Sat, 28 February 2015
Why did we have so many great artists, painters and sculptors in the Renaissance? Why does Brazil produce so many great soccer players? Is slow learning better than fast? Learn more by reading "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. / / For more: http://www.psychotactics.com / / sean@psychotactics.com |
Thu, 26 February 2015
If you're struggling to get attention on your website or when you meet a client, it's because you're not using two core factors: novelty and consequences. When you use these two concepts back to back with each other, something magical happens?you get attention! http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (Finish Your Book Workshop in Washington DC) http://www.psychotactics.com/magic (for magic, of course) === Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. On January 15, 2008, Steve Jobs stood in front of an audience and in his hand he had something that seemed quite boring. It was just an envelope, a yellow envelope, a manila envelope but, still, quite boring. Then he proceeded to take out a computer from that envelope, and that's when the audience gasped. What did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? It's what you should do as a presenter no matter where you stand in front of an audience. It's what you should do when you're presenting something, a product or a service, and that's something that you should work on. It's called attention. While we all seek attention, we don't seem to get as much of it as we'd expect. The reason why we don't get that attention is simply because we don't understand the elements of attention. Attention has two elements, novelty and consequences. We'll start off with the concept of novelty. What is novelty? Let's take the example of Sara Blakeley. She started this company called SPANX. SPANX is an undergarment that smoothes the contours of a woman's body, making clothes more flattering, making them more comfortable. Sara was having a problem. She was having trouble making her first sale. That's because when you're presenting something, it's usually in a boardroom and some buyer is looking at your stuff and you're in a list of seventeen buyers or seven hundred buyers. For some reason, Sara decided to change the tactics. She decided to go with novelty. Instead of making the presentation in the boardroom, she decided to take the buyer to the Ladies' Room. There she was at a Neiman Marcus in Dallas and they go to the Ladies' Room. To really make a point, Sara had worn some form-fitting white pants, and because it was form-fitting and white, well, you can tell it wasn't that flattering for a woman. Then she pulled out her product, which she had called SPANX, and she put it on and the buyer saw the before and after. Right there and then, there was a moment of conversion. There was this flashing bolt of light and suddenly she was able to sell this product that she was having so much trouble selling before. What she found or stumbled on or figured out was this factor of novelty. The whole scenario of the Ladies' Room, the white pants, it being form-fitting, all of that combined to form this moment where it was impossible for the buyer to ignore. That's really what you're doing. You're making it impossible for the buyer to ignore you. In this episode we look at the methods that you can use to get novelty going. We'll look at the length of the novelty and finally, we'll look at the connection. Once you've done your novelty act, how do you connect? How do you stay relevant? Where do you go from there? Let's start off with the first one, which is the methods that you need to use to get to novelty. When I make the Brain Audit presentation, I do something very odd. I'll step into the audience and pick up a chair that no one is sitting on. Then I will get the chair to the front of the room and I will say, "I'm going to sit on this chair, stand up." Sit on the chair, stand up. Sit on the chair and stand up. Then I turn to the audience and say, "Did any one of you expect this chair to break? Why didn't the chair break?" What you've seen there is a demonstration of novelty. It's breaking that cycle of whatever people are doing. The method that was used in this system of novelty was to use the demonstration. You can use stories, analogies, and demonstrations. Those are the most common uses of novelty. Whether you're writing an article, you're doing a presentation, you're in front of a client and you're selling some product or service, one of these three methods, stories, analogies, or demonstrations, are extremely powerful. The reason why they're powerful is more important, and that is because it breaks the pattern. When an audience or a client is expecting something and you've come out from left field, they are forced to pay attention. You are forced to pay attention when someone walks onstage and pulls out a computer from an envelope. You are forced to pay attention when someone starts to pull up a chair and sit on the chair and stand on it. In another example, when I was speaking in Chicago, there were about two hundred fifty people in the audience. I don't know about you, but it's very hard to get two hundred fifty people to pay attention to you. The topic that I was speaking about was pricing, about how to increase your prices without losing customers. How would you start such a presentation? I started the presentation with a video of New Zealand. That is novelty. It breaks that pattern in a matter of seconds. It doesn't matter what you are thinking or doing or thinking of doing. The pattern is broken. You have to pay attention. When Tom Dickson wanted to sell his blenders, well, how can you break a pattern with blenders? When an iPhone comes out, it's extremely coveted. To destroy an iPhone is crazy. It almost flies in the face of reason, so that's what he did. He broke the pattern by going the opposite way. What he did was he took that iPhone and put it in a blender and crushed it to pieces. That got everyone's attention. He became a sensation on YouTube. The sales have soared since then. Whenever you look at this factor of how people have got attention, it's by going almost counterintuitive, that everyone expects you to go one way and you're going the other way. When we go back to the sixties and we look at Bill Bernbach, he started up an advertising agency which is now called BBDO. He had a lot of these things. We had the Volkswagen, which is the Beetle. All of America was thinking big, big cars, big everything, Big Mac. His campaign was completely the opposite. it was think small. They started selling these Bugs, the Beetle Bugs, and they were about thinking small. In the car rental business, Avis and Hertz have been at each other's throats forever. It was such a delight, such an attention-getter when Avis said, "We're number 2. So why go with us?" Immediately, that gets your attention. What we're looking at here is this attention-getter, which is this disruption in what people are expecting to get and what you give them. It's done through stories, analogies, demonstrations, and just plain counterintuitiveness, but at the very core of it, what gets attention is the novelty. If you're expecting me to say something and I say exactly that, you fall asleep. You have to find something that's going to wake me up. Yes, novelty wakes me up, but what about the length of that novelty? How long should I go before I stop? When we read a novel, we tend to find a lot of description; the character is being built up. The same thing applies to movies; the character is being built up. When you're communicating, you don't have that build-up time. Let's say you're writing an article, you've got maybe a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs of telling a story or a demonstration or creating some kind of analogy. That's it. Then you have to go and connect. You have to continue. You have to go to the next section. You can't stay in the novelty for too long because the novelty wears itself out. The same thing applies with presentations. When you're standing there in front of an audience, you don't have half the presentation to get the novelty across. In fact, it would be boring. When you sit on that chair, stand up, sit on the chair, stand up, that's quick. When Sara Blakeley went through the whole routine of changing into SPANX and showing how it made a difference, that was quick. The same thing applied to Blendtec where he spun those iPhones around in the blender. Again, it's quick. It doesn't have to be very quick; it just has to be quick enough. The novelty lasts for a few minutes, and this applies to reading or speaking or anything. If you're standing in front of a person, making a presentation, you've probably got a few minutes, maybe three or four minutes. If it's an article or a sales page, you probably have less time; you have twenty seconds, thirty seconds. The novelty of a story, demonstration, or analogy doesn't last very long. It's best to get there, not to be too hurried about it, but to tell the story and get out of there. Pretty much like you've heard in the podcast here. There's a story, it shows up, you get the point, and then we move on to something else. That something else is the third part in today's episode, and that is the consequences. When you look at a story like Little Red Riding Hood, yes, it's a story. It's a novelty, it's very interesting and kids love it. The little girl is headed to her grandma's place and she's taking some goodies for grandma. Then along the way, she meets the wolf and there are consequences, not just for the girl but for the grandma as well. There is a moral to that story, but before we get to any kind of moral, we are looking at two distinct phases. One is the whole novelty of the girl meeting the wolf and then the consequences. Sometimes the consequences are not so apparent. When Sara Blakeley shows the before and after of SPANX, those consequences are apparent immediately. When Steve Jobs took the MacBook Air out of the envelope, there didn't seem to be many consequences. In the Steve Jobs presentation, the consequences are in the lightness. When you don't have that light MacBook Air, which was billed as the lightest notebook, well, you've got a heavy computer. These messages are driven through the media and in the presentation. When you went with Avis instead of Hertz, it was to show you that Hertz is number one; they don't care. Number two, we have to care. In many cases the consequences are either stated or implied. When you're making a presentation, when you're speaking to a client, you cannot afford to let it be implied. You cannot afford to let the client figure out what the consequences are. You need to tell them. When I'm making a presentation on pricing and I show them this video of New Zealand, the next thing I talk about is The Three-Month Vacation and how pricing affects your ability to go on vacation and how you have to work a lot harder and money is not easy to come by. What happens is a very unconnected topic like the video on New Zealand then connects nicely into pricing with consequences. When I do the