot about mind taming and I guess I'm teaching him a lot about social media. Sam's created his own formula and I've created years and years of formulas. So I'm just sitting back and it's just nice to see, see Sam with all of this intellect about social media. It's good.

Thank you.

There's one thing that I have to mention, which is for a very long time, my page was basically quotes because you got, okay, 40% of engaged videos are 40% higher. Engagement do videos, that's something you got to do videos. You got to do more videos. Quotes are more appealing to people than just anything else. Just a photo, writing captions, writing in the caption gives them more content. But for a very long time, my page was basically quote, video, quote, video. So it's like, yeah, now for six months you've been trying so hard, you've been begging me, like, please give people a break. Do a white background quote rather than just the photos. And I was resisting that for a long time because the page is about the quotes. That come out of my photos or the photos of the photographers that are now sending me to see what quote I can extract from their photos. So that was the whole thing. And I was resistant for a very long time.

Yeah, he was.

And, yeah, okay, you don't have to. So basically I decided to try that.

Because, you know, 100 years ago, people were trying to figure out how they could travel, you know, like a few miles. And now we're. You know, the big issue resisting is.

Should I add a white background on our color?

Yeah. I mean, AC didn't even exist. You know, I don't even think they invented toilet paper till the end of the 1800s. I don't know what the hell people did before that. Now we're like, over what?

Anyway, so when I started doing that, I realized the power of that because I'm giving people a break from color. And when I do, when I post a white, and then when I. When I go back to the color, I'm giving them a break from the white background. I could still.

It allows people to appreciate your photography even more because people, they're not going to. They don't care about your photography until you give them a reason why. So it's like a break from the content. And white background quotes, they're just easy to read. I'm obsessed with fonts, so I would say the best to use is like, Georgia or Times New Roman. These are really great fonts. Not too large, not too small, readable. Even if you come out of the picture itself and you're just scrolling through the feed, make it big enough so that you don't actually have to click into the picture. And like you said of the captions, when you click into the picture, you get to see the caption which emphasizes the quote, which allows people to understand how you got to that quote and how you think. So then that allows people to leave their comments, and then people engage with others and.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, I mean, anything else?

Well, I wanted to say something related to the white background and the color. You can always use video for your quote. So one thing I do, and this is there are two tips I can share about that. It actually made it easier for me because there are two ways I write quotes. One is from the photo, and the other is when I'm recording ideas, writing for the book. Whatever I'm doing, I'm basically writing any quote that comes out. I was like, that's a good quote. I have a list of quotes. So with the white background, I can't say I Can't ask myself, what does the white background inspire me to write about? It's just. It's like a brick. It doesn't make sense. So that day is a break for my mind to just take one quote from that list and place it there. So it gives me a break. The two tips I would recommend for the story. One would be screen recording. If nobody's using screen recording. Actually, when I showed it to Megan, she was like, I've never seen anybody use that. Screen recording. Screen record. This is something so easy. I connect with other influencers. I connect with. I screen record one of their stories that I like and I post it on my story, linking it to them and commenting on how much I like it. Because I like it. And suddenly I start connecting with them. But I get more content on my page. I also screen record. On your voice memo app, you can click and record and then play it back and screen record it. And you could chop it up through Cut Story to like four different videos and post those four videos on Instagram on the story. And people love that audio because it's personal, because it's something I actually recorded. It's not in a studio. Yeah, I think. I mean, what else? Yes, I post a quote. I'm just trying to put as much as I can.

No, no, this is great. Are you guys finding this valuable?

So I post. Whenever I post a quote on the story. Sorry, when I post a quote on my page, I promote it to my followers and to everyone else on the story mode as a video. So I turn the quote into a video with music in the background or I turn it into a video with music in the background and me fleshing out what that quote is for 15 seconds. And so people know that there's a post coming, that there's a post that actually was posted. So it's a promotion for the people now. Why? How can I. How can I promote other. Or how can I promote it to people that aren't following me on the story? That's a bigger topic. But use location stories, location tags and hashtags. Every single video. If you just watch my stories, every single one has location, but you can't see the location. I minimize it. And this is the only one I'll mention for now, just for time. Part of that, one of the hacks, basically, when. If I'm in London, I don't put the location. London, I put the location. Let's say I posted 10 videos and I'm in London, I'm not going to post. I'm not going to put the location, London in all those videos. I'm going to put Dubai, Mumbai, Saudi Arabia, New York, Los Angeles, US because those are the target. I just want to target more people but to avoid confusing my followers because they're going to be, they know I'm in London and they're going to see New York and Mumbai, they're going to be confused. I minimize it until it disappears, but it still counts to the people that aren't following me. Does that make sense? That's it.

Very cool.

Very cool. Well, so since you've posted a bazaar.

Quotes, you have a favorite quote Was that Nelson Mandela? One of Nelson Mandela's speeches about our deepest fear is that we are not inadequate. It's that we are powerful beyond measure.

Yeah, the Marianne Williamson.

Yeah, that's on my wall because I deal with a lot of like overthinking or self doubt. So you know, I think sometimes I think am I being too much of Meghan? Am I outshining people? No, I'm not. No, it's not my fault. I have all of this greatness, you know, and I have to express that and I encourage everybody else to do that as well.

Now that you're better than most of your friends, do you rub that in the first place?

Never. Never. Never. No. Actually a lot of my friends really encourage the journey and stuff, but they all have their own passion. So we're never conflicting on anything.

No, look, I know I said you're to going. So out of all the stuff you've done, what are a couple of stories of how that you're most, I guess you feel really great about or of how your, what you've done is helped people and influenced people.

What are some.

I mean you shared that one story, but what else?

