Sun, 29 March 2015
Most of us make a fundamental mistake when dealing with the first few paragraphs. We put too many problems in, right away. And it's a mistake. A big mistake! It's like an air traffic controller letting three planes land on the same runway. So how do we avoid this problem? And is the problem over once the "plane" lands? Or is there more to worry about? --------------------
Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
-------------------- Sean D'Souza:Imagine you are an air traffic controller and you've got three planes circling the airport. Are you going to land all three at once? Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from the Three Month Vacation. Today, we're going to be talking about how you need to dwell on a single problem instead of several problems when you're writing a sales page. Now why would a sales page be critical to you and how would it be connected to a three-month vacation? It doesn't matter who you are. At some point in time, you're going to have to follow the three-prong system. If you haven't done so, listen to episode number two, where I outline the three-prong system. It is a system that has run for pretty much thousands of years, and it's based on three core concepts, which is creating products, services, and training. Today, we're trying to sell either a workshop, which is training, or a service or a product and you're trying to write a sales page. You know that once you write that sales page and once you sell that product, service, or training, it generates income and clients, and then you get to go on your three-month vacation. Even as you're sitting there, you're trying to land three planes, and that's a mistake. I don't have to tell you it's a mistake. You already know it's a mistake. You know it's a mistake when you're trying to land three planes, but the moment you get onto the sales page, all hell breaks loose. How do we prevent this from happening? How do we land a single plane at a time? If you follow this podcast, you know that we have three topics that we cover and then an action plan. What are those three topics that we're going to cover today? The first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at the problem and how these problems seem to circle the airport and how we have to land them one at a time. The second thing is once they land, what are we going to do with them? The third thing is when do we give them a break? When do we get to the solution? Let's look at these three and see how we can get this sales page to really work for us so that we can start to sell our products, services, and our training. The moment you sit down to write a sales page, you have to focus on the biggest problems that you're solving. It doesn't matter whether you have a product or service, you are solving a bunch of problems and this is where you run into a dilemma. Any product or service that you're selling is going to solve several problems, and you're going to feel like you have to stack them all together. When you go to some sales pages, what you find is you won't find a single problem that they're dealing with. You will find that they put in problem number one, problem number two, problem number three, problem number four, problem number five. Then they ask you, "Are you having any of these problems?" That sounds like five planes circling the airport and you're trying to land every single one of them. What should you do? What you should do is do what any air traffic controller would do; you land a single plane. For us to take this analogy home, we have to treat that plane as a priority, as if there were an emergency. Even if there were a dozen planes circling the airport, one plane has an emergency; it has to land right now. As an air traffic controller, you have to bring that plane down, and this is what you do. You find the biggest problem. How do you know it's the biggest problem? When you give your customer a list of the problems that you're solving, the customer will usually come back and say, "Okay. Out of these three problems, out of those five problems, this one, this is the biggest problem." You know it's their biggest problem and you know you're solving their biggest problem because if you said, "I'm not going to have this anymore. I'm not going to solve this problem anymore," they don't want your product or service. To illustrate this, let's take an example. Let's say you are selling a car to a mother, and she has four kids. Now she wants to buy the car because of fuel efficiency; she want to buy it because of style; she wants to buy it because of space. The car is solving three different problems, and if you were to take away one of them, say you take away space, say you said, "Let's get a smaller car. You'll still get style and fuel efficiency," and she says, "No. I need this because I need to take my kids to soccer practice, and I need to take them for music classes and stuff like that. I need to take all four of them." That's when you know you're solving the biggest problem, and that is one of space. Of course, she would like the style. Of course, she would like the fuel efficiency, but the space, that's the overriding problem. That is the first plane that you've got to land. Instead of dealing with all three problems or all the five problems, you actually drive home just one problem. Once you've done that, you've finished your first part. This takes us to the second part, which is you have to get the plane to the gate. This is very important. Most people