Brain Audit presentation, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, standing up, what are the consequences there? Again, the consequences are explained. It's how a chair is built on science and how marketing doesn't work on science, how it falls apart, how we raise thousands of dollars just buying some crazy system that's supposed to be working tomorrow instead of understanding the science behind it and why things work. Then the audience gets it. We've gone from a stage of novelty to a stage of consequences, and that's how you get and you keep that attention. You can do that very, very quickly. It does take some practice. All of the great stories and demonstrations and analogies, all of them have to have this little practice routine before they go live. Once it goes live, you'll see the results for yourself. You'll stand up and people will pay attention. Then you'll drive home the consequences, and they'll want to know how do I buy into whatever it is you're selling? Yes, that brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out with the methods of getting attention. We saw that the methods are usually a story, an analogy, or a demonstration, but at the very core it has to be almost counterintuitive. It has to be something that the audience or your client is not expecting to hear, and that gets the attention. It snaps the person to attention. The second thing you want to do is you want to figure out the length. The length needs to be short enough. In an article, that means a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs. When you're meeting a client face-to-face, you'll get three, four minutes. Anything more and you're just pushing the boundaries. Novelty lasts only so long, and then you have to move to the next stage, which are the consequences. That was our last section, which was the consequences. Sure, you can have implied consequences, but it's very dangerous because the client needs to know specifically what are the consequences of not taking that action. You should bring that in your presentation, in your speech, in your article, in your sales letter. There you go. Novelty and consequences, and you get attention. What one thing can you do today? We covered quite a lot. The important thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you're saying. Whatever you're saying is what you'd call intuitive. It's what you've trained yourself to say. How about going counterintuitive? Let me give you an example. I started writing a series on writer's block this week, and maybe I'll make it into a booklet, maybe a book, but I went counterintuitive. How would we do this intuitively? How would we come up with a title? We'd say, "How to avoid writer's block." Mine was counterintuitive. It said, "How to get writer's block." Notice how it gets your attention? That's what you want to do, that one thing. This week, try and do one thing that is counterintuitive and you'll see how it just gets the attention of your audience. Then move to the consequences. Yes, that's the end of this episode. If you haven't already rated this podcast, please do so at iTunes. If you have a list and would like to share this podcast with your list, please do so. I'm telling you because unless you tell, things don't happen. On another front, if you've been struggling to finish your book or your e-book, then there is a workshop and this is at Psychotactics.com/dc. It's three days. It's a lot of fun. More importantly, it helps you understand the structure of how to finish a book. A book is very frustrating to write, and the reason why it's frustrating is not because of the whole factor of the content. You already have the content in your head. It's how you structure it. When you are able to structure it quickly, put the book together quickly, your client is able to do the same. They're able to read it, to consume it. As a result, they come back for more. They come back for more consulting, for more training, and for more books and products.
That's Psychotactics.com/dc. We'll see you there on May 5th, 6th, and 7th. That's it from The Three-Month Vacation and Psychotactics.com. If you haven't been to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now. |
Mon, 23 February 2015
We often wonder why the sale gets killed. Why the customer walks away. Sometimes it's because we're doing a lousy presentation. Or we forget the facts. But often, we get everything perfectly right. And then it's time to ask for the deal. And we freeze. We get needy. We hope the neediness helps to get some empathy. And in reality, it kills the deal. Or at least puts us in a weak spot. So where does this neediness show up? And how do barriers help to avoid being needy? Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc
Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:25 Table of Contents: Status and Urgency 00:04:27 The Story of 5000bc.com 00:07:58 How Good Should You Be To Put Up Barriers? 00:10:02 Increasing Level of Barriers 00:12:43 Final Announcements
Transcript Sean D'Souza: Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. You've probably heard of Pilates, but maybe not of Joe Pilates. Who was Joe Pilates? He was the guy who started up the Pilates system, except when he got to the United States he wasn't that popular, so he rented a studio right under the studio of some dancers. They would practice, and as you'd expect, as you dance more frequently you get more injuries. Joe's system, of course, would make sure that you were more fit. Now the important part is that he didn't have any clients. Yet, when someone called in and wanted to make an appointment, this is what he'd say: I can't work with you right now. I'm busy and you'd have to wait for a couple of weeks. He was busy. He was busy doing nothing. That makes no sense, does it? Why not take someone who's willing to pay right now instead of waiting for a couple of weeks when they could change their mind? That's the whole point about neediness. If you are needy that's a deal killer. That's the number one deal killer no matter what you're selling, whether it be a service, a product, a workshop, just about anything. If you are needy, it's going to go down in flames. Why is neediness so bad? There are two reasons why neediness is terrible, and the first is that it reduces your status. The second is that it derails urgency. Let's talk about status for a second. We don't even have to go very far to look for examples of neediness. Let's say a friend of yours wants to go for ice cream, and they get needy at that point in time. They are trying to convince you to come for ice cream and you're not that keen on going for ice cream. Immediately their status level goes down and your status level goes up. They need you to come along. You don't need to go. But at the same time, the second factor kicks in, which is urgency. They want to have that ice cream right now, so the more urgent it is, the more they're going to pull you and the less urgency you feel. Yes, you might say, "Fine, we'll go for the ice cream," but notice how your status level has increased. Notice how your urgency has decreased. Whenever we're selling anything, the moment we're needy it doesn't work for us. We think that the buyer is going to feel a little empathy for us, they're going to feel a little sorry for us, but something else happens. A switch turns in their heads and suddenly they don't feel any urgency. They don't feel the need to buy anything from us. Instead, what happens is the other person, they feel this need to pull out. That is just human nature. The moment we feel that we're in control and the other person is not in control, we don't feel the need to go ahead and follow their agenda. We think our agenda is more important. It's all because of this little switch of turning needy. In 2003 we started out a website, a membership website, at 5000bc.com. Right at the start we decided that we were going to have only a fixed number of members. The second thing was that you needed to have read The Brain Audit, which is our book, before you joined 5000bc. Now think about it for a moment. It's a brand new website. Hardly anybody knows us. We've just started out in 2002. Psychotactics was brand new. Why would you put barriers in the way? Why would you tell them that they had to read a book before they could join? No matter where you go and what you read they tell you that you should reduce the friction. You should reduce that friction so that people can sign up for your product or service. Here you're getting barriers. The barriers is very important, because it removes that sense of neediness. It's like okay, we're going to have five people in this workshop. It doesn't matter. We're still going to go ahead and with the workshop. Today our copyrighting course, our article writing course, it fills up in about 30 minutes. Those courses are in excess of $2,500. Almost no one on the internet fills up their courses as quickly as we do. How are these courses billed? The article writing course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world, and yes, you have to read The Brain Audit anyway, and yes, the notes are sent to you three months in advance and you have to go through the notes and listen to the audio. There are all these barriers. Clients, knowing these barriers, still want to get there. They still want to do the courses and they sign up faster than ever before. By putting the barriers in place we are less needy, but there was a time when we used to be needy, when we used to do all the things that we were told, which is reduce the friction. So we reduced the friction. We had four people on the copyrighting course, nowhere next to full, nowhere next to half full. When you look at our website and you look at the form you have to fill, most forms have just a name and email address. Ours has the name, last name, where are you from, what city, country, where you found us. Why bother with so much stuff? Again, they're barriers. The more needy you are the less likely I am to feel any urgency. We saw that with Pilates as well. When Joe started up his studio he worked on that concept of increasing his status level. Even though he had no customers he still increased his status level. Secondly, he made sure there was an urgency factory. They could come in only three weeks from now. You know this when you go to a doctor for instance. You go to a dentist and the dentist goes through his list and there are all these blank spaces but he goes, "No, no, no. It's March now and you can come in July." You are desperate to go there in July, especially if the dentist is really good. You think wait a second, you said, "Provided the dentist is really good," and I'm not that really good. I'm not so good. But think about it, was Joe Pilates that good? When we started out were we that good? Are we still that good? People are always in a state of evolution. No matter where you are on the road you're always able to help your client in some way that is useful for them, but they have to feel this need. They have to feel needy. They have to sign up. It's only when they feel needy, when they feel this urgency, that