I mean in regards to our clients, we work with authors, we work with motivational speakers, we work with really cool brands and create really great partnerships. So I mentioned Jay Shetty is one of our clients taking him from 100,000 to 1.4. We worked with a girl because our prices are quite steep depending. But we don't like to alienate people that can't afford that. It's not part of our ethics at all. So there was a girl called Najwa Zabim, she's a writer in Canada and she came to us with 200 followers. She was literally on 200 followers and a small budget. And we said to her, okay, we can post maybe once or twice a week of this budget and in the space of a year she's grown to 780,000 followers. And her life has completely changed. Completely. She's doing speaking events. She. I think she was on Forbes. I'm not sure. Lewis Howes, we've worked with Brendan Burchard. We work with VaynerMedia all the time. So we have really great clients. I guess when we go into. Of what we actually do, the business model, I could explain more.

Yeah, no, so, yeah. So what is. What is your business model? And then I'll open it up for some questions for people.

So.

Surface level. We have a motivational platform. We have 32 million followers. We create unique content that empowers and encourages and motivates our audience. That's the surface underneath. We have a agency, we have a merchandise company, and we are going into publishing. So with our agency, we work with really cool brands. We work with authors, writers, motivational speakers, anybody that has a story, that wants to sell, a product we work with. We have been able to hack the way we gain our audience's attention. So if you go onto my page, can you. You would never see an advert. You wouldn't even know. We basically really dislike the marketing model as it stands. So what we do instead is that we work with each client and we create really dope content. Dope means cool. We create really cool content that inspires, educates, and empowers our audience and then we provide them with the product that we're trying to sell.

No one would ever call Brenda, would they?

I don't know. They'll call Lewis, though.

I think they call him a dork, but I don't know if they call him.

Actually. Brendan Bashed was a really. And still is. We still work with him. He's a very interesting case. I mean, I won't speak too much about what he does, but he's based on business. And what we do with him is that we try to speak more about the emotion and what people can get and how they can improve themselves and their lives. And then we sell him his product. So we find that even though we're advertising to our clients, they're really just still taking as much as they would from any other content that we put up. So this results into high engagement, which then results into high sales. So all I do is test. Last year, I created a jewelry store. I posted a picture once a day and I made £300,000, like net profit. And, you know, we're doing the same with clothing. So, yeah, we. With motivational speakers, it's fairly simple. We just take clips of their work and Then we just post it on our page and they grow. You know, we. One of our best case studies was with a guy I was explaining today at lunch, his child is. He's like three or four years old and he has an obsession of the gym and fitness. So we took one of his videos and we posted it on our Instagram and he got like 4 to 5 million views and he grew a hundred thousand followers in a day, which was incredible. And that was literally because we were able to watch a child struggle to jump on a box. You know, he had many, many attempts and then when he finally jumped, everybody was excited. We received about 38,000 comments and he just. His following grew and it's grown massively since then. So, you know, depending on, of content, we like to create things that's actually going to teach or empower people or inspire them. And that's the difference between our agency and other people's. So our ads are very seamless. Nobody really knows. We don't, we wouldn't want to just say, here's a product, buy, buy, buy. You know, for instance, if I was working with somebody who's selling a cream, for example, right. What we would do is that not only would we take his cream and would create like a cool one or two minute video demonstrating what that cream does, we would sit down with him and we would talk about his journey, his parents, his story, his upbringing, how he got to hear what it is that he is passionate about, why he's creating this. And then we distribute that to our audience. They fall in love with him and then they'll fall in love with his product. And that's what we've learned. So that's with the agency, with the merchandise. We just test, we're testing all different products because we're trying to. When we, when we work with brands that are selling products, we don't just work with anybody. We always say to people, we're not money motivated. It's all based on our following. At the end of the day, the ethos is to give this world good energy. And I personally just still want to be able to provide a safe place for people that are going through things that they need encouragement for. So the last thing I'd want anyone to do is go into the good quote and feel like I'm forcing them to buy something. So if we're going to promote a product, are you giving parts of the profits to a cause? You know, what is the product even about? These are the things that we explain to our audience. So yeah, and in regards to publishing, we work with writers. I mean, we source all of our content from unknown writers. Major, major writers. We've been able to see writers go from zero to like 400,000. You know, it's been crazy. Over the last eight years, we've been responsible for the sales of over 250,000 ebooks and books in general. Over the last 17 months, we've worked with some really great authors and created some crazy campaigns. Our simplest campaign is literally taking a picture of the page of the book and highlighting the part that inspires us the most and posting that. When we post that, people just directly read the highlighted version. And each post allows us to be able to sell about 500 to 1,000 books each time. So it's really crazy. But then again, I can't sell a book about gardening. I could only sell books about things that empower people. That's it. As long as everything stays native to our content, then I can guarantee great sales.

That's fantastic. What about this idea? If you think this is good? If I was to take your quotes and I was to create the polka dot quote page and I just put polka dots, pictures of myself and polka dots, and I don't create anything except polka dots.

Yeah.

You think that would be a big hit?

I think I would block you.

What if you started the polka dot quote?

I think people would block me. Yeah.

That would be too damn dope. Yeah. Only dope sees dope. Remember that joke? Okay, so what's your perspective? And then this. I want to open up for questions. What's your perspective on the social influencer industry? I mean, there's a lot of people that are wanting to do that and be famous and stuff.

So what's your view?

Good and bad.

The great thing about it is that with an investment of two to four years online, you can change your life completely and you can have full control of your life. It's almost like being an independent artist. Once you create a platform and trust and love and you're showing the consistency of the content that you're providing and you're actually giving people a service as to how they feel better about themselves. Whether it is if you're encouraging them or you're making them laugh or you're educating them, if you're doing that, these people who are following you and investing their time into you, they will then purchase anything that you're selling. So that's incredible. And influencing, just don't have to look a certain way at all. I'm trying to encourage my mum to get on Instagram and actually give like a different perspective of advice, you know, because you don't have to be aesthetically pleasing as what you think people want you to look like. Just, just give your soul, just, you know, just give people a reason to feel better. So with social media influencers, you've got motivational speakers, you've got people that are taking pictures of them wearing clothing in their house and brands are just bombarding them with clothing. You've got kids, I mean, there's a child at the moment, I think he's 7, and he's got a YouTube channel of like 14 million followers. I can't remember his name. He's making like $200,000 a month, you know, so the social media, it's a.

