How To Get Your Clients To Say Yes Feat. Michael Stevenson

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.

Genius Network member Michael Stevenson has been involved in Internet marketing since 1995 and he's begun. He began fusing NLP into copywriting and into marketing in 1998. And he is a recognized expert in the subconscious mind who's been featured on TV and radio and print. He's the best selling author of many books, including his newest release called Influence to Profit, which is a book that teaches people how to close more sales, how to become more persuasive and influence others with integrity. And Michael was recently featured on CBS News. He has the honorable distinction of being featured twice in Dan Kennedy's prestigious Elite Gold Crown publication. And he's looking forward to teaching all of us in Genius Network some really effective ethical, ethical uses of language in business and in marketing to help us connect more with people, get more yeses, and to put more cash in your pocket. So, Michael, say hello. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for the great introduction and it's really a pleasure to be here. I want to thank everybody on the team for inviting me and thinking of me for this. I've spoken a lot of places in the last 20 something years and the best joy that I ever get is really speaking in front of peers and friends. And it's really an honor to be able to speak in front of this group. So thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So what I'm going to talk about today is how to use ethical influence and persuasion to get more people to say yes. And you know, usually when I talk about this kind of stuff, most people are focused on marketing. I teach a lot of people about copywriting and marketing and sales, face to face sales and things like that. But one of the things I want you to know is this is not just about business, which I think is really fitting for Genius Network. These are the kinds of things that you can use in everyday life. And you know, a lot of times when I speak, I get people that you Know, they want to know the magic words. I'm an NLP guy, right? It's all about linguistics. They're like, tell me the right sentence to say for this and, you know, this and that. Um, it kind of reminds me of, you know, back when Evan Pagan used to do the. The double your dating thing. You know, I was an affiliate for his probably 20 years ago, and he would guy, he would get guys all the time going, tell me the pickup lines. What do I say to girls? They make them like me. And he would say, I'm not going to teach you pickup lines. I'm going to teach you how to be a better man. Then you'll naturally be more, more attractive. And that's kind of the. The, you know, I thought about all the things that I could teach in, you know, 25, 30 minutes today. And that's kind of the tack that I'm going to take, is I'm going to go a bit meta on influence and persuasion, and you'll be able to apply this to anything that you do. It's not necessarily about the individual language patterns. There are a lot of them. You can learn language patterns. This is more going to be about how to think about how you speak to people in a way that will get them to say yes in every area of life, every context of life. So I'm kind of new to Genius Network. You know, my wife Kayla and I, we joined in January. Don't know a lot of people yet, so I'll just spend a second kind of of telling you where I came from and how I got here. This is where it all started for me. Back in 1995, I started a company called Liquid Mirror Software. I was what we affectionately called back in the day, a shareware author. Try before you buy software. And I actually got into business for a really weird reason. I was 20 years old. I was fresh off the streets being homeless, and my girlfriend, who I'd only been dating for a few weeks, got pregnant. And I had no ambition in my life. I didn't have a high school degree. I didn't have really any skills other than the fact that I was a hobbyist programmer. And I knew I needed a career. I knew I needed to take care of this, you know, new human being that was coming into the world who's about to turn 30, which is crazy to me. And, you know, I was a security guard making $6 an hour, which was a lot of money for me. I mean, I think minimum wage at the time was 450, so $6 an hour is like, wow. I was making it and I knew I needed to do something and really programming was the only skill that I had. And this new thing had been coming out called Internet programming. You didn't need a degree to get into it, but everywhere I went, I would give them my resume and they'd say, well, you don't have experience. Come back when you have experience. Nobody would hire me. And after probably 20 or 30 interviews, I was finally like, how am I going to get experience if nobody hires me? And I came up with this idea, what if I came up with my own software company and I published my own software title and then put that on the resume. Then, then I've got experience and people will have to hire me. And I had this little program that I had written, it was called Send to Anywhere. And it was a file utility, would help you copy and move files around in Windows. And I published that out there and really it was the only purpose was to get it on the resume. And it took off and it did really well and it did help me get my first job. And then that was my side gig for a number of years. And about a year later I started getting featured in newspapers, magazines, and I started realizing I should really figure out how to market this thing. Maybe I don't have to have a day job. And so that's where I used to get these 3M floppy disks at CompUSA and duplicate them and put the stickers on them. That's where I started. That was my first website back in 1995. That was my earthlink.net free 10 page website that I had there. It was beautiful. I ended up with a better one. Later started one of the very first shareware networks. If you ever downloaded shareware software in the late 90s and 2000s, you probably downloaded from one of my sites called the Shareware Junction Network. Had one