they feel wow, this was great. This is because how our brains are wired. We are happier with the chase than the reward. Once we get the reward we're like okay, but there's also a downside to neediness, and that is haughtiness. No one is saying that you need to be haughty or impersonal or rude. Say you go to a gas station and the person there is really rude. Does that make his status higher? Does that increase your urgency? No, it doesn't. We're not saying that neediness needs to be rudeness. The definitely of neediness would be more about putting in a barrier, several barriers if you can. It really depends. The point is that when a client comes in they have a small barrier. They jump over that better. Then they go to the second level and they jump over more barriers. The funny thing is that when they get to a higher level you increase the number of barriers. When people join Psychotactics they just have to fill in the form, which is five boxes, but they still have to just fill in the form. Then when they join 5000bc they have to go on a waiting list. They have to be sure that they have read The Brain Audit, so the barriers increase. If we have a program like we used to have, the Protégé Program, they had to read The Brain Audit, they had to be on the list, they had to pay $10,000 in advance, they had to submit to an interview, they had to fill in a whole bunch of details and send it back. When it was free they just had a form, but then when they got to the point where they were actually signing up for a year-long program they were doing a lot more. Not everyone wanted to do a lot more. One of the participants that signed up decided that she was just going to pay the $10,000 and she was not going to buy The Brain Audit. Renuka wrote to her and said, "You've got until Friday. If you don't get The Brain Audit by Friday the money goes back, right into your bank account." I want you to think about it for a second. What would have gone through that client's mind? She thought we were bluffing, so that's what we did. On Friday we returned all her money. She came back with this enormous sense of urgency. "I bought The Brain Audit. I was stuck. I couldn't buy it." She bought The Brain Audit and she became the protégé, and she paid the $10,000. But if we were needy, we had to deal with her for the rest of the year. She would take advantage of that situation. This is not about domination. This is just human nature. You're dealing with human nature all the time. The more you reduce your status, the more the chances that someone is going to trample all over you. You can be polite. You don't have to be haughty or rude, but you'd never want to be needy. This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered how neediness reduces your status level. It brings you to the point of begging in a way. Immediately people change their behavior, their attitude towards you. The second thing that neediness does is it reduces the urgency. The moment you need them, they're not ready to move. But if they need your stuff, they're ready to move. Just by putting in those barriers in place it creates a sense of urgency. It reduces the need to trample all over you. Let's face it, you have a far superior relationship with your clients. There is respect between both parties. If you're standing on stage and you're asking your audience to please subscribe to your website, well that's being needy. If you're selling something to someone and you're not creating a sense of urgency, you're not putting any barriers, well that's needy. Even on a website your language, your tone, if it doesn't have these barriers in place, it doesn't have this "Wait, we are fussy about our clients. Wait, we are fussy about our systems," then you're being needy. Sometimes you have to be needy. Sometimes you have to ask for things, and immediately it reduces your status. It works but it's not as effective. It's very slow going. I'm not saying that you never need to be needy. The situation changes. It depends on a day to day situation and what you need, but as far as possible you want to make sure that your not needy. What's the one thing that you can do today? Put a barrier, find a barrier. What is your next project about? What is the barrier that you can put in. Maybe a small barrier, business still, put in the barrier. The barrier increases your status and definitely increases their urgency factor to sign up for whatever it is you're selling. That brings us to the end of this podcast. Now one of the ways to reduce neediness is to have uniqueness. When you have a uniqueness factor it means that you're standing out from the rest of the public. You're standing out from everyone else. If you would like to learn more about uniqueness, we have a program. It's not cheap. It's in excess of $800 but it's a really good program. The reason it's good is it shows you not only to get the uniqueness, but how to get to second level uniqueness. Second level uniqueness is so cool, because your competitor can't just step in and rob it away from you, can't take it away from you. In fact, one of the stories there is about a property manager and how she was charging 6.9% for a commission, versus the others that were charging 8.5%. What was the difference? The one that was charging 6.9% was actually better than the other ones, but she didn't have this factor of uniqueness. Those set of words that you use, they make the difference between your product being just another me too brand, another property manager, versus something that stands out. That's what you can find at the Psychotactics site. If you haven't subscribed to the Psychotactics site, do so. Fill in the form. There are about four or five boxes, but you already knew that, didn't you? One last announcement. The workshop at D.C., that's starting to fill up reasonably quickly. You know where to find that. It's at www.psychotactics.com/dc. Now it's time to go. Shall we play some mariachi? Possibly. I'll say bye for now. What's the next episode about? It's about attention and how tension is the critical part of attention. Bye bye.
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Thu, 19 February 2015
The hardest thing in business?or life is the factor of confidence. Whether you're in online marketing, selling products or services, or run a physical store, the confidence goes up and down. And yet, confidence is what creates sales. Sales, after all, is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So how can we create this enthusiasm without confidence? And where do we start looking? http://www.psychotactics.com/dc ===== / 00:00:20 Introduction: Biryani Disaster? ===== Transcript: There are lots of things that I like doing: dancing, painting, cartooning, but one of the things I like the most is cooking.
Of course I invite people over to dinner. On this evening I'd invited one of my friends and I was making this very special dish. It's a multi-layered rice dish called a biryani. If you say the biryani to most people they get a little afraid because there's so much preparation involved, and you have to get so many things right.
Anyway, I got a few things wrong that day, but only I knew that I'd got those things wrong Andd yet when I went to serve the dish I mentioned that it was not up to standard. Now this friend of mine, he had never had a biryani before. He didn't know what a biryani was supposed to taste like, but what I said, it really affected him. My lack of confidence spilled over and he didn't feel that the biryani was up to standard.
For ages after that, whenever we met he wanted all the other dishes except the biryani What did I do wrong? The answer doesn't lie in the recipe for the biryani or the way the biryani was made that evening. What it lies is in a factor of confidence. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another, and that evening I wasn't transferring any enthusiasm, so I wasn't selling my dish. This is what we do a lot when we're at networking meetings, when we're at presentations, when we're selling a product or a product or a service to a client. We lack that enthusiasm. We don't appear confident, and then the client wants to think about it. They want to ask their mother, brother, sister about it before they decide.
Today we're going to talk about three aspects of confidence We'll start out with the root of confidence. Where does the confidence come from? Is it inbuilt or do we have something that we have to learn? The second is how to deal with this whole set of confidence issues when things don't seem to be going your way. The third and most importantly, to realize how confidence is like a rechargeable battery, how you need to charge it up all the time.
Let's start out with the first, which is the root of confidence Your background, that's the deepest, strongest root that you can have in confidence with anything. As you're growing up you don't realize it, but as you're sitting around reading some comics or watching TV and the adults are going about doing their own things, you get an education. When I was growing up my father ran a secretarial college and he used to train people to be secretaries.
I used to sit around; I used to eat; I used to read some story books, type on the typewriters because he had a lot of them. Essentially I wasn't doing anything, yet a lot was happening. A lot of the information was going into my head and I was getting confident about teaching, about speaking, about meeting people, about doing a lot of things that I didn't realize until it was much later.
Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because when you grow up in a different kind of family you have different experiences. If your family was largely job-oriented and it was about safety and not making mistakes and not taking too many risks, then it becomes quite hard for you to do that and you have to learn that confidence. If you grow up in a family where people are cooking, or they're painting, or they're doing some woodwork, what you're doing is you're getting the confidence just by sitting around. You're absorbing all that information but you also get information.
For instance, when I'm sitting with my nieces and there's my palette in front of me and I'm painting some cartoons, they're getting information about what yellow ocher looks like, how the sky is not really blue but it is blue at the top and then blue and yellow ocher in the middle and then yellow ocher towards the horizon. They get all this information so they get confident. When you don't have that confidence then you have to build up that confidence. Because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm for one person to another, all the things that you're selling depends on you being confident about it because you project that energy.
What I used to do is I used to go to networking meetings and I was quite terrified I was in a new country when we moved to New Zealand. I would play "Simply The Best." I had a tape player in my car and I'd play that over and over again. That gave me confidence. That just boosted my energy to the point where I could last the meeting and then go back home.