Way underpaid 7 year old for that level of influence. I mean, come on.

But the fact that you can get closer to your customers for using the right people. Customers. So it's using the right people is incredible. It allows you, with the insights on Instagram and social media, you're able to really tap into who your audience are. So if you can find the right influencer to sell your product, you've won. You know, you have.

What's the dark side of social media? Because there are like a lot of reports of people that, on Facebook a lot. That increases depression and stuff like that.

Yeah, it does. I mean, because it depends. My easy answer to that is to just unfollow everybody that's not promoting wellness. My feed is fantastic. My feed is full of great stuff. I was having that conversation with the lady in the back there. We were talking yesterday about you don't have to follow people that make you feel bad about yourself, you know, but social media in itself, it can create a lot of anxiety, a lot of comparing, comparison, a lot of depression. Sometimes unfiltered content is able to seek through so people are able to see things that they're not meant to. You can see a lot of killing online. You can see a lot of, really a lot of dark content, you know, depending on where you're, where you're at.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, I remember reading an article a couple years years ago where there's like a couple hundred thousand people in the Philippines and different parts of the world that work for the big social media companies. Far more employees than are even employed by the actual main companies that their job is to keep about scrape about 80% of the worst of the worst stuff that's online. I mean the most horrendous thing and it was an interview with one person that had lasted like six months because it just destroys them. They're literally staring at the most horrendous things that humans can do all day long and before it ever. But a lot of it seems through, like you can find, you know, anything.

Yeah, you really can, you know. So my advice would be to just monitor who you're following and that's it. You know, spend as little time as you can on social media as well. And I know it's coming from myself, but go outside and while you can.

How many hours do you spend a day on it?

Nine hours a day.

Nine hours?

Yeah, nine hours a day. I try my best to not let it exceed 10, but the more I'm able to delegate. I think outsourcing is my hardest thing at the moment. Finding the right person to take over the tasks, which is really difficult. It's literally taking like.

Well, it's interesting here with you is, you know, now you doing that for other people so they don't have to put in all that time, but it's now you getting yourself to that position, owning the company and stuff.

Yeah, because my business partner is a full time lawyer and I do this full time. And so it's literally myself doing all of this stuff. And then we've got like some staff that work part time. So, you know, I would advise people to not spend too much time on social media because you can actually forget the real world. You know, I was having a conversation with some of the crew backstage and one of the guys was saying how he doesn't like going places where everyone's just like this, you know, and it's just, it's bad. We have a thing where if we go out for a meal with our friends, everyone has to put their phone down. And then, you know, whoever picks their phone up first has to pay the majority of the bill. Yeah, so, yeah, that's my.

According to the new thing that you've.

Done, you have added a seventh universal.

Principle, which is so appropriate for our theme of connection, for the theme of.

This Genius Network meeting.

What is that seven principle and how.

Does it apply to Genius Network members?

Okay, that's a good question. And it's a differentiator for the new edition as opposed to the other editions. I should just name the six principles and then go on to the seventh. But the principles are reciprocation. People say yes to those they owe. So if we go first with benefits, advantages, information, they give that back to us in terms of benefits and advantages in return. Liking. Nobody's surprised that we prefer to say yes to those we know and like. But there are two very simple things we can do to highlight and enhance the report that people feel with us. One is to point to genuine similarities. Another is to give genuine compliments. Third principle is social proof. It's a term that we coined back in 1984 in their first edition. Now people use the term all the time and it means that people want to follow the lead of their peers. What those around them, like them, have been doing or are doing reduces their uncertainty as to what they should do in that situation. If we can give them evidence like that, they will significantly more likely say yes to the request that accompanies that evidence. Fourth is authority. And you know, the people want to also want to reduce their uncertainty by following the lead of the experts in a situation. Again, if we can give them evidence that there are expert voices that are aligned with the proposal or the request that we are making of them, they will more likely say yes. Next principle is commitment and consistency. People want to be consistent with what they have already said or done. If we can show them how what we have to offer is congruent with the commitments that they've already made, especially in public, especially in front of us, we significantly, once more, increase the probabilities that they will say yes to that proposal. Scarcity is the sixth principle. The idea that people want more of the those things they can have less of. And if we can honestly show them that what we have is scarce, rare, dwindling in availability to them, gives them something unique that they, they can't get elsewhere, they pile in to the offers that we, we make under those circumstances. And now we come to the seventh principle. It's what I'm calling unity for a communicator. If as a communicator we can arrange for people to see us as sharing membership in a group, an important group that they use to define themselves, that they use to identify who they are. All influence barriers come down to us. They just come down because inside those we groups, people trust us more, they cooperate with us more, they believe us more. And for the bottom line, they say yes to us significantly more often. They comply with our requests, proposals and recommendations significantly more often. And this is different from similarity inside the liking principle, where if we see that we have similar tastes or preference differences or style orientations to other people, that causes us to like them more and that's, that's successful. This isn't similarity like that. This is similarity of membership in a category A group that we use to define ourselves. Let me give you an example from a study that was done on a college campus. Researchers took a young woman, college age student, young woman, put her on a very heavily traffic spot on campus and asked her to request donations for a legitimate charity from students who were passing by. And she got some results from that, she got some contributions, but she was able to to more than double contributions by adding one more sentence.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com.

And you can get a copy there.