of the very first file hosting companies out there. SW Mir years ago. In 1998, everything changed. I was at the county fair in Orange County, California, and my friends and I would go there every year primarily to see the stage hypnotist, a guy named Mark Usick. And I think he's one of the best stage hypnotists on the planet. I was sitting there in the audience and enjoying the show like I did every year. I mean, we would go pretty much just to see him. But I didn't believe in hypnosis. I thought it was all, you know, a put on. I thought the people on stage were drunk or, or idiots are just Paid to be on stage or something like that. But I love the show. But at the end of the show, he was selling these tapes, and he's going, step right up, step right up. Get your tapes. Three for $20. And all I wanted. I didn't believe in hypnosis. I was super skeptical, very logical guy. And, you know, I believed the kind of hypnosis that they put out in Hollywood and cartoon, you know, cartoons, where people are sort of controlling others and their eyes, you know, spin and stuff like that. But I had 20 bucks in my pocket, and I just really wanted to hear what was on these cassette tapes. So I walked up and I said, you know, I'll take it. Slap down my $20 bill. He goes, which ones do you want? I looked down in the case, and the first one that jumped out at me was, quit smoking. At that time, 1998, I was 25 years old. I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. And I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes. From the time that I graduated high school and really got some freedom, you know, being out of the house a lot, I really just started smoking more and more and more. By the time I was 21, I was smoking three packs a day. There was a time where I actually rolled cigarettes, and I would smoke filterless cigarettes just to get even more of a rush out of it. And I tried everything I could to quit smoking. Nothing worked. And so I bought this silly little tape about three weeks later at home. I popped it in and listened to it. The curiosity finally got to me, and everything changed. I woke up the next morning and never touched another cigarette again. I barely had a thought of a cigarette after that night that I literally fell asleep listening to the tape. And it was so effortless for me to quit smoking that it actually took me three days before I realized that something had changed. And it dawned on me that I hadn't had a cigarette in 72 hours. And. And that was the moment when I went down a rabbit hole, that I'm still going down rabbit holes. I fell in love with the subconscious mind and how it works. I started reading everything that I could find on hypnosis. That led me to neuro, linguist, social psychology. And in late 1998, it really began to fuse into my marketing. And I began to play around with these ideas of things like conversational hypnosis and embedded commands and anchoring and using these things in my marketing to such an extent that by 1999, 2000, I was actually writing copy for other people. I'd never been Trained as a copywriter, I'd read some books. Of course the Joe Sugarman book was the one that really got me started. If anybody's ever read that, if you've never read that, it's definitely one of the top books to read on copywriting. The slippery slide principle, right. And you know, really helping other people as well. And it was great because you know, working with other people I could really see the objective change in their results just by adding a few things. Sometimes I wouldn't even rewrite their copy for them. I would just change a few things or put a little embedded command in that, you know, was almost already there. And I just became fascinated with this. So my in 2000 I became certified as a hypnotherapist 2001 at NLP I ran a practice for many years. I'm still a today. Till today we run a coaching practice. But my real love, like my passion is fusing together, you know, NLP and hypnosis and psychology with marketing because I really think it's all the same thing. And I think a lot of times people think that marketing is about creative writing whereas in my mind it's all about hypnosis, it's all about suggestion, it's all about really getting to the subconscious mind. So today I'm the owner of Transform Destiny. We're the top NLP training company in North America. And and also with my wife I co own Transform Destiny. And also with my wife I co own Influence to Profit. And that's where we teach heart centered business owners ethical influence and persuasion. I think the most important word of that is ethical because I find that most people who are heart centered business owners, they have something that's going to transform the world in one way or another or at least transform a life, help a person out and they just don't know how to get that message across. And that's what I'd love to do is to help people, number one, craft that message and then number two amplify it, teach them how to get that out there. So there's my shock and awe slide. You all know you're supposed to have one of those, right? All right, so let's talk about this. And my, my goal today is I'm going to talk for, you know, probably about 20, 25 minutes. I'm going to give you some really good stuff and then I'll open it up for questions. I know Gina said, you know, we should probably have a question and answer segment. If you don't have questions or if you want Me to go deeper, I've got more content, and I'll, I'll go, you know, as long as you want me to, up until the hour. So 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 hear 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, my thing here. I've got Bruggers, 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 two options and one is easier or quicker or has less resistance, the unconscious mind will tend to pick that one. And this is where a lot of people's procrastination comes from, 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 know. 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. 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, 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.