There are certain areas where you have confidence because you've grown up around that environment, that family, that atmosphere. There are other areas where you don't have the confidence. One of the things that you have to do is artificially boost that confidence somehow. Listen to some music. Listen to someone who is talking about confidence making you more confident. Because the lack of that confidence often leads to people not buying from you.
How does this confidence play out in real life? We don't stand in front of an audience and say we're terrified, but we say little things like, "Oh, I'm sorry but we didn't have a good night last night," or I would say things like, "Oh, that biryani didn't turn out as well as it should. It's missing these spices." Or right after making a presentation and getting an applause we'll say, "Thank you. It was so good, but ... " But? You use the word but. It's these little clues that give away the fact that we are not as confident as we should.
The moment we are confident people get this surge of enthusiasm from us and they're more interested in buying. Now sales is a lot more than just enthusiasm, but we doubt the confidence, it's almost impossible to sell anything. While some of us have our deep roots in confidence because we've grown up with that atmosphere, the moment we're thrown into an unknown space we have to get that enthusiasm building within us and not apologizing. That's how you get to a level of confidence. The moment you apologize it kills everything. Everything you've done just before that, it's dead.
It's like the song from The King and I: "Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one will suspect I'm afraid."
This takes us to the second part.
What do you do when things really go wrong? For about 10 years the musicians and rock star Sting was in what he called a writer's block. He wasn't able to produce any music, write any songs, and then he wrote this album called The Last Ship. Then they went to Broadway and they spent four or five years putting together everything.
The musical cost about 15 million dollars to just bring to the stage, and then about $625,000 in running costs; that is per week. Yet, they were losing. People weren't showing up for the play. You put in all of this effort, all of this time, and what happens? At this point in time it's very easy to say, "I'm a failure. I'm not supposed to do this." But it's not true. It's always a stepping stone for another learning.
We've had situations where our confidence has been badly beaten. I can remember the time very early in my career when I went to Australia. It was this kind of pitch fest and I was not used to pitching from the podium. Everyone around me were selling tens of thousands of dollars of product and when I stood there I couldn't manage anything. I think about 10 people bought the product. It completely shattered the confidence.
At that point in time you have to step back and reevaluate and say, "What did I do wrong?" Not "What is wrong with me," but "What did I do wrong?" Because more often than not it's got nothing to do with you. Back in the year 2000 if you published an article on someone else's site, on a big site, you'd probably get 200 subscribers. If you published it in 2010 you'd probably get 50 subscribers. Now you'd probably get 10 subscribers.
The point is that the distraction has increased tremendously You look at some of the bigger sites and you find that the comments have gone down. You find that everyone is having to fight the same battle. Because you're just starting out, because you're struggling you think, "It's me. It's got something to do with me. I'm not writing well. I'm not doing stuff well." That's possible, but it's possible the technique, which is what I found out on stage in Australia. I found out that my technique was wrong, so I had to learn from that technique. I had to build up that confidence, and then when we went to Chicago a few years later I outsold everybody in the room.
Now admittedly I don't do this pitching from the podium anymore, but in the early years I did a lot of it I had to get the confidence because it was very unusual for me. This is what you've got to understand. Most of the time there's nothing wrong with you. You probably don't have enough experience so you don't have enough confidence and you don't have enough technique. Of course if you're buy into hype from people who say that you're going to get hundreds of customers or thousands of customers, or Facebook fans, and you buy into the la dee da, that's your problem. At the very core of it it is about boosting yourself up, getting the technique, and that's how you get confident.
Because you will run into a whole bunch of potholes in your career, and every single time you have to pull yourself out. That's what Sting has done as well. He's gone on tour now with Paul Simon. You pick yourself up, you dust yourself, and you walk on. Because there is no option. When your confidence is battered it's no point staying in the mud. You just pick yourself up and walk on.
This brings us to the last part, which is the factor of how your confidence is like a rechargeable battery. Just yesterday I got an email from my friend Bryan Eisenberg. Bryan said he really liked the podcast. He mentioned how it was getting better and better with every episode. That's a charge. That would keep me going for at least two or three days, but just like there is a charge, there's also a discharge, and there are people around you all the time that don't exactly encourage you. They don't discourage but they don't encourage you. As soon as that happens your confidence starts to go down.
These might be people you love: your husband, your wife, your friend These might be people that are almost always in your favor, but in this one aspect they don't exactly encourage you. Like yesterday I was helping my wife do a handstand and she's been struggling with the handstand for ages. I said to her, "I don't think you're going to get there." In that moment she was quite angry, she was quite upset.
I realize today that I wasn't being helpful. If you look around you, in your house, in your friend circle, in your family, you will find people who are not discouraging you but they're not encouraging you, and you have to find people that will give you that charge. Because every single day that battery goes up and then it comes crashing down, and you have to have that charge.
We get confident because we recover from mistakes, we fix those mistakes. The icing on the cake is simply when someone says, "Wow, you made a great dish. That was a great painting. That was a superb podcast." If we're not getting this from our friends and our family, especially the family, then we have to find our source that will encourage us and get those batteries up and running.
When we do workshops, one of the questions that we ask is why are you attending this workshop. If you dig deep enough the answer is always confidence, always, always confidence. If you dig deep enough you will find that everyone attending your workshop, everyone buying your product, everyone getting anything from you is because they want to gain confidence. They want to get that charge from you. You've got to send out that confidence and you have to be enthusiastic. For that you have to make sure that you're not being discharged.
That brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out today with the root of confidence. When you grow up in a family or in an environment where things are happening, you don't have to be part of it. You just have to be there. Of course it helps if you're given responsibility and taught stuff as you go along, but just being around makes you more confident than the average person.
The second element that we covered was what happens when you make mistakes. All of us make these mistakes. All of us make terrible mistakes, and really the only way to get over the mistake is to get up and make another mistake until you stop making mistakes. There is a technique, and people learn how to speak better, how to present better, how to write better. There is a technique, and what you need to do is buy into a system that promises you a lot of hard work instead of get rich quick or do this really, really quick. Because the quick methods, they lead to destruction. They don't work, and so your confidence goes down even further.
Finally, we looked at confidence as a rechargeable battery. If you find someone like me who's a scrooge who's saying, "You're not going to do that headstand," you're never going to do the headstand at least with me around. You know this one driving. You know when couples go driving? This is what happens. You want to find a source of confidence of inspiration because our confidence is so fleeting.