To the request it was, I'm a student here too. I'm of you, I'm one of you. And all the barriers came down and these college students who don't have a lot of money were 250% more likely to reach into their wallets or purses and make a contribution. Let me give you a personal example of how this works. Where you can identify an existing category in which you exist with somebody else. And simply raising that commonality to consciousness makes all the difference. A while ago I had a project that I needed to complete by the end of the next day. I had to submit the the project. And as I was reading through the final draft of my report that was going to request that the project be approved and funded, I noticed there was a section in the report that wasn't really compelling. I didn't have the evidence I needed to make that case in a convincing way. But I knew I had a colleague, let's call him Tim, it's not his real name, who did have the data like that because he had done an experiment the year before that provided that evidence. And so I, I, I sent him an email. I said, tim, I'm going to call you in a few minutes, but I want to put you on alert that I have this need for some data that you have in your archives. I have this problem. I have this report due tomorrow, I need it today. Could you go into your archives? I'm going to ask you if you can go in, take the data out, get it into a form that I can use and send it across to me today. So I sent that and then waited a few minutes and I called him. Now I have to tell you, Tim was renowned in my psychology department for being A sour, irascible guy, A difficult guy. This is a difficult guy. So when I called him, he answered the phone. He said, hello, Bob. I know why you're calling, and the answer is no. You say you have deadlines. I have deadlines. You say you need to have this done by the end of the day. I have things that have to be done by the end of the day.

Day.

I can't just respond to every time you need something because you have poor time management skills. No. The answer is no. Before I read the research on unity, here's what I would have said to Tim. Come on, Tim, I really need this. I have this thing. It needs that. The data that you have, and it also is due tomorrow. He had already said no to that. Instead, here's what I said. Come on, Tim. We've been members of the same psychology department now for 12 years. I had the information that afternoon because I reminded him of a connection that we had. I know that the title of this meeting is connection. This was a we connection. This was a connection that we used to define who we were, identify ourselves. And those things have massive power to move people in our direction. So let's. So I know we'll probably come back to this in, in some of your questions about how you actually do this, to harness the power of. Of unity. But I'll leave it at. At that. At this point, this meeting's theme is on connection. We have a number of members, quite.

A few that are single and they're looking for partners.

Can you tell us the factor that online dating sites have found that makes.

A potential romantic partner most desirable both.

To men and women? Since this is now new to the.

Book, how about that one, Robert?

And I'm going to answer that in two ways. One is how do you obtain such a relationship? How do you get that relationship, a good one with somebody that you haven't met before? And then there's another set of research I want to talk about. How do you maintain the strength and even bolster the strength of that relationship? So the first one, what is the one thing that online dating sites report is most likely to produce a connection between two individuals? People think it's physical attractiveness. That's what they report that it would be. But if you look into the data, that's not the thing that is most correlated with choice. The thing that's most correlated with choice of a partner.

Yes.

Let's go out on date. Let's take this to the next communication stage. It's similarity. We're comfortable with People who are like us. And if you can establish not just like us, but of us, and build in both similarity that comes with, through liking and unity, a sense of deep shared identity, that's gold. Those are the things you should in any initial interaction, search for, sample around, ask questions for. And when you encounter those commonalities, bring them to the surface. There was a lovely study done on negotiators, professional negotiators. They were bargaining, and because of all of the problems associated with people being in the same room these days, they were negotiating by email. Email is the most bloodless communication channel we've ever developed. There's no humanity there. Researchers had these individuals bargained by email. And under those circumstances, because there was such a lack of common humanity in the exchange, in 30% of the cases, they were stymied. They walked away with no agreement, no mutual agreement. Both sides just lost nothing. They got nothing out of it. But if the researchers had another half of the negotiators send some information to one another before the negotiation began, information about themselves. What are your interests? What are your hobbies? Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What was your major? These kinds of things in school stymied. Negotiations went from 30% to 6%. Once those similarities are there, for example, people would learn in that information, oh, you're a runner, I'm a runner. You're an only child, I'm an only child. You have teenagers, I have teenagers. Those kinds. It was those connections, not the amount of humanizing information that was sent. It was the information that revealed parallels and commonalities that didn't exist. So those are the kinds of things that when we are beginning a relationship and seeking arenas in which we can move forward with it, similarities is the platform from which you should start. Now, let's say you've got that relationship and it may even be a long standing one, say quite a few months. But there's a problem. There's some sort of difficulty that you're having with your partner and you just can't seem to get over the top of it. It just keeps coming up. There was a study done in Texas. They took couples that had this issue, some issue that was preventing them from being entirely compatible. And they nominated one of the people and said, we want you to be the persuader to try to convince your partner to come into line with you on this. And then the researchers said, you do that here in this conference room, we're going to leave. Well, they didn't really leave. They had video cameras going they had tape recorders, they knew what was going on. And there were three kinds of persuaders who emerged from this. The worst in terms of effectiveness was the one that the researchers called the coercive, punishing persuader, who said, you know, you better do this for me or you'll be sorry and I'll have to do some things that, that you don't want, that you don't like. Not only was that a failure of moving the partner in the requested direction, it had a boomerang effect and it actually polarized the partner to be further away. So we certainly want to leave that out as a strategy. The second was what they call the researchers called the rational logical approach, where the persuader said, you know, if you'll just take a closer look at this situation, the, the problem that we're having, you'll see that my position is the more reasonable one. Yeah. Now, that didn't produce polarization, it produced laughter.

They just.

The partners.

Oh, yeah, sure, right. No change at all. But there was a minority, a small minority of persuaders who used the only strategy that worked. They simply said, you know, we've been together now for whatever the amount of months were. I really wish you'd do this for me. That's where I got my cue for talking to my colleague, Tim. You know, Tim, we've been in the same psychology department. I wish you for 12 years. I wish you would do this. That was essentially the same language that came out of this study of personal relationships, not business relationships, a personal relationship. They were the only ones who got change and notice something about it. They added no new facts to their position. They didn't clarify the logic of it, the reasonableness, the rationality, none of it. They just pointed to a unit that existed. They pointed to a category.