But here's 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 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. The challenge with creating winless 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 to me. And I'm passionate about what I do. I didn't get into business to make money. I got into 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 influen creates relationships that thrive and flourish 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. And 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. 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 Mihaly, Csiks and Mahali, 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 conscious, 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.

Right?

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 humans. 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 your relationships. My, my first, by the way, guinea pigs when it came to hypnosis and NLP were my kids, right? My son was five, my daughter was three. 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 buy. 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 the 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 and 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. Okay? 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 you know, 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, right? So 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 reason why they're in the career. 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, 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 will 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. No, 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 of them, 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. 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, you know, 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, 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, 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 an 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. Well, 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. That's 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. And neg 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 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 I 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. 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. So grab a screenshot of that if you want those Are all the layers and so good.

Thank you for all this. This is awesome.

I'm glad. So I'm going to show you a little clip here. I don't know who watches Survivor. If you're not watching Survivor, you're missing out. I know a lot of people go, oh, I don't watch reality tv. But Survivor is. If you want to see social dynamics and psychology and motivation, how people are motivated, what people do. Communication, Bad communication, good communication. I mean, it is all out on display in Survivor. These people are put out on an island with almost no resources whatsoever for usually I think it's 40 days and you really kind of take away all the pretty polish and the masks that people put on in society and you get to see raw psychology. It's pretty amazing. This is a clip from several years ago. About 11 years ago, there was an all star game. Two people in the game. One guy was named Coach, another guy was named Cochran. Coach is this sort of like black belt, thinks he's a really cool dude. Cochran is a nerd. He said himself he's a nerd. He's a law school graduate and just like never been with girls, never had a lot of friends and this and that. He talks about that a lot on the show. I'm not trying to put him down. Well, there came a point in Survivor where there's always two teams that start out, the two teams coming to emerge and now they're one team and they all start scheming on who they're going to vote out. Well, a lot of times the two teams will come together like six and six. It's even and you know you're probably going to get a tie. There's all kinds of ramifications to having a tie in Survivor so they need to get somebody to swing. They call it the swing vote in Survivor. They're always looking for angles, cracks in the other team. Who can we get to swing over? So Coach decides that Cochrane's the guy. All the other people on Cochrane's team, they're all like these macho men and these. These pretty girls. Cochrane kind of resents them all because they're all the people who picked on him in high school, metaphorically. And so coach kind of pulls him aside and says, I identify with Cochran.

On so many levels. I look at Cochran, I see somebody that hasn't been blessed with the best physique. I see somebody that's been blessed with an incredible mind. But man, the poor kid, imagine what his life has been like. Imagine what his self esteem is like nobody's given him self confidence in his life outside of his family. Anything that I can do to give him courage and to make him feel included and loved and valued and respected, I will do.