What's the one thing you can do today? The core of confidence is the ability to do something very quickly, like speaking a language. You get confidence from someone who has a method, a method that is slow, steady, that has tiny increments. The one thing you can do today is avoid anything that is super fast. When you see that red flag, someone promising you super quick clients, super quick this, super quick that, step aside and find something else that will truly build your confidence, truly build your skill, that takes a lot of effort. That's how you move ahead and that's how you get more confident in life. |
Wed, 18 February 2015
It may seem like article writing is very hard. And it is. Good writing needs structure, it needs skill and it needs one more thing: input. Without input, nothing happens. So where do we get this input? And why bother with bad input? Finally, what if you don't like audio learning? Can't you just stick to books? Knowing these answers can dramatically change the way you approach article writing. And yes, make you a better writer. For more, go to http://www.psychotactics.com For the fun workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc For the Story Telling Product: http://www.psychotactics.com/story --------- Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to The Three Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Imagine you go to the café and you're sitting there and the barista is making this fabulous coffee. The machine is superb, the barista has just won the championship. This is the top of the line barista and then you get your coffee. You take one sip and you think, "Something is wrong with you," because it can't be. It can't be this bad. How come this coffee is so yucky. It's very simple. Bad input. In coffee land, that is bad coffee beans. Either they're over roasted or under roasted, or just inferior coffee beans. Input is what matters and the same thing applies when you're writing an article or a book. The most important thing of all is input. If you were to ask someone to write a story about their life, they probably could manage it. You would have to narrow it down, of course. You would have to say, "Tell me about when you were 10." You would have to narrow it down further, maybe some episode at school, but eventually, they would come up with some story and the story would have clear ups and downs. It would have a storyline, it would have everything in place. How did they do that? How did they conjure that up from nothing? Nothing is a silly word to use here, isn't it? They already had something. They had the whole story in their mind. They have the concept in their mind. That becomes input and then it's a matter of structuring it in an article, and you have to know that structure, or structuring it in the form of a book. Then, you have your material. Most of the time, when you sit down to write an article, we don't have enough input. We have knowledge but we don't have enough input. In this episode, we're going to look at what is input, where do you get it, and why structured and unstructured input is very important. Let's tackle the first burning question, which is: What is input? The thing with you and me and everyone is that we already have the answers. The problem is we don't have the questions. We don't have that thing that prods us in the side and gets us to answer the question. That is our problem. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer or in real estate or fitness or any business. You already have the answers. The problem is you're not getting enough questions. People don't ask you enough questions and so to get those questions, you have to go elsewhere. That elsewhere is really other books, other material, and that is input. To give you an idea of what my day looks like, I start off the day with going for a walk. Usually, I have a few podcast, different types of podcasts and my phone is loaded with audio books as well. I know a lot of people have aversion to audio and obviously, you're listening to a podcast so you don't have this aversion, but a lot of people think that they're not going to listen to audio books or they're not going to listen to podcasts because they're not going to remember anything. You're not supposed to remember everything. You're supposed to remember just one thing. That one thing is something that the author says and this could be something brand new, something that you've never thought of. That's input. Now, your brain is churning. Now, your brain is moving faster than ever before. What if it's old material? Old material, when listened to or read a second or a third time, is different from when it was read the first time or listened to the first time because so much has changed. You have learned so much in between and now, that seems like mundane material could be very exciting. Both old material and new material make a big difference. That becomes input. That becomes like the coffee bean. That becomes the great stuff that you can work with. That is your starting point. You want that ignition point and that ignition point comes from input. Of course, when we think of input, the input could come from a report, it could come from a book, it could come from audio, it could come from video. Why audio? Because you're always traveling somewhere. You're always going to the supermarket. You're always walking around. You're always doing something that is just dead time. This is when you want to get that input. You want to start making notes, get more input, make more notes, and all the time, your brain is readying for that moment when you're going to write. Book reading, on the other hand, is a dedicated amount of time. You probably sneak in 15 minutes before bed or 15 or 20 minutes in the morning if you're lucky. This dead time is there all the time for you. When you're waiting in the queue, when you're at the dentist, when you are picking up your kid, when you are driving in your car, there are literally hours in the day just waiting for you to get that input. If you think I'm telling you not to read and just listen to audio, that's not the point. The point is very simple: To be able to have output, you have to have input and to be able to have great input, you have to read great stuff or listen to great stuff and really crappy stuff. Crappy stuff? Why would you listen to crappy stuff? We know that when you are listening to great stuff, it really inspires you. It makes you feel on top of the world. You feel like you're going to write an article or you're going to write some chapters in your book. You feel that because that's what input does. It sends energy through your system. Why would we deal with crappy stuff? The reason why you're dealing with crappy stuff is because you want to see how badly people give advice because that also sends a charge through you. You get very excited. You get emotionally charged. You want to get rid of this rubbish that people have been spouting. That then generates another form of input, which is, "This is really bad, I need to fix it now." Crappy stuff could be just average information, but it also could be unstructured information. It might seem like, "Why do I have to listen to this?" Some of the great input comes from bad stuff. You can show people how to avoid that bad stuff, how to avoid that bad structure. However, there is a downside to input. That is we're all information junkies so we could be reading and we could be listening to endless amounts of stuff. The key is not to remember everything. I've said this before. I want to say it again. You just want to take away one idea. You will almost never get one idea. You will get more than one idea. If it's really crappy, you might get nothing. This is where the strategy of having several podcasts, several audio books, and several books maybe, if you're reading ... That's really why you need to have several of them, because then, if you're getting nothing for half an hour and you think, "This is rubbish," you can switch. You can switch to something else. I will listen to philosophy and psychology and marketing and all kinds of stuff on a single walk. It all becomes input. Most people think that article writing and content creation is about sitting down and writing. It's not. It doesn't matter that you have all the information in your head already. You still need an ignition point. You still need something to fire you up. You still need something to inspire you, something to get frustrated about. That is how you create great content. You can make coffee from any coffee bean or you can make coffee from great stuff. Even bad coffee teaches you a good lesson. That brings us to the end of this episode. What are you going to do? What's the one thing that you're going to do as a result? You definitely want to subscribe to this podcast. If you're on iTunes, you just press the subscribe button and therefore, you will get a lot of the content that is coming out on Three Month Vacation. Episode 5, 6, and 7 is about storytelling and one of the most critical thing in sales, in storytelling, in article writing, in book creation, product creation, is storytelling. You want to go back and listen to 5, 6, and 7. If you haven't heard it, well, here is a nudge again. Go there, subscribe, and that's your one thing that you need to do today. You want to stack your phone with lots of podcasts, lots of audio books. There is a ton of dead time. People say they have no time. No, they don't have efficiency. This is efficiency. Do it. Today. There is a series on storytelling. If you go to Psychotactics.com and search for storytelling, there is a really good series on storytelling. Yes, you have to pay for it, but it's worth it. It's all input and it will help you write better articles. There is also the article writing course. If you want home study for that, that's well worth it. We've been doing the article writing course since 2006 and we never promise that one person turned out to be a great article writer. Everyone turns out to be outstanding. That is because the article writing course is built on structure. It's built on a system. When you put those elements together, it's just fabulous. It's just amazing. You take the input, you take the structure, and you get great articles. You get great content and then you don't struggle anymore, which is the goal, isn't it? Finally, you know about the information products store, so that's on the East Coast of the United States, in Maryland. It's located at the Sheraton Silver Spring. It's the 5th, 6th, and 7th of May. We don't have 300 people come to our event and have 25 speakers. There is just one speaker and you spend 3 days actually working instead of just listening to more blah blah. We'll see you there. Bye for now.
This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three Month Vacation.
Direct download: 021_The_Secret_Ingredient_To_Writing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:00pm NZST |
Mon, 16 February 2015
Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours?
Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test?He probably practices for two or three weeks, off and on, and then after that, he drives. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today? Several years ago, best-selling author Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”.Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work. The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t? What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented?Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all. In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true? |
Wed, 11 February 2015
If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing 70% right. You can always come back to do the 20% later. Yes, read it again, and no, the math isn’t wrong. If you’re going to build a website, a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to do a presentation a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to bake a cake, for that matter…do you need all the ingredients? The perfect cake? With all the perfecto ingredients? Or the cake with ’70%’ of the ingredients? Let's find out what the 70% principle is all about shall we? ==== LINKS: To subscribe: http://www.psychotactics.com To get to that amazing workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Storytelling? You want stories? http://www.psychotactics.com/story To subscribe to this podcast: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic ==== Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. I was sitting in the café minding my business when this woman was sitting across from me. She looked up a few times and made eye contact. Then she summoned up courage and moved across and she spoke to me. Apparently she was a writer. She had written three or four books and never got them published, so I asked her why. You probably know her answer. She said, "Well, I'm a perfectionist." This is the problem. We think that we are perfectionists, but everyone is a perfectionist. Everyone would like to do the best possible job, and yet some people get their job done and others don't. The reason why they do that is because of a simple concept called the 70% principle. This podcast is going to explore what is the 70% principle, how it helps you, and when you should stop. Let's start off with the first one, which is the 70% principle. What is it? In 2004 we were headed out from Auckland to Los Angeles. It was the first time we were having a Psychotactics workshop internationally. Of course everything had been sold. We'd booked the venue. We'd got people to sign up. We'd printed the notes. We'd done everything. There was only one little hitch. We still hadn't got a visa from the US embassy. It wasn't because we were delaying or procrastinating. It was just that they were giving out visas just a week before departure. You can imagine the situation, can't you? What if we didn't get the visa? What if something happened and the workshop couldn't go ahead? Life is full of so many what ifs. It becomes much simpler if you take a software developer's philosophy. A software developer's philosophy is very simple. It is get 70% right and come back and fix the rest later. So many of us don't complete our projects because we think that it's not good enough. Then having completed a project we don't sell it because, again, we feel somehow it could be improved. Of course it could be improved, but your 70%, the audience is already waiting for that right now. They're waiting for the information that you have and they don't care about the remaining 30%, not just yet. We went ahead with our first workshop simply because we thought that's the best we can do, 70%. When I wrote my first book, The Brain Audit, it was only 16 pages. Today it's 180 pages. What's the real size of the book? To me I think it's about 1,500 pages. Well, not as a single book but as different courses and books. The point is that if you wait for that perfect moment, if you wait to get everything down, it never happens. When you think like a software developer you go, "Okay, this is the maximum I can achieve." You go out there and you put it out there. Then you can come back and fix it. The brain audit started out with version 1 and then went to version 2, and is on version 3.2. Will there be a version 4? I don't know, but the point is very simple. You can always fix it later. We understand the 70% principle but why does it work? It works for a simple reason. That clients are waiting for your stuff right now. Your audience is waiting for your stuff right now. If you don't put it out there they still have to get it. They still have to get the information. There's a story about Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson the musician. In a Rolling Stone interview Jack Johnson said, "A song like "Bubble Toes," I don't know if I would have written that song if a million people we're going to hear it." He said, "It was like a joke to my wife around the house. Then a couple of friends liked it and then people asked for it at shows, and it became popular." We're going away from the point. The point is the middle that comes in the middle of the song. It goes like this: la da dada da da, da dada da da da da, la da dada da da. Jack had been planning to put in words but when the time came to release the song there were no words, so he ran it as la da dada da da. Today that's the most endearing part of that album. In fact, if you just play the la da dada da people know that's Jack Johnson. That's really what the 70% principle embodies. It embodies the fact that people are ready for your music as it is. It might be in version 1, it might be in version 2. It doesn't really matter. That whole concept of perfection, that's just a story you've been telling yourself. That's just another way to procrastinate. That's just another way to not put out that book, that song. That's just another way to hold yourself together. Exposing yourself with just 70%, that really works because your audience is ready for it right now. The main point is that it's never going to be 100%. No one is ever satisfied with their work. When you look at a writer going through a book, by the time the writer goes through that entire book they have changed. They have physically changed. Something in their brain has changed. When they look at the first few pages it's totally different from page 200. The late night comedy show Saturday Night Live, that runs on the 70% principle. They can rehearse all they want but then on Saturday night they have to go live. That's the best they can do. At this point in time they're in their 40th season just doing 70% of what they can do, and doing it by deadline. This brings us to the third part, which is how do you know that it's done. When do you stop? When is that 70% reached? The answer is very simple. We know that we've reached our 70% when the time is up. Let's say you have to write an article. You give yourself a couple of hours and at the end of those couple of hours you're done. You're doing a painting, you give yourself 45 minutes and at the end of 45 minutes you're done. Over the years I've wanted to write books on membership and pricing and presentations, and every single book I could have done better. Every single podcast that I've done I could have done better, but there is a deadline. When you have that deadline and it's an unshakable deadline, then the job gets done. The reason why people call themselves perfectionists is because they never intend to put the book out. They never intend to have the la da dada da da out there. The ones that put it out there, they get the rewards. That's the one thing that you've got to do today. You've got to make sure that you have a deadline. Whatever you're producing, whatever you're creating, whether it's a book or an article or a song, or maybe you're just going to fix a tap or paint a ceiling, the point is you need to have a deadline and on that deadline it's done. It is absolutely incredible what a deadline can do for us. We would have never gone to that workshop in the United States if we knew in advance that the visa was only going to come at the last minute, but we had tickets. We had a deadline and we had to go. We had to go for the visa, and we got the visa. There's a happy story there. Sometimes you don't get happy stories, but if you take an average of just putting it out there like a software developer, you'll find that you have more happy stories than unhappy stories. That's what the 70% principle is all about. Get 70% done, have a deadline, and then you can always come back and fix it later. That brings us to the end of this episode. For the last few podcast episodes I've been talking about the information product workshop. The most critical thing today is just how to put together information when there are so many experts out there. The goal isn't to get someone to read your stuff, but how do we get them to read right to the end and then come back for me. Most information isn't that compelling. The reason why it isn't that compelling is because it doesn't have a structure. When you have structure it goes flowing from one section to the other to the other and you get to the end. When you get to the end you want more. It's just like a meal. It's like an amazing ... You go back to the restaurant again and again and again. That's what we're going to cover at the information products workshop. It's at psychotactics.com/dc. All of this action is happening in the first week of May, so go to pscyhotactics.com/dc and find out for yourself. If you can't make it to the workshop, get yourself the home study and you can find this in the home study section at psychotactics as well. That brings us to the end of this podcast. You want to hang around for one more story? Okay, we'll do one more story. Have you heard of the song "Second Wind" by Billy Joel? If you listen to that song, right at the end there is a flub. There is this mistake. If you just listen to the song you don't pay attention to it and you don't notice it, but of course Billy Joel knew he had made a mistake, and he was in the studio and he wanted to erase it, but that was the whole point of the song: to make a mistake. That was the 70%, so he kept it. Today if you listen to that song you can hear it. Now I'm going to play this piece of music because my wife absolutely loves this. Here we go.
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Mon, 9 February 2015
Clients aren't always keen to accept our ideas?no matter how brilliant or workable. And we have the same problem with product or services. The resistance is much too high and we struggle to get things moving. So how do we overcome this resistance from clients? How do we overcome the objections? / / 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:03:12 Part 1: Creating Expertise On Your Site / 00:04:48 Part 2: Pointing Clients To Existing Material / 00:06:48 Part 3: The Power of Demonstration / 00:11:33 Wrap Up + Information Products Workshop: Washington D.C.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of the white pants of Sara Blakely. Sara’s product was an undergarment. It smoothed out the contours of a woman’s body making your clothes more flattering, more comfortable but Sara was not able to sell the product. Yet as the legend goes she was at the store at Neiman Marcus in Dallas and she was wearing these form fitting white pants. She invited the buyer to join her in the lady’s room. At this very unusual place that Sara proceeded to show how those white pants looked with the undergarments that she was selling which were called Spanx and then she proceeded to show how they looked without it. Sara didn’t stop there she went on to sell to Bloomingdales to Saks, Bergdorf-Goodman and today that brand is worth over $250 million, but what was Sara really doing there? Was she selling a product or was she doing something different? Sara was actually fighting resistance. Often as we go about our day to day business selling products and services we run into clients who are convinced that they are right and often they’re wrong. We then try to get into this debate, this mini argument as it were and that’s not the way to convince a client. The way to convince the client is to show them proof. How do we go about this proof? In today’s podcast we’ll cover 3 ways in which you can get a client over to your side of the fence without any of that mini argument or debate. We’ll talk about 1 the proof that you create, 2 the proof that other people create and finally irrefutable proof demonstration. Let’s start off with the first type of proof which is the proof that you create. Let’s say for instance you are a web designer and you’re completely convinced that responsive sites are very, very important for clients. Responsive sites as you probably know are sites that you view on a mobile or on a tablet and they readjust to fit the width and the height of the mobile or the tablet. There you are in front of the client and the client is old school. They built their site in 2005 or 2007. They’re not that