Couple.

We are a couple. This is what I was so impressed with in those people who did it. They didn't sit still for the psychological frame that the researchers gave them. Difference. We want you to talk about and focus on a difference between you. They said to themselves, yeah, there's this difference, but what characterizes us is something much larger. We are a couple. They raise the couple status to consciousness. That's all they needed to do. How many times have you had long standing relationships with colleagues at work, with clients, with customers? And there's a new issue to be negotiated, to be hammered out. We would be fools of the influence process if we didn't raise the existing relationship we relationship to consciousness before we began. Because remember what I said at the outset, inside that relationship People trust us more, they want to cooperate with us more, they believe us more, and they want to say yes to us more. Bring that to the surface. And now all of those things that are associated with the. We come into relief and dominate and drive the decision.

Robert, this is wonderful. Here's the problem. We live in a high saturation world. This is, I think, in the last two, two and a half years, even ever more so, a problem. Seth Godin predicted this 22, 23 years ago, right, that the Internet was going to change everything about how people consume, about how people learn, that we are so saturated with, I mean, just messages, but most of them, it's, you know, it's been estimated that we see between 30 and 90,000 marketing messages a day. Remember the first time I heard that, I thought, well, that's ridiculous. We don't see that. And then I realized, well, my, you know, my computer says Microsoft on it is focused right on my thing here. I've got burgers, bagels on my coffee. We probably do, if not tens of thousands, right? We're continually saturated by information and by choices. People are overwhelmed, they're skeptical and they're cynical. And here's the problem with that. The subconscious mind, which really is the number one player when it comes to getting people to buy things, it takes the path of least resistance. If given 2, 2 options, and 1 is easier or quicker or, you know, has less resistance, the unconscious mind will tend to pick that one. And this is where a lot of people's procrastination comes from, right? Is people set up situations where the easier thing to do is to not do what they have to do. And the unconscious mind will always influence you in that direction. The result is this. These days, people's default answer is just no. It is literally the easiest thing a person can say. And it really doesn't matter how good your intentions are or how good your product or your service is. The fact is that most people will probably reject you, especially if you're only trying to sell to the conscious mind, which is what most business owners and marketers do. So the solution is to learn how to ethically influence and persuade people you interact with. Really, I think all business is about influence and persuasion, but more importantly, it's that word, ethical, right? And so we do this by learning how to speak directly to the subconscious mind. This is something I've been fascinated with now for 24 years, and I've dedicated, really my whole life to this. Now, people used to think that in order to speak to the subconscious mind, you had to have a pendulum or a hypno disc, and you had to have a person with spooky eyes that would look at you and, you know, speak in a soft voice like, you know, what was the old Taco Bell dog, right? You're getting very hungry if you remember the Taco Bell hypnosis commercial. And the fact is that's not true. Right? Formal hypnosis or formal trance is something that is very useful when it comes to doing change work. If you need to quit smoking, lose weight, drop a bad habit, gain a good habit, let go of fears, any of that kind of stuff. Formal trance is great for that. But in 1951, Milton Erickson, who was one of the greatest psychiatrists on the face of the earth, he was also a hypnotist, he sort of made the announcement that you don't need formal trance to speak to somebody's subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is always listening as long as you know how to speak to it. Right? Now, usually when I bring this kind of stuff up, people go, wait a minute, hang on. You're talking about, like, you know, digging into people's minds. And isn't this all just manipulation? Aren't you. Aren't you trying to force people to do things against their will? Well, the fact is this. If we look up the definition of to manipulate, it's a transitive verb, and the definition essentially is to move, especially in a skillful manner. I think all language moves people. Sometimes it moves people elegantly, sometimes it moves people sloppily, sometimes it. It barely moves people. But really, when we communicate with people, we're trying to move them in one way or another. We're trying to move them from one state to another state, from one decision to another decision, from maybe where they are physically in one place to another place. Right. We're always trying to move people when we speak. And wouldn't it be great to do that in a skillful manner rather than what most people do, which is, you know, most people, they learn most of their language between 5 and 8 years old in terms of learning how to speak. Most of that you learn between like 5 and 8 years old. And then beyond that, the only thing we tend to do to add to our language is just to learn vocabulary, just to learn new words. Most people don't actually invest time in learning how to skillfully use language, which is a very powerful skill.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there is a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's freebook.com and you can get a copy there.