So Coach pulls him aside and he says, I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you a story about the people here on the island. And he starts telling the story of these Greek gods and he starts assigning all the people in the tribes different, these different gods. You know, this person is the God of Narcissus. This person is so self absorbed they can't tell what's going on in the world. This, this woman over here is, I think it was Siren. You know, she's, she thinks she can get through the game on her sex appeal and, and he's going, and a lot of these are not very flattering things he's saying about these other people. Finally gets down to where he's named everybody on the two teams except for himself and Cochrane. And there's, there's a point where he starts telling him goes, you know, there's only two people left that don't have a name. And rather than trying to convince Cochrane to swing over for logical reasons, hey, come over with us, we'll protect you. This, that, what he did is he started speaking to identity. And so listen, watch Cochrane light up when he says this. Next thing.

You are the most powerful man in the game.

Okay, okay.

Really? Who is the most powerful God?

Who's this?

Who is the strongest, strongest man on earth? They call this Hercules.

Yep, I'm Hercules. And I'll tell you why I am Hercules. Watch him light up when he says that. Here's the, here's the guy that's been picked on his whole life. He's been picked on here on the island. He's the outcast. He's probably going to get voted off next. He knows it and suddenly he's told at the identity level, you're the most powerful person here on the island. You're Hercules. The reason he's Hercules, by the way, is because he wields all the power in the game. He can choose to cast his vote with the other team and then go to the end. And you know, this is just one of those beautiful displays, I think, of somebody using identity. Now the most important, potent form of identity is what we call an impression of increase in status amongst peers. Right. This is the key thing. Wallace D. Wattles, if you read the book the Science of Getting Rich, it's a tiny book, most people have never read it. There's one chapter in there. It is seriously the key to wealth. It's called the impression of increase in status. Right. An impression of increase says this. People will pay inordinate amounts of money for an impression of increase in status amongst their peers. Whatever your product or service or program is on the identity level, if you can give them that increase in status, there's a high need for people to be seen as likable, to be seen as more desirable, and to be admired by other people. Right.

I'll be Mike today. Michael, can you give an example of the propulsion system that you mentioned, going from doom to gloom to a toward kind of scenario?

Absolutely. Imagine you're talking to your dentist. Right. There are three kinds of dentists. One dentist will say, hey, make sure you schedule your appointment so we could keep your teeth healthy and nice and shiny. Now, is that person likely to come to be compelled to come back in six months? Maybe, maybe not. Then you get the dentist number two. Hey, if you don't make your appointment, then you could get cavities. They could infect your teeth and we'll have to do root canal. So you better make sure you come back in six months. Right? Now that is an away motivation. And while there are some people who will be motivated by that, a lot of people will just be agitated by that. Right. It's going to bring up a negative emotion and then they're going to sit in that negative emotion. They won't necessarily be motivated to move forward. So the propulsion system, the third dentist would be the dentist that says something like this. Now, it's really important that you get in here in the next six months so that your teeth don't end up with cavities. We don't want to have to do a root canal and we want to keep those teeth shiny and pretty for everyone else to see. Notice how now we're combining both the away motivation and the toward motivation. Does that make sense?

It does, yeah. While you were talking through it, kind of the image of like a SpaceX shuttle was going off, where it's kind of like a shit show in the beginning and then it's smooth sailing. Yeah. So it's like you start, you start out your copy with something kind of detrimental, shaky, and then you get through that. And now we're flying.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yep. You want to give something for them to move away from, but then you don't want them to sit in that negative space.

Right.

Feeling those negative emotions. So once they start moving away, then we give them the toward in the Direction to keep going.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

You're welcome.

The way that I. This is an improved version of it is my life changed the day I realized a man would die for a blue ribbon. And so, you know, Michael, this was actually great. I've got, you know, my little remarkable here, and I've got just several pages of notes on everything, which is awesome. But yeah, I mean, you know what I thought was interesting when you, at the very beginning you talked about, you know, the definition of the word manipulate to move, especially in a skillful man. And I used to say we're either manipulating people into a direction that they want to go and is good for them or into a direction that they do want to go and isn't good for them or that they want to, you know, don't want to go and isn't good for them. And I quit using the term manipulation just because of the negative connotations that have been attached to it. But the fact of the matter is we're doing that all day long, especially to ourselves. Right. And so when you, you know, so if you're doing that to yourself and if you're, if you're putting yourself in crappy situation, I think you're more prone to create win lose situations for other people. Because if someone's life lives within win lose for themselves, they certainly, their identity becomes. Well, you know, I don't give a crap about myself. Why should I give a crap about other people? Right. Yeah. I mean, I thought what you shared here was really, really valuable and very helpful.

Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting because most people will only do things that are within their values framework. But there, there are situations where people get into. Put into what we call threshold values. And we saw that in coronavirus. We saw a lot of people go against what would be their normal values because they were scared shitless in a time where they thought their business was going to collapse and people would do things that are not. You know, like you said, in a crappy situation, people will do things that are seemingly out of character and very often regret it later, but in the moment they feel justified.

The hypnosis tape where you quit smoking, have you gone, like, what was it that happened as a result of that that you think was the big. Did your identity change? Did like, what was it that caused you to not have that craving?

I will say the tape itself was a very simple hypnosis. Matter of fact, Mark Usik, I'm great friends with him these days, and he always laughs about those tapes because they said he was, he said that they were awful. He went back and re recorded them several times over. It was very basic suggestion. Yeah, that was it.

You just needed. Your brain was able to take it on and. Yeah, okay.

And I was ready. I mean, the thing is, there's no form of hypnosis can make, that can make somebody quit if they don't want to quit. Hypnosis does not control other people. It just helps you achieve what you want to achieve. If I didn't have a desire to quit, I couldn't have, no matter how deep the hypnosis was. But I was so ready to quit and I had tried so many things and I was so frustrated. It was literally I was like, this is the last thing I can try.

So, Patti, so a couple of things as you were speaking that I thought was really helpful to hear is basically it all comes back to we can't pitch anybody to buy anything. Right? People have to want something.

Yes. Right.

We can't sell you anything.

The thing is not the thing.

Right.

And what you said earlier is, you know, for a long time you would hear people, people talking about motivating people motivating. And really what we need to do is to be able to help people be inspired. Right. It comes from within as opposed. Because motivation only lasts for as long as Joe said. But Joe's not listening now because he's not talking, so. Oh, there he is.

I'm listening.

What Joe said earlier about when he realized people would buy that blue ticket or whatever it was, right. That external motivation will only last for so long because emotions only last for so long. But when you're inspiring somebody, then. That's right.

And that's the thing is you actually cannot create motivation for somebody else. All you can do is stimulate the motivation that's already inside of them. And that's what we're doing with our, with our copy is we're researching our people enough to know how to stimulate that motivation inside of them, which for most people is buried because most people are so distracted in their life, they don't think about what motivates them anymore. Right. And so part of it for us is just figuring out how to get them to focus on the thing that they really already wanted in the first place.

Right. So the push pull of earlier about the SpaceX was really interesting because, you know, you want to say to somebody this sort of kind of doesn't feel great, Right? You want to get them a little uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable. Yes, but not too much. So where they see where they dwell in it and they get lost in it, the downward spiral. And then you move right to the motivation. We want to make sure you keep your teeth clean. Right.

And that's where the call to action goes.

Right.

Great. Thank you.

You're welcome.

This would have been really helpful to me a long time ago when I. The work that I do in exit planning, I did for years inside of my practice of law. And of course it was hugely constraining because it limited the things I could do and the way I could do them. And so I had a really hard time when I flipped it over to a consulting company. And Joe used to make fun of me about my marketing because I was.

So horrible about articulating everything.

But it took me a long time to be able to go through these pieces and then apply that if I had been starting. And this would be awesome stuff for somebody that is trying to figure out how to do what they want to do in a way that makes them appealing to the people they want to do it for.

I guess I'll put it that way.

So this would be great, especially in the professions and the service side business, as a really great tool to work with when you're doing your foundational work about what you want to do and how you want to do it and.

Who you want to do it for.