think once you land the plane, there is nothing to do, but you know, there have been plane crashes after the plane has landed. That takes us to the second part. What do you do once that plane is landed? Here we are in the second part. Your plane has landed and it is taxiing towards the gate. What's happening at this point in time? At this point in time, you haven't gone away from that problem. Now, what you're doing is you're driving home the consequences. You're driving home the reason why they have to go ahead and what would fall apart if they didn't go ahead with that one problem. We're still on that one plane. The plane has landed. Now, in the second part what we're doing is we are making sure that the consequences are driven home. If we took that example of the woman buying the car, well, we would first bring up the problem of space. Then we would drive home the consequences of not having that space and how other cars seem to compensate on that space and how it becomes uncomfortable in the car. You're still talking about space and space and space and space, because you're getting that plane to the gate. You're doing this with the consequences of not making that decision, and because that is the one thing that is most crucial to the customer, that is the one thing that they are listening to. They want to know that you understand their problem and that you understand the consequences and you are giving them more depth. Those consequences that you're talking about, it's bringing more depth to them and they understand, "Yes, this is exactly what I want." What about those two other planes in the sky, the ones on style and fuel efficiency? You want to let them fly for awhile. Let them circle the airport. We're dealing with this one plane. We've landed it; we make sure that we get to the gate with the problem and with the consequences. At this point in time, we are itching to get across our solution, which is presenting the workshop, presenting the car, presenting the whatever you're selling, and you have to hang on. Those planes up in the sky, they're going to crash if you leave them alone, so you land the second plane, which is the second problem, and then you drive home the second set of consequences. Let them get to the gate, land the third plane, and at this point in time, you're ready to bring out the solution. This is when you get all those customers off the plane. You know how they rush off the plane? Your customer, reading your sales page, this is how they feel. They want to get off that plane right now. As air traffic controllers, what we've done is we made sure that we get one plane down, one problem, then we drive home the consequences, and then we've got them to the gate. All of them have got to the gate at the same time, the three problems and the three consequences, and then we can let them all off together. Now this is not what happens at regular airports, but bear with me. The analogy breaks a bit here, but what you want to do is you want to drive home all of those three problems and then, and only then, get the customers off the plane. This is where you announce it. You say, "Announcing the Article Writing Workshop," and you give them your solution. The analogy falls apart a bit towards the end, but to understand it, it's very simple. You have to make sure that you land one problem at a time, drive home the consequences; land the second problem, drive home the consequences; land the third problem, drive home the consequences. Then, and only then, do you bring your solution. Now do you have to have three problems before you bring home your solution? No, you don't. You could have just one problem. It could be just one plane circling the airport. You bring out that problem and then you drive home the consequences for the next three of four paragraphs, or you could have a couple of planes and you land the first one, drive home the consequences; land the second one, drive home the consequences. Get them all to the gate, then unload the whole lot together. Then get the solution. Really, that's the summary. The mistake that most people make is they're always trying to get too many things across, and it's like giving someone five instructions at the same time. You give them one instruction and they follow it. A very good example of just this one plane landing is on the article writing course. If you go onto psychotactics.com and search for the article writing course, you'll see that it's just about how to stop knocking on clients' doors and how to get them to call you instead. It goes about just talking about the consequences of knocking on clients' doors, how it's so hard to get business every time you have to knock on them and how clients tend to put off the purchase and how articles then help you sneak in the side door. It takes awhile before that plane gets to the gate, and that's really what you want to do. You want to drive home those consequences. You want to get to the next problem, drive home those consequences. On this article writing course page, you will see that the next problem comes up as well, which is, "Hey, the competition can write articles, too, can't they?" That's the second problem, and then the consequences are driven home. Then the third one, which is, "But my articles are boring." Then we're talking about how you can be entertaining with your articles. We have three big problems before we say, "Announcing the article writing course." You already have the summary, but let me give you some steps here. What are