But here's the, the thing. Manipulation isn't the issue, right? What really is the issue is intent. What is a person's intent when using these words, right? When people talk about the word manipulation, usually what they're talking about is a win lose situation. So I think when it comes down to it, when it comes to influence and persuasion especially intention and integrity is a big part of it. And this is why the ethical part of influence and persuasion is so important. Can these techniques be used to create a win lose situation or what we might call a manipulation of other people? Of course they can. But all language can do that, right? You don't need, you don't even need skill to manipulate people. Just a black heart. There are people who manipulate all the time just with the English language, right. It doesn't even necessarily require skills. So here's the thing, the challenge with creating win lose situations and there are unfortunately there are people out there who use Neuro linguistic programming and win lose ways. Most of us know what their reputation is. Unfortunately they've kind of dirtied the reputation of Neuro linguistic programming where there is a lot of positive that you can take from that. And the challenge with creating when loose situations is you may get them to say yes but then they never trust you again. Now I've been in this business that I'm in right now transform destiny for 22 years. I have people who've been buying from me for nearly that long right from to me and I'm passionate about what I do. I didn't get into business to make money. I got in the business because I love what I do. I go down these rabbit holes and I'm compelled to do this. It's my purpose and then money's the result of it. But there are some people who are primarily money driven and they try to use these kinds of tactics and techniques but they backfire because that person will only ever buy from you once and will probably poison other people to not buy. It's not influence, it's just tricking people. So real influence creates relationships that thrive and flourishes as both parties, for both parties as they grow. And I would even stretch that to say that I think that real influence is leadership. If you truly. And Joe's a great example of this. Right? Joe went through his recovery and got well himself, and now he helps other people recover. Can you imagine if a person was still stuck in their addiction and charging other people to help them not be addicted? Right. It doesn't work well. And that's not to say that it can't work. And that's not to say that there aren't some people who are, you know, pretenders. We were talking about imposter syndrome. I always find it funny that the people who should feel imposter syndrome don't. And all the people who are really the good, genuine, kind people who really can help people are the ones that feel imposter syndrome. Right. I think that the true influence is about leadership. Right? So that means walking your talk, believing in what you sell. And that of course, goes even further into making you a more influential person. When you are fully and 100% congruent behind what you're selling, that makes other people want to follow. So really, in essence, ethical influence makes you an excellent communicator. So if you look at the mind, there's a lot of misconceptions about the conscious mind, subconscious mind. A lot of people say we only think with 10% of our mind. It's actually nowhere near that. If you look at the research, and a lot of this comes from knee high Csiks and Mahaliai. The conscious mind actually only makes up 0.006% of the mind. It's 6/1000 of 1% of the mind. The conscious mind is the other 99.994%. The conscious mind is logical and analytical, which is how a lot of people try to sell and market. Whereas the unconscious mind, or subconscious mind is emotional, organic. The conscious mind is in charge of accepting or rejecting what it encounters, whereas the subconscious mind is in charge of desire. The problem with trying to sell to the conscious mind is this conscious mind is like one of those funny guards that you see if you've ever been to England and you've been to Buckingham palace, you get the guards, by the way, don't ever touch them. They're badasses. They will kick your ass hard. Other than that, they won't look at you or, or move, but they have permission if you touch them, to really mess you up. The conscious mind is kind of like one of those guards. It's standing guard outside the gate and it's the gatekeeper, it's the guard that you see at the royal palace. Its job is to filter out the environment and to keep out suggestions. That's really the job of the conscious mind, right? The intention is supposed to be a good thing, but often it's not. Very often it's our conscious mind that prevents us from achieving what we want in our own lives, from taking that chance and falling in love, or from buying the thing that we know is going to help us from starting a business or whatever it is. A lot of times it's the conscious mind that gets in the way and rejects the wrong things. And so what we have to do, we have to learn how to bypass that gatekeeper. And if you do, you have access to the vast majority of the mind that's in charge of desire, which is where all buying decisions are made. And there are people who go, what if I'm B2B? What if I'm selling to corporations? Well, you're still selling to a human. Somebody said this at the last, the last genius network mastermind, which is, you know, it's still H2H. It doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C or anything else like that if you're selling to another human being. Desire is always part of the equation. Now it may not be the desire of oh, I want this fancy car, but it may be the desire of I want to make this good purchase decision so that I get praise from my boss and other people think that, you know, I'm a good worker. So there's always desire as part of the, part of the equation. So accessing and communicating with subconscious mind is the key to great marketing and sales. And really the number one thing is desire. It's the driving factor in all sales and marketing. So what I'm going to present to you now, I'm going to kind of go meta on influence. Instead of giving you language patterns, I want to teach you how to think about what you say so that you can choose the language patterns that you probably already know. And this will help you in your copywriting and face to face sales and relationships. My, my first, by the way, guinea pigs when it came to hypnosis and NLP were my kids, right? My son was 5, my daughter was 3. And, and you know, using this in my everyday life was how I really began to start to get good at it before I ever even introduced it into business. So we're going to talk about purchase here, right? The most important motivating factors in a purchase. But really it's any kind of influence. It could be a negotiation, it could be if you want somebody to do a favor for you or donate to a charity. It doesn't necessarily have to be A monetary purchase or even a monetary thing. But the most motivating factors, and I'm going to go from the least motivating to the most motivating are these. Number one, the least motivating factor that will get a person to buy from you is what will they have or get from buying your product or service. Now the unfortunate thing, this is what most small business owners talk about, what most marketers talk about. Buy my product and you'll get this. Buy my product and you'll have this. I coach a lot of coaches and you know, a lot of these coaches will put out a high ticket program. They want to charge 15 grand for it. And then people go, well, tell me about your program. And they go, well, you're going to get 52 calls and you're going to get 12 home study courses and you're going to get a login and a password to a private and you're going to get a community. And people talk about what they're going to get. And that is by far the least motivating factor. Now I'm not saying to leave that out because you know, we've all heard the phrase a buyer will buy on emotion and then what, back it up later by influence. We just, by logic. We, we do justify by logic. So you want to make sure that you have that information somewhere. You can't just sell people empty packages, not tell them what's in it. But it's certainly not the thing you want to lead with, right? It's the follow up information and usually even the information that people will go back to after they've made a purchase, when they want to justify it. But overall, this is something that's outside the person. It's an external thing. You know, very often we talk about features and benefits. This is the features, it's the things they're going to get or the things they're going to have. Now as we go through these, what I like to call the layers of the mind, we go deeper and deeper into the mind and each layer becomes more influential because not only does it become more influential on its own, but it also trickles to the other layers. So the second layer of influence is what will your product do? Or what will they do with the product? This is what we call the level of behavior. Right? What is it going to do for them? What will they do with it? How will they act when they have the product or service? Okay, again, this is something that commonly you'll find in copywriting. Now the interesting thing about it is this if you have, let's say you have a home study course or something like that or a book that you're selling or could be a product or service, whatever it does for them or whatever they do with it will allow them to have or get things. So this is what I'm talking about, the trickle down effect, right? Each layer we go deeper actually influences all of the other layers. So when we talk about what will it do for them now that starts to imply that they will have or get something from it because behaviors get us results. Now the next layer that we can get into, where we go deeper into the mind is now what will your product achieve for them or what will they achieve with it? What will it unlock for them? That was not possible before, right? So now we start getting into that level of possibilities. What are the possibilities for them once they buy your product or service? What, what are they going to achieve with it? Are they going to like, you know, for example, for us we sell neuro linguistic programming certification courses. So they will be able to achieve certification, they will get their diploma, they will achieve that. It will unlock for them the ability to see clients, right? Now once that's unlocked, guess what, they're going to see clients and then that will give them results. And so this is kind of that trickle, you could call it trickle back effect if you want to, right? And so, but the more important thing to talk about or the more important thing to highlight is what are they going to achieve? That's going to imply that they'll do something and then imply that they will get results.