keen to switch over to something that readjust their entire site. What are you going to do? The first thing that you need to have is you have to have content of your own because clients have objections and usually they don’t have a lot of objections. They’ve had maybe 6, 7 different kinds of objections over the years and what you need to do is you need to put together information. A good form of information is a bunch of articles. You could have a booklet, you could have any kind of information that you’ve written and it’s very important that it comes with your name attached to it because that makes you the expert. As the client is battling a bit not a lot but just a bit with you, you can point out that information on your website or maybe you’ve got a booklet that you can hand out to them. Now it’s easy to think we’ll I can just tell them. I can just speak to them right on the spot they are sensible people but a conversation doesn’t have the elements of an article or a booklet that has structure and form. You can’t just put together anything on a website. You have to have structure and form and you have to build that argument as it were. When they go and see that structure and form and it’s signed with your name because it’s on your website or your booklet that makes you the expert. That makes a big difference to have the client perceives you because now you’ve anticipated their objection and you’ve answered their question. That’s only 1 way to do it. The second way you want to think of is external proof. Let’s say the client decides that “Hey it’s your website. You wrote all the information that’s nice but I’m not convinced.” At that point in time you’ll have to have external proof. The external proof could be again booklets, could be books, could be information on other websites and this becomes third party proof. You may say “That’s exactly the same as what I’m saying.” but it’s not. The moment it comes from a third party automatically it gets relevance. If it’s already published in a book it has even more relevance. Even if you direct them to an authoritative site you will find that it’s relevant enough and what you’re doing now is bringing down that resistance. That’s really all you’re doing. The client has resistance and you’re bringing down their resistance. When we assume being … see the same thing over and over and over again it becomes true for us. Suddenly that client is no longer seeing the fact that you said that they need to have a responsive website could now suddenly google is sending out notices to website owners saying “Hey you need to have a responsive website.” Suddenly everything is changed but it’s not likely [it’ll 00:05:54] just show up and expect the client to buy into your idea or your product or service. There’s huge amount of resistance and it’s only when you have these couple of things together your own proof and external proof that makes a big difference. Imagine you're Sara Blakely. Imagine you don’t have any of your proof. You don’t have any external proof .You just have this product that you want to sell and no one has ever seen it before except maybe your friends, maybe your relatives. No one has ever seen it before how do you sell that’s when the power of demonstration comes into play. That’s the third part which is demonstration, actual physical proof right front of the buyer. Three’s a story about Corning glass. You’ve probably heard it. It’s about how they tried to sell Corning glass many years ago. Now Corning glass was unbreakable at least this kind of glass was unbreakable and all of the salespeople were talking about how the glass was unbreakable. One of the salespeople was doing better than everybody else and so much better that the management called him in and said “What are you doing?” What he was doing was actually demonstrating that the glass was unbreakable. He’d take the glass, put it in front of the buyer then get a ball-peen hammer and swing the hammer towards the glass. As soon as he did that they would go back in horror because you’re about to smash glass and he bring that hammer down on the glass and it wouldn’t break and that was proof. That was irrefutable proof and that is through demonstration. You’re thinking “I have a website. I don’t have glass and I don’t have hammers.” You can have a before and after and it doesn’t matter which business you’re in. There’s always a before and after. If you’re selling an article writing course, there is a before and after. If you’re selling a microphone, there is a before and after. If you’re selling Spanx like Sara Blakely well there is a before and after. The before and after is probably the most powerful instant demonstration you can get through anyone and the moment you do that whole resistance comes crashing down. Not the whole thing but most of it. Sometimes all it take is 1 demonstration but sometimes you need all 3 of these back to back. You’re going to need articles or a book or a booklet that you have written that makes you the expert then you’re going to have some external information that some other expert has talked about that points exactly to what you’re saying. Finally there is going to be a before and after in your business. There’s always got to be a before and after an when you stack all 3 of these back to back, it’s very, very hard for a customer not to be convinced and that is because you’re prepared. When you’re prepared, you’re full of confidence and the customer can see that confidence. They can feel that confidence. It’s not you just coming up there and refuting some objection. You’re actually prepped. That’s the kind of person you like to buy from, that’s the kind of person I like to buy from. However there are situation where a customer will still argue with you. You can show them all the proof, you can give them all the information, you can do the demonstration and they still won't buy from you because they want even more proof. At this point in time we tend to back away and say that customer is really stupid. Is it just the customer being difficult or is the proof not as compelling as it should be? You’ve got to check this out with your target profile. In the Brain Audit which is our book we talk about target profile in great detail and essentially it’s this. You want to go out there and speak to a single person. You don’t want to make up all these things in your head and they will tell you whether you’re communicating or not. You need to have this kind of audit from your customers especially when it comes to your own information. Especially when it comes to your own demonstration, you get rid of all the holds and then you get a story like Sara Blakely’s. It’s perfect. Everything is engineered including the master stroke of going to the lady’s room and not selling in the boardroom. That’s all engineering and that’s what it takes to reduce the resistance and to get the customer to be convinced to buy from you and only you. As we jog to the end of this podcast, what is the one thing that we can do today? It’s very simple. Find a before and after. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling there will be a before and after syndrome. Your product or your service or even your idea it’s solving a problem so there has to be a before and after. Look for the before and after and start there and that will make a huge difference in convincing clients and reducing that resistance. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, where do you listen to it? Can you email me at sean@ psychotactics.com. Tell me, do you listen to it when you’re walking? Do you listen to it when you’re exercising or do you just listen to it in the middle of the day somewhere? Email me at sean@ psychotactics.com and let me know where you’re listening to this podcast. On another note we’re having an information products workshop in Silver Spring which is just outside Washington DC in the United States. It’s in the first week of May and if you want to come Psychotactics workshop is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. We have a party. We have a great time and you learn a lot. You spend 2/3 of your time outside the room and that’s where you really learn. It’s not this blah, blah, blah that you have inside the room you’ll find out for yourself. If you’ve been through a workshop you know exactly what we’re talking about. If you haven’t been to a Psychotactics workshop you should come and the reason why should come is it’ll show you how to construct information in a way that is extremely powerful. We have [inaudible 00:12:26] information and people are putting more and more information together and the information products workshop shows you how to put together less not more information and make it more powerful for your clients so that they consume it and come back for more. How do we do it? We have a system that involves the planets, the sun, the moon and the lunar surface and if that sounds bizarre, it’s a lot of fun. You learn how to put together an information product that is very sound and customers love and they come back for more. Just like you do with a lot of Psychotactics product, you keep coming back to buy more and more. What is it that holds it together? What is that glue? That’s what we’ll cover at the Psychotactics information product workshop.
Information products have made the difference for us in our lives. It was the Brain Audit that started us on this journey and it’s what enables us to take our 3 month vacation. All the products then lead to clients buying and to consulting buying [inaudible 00:13:24] courses and we’ve made friends with many of our clients through the world. We travel with them, we enjoy ourselves and I wish the same for you. If you would like to come to the workshop the link is at www.psychotactics.com/dc. This podcast had been brought to you by psychotactics.com and of course the 3 month vacation. Bye for now.
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Mon, 9 February 2015
For most of us life is about work, work and more work. And no matter whether you have a small business, are in the online marketing space or in consulting, you feel rushed and hassled. This podcast is about how to slow down using the three concepts of "meditation, relaxation and vacation".
Sean:Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you’re listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy you work and enjoy your vacation time. Did you know that “medication” sounds a lot like “meditation”? Well, I didn’t know that, and I’ve been playing around with it in my head, “Medication, meditation. Medication, medication, meditation.”
When we talk about the three-month vacation, it’s very easy to just think of going away; but as you know, we don’t have to leave the desk to go away. We could just be here. Should we go away, or should we stay? Do we really have to choose? As you know, it’s summer in December here in New Zealand, and there’s a lot of time because we take time-off around December the 20th, and then we don’t get back to work till almost February, and this is pretty much the whole country. Imagine the entire country going on vacation.
As you walk around on the streets of Auckland, well, there are no people around or very few people around. My wife, Renuka and I, we never go away when everyone else is going away because what’s the point? Everything is more expensive, there are bigger crowds, you have to wait a long time in restaurants, so we stay back and we sit on the deck, get some beer. We have a good time, and we read. When I was reading, I ran into this book by author/speaker Pico Iyer. First, just to backtrack, before I ran into the book, I ran into his TEDTalk.
In the TEDTalk, he was talking about how he started to meditate, how he started to relax. In his talk, he gets you to imagine gong to the doctor, and the doctor is saying, “Well, your cholesterol is up. Your blood sugar is up, etcetera, and you’ve got to exercise.” He says, “Most of us will go to the gym. Most of us would go for a walk. Most of us would do stuff like that, but imagine the doctor said, ‘You need to slow down. You need to take time off and meditate.
Take about half an hour, maybe meditate.’” It’s unlikely that any of us would feel the urgency to meditate, would we? I mean, we have so many things to do already. Really, that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Three things, meditation, relaxation, and vacation. All the “tions” together.
Now, of all these three, mediation is probably the only stuff I know of because it seems like you have to sit in one place or stay in one place, and then just be quiet; and so what I’d do is I’d go for a walk, and I’d hum the same song over and over again, almost like a chant. I was happy doing that, and I thought, “Well, that’s meditation;” and it probably is. I don’t know, but I found that with TheEndApp, it was much easier to do this, and that is to just clear your head of all the thoughts. I’m not very ambitious to begin with, and I don’t suggest you get too ambitious because it’s very, very hard to meditate.