you going to do? You really want to look at all the problems that you're solving. Now you can do this yourself sitting at your desk and banging your head against the computer, or you can go to a client, take them to lunch and ask them the problems that they're facing and they will give you a whole list of them. Then in step two, you get them to rank it. They'll tell you which is their biggest problem, second biggest problem, third problem. You've got three planes; that's enough. I'll tell you what to do with the rest later. Now, you've got those three planes. Now, you have to get the consequences of the client not acting on those three problems. Ask the client. Ask them, "What would be the consequence of not dealing with this issue?" They will tell you, and you just record it. Don't even write it down; record it and transcribe it. You now have a situation where you've got the problems, the whole list of problems. You've got a ranking, and the client has given you the consequences of them not acting on it. You really don't have to do any copywriting. Then you ask the client what their solution would be like, what would it look like? They will tell you, and then you get that down as well. What are you going to do with the rest of the problems? Supposing they came up with a list of seventeen problems. Put them in the bullets. Put them in your features and benefits. You don't have to have them all up there at the start of the page. Up there, you just have to deal with those two or three flights that are landing. Now, your sales page is focused. Now, your sales page is actually doing what it should be doing. This is why some sales pages work better than others. This is why some people sell more products and services than other people. This is why they go on vacations. Landing five planes or three planes or two planes, even, is a disaster. Land one plane at a time, drive home the consequence, get them to the gate, and then you've done a really good landing. It's funny that it's called a landing page, isn't it? I didn't think about it until right now. That brings us to the end of this episode, and this is Episode number thirty-two, so you know what that means, right? You can just go to psychotactics.com/32 and you'll find the transcript, you'll find other resources. Whatever you want out there, you can download it from there as well. You can also download it on iTunes or you can go to Stitcher if you're on android and you can listen to this. For members of www.5000bc.com, you can log in and we'll be having an interactive session where you can bring in your first problem, second problem, third problem, and we'll do an audit there. Bring it to 5000bc and let's solve this problem within 5000bc itself. If you're not part of 5000bc, you should get on the waiting list and pay your ten dollars. Yes, it's ten dollars to be on the waiting list. Then while you're waiting, you can read the Brain Audit, and it explains a lot of these concepts. The Brain Audit is available on the site at psychotactics.com/brain audit. If you have any feedback, really bad feedback, like not good stuff, or really good stuff, then write to me at sean@psychotactics.com. You can also write in for requests. If you have some question that you want to be answered, well, I can do this on the podcast. In fact, the last episode number thirty-one, that was a question that was sent in from Australia and we dealt with that in a reasonably long episode. It was twenty-three minutes, I think. There you go. Send in your questions as well, and I'll do my best to answer it.
Hasta luego from the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Bye-bye. |
Thu, 26 March 2015
Whether you conduct online courses or workshops, there's something we fail to consider. It's called the Safe Zone. If we just want to play Internet guru, we don't care if the clients can actually implement the information or not. But if we're keen to be real teachers, it's the ONLY thing we care about. Find out how the safe zone helps clients to consume and apply your material. And that's what makes them come back for more. In a world filled with "experts", you're creating a true learning experience. -------------------- Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ This episode is available at: http://www.psychotactics.com/31 --------------------
Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem 00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode / 00:02:30 Table of Contents 00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions 00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem 00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem 00:14:07 Summary 00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing 00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review
-------------------- Transcript
Sean D'Souza:In 2010, I decided to go for a walk at 6am, except it was Paris, and my wife was fast asleep. I decided, well, I could go and explore Paris a little bit, and so I did. It was a nice place. It is a nice place. It's full of people and markets and it was great. I walked for a couple of hours, and then I turned around and I found I was lost. I had taken some kind of road somewhere and I couldn't find my way back no matter what I tried. There I was in one of the most well-documented cities on the plant and I was feeling extremely unsafe. There were all these people around me and they were speaking a different language, and I didn't even know how to get back to where I was supposed to be.