All right?

Now at this point we're talking about people's, what I like to call their potential. At this point we're actually unlocking potential for people. And the thing is when it comes to behaviors and what things people have, people are mostly conscious of those things. When it comes to our potential, we're starting to get to that level where there's a lot of unconscious potential that people don't realize they have and that you can help them get, you can help them achieve with that kind of whatever it is that you give them. We're now starting to tap deeper and deeper and deeper into the unconscious mind. Now the next layer we're starting to get to the ninja stuff now, right? As we go deeper in the unconscious mind, we find that the next layer is what will your product or service help people think, think differently or help people know, right? What are the beliefs that they're going to walk away with? This is the kind of stuff that most people don't really get into when it comes to selling a product or service. You know, they're so consumed with, here's what you're going to get. But really the fact is most people, when they buy a product or service in some way, especially if you're in any kind of a personal development industry or education industry or masterminds or coaching or anything like that, what people really want and need is the new belief systems, right? The new beliefs that go along with what the transformation is that your product or service brings, right? I look at all of, we own three businesses and I look at all of our businesses as transformation. You know, where is that person when they come to you and where do they want to be at the end? There's a bridge there that most people don't know how to build that bridge on their own. That's why they're looking for you, that's why. And it doesn't matter what you sell, right? There's some thing that they want that they don't have in their life and you are the bridge to get there. Now, even if you're doing something like selling clothes, for example, why does a person buy a high end suit? Right? They don't buy a high end suit because it has a certain number of buttons and these many pockets and, you know, this many double breasts or whatever, right? Very often when a person puts on a suit, there's a transformation that's happening when they do that, right? About beliefs about themselves and how they present themselves when they go forward. So that's the next layer is what is your problem? What is your program or service or product going to have them thinking or knowing by the time that they're done consuming it? That's very, very powerful. Now as we go deeper into the unconscious mind, the next layer is this. How is your product or service going to make them feel? We're now at the level in nlp, we call this the level of values, right? Values. If I could give a really quick definition of values because I could go deep, I could speak for days on values. Values are deep unconscious desires that we have. They're drivers of our life. You know, most people, if you look at them in their life and you go, why did you do that? Most people will look back at you and go, I don't know for most of the stuff they do in their life. I love to ask people questions like why did you get into the career that you're in? And a lot of people are like, they don't have a reason why they're in the career. It's just I went to college and they made me pick a major and then I got this job. A lot of people just sort of coast through life and. But really, when it comes down to it, the things that drive us, especially if you have something you're passionate about. Like I have a friend, Ruben, who every morning at 4:00 clock in the morning, he's in the gym. One of the only few days that he missed in the gym. He was one of the very first people to get coronavirus in Orange County. He was the first recorded case, I think, in Orange County, California. And he was in the hospital for a week. They put him on a ventilator. It almost killed him. And he missed like 10 days in the gym and he was kicking himself. He was so upset with himself that he missed his days in the gym. It was almost more important than him, you know, even having coronavirus, right? Because he has deep values, a value system around working out and around his body. He feels like his body's a temple. Whereas other people that don't have that value in them, you know, they can try and get themselves to, you know, to do the gym or to have the body that they want, but without that deeper inner programming, they don't get there. Right? And this is one of the reasons why so many people will make goals and then not achieve them because, you know, their values are out of alignment. One of the most important things, and this is something that we do when we do our avatar work, is discovering what the values are of your ideal client, right? What are the things that drive them now? Values. They tend to be feely words. They tend to be one word. Whereas beliefs can be sentences, whole sentences and even whole books can be written about beliefs. Values are a little simpler. They tend to be one word. If you ask a person what's important to you about your career, they're going to give you words like reward, passion, integrity, drive, right? They have these kind of one word, we call them semantically packed words in NLP because even though they're one word, there's feeling behind them. There's a lot of emotion behind these words. And one of the best things you can do is find out what those words are for your client. Easiest way to do that, by the way, is to sit down with a bunch of your clients and ask them the question, what's important to you about blank? Okay? And whatever the blank is, is what you provide as a product or service and program. What's important to you about your career? What's important to you about your health, what's important to you about your relationships, right? And then ask them that question over and over and over again. What'll happen is they'll run out. They'll. They'll get to a point where they go, that's all I can think of. Maybe they give you five or six. They go, that's it. That's all I can think of. But they're never really empty yet. There's. There's just more in the unconscious mind they have to dig up again. So just keep asking what's important to you about blank. What else, what else, what else? And then a few more will come out. And then they'll go, I think that's it. Their mind will go blank again. And then a few more will come out. By the time you've run out three times, you've really got their collection of usually the top 10 or 12 values of things that are important to them. Then what I like to do is I like to go, which one is most important of all these ones that you see here, which one's the most important? Then of all the rest of them, which one's the second most of all? The most rest and what are the third most? And get them in order. And what you'll find is that your ideal client avatar will have a collection of values that are. They'll obviously not all have the same values. Every person is different and unique in their own way. But there will be clusters of those values that are common to all of your avatar. Those words are the ones that are going to drive people, right? Those are the ones that are going to get people to that point of desire, whereas what they have is just like, oh, that's interesting information, right? Or what they're going to do with it. We really want to move people to that point of desire. So a lot of times, like if I'm working with small business owners, a lot of times one, like one of the top desires or one of the top values that small business owners have is freedom. So it's funny that, like, I can sell a copywriting course which is all about writing, you know, creative words, but what I'm really talking to people about is the freedom that they want. Because the fact that they can't get their message across to people and get them to say yes is robbing them of their freedom, right? So find out what those words are. This takes research. This isn't one of those things where you just snap your finger, you know instantly what to say. That's why I said I'm going meta today. I'm not going to give you. I'm not going to give you the pickup lines, but I want to give you a way of thinking about how you use your language and the different layers of language and which ones are more powerful. How a person is going to feel by using your product or service or program is far more motivating to them versus what they're going to get or what they're going to do right now, as powerful as that is, and that alone will light your copy on fire and your negotiations and everything else will just absolutely amplify it. But it's not the deepest we can go. There's one more layer deep that we can go. It is the most powerful function of the unconscious mind and it is this. It's identity. Who will they be or who will they become by using your product or service? This is the deepest functioning unconscious mind. Joseph Campbell famously said that I am are the most powerful words in the universe for what you put after them. Shape your destiny. This is really the core. And the thing is, it's one of those things that is so unconscious to most people, sometimes you have to dig this out of people, right? And this is why I say you're not just going to snap your fingers, know what to say. You've got to do your research on your avatar and your ideal clients. But who do they desire to become? Or the other question is, who do they desire to not be anymore? Right? Now, all of these layers that I've given you here, right, which is the have, the do, the unlocking or the achieving the thinking or believing the values and emotions and the be and become. One of the important things to point out is that every motivation that a person has can come from two different directions. Every motivation a person can have can come from two directions, right? There's one direction is what we call toward motivation. This is where a person decides what it is that they want in their life. Let's say this person says, you know what, I want to be fit and I want to be healthy person. Wherever they are on the spectrum, they decide what they want, that they set their sights on it, and they move in that direction. That's called toward motivation because the person moves towards what they want. The second kind of motivation is away motivation. This is where a person gets sick of or decides that they don't want something. I don't want to be fat anymore. I don't want to be sick. And they move away from that motivation. Now, interestingly enough, notice that Both motivations move in the same direction, right? This is something that I think is commonly misunderstood about toward and away motivation is that they both move in the same direction. Now when it comes to coaching and motivation, away motivation tends to have very unstable results. It tends to get very yo yo. You know, most diets don't fail because of the biology and the, and the chemistry of the diet. Most diets fail because of the motivation, because instead of wanting to be healthy, people want to not be fat. And that's where the yo yo diet comes from. It has nothing to do with the diet itself.