So, yeah, I really like it. It's funny, there is innately in this, there's some stuff that you just kind of. It comes to you under different circumstances. Like I wrote when I first became a broker and I went and opened my own business after a couple years of working with one of the large wirehouses, I sat down and I went to a little town. I moved to it, and I sat down and wrote 10 letters. And every single one of the letters I wrote to the people became clients. And many of them are still clients than mine 35 years later. And people always ask me, did you keep the letter? I was too young and too stupid to know that it was actually valuable.

Oh, man. Roy Williams wrote several books based on the letters he sent to his clients called the wizard of Ads. There's a whole series of them. Fantastic. Some of my favorite books in the world. Yes.

But anyway, this is good work. I really enjoy, enjoyed that.

Thank you.

You know what, Can I say something to Randy? I mean, if with people wanting to sell their company and who they don't want to be anymore or the identity piece or what do they want to feel? I mean, that would be a really interesting thing, Randy, for you to crowdsource everyone that's in your current pipeline or people that have already gone through your process to ask them who were they before and who were they after, what needed to change line. Almost take, I mean, the whole questions of that, you know, you went through Mike, you know, have got, do, act, you know, achieve, unlock, think, know all that sort of stuff. I mean, it's, it's really, it's really great. I mean, to. I think it'd be. I don't know if I've seen anyone actually do that level of deep thinking that actually helps guide people into positioning their companies for an exit. Because the, you know, it's that Einstein thing, you know, the, you know, the same level of thinking that created the problem is not the same level thinking needed to solve it. Or the Solomon wanted the skills to get you out of Egypt, but not the same skills to get you to the promised land. And so it's, you know, I actually think that applied to what you're doing would be very, very good marketing. Yeah.

And we, we do some exit interviews.

And some of them are on the.

Website, but we do exit interviews with some of our clients. And that really is. Sounds like the direction from which we should focus everything pretty much. Right. And not, not just about what they accomplished and how their life changed, but also, you know, who did. Who did it allow them to become. Because a lot of people, you know, when you. And you may learn this one day, Joe, you get rid of your.

You.

You exit your business. And a lot of people are. Their. Their whole identity is tied up in that. And so this process of this exit planning kind of forces us to work through them mentally and emotionally is to make them understand that they're not their business. Right.

I think about parents. When teenagers grow up and parents move out of the house, there's, you know, a certain percentage of parents just melt down at that point. Why? Because they don't know who their next B is. They don't know who they are anymore when they're not parents. And the parents who plan that out ahead of time are the ones that transition gracefully. And so I'm sure it's the same with business.

A quick thank you to Michael. That was very powerful for me on a personal level. In my long and forever journey of personal improvement. I've always been driven crazy by being that away person. Running away from the pain or the trauma and just the propulsion idea kind of integrated into personal development to integrate, yes, I want to move away from what makes me uncomfortable, but then transition the outcome towards what I will be and feel at the. At the conclusion of that part of the development, I can't wait to implement this and round out that process in a healthy manner.

I love it. And here's the thing that is the key to confidence, right? People who are in anxiety are people who always think about what they don't want to happen. So it's okay to think about that. It's okay to recognize it, use it to move. But then once you're moving, once you have the momentum, flip it around to what you want instead. That's where confidence comes from.

From instead of falling back into those feelings and start, stop, start, stop.

Exactly. Yeah.

Thank you.

One last little thing that I'll put out here, too, for those of you who are maybe looking at doing avatar work. All these layers that I talked about right here, when I do an avatar, you know, a lot of people do an avatar, they talk about the demographics, what age are they, where they live, zip code, you know, this and that. But really, the most powerful avatars are the ones that go into the psychography, the psychology of the client, not just the demographics. And so, you know, these kind of layers are what I'm looking for so that I can craft my copy to exactly what I spoke about here. And by the way, just because one's more powerful than the other doesn't mean you should leave the other ones out. They should all be in there, but focus more on the ones that are the most powerful.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here.

Do it now. Come on.

Thank you.

Watch him.