This is a lot how students and participants feel when they're doing a course with you. Whether it's an online course or if it's a workshop, it's the same kind of feeling. They get this feeling of being unsafe, and your job as a teacher is to put them in the safe zone. In today's episode we're going to explore the safe zone. What is the safe zone? Why is it so important? How do you take the steps to get people into the safe zone? As usual, we're going to look at three things. The first thing is isolation. The second is mistakes, how do you make them make mistakes. The third is the group size. These three elements are critical to get people into a safe zone.
First, what is a safe zone? When you're doing a live course, you'll notice something, that people from the same company, they seem to sit with each other; or people that know each other, they seem to sit with each other. The reason for this is that they feel unsafe. Now they're there for a course; they should not feel unsafe. No one is coming to bite them, but that's how they react. On an online course, you can't see this activity, and so it's very difficult to realize how incredibly unsafe people feel when they're on the Internet. What you've got to do is you have to create that safety.
Safety is when people feel comfortable. They feel comfortable with their group. They feel comfortable with the pace of the stuff they're learning. They don't feel that intimidation. Mostly, they feel comfortable with you. You'll know they're comfortable with you when they start questioning your behavior. You're the teacher. You're the person training them, but they start questioning the system. They start questioning the way you've approached something. That's when you know that they're in the safe zone, because that's what happens at home, right? When you're at home, people don't just take your word for stuff. They'll ask you, "Why do you want me to do this? That's when they feel they're in the safe zone, when they can come back to you.
For you to create this safe zone is very critical simply because it enhances learning. Instead of it just being top-down, which is you, you're the boss, you're the teacher, it's now back and forth. When a student or participant realizes that there is flexibility in the system and there is safety in the system, they really relax, and that's when they learn. We all learn when we are completely relaxed, not when we're uptight.
Let's explore those three things. Let's start off with the first one, that is, isolation. What is isolation? When I teach the article-writing course, which I call the toughest writing course in the world, I have a responsibility as a teacher, and that is not to say that three people finish the course or five people finish the course. I have to take everyone across this minefield. What is in this minefield? You have headlines, connectors, disconnectors, storytelling. You have so many elements, and it's very easy to just throw it all together and say, "Okay, let's write."
What we have to do is we have to isolate. We have to take step-by-step. Often, just for the first fifty words, we'll take a week, two weeks, and this gets the fluency, the practice, and mostly it's about the isolation. Instead of looking at the entire article, which has so many elements, we focus on one tiny little bit and then we pull out that bit and then break it up into smaller bits. When you do that, what you get is this feeling of isolation.
The reason why isolation is so critical is because your instructions are always going to be misunderstood. For instance, when we do the cartooning course, we ask people to draw circles. Now how many ways can you draw circles? A lot of ways, apparently, because people will draw circles with crayons or colored pencils or large circles and small circles. Some people will do circles with some kind of design with it and some of them will be spartan. The point is that when you give an instruction, it can be interpreted in many ways. The moment you have multiple interpretations, you have creativity, but when you have creativity, you also have confusion.
I'll give you an example. Let's say I asked you to take a step. Now, obviously, you think I'm going to ask you to take a step forward, right? What if I meant you to take a step to the left or what if I meant you to take a step to the right or to the back? There are all these permutations, and the only way to reduce these permutations, to reduce their confusion and to create a safe zone is to have this factor of isolation.
A good example of this would be when I was learning badminton and I had this coach. If you looked at someone smashing the shuttlecock across, you'd look like one fluid motion, but, in fact, there were about five different steps. What he made me do was to work on the first step, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, and then the fifth, but not in one go. This was in five different sessions. This is what isolation is all about.
What happens is you get very, very good at executing and becoming very fluent at that one step. Clients get an enormous amount of confidence. Instead of you just rushing through a course or rushing through a workshop, you're isolating the steps. They master those steps, and then you move to the next one. If this sounds very Eastern, almost like karate or making sushi, then it's exactly that. Instead of this rush, rush, rush, get to the end, finish line, you're slowing things down. That creates a safe zone, because when the client shows up, they know they're not going to be intimidated; they're going to be taken through one little step. If they make the wrong step, you can gently nudge them in the right direction.