Right.

But when it comes to influence, what we have to realize is that most people need both of these right? Now each person has a personality type, we call it motivation, direction and nlp, where as a person they will tend to be more motivated toward what they want or more motivated away from what they don't want. In my estimation, about 85% of people in the world are away motivated. And this is, you know, if you've ever been through personal development. I've been working on myself since I was 12. I've been heavily working on myself for the last 24 years, since I learned hypnosis and NLP. I had a really interesting thing happen for me where as a copywriter, my copy stopped converting. I would write copy for people and be like, why isn't anybody buying this? And I realized one day because I had gotten rid of all my stuff, I released all my negative emotions from the past with nlp. I released all my limiting beliefs. I mean, there's still ones that pop up from time to time, but most of them I'm always a work in progress. But I had cleaned up most of the negative stuff that had happened in my past. And therefore I became a very toward motivated person. And so I was writing copy that was all rainbows, butterflies and unicorns and nobody would buy anything. And one of the things I realized was that I was missing the away motivation. Now an interesting thing happens is that we do get a lot of people, especially in the spiritual space and the coaching space. They go, I don't like to use deadlines, I don't like to use away motivation. It just doesn't seem, seems icky, you know, but the fact is, you know, if I was going to go to China and do a deal in China, I would do my damnedest to learn some Chinese before I go there, right? If I'm going to speak to people in another country, I am going to do my best to communicate with them. I'm not Going to expect them to communicate with me. The same thing is true when it comes to motivation direction. Right. It doesn't matter if you're a toward motivated person. It doesn't matter if you don't like deadlines and talking negative if that is what is going to get people to buy. Because that's the language they speak. We have to speak. It's right now the most powerful form of influence actually has both. We call it a propulsion system where you combine away motivation usually first and then give them some hope and then give them toward motivation at the end. Right. That's usually when I write my copy. I start with the doom and gloom, agitate the problem at the top and then there's hope and then we start moving in a toward direction. But we definitely have to have that away motivation in there for 85% of people. So all of these layers, and I'll leave this up here for a second, you can do a screenshot. These are all the layers that I just gave you. All of these can be used in either a toward or an away motivation. So with results, what are they going to have when they get. You could also talk about what they're not going to have anymore, what they're not going to get anymore. With behaviors, what are they going to do? How are they going to act? You could also say what they're not going to do anymore, how they're not going to act.

Right.

Capabilities, what is it going to achieve? Unlock, but also what's it going to prevent them from doing? With beliefs, it's the positive beliefs they could accept, but also the negative beliefs they're going to let go of.

Of.

With emotions, what emotions will they feel? But also what emotions will you prevent them from feeling again? And then with identity, who. Who are they going to become? But also who are they leaving behind? Right. By using your product or service, it's, you know, especially in personal development. The whole reason I got into hypnosis and nlp, I didn't want to do this as a business. I was a computer programmer. I got into it because I was sick of who I was. I literally didn't love myself. I didn't like myself. I just wanted to become the person I wanted to be so that I didn't hate myself anymore. You know, that that was. That was my first inkling. I always tell people I was my first client. You know, when I got into this business and then when I worked on myself and I saw the results, I just became infected with helping other people get those same results as well, okay.

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