If you’ve ever tried meditating, you know exactly what I mean. It is extremely hard. The moment you decide, “Well, I’m going to be very quiet and clear my mind of all the thoughts,” every single thought comes rushing through. It’s like as if you opened the door and started screaming, “Come on, guys. Bring in all the thoughts.” That’s how meditation is. It’s so weird, and yet time and time again, you read about it, and you’re not sure how to go about it. I ran into this website at Calm.com. That’s C-A-L-M-.com. They had a lovely app. It’s free, and they also have a website.
You don’t need to have the app. You can just have your computer on, and they take you through a guided meditation. It’s very hard at first. It’s just this emptying out of your brain. Not sleeping, not dreaming, not doing anything, just completely blank. Just like looking at the clouds, one cloud after another, after another. Just completely blank, and so I’d recommend that you start there. What I started doing was every day, before I go for a walk, I meditate for 10 minutes. I just lie on the floor, and I go for 10 minutes. Then, I go to the café, and my wife started this. She says, “Okay, let’s be quiet for two minutes.” We close our eyes and sit at the café, and you can hear the coffee.
When your mind is that quiet, you can hear everything. It just screams through, and it filters out those thoughts. It’s very cool because in a day that’s completely chaotic, we need to have these moments of meditation, and it’s good for your brain. I mean, this is about business, but it’s also about taking that time off, just those few minutes in a day. That brings us to the end of the first part which is mediation. It takes us to the second part which is relaxation.
When you think of relaxation, you probably think, “Okay. I’m just going to lie on the bed, or I’m just going to lie on the safe, and read a book, and relax.” That’s nice, but what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t take you out of the house. What I found is that as long as you’re in the house, you’re not as relaxed as you could be. What we started doing was taking a day or two away. We don’t go very far. We could go just half an hour away from where we live, but we go away from our home, and this is very important.
Once you go away from home, everything about your home is left behind like the clothes that needed to be folded, the garbage that needs to be taken out, the coffee blender that needs fixing, the … Whatever issues you have, and there are many of these issues. The moment you leave home, those issues stay behind. Suddenly, you start to relax, and you find that this level of relaxation starts the moment you head away from home. What we found is that in about 24 hours, we feel like we’ve been away for a week.
By the time you’re away for a couple of days, it seems like you’ve been away forever, and most of don’t do that. In fact, right after we got married, we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t go anywhere for a long time, and then we decided that’s what we’re going to do. A lot of these comes from planning. All of your work comes from planning, but even the vacation, the time away, the meditation, the relaxation. Everything comes from planning. It doesn’t just show up like that. We have to sit down at the start of the year and work out when do we have these bouts of relaxation away from home and when we do we have the vacation which is a long way from home and for … Along the previous.
The thing about relaxation is that those 48 hours can change the way you continue to work, the way you work with your clients, the way you deal with issues when you go back, and so having those little spots makes a big difference. Like for instance right now, we have the article writing course, and this is the toughest writing course in the world. It is very demanding for both the students and for me. You can be sure that once four weeks have passed, I’m going to need a couple of days off.
It’s very easy to say, “No, no, no. We don’t have that kind of time.” Just like we do with meditation, “We don’t have that kind of time. We don’t have two days off. We have to do this, and we have to do that.” The moment you allocate that time, it changes everything. The funny thing is that it changes your mindset even if you’re on vacation. This summer, we started out not checking email, not doing all those kinds of things, and you would think, “Well, it will take a few days, and you’ll be fine.” It wasn’t fine.
A week passed, and I was still waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I like to sleep a lot in the afternoons, especially on vacation. I’ll sleep two, three hours even, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than half an hour. I was still wound up, and it’s only when I got to Waipu, which is about a couple of hours from here that I relaxed. Two weeks into a vacation, the moment I stepped away from home, and I think the same thing applies to you as well. What we need to do really is stuff for ourselves because we’re always doing stuff, but it’s not stuff for ourselves, and it’s definitely not this relaxation that we desperately need. This takes us to the third part which is vacation.
Vacation has always been a big part of my life, but planning the vacation was what I learned from my friend Julia. What Julia would do was she’d book the vacation at the start of the year, and then they had to go. Everything was booked. I remember the year that we went to Japan, the year they had the tsunami, and I wasn’t keen on going there even though we were going several months after the tsunami; but it was booked, so we went. We had a really good time. We learned so much about a different culture, ate different foods. Something I might not have done if we hadn’t booked everything in advance.
Here I am, preaching to the choir as it were. We already know that mediation, that relaxation and vacation are good for us. We know that, so why doesn’t it work for everyone? Why don’t we end up feeling on top of the world? Why is it that we feel like we’re more tired than ever before? There are reasons why it doesn’t work, and the first reason and probably the most important reason of all is email. I have a friend, and she goes on vacation, and she say, “Well, I only check email and work for three hours in a day.”
No, no, no, no, no. You can’t do that. Vacation is nothing. It’s like mediation, nothing. It’s like relaxation, nothing. No email. Get someone else to check your email. You’re not that important. That brings us to the second point, of course, which is, “I’m the most important person here. Nothing can happen without me.” I have a very simple philosophy, and that is, “I can spend time at the beach or spend time in hospital,” and I choose to spend time at the beach. Sure, you’re important, but why are you earning all these money? Why are you doing all these stuff? It is to enjoy yourself.
If you’re going to have this self-importance that no one else can do the job you’re supposed to be doing, well, you’re a bit in trouble, and you need that vacation. Of course, the third one is the most obvious of all which is too much activity. You can’t go on vacation and see 300 cathedrals. You just cannot. They’re boring after a while, and they all will start to look the same. We have a vacation philosophy, “We’re called the five-monument people.” That means we look at five monuments or five places we’re interested, and we’re done.
If we go to Istanbul, five things, and we’re done. If we go to Washington D.C., five things, and we’re done. Friends who know us, they will drive us fast on some of these monuments and go, “There you go. One, two, three, four, five. We’re done. Let’s go to eat.” Of course, that is crazy, but you get the point. You don’t want to have too much activity. If you have all of these stuff packed back to back, you never get relaxed. You never get to nothingness. Nothingness is amazing, but only once you start to get a hold of it.
To me, a three-month vacation, not all three months together, one month at a time is part of my work. It helps my work get better. It helps me relax. It makes me want to do better stuff. I think that if there’s one thing that we could do today is to meditate. That’s one thing you can do at your desk. Go to that website, Calm.com, C-A-L-M-.com. Download the app or just listen to it on your computer. I think that will make a big difference. Five minutes, you can start off with five minutes. You can go with 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It’s up to you. It’s a much easier way to meditate.
I think the second thing, and here I am breaking my own rules saying one thing and telling you about two things. The second thing is just book a couple of days somewhere close by, 20 minutes away, 30 minutes away. Just go. Leave home. Leave the garbage. Leave the coffee grinder. Leave all that stuff home. Of course, leave your email for two days. I’m sure someone can manage it, and you will find that while you may not, at least at this point, make a three-month vacation a reality, that’s where you’re headed. You want to start right now. You want to start today, and you want to relax.
That brings us to the end of this podcast. Before we go, where are we headed for our monthly vacation? We’re going to Sardinia, Italy. We’ve been to the mainland before, and I know Italy is a big place. You can never get enough of Italy, but Sardinia seems to be a completely different space altogether. We’re going from one island to another island. We hope the coffee is good. Before that, we have the info-product workshop, and that is in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C.
It’s about information products. It is how to create powerful information products, whether it’d be a webinar, or a workshop, or a presentation, a book. The reason why it’s so important today is because there’s so much junk out there. This workshop isn’t about showing you how to write or create that presentation. It is the structure of what makes compelling information, how do you put everything together, so that customers go from one end right to the other end, and then come back for more.
That’s why it’s different. It shows you exactly what you need to do to make information structure compelling, so that you can take whatever you know, all of that knowledge, and package it in a way that customers consume from one end to the other because once they do, they come back. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three-Month Vacation. Now, if you haven’t been to iTunes and left us a glowing testimonial, then this is your chance, so please leave that testimonial because I’d really appreciate it. Bye for now. Bye-bye.
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The Three Month Vacation Podcast
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