The goal for every teacher is to get their students to the finish line. When you do isolation, you get the students to the finish line in a state of fluency, and there's a big difference between someone at the finish line and someone who is fluent at the finish line. What you've got to do, really, is you have to sit down and look at the sections that you're teaching. Maybe you're teaching web design and maybe you're teaching about the home page. The home page might seem like a single page, but it has seven different components. I'm must making this up, of course. What you're going to do is sit down and work out how each component works and break it up into tiny little bits. Then the client takes one little step at a time, and they master it; and the next step, and they master it. This is isolation. This is the first step towards creating the safe zone.
Let's look at the second step, which is making mistakes. Ever since you were a little kid, you've been told you should make mistakes. You should learn from your mistakes; you should make your own mistakes. Then you go to school and you make mistakes and you get everything wrong, and the adult says to you, "Why did you make all these mistakes?" We learn very quickly that it's not a good idea to make mistakes.
Talent is a reduction of errors. When someone learns to fly a plane, it's very easy to technically fly the plane, but it's very difficult to pull a plane out of a crisis situation. The way a pilot is trained is through mistakes. They are put on a simulator, and the simulator is doing something crazy like crashing the plane and you have to pull out. The hydraulics have failed; you have to pull out. Something has happened and you have to pull out. You have to learn from the mistake.
How does the client learn from mistakes? Obviously, they don't want to make mistakes in the course. They don't want to get things wrong. What you do is you design a mistake session. On our courses, we design mistake sessions where if you get it wrong, you get it right. I'll say that again. You get it wrong, you get it right. If you get it right, you get it wrong. You can sense the feeling of fun here, can't you? You have to write headlines, but you don't write them correctly; you write them wrong.
What we do is we teach people how to write headlines. We show them why the headline works, how to deconstruct it. Then when they are proficient at it, we get them to break it. We get them to write headlines that are completely wrong. Of course, they have a lot of fun. They also get very frustrated, but the mistake highlights their skill and it creates fluency. When they have that fluency, they feel safe. They also feel safe just to make the mistake.
In a uniqueness course that I did in California and London, we did the same thing. I gave out a sheet in the first five minutes, and I said, "This is something that you have to solve. The only thing you have to know is that none of you are going to get it right." Everyone in the room immediately knew that they were not going to get it right; they were going to get it wrong. Crazy as it sounds, the entire mood of the room lifted. Then I was able to show them how uniqueness mattered and how copywriting, as it were, didn't make as much difference. What you're really doing is you are creating a situation where you're enabling the client to make a mistake.
In the article-writing course, which is another example, we have a situation where I'm teaching them to boil down the article to a single word. Even though I use the word, one word, one word, one word, which is a single word, but you understand that as a teacher and they don't understand what happens when they go and they boil it down to a couple of words or two or three words or a term. What you've got to do is you've got to help them make that mistake.
In the instructions, I say, "You can use one word or two words or a term, but I recommend that you use one word." Invariably, about fifty to seventy percent of the group will do exactly that; they will use one word, but a few will use two words or three words. That's when you highlight the mistake. You say, "Here's where you went wrong and here's why you went wrong and here's why I put you on the wrong path on purpose so that you could learn from the simulator exercise." Of course, you may get a little pushback, and the only reason you'll get that pushback is because they feel they're in a safe zone. They can push back. Then you explain things to them.
Sometimes, this mistake-making exercise, it needs to be highlighted. This is a mistake-making week. You cannot get it wrong unless you do it right. Sometimes, the mistake needs to be slid in quietly. They need to make the mistake by themselves, and then you need to help them fix it and explain why you put them through that exercise. Both of these elements of sliding the mistake or announcing the mistake is what helps people get into that safe zone. They now know they can make a mistake and not be penalized for making that mistake, so they relax. When they relax, they learn, and that's really what learning is all about.
This take us to the third part, which is the group size. Whenever you go to a conference, whenever you go to a workshop, or even when you're doing a course online, one of the greatest achievements of the people who have conducted the conference, who have organized the conference, is that they've got so many people in the room. This is like going into a classroom when you were five and to find two hundred people in that room. It is horribly intimidating. It's great for the organizer. It's great for the person that's having the workshop or the training course online, but it's terrible for everyone else. This is where you've got to understand that groups size matters.
At Psychotactics, when we do workshops we never take more than thirty-five people. When we do course like the article-writing course, we'll never take more than twenty-five people. I thought that was fine. I thought twenty-five people, that's not a lot of people; it's a whole lot better than two hundred people, but I was wrong. You have to get in from a mind that is intimidated by being in a group of twenty-five people. There was this one woman from France, Catherine, and she told me, "I'm not comfortable in such a large group." I'm going, "It's not such a large group." She says, "For me, it is." I had to ask her, "What do you mean by a smaller group?" She said, "Well, about ten people, that's okay-ish for me."
Eventually, what we found was that the group of six to seven people, that is ideal. Whenever we have our workshops, even if we have thirty-five people in the room, they are broken up into groups of six or seven people. The reason why it's six or seven is because if you have just two or three, a couple of people can dominate and they can go beyond their bounds. When you have six or seven, you have this little balance. It's important to note that just because you do this in a workshop, and we've done this in a workshop for many, many years, we didn't necessarily figure out that we had to do this online as well.
When I first started doing the article-writing course, I used to have twenty-five people in the same group. Again, because of the safe zone, someone said, "No, no, no. I want a group of six or seven." The moment I got this feedback, and this was in the middle of the course, I thought, "I don't really want to do this. This is going to increase my workload four hundred percent because now instead of looking at everyone's work at the same time, in the same area, I have to go into four sub-areas and click and unclick and do all those kinds of things."
Because of the safe zone, the client becomes a little adamant, and this is really good. This shows you that there is this feedback. There is this back and forth even as the course is going on, even as the workshop is headed towards day one or day two or day three. What we did was we broke it up into six and seven. The moment I did it, I realized that it works. You've got to create the safe zone, and big groups don't create a safe zone. They create a feeling of anxiety, of being just one among many, many people. We think that it's okay to be in a big group because we won't be noticed, but no learning happens. If you're really a teacher, you want learning to happen; you want fluency to happen; you want mastery to happen. That happens in a small group.
Let's summarize what we've learned today. The first thing that we tackled was this concept of the safe zone and how people get very comfortable in that safe zone and there's feedback back and forth. The three elements of the safe zone were isolation … What you do is you take one section like if you're teaching about web design, just take the home page, break it up into five, six, seven components and see how they gain fluency. Think of yourself less as this modern day guru and more as a teacher that's teaching a skill like karate, or karate, as we know it, where the little bits like in Karate Kid, "wax on, wax off," that was isolation.
The second thing to consider is that clients don't want to make mistakes, and they yet want to get their assignment right, so you create assignments where they make mistakes, where the only way to get the assignment correct is to make a mistake. If you have a photography course, make them take pictures out of focus, ;make them take pictures with the wrong ISO setting, and you will see that they will gain fluency. The third thing is the group size. If you really want to teach people, if you really want them to get fluency, you have to break it down into smaller group sizes. About six or seven people in a group, that's more than enough. Two or three is too small; six or seven is just about right.
This brings us to the one thing that you can do today. If you are like my badminton coach, then you will take that one action and break it up into five small actions and get your clients to work through those actions. The reason why it's so powerful is you can do this yourself. You can see for yourself that you've been speeding through things and you need to take one step at a time. Isolation is where you need to start.
This brings us to the end of this episode. Now to go back to France, how did I get back? I was lost. I did get back. What I did was I found an Internet café and I went in there and I punched in my address onto Google Maps, and it told me how to get back. There I had printed instructions on how to get back to the apartment, and I was back in my safe zone.
If you want to get more of these episodes, you can find them on iTunes; that's for all those on Apple. You can find them on Stitcher if you're on Android. You can also find it on our website if you go to psychotactics.com/podcast. To get the transcript and the download of this particular episode, and this is episode number thirty-one, you go to www.psychotactics.com/31. This is true for every episode, so if you want to find the transcript for any episode, just go www.psychotactics.com/29 or 43 or whatever. We're not up to forty-three yet, but we will be.
It's 5:22am, and I have to head back to writing my book on pricing. I finished the first book, kind of. It's one book out of three books, and it’s not the usual book on pricing, which is all these measurements and all this kind of stuff, but it enables you to increase prices without losing customers. We're doing a trust-the-chef offer at this point in time, so it's at its lowest price, and with Psychotactics, the prices always go up, up and away. They never come down; they're always going up. If you want to get to the pricing book, this is a good time.
If you haven't already done so, leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps boost our ratings and gets other people like you to listen to this. Go to iTunes or go to Stitcher and leave a review.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye-bye. |
Sat, 21 March 2015
Most of us use benefits or solutions when presenting our products or services?and not the problem. So why bother with the problem? Will it actually improve the conversion on our sales pages? Will it improve our e-mail marketing? Will it get more attention when we're making our presentations? The answer is yes, yes and yes. And you can do it without being negative in any way. So how do you do it? Let's find out in this episode. /
-------------------- Useful Resources
Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem
------- Sean: Have you ever been in the situation where you've been in the shower, it's nice warm water, and then suddenly it's freezing cold? That's because someone else turned on a tap somewhere else in the same apartment. No? That hasn't happened to you? How about a computer? Have you had a computer that went vroom, vroom, vroom, ready to start and it started to go slow and slow and then boom? These are problems and problems get attention. The problem is that we don't make use of the problems when we're getting our message across and we certainly don't use it the way it should be. How should the problem be used and why not use the solution instead? That's today's episode on attention getting. On the last episode of attention getting, we talked about how you can use the two concepts of novelty and consequences, but here's another way, using the problem. What are we going to cover today? You like the three things, don't you? We'll cover three things, then we'll do the one thing that you can do and then we'll wrap up. Just in case you haven't heard Episode No. 24, well, listen to it again. I had to do it twice. The first time I did it, I was half asleep and then I had to re-edit the whole thing all over again because the first one really put me asleep. Imagine that? The irony. It was about attention getting and the voice was so slow. If you got that episode or you thought this is really slow, well, there's a new episode. Delete the old one, download the new one again and you'll find that it's much better, much better music, much better tone, and yes, I'm awake in that one. That was Episode No. 24 on how to get attention through novelty and consequences, use the problem. We're going to cover three things in this episode. The first thing is why solutions are less effective than problems, and second is why problems get your attention. The third is the mistake that most of us make with implementing the problem. Let's start with the first one which is why solutions don't work as well as problems. To understand solutions, you have to understand your day-to-day life and your day-to-day life is simply a whole bunch of solutions. When you sit on the chair, that's a solution. When you switch on your computer and it works perfectly, that's a solution. When you get in you car and you turn on the ignition, that is a solution. What is the problem? The problem is the opposite of the solution. Let's take those instances and you know where I'm going with this. You sit on the chair, it breaks. You turn on the car ignition, it won't start. That's where your brain gets activated. You don't think of your chair, you don't think of your car, you don't think of all the things that work. That's because the brain is focused on the problem. It's not focused on the solution. When we get into marketing and when we get onto our website and we get into networking and we get into our presentations, what we tend to do is we start to lead with the solution and that's a problem. The reason why we put our audiences to put is because we're leading with the solution. When someone asks us what we do, what we so is we immediately talk about our solution and you notice that immediately those people start to fall asleep. They are very polite. Let's say you're at a networking meeting, so let's say you're a software developer and let's say you make time-tracking software. Someone asks you what do you do? Well, you spit out your solution. You say we make time-tracking software and this helps you keep track of your time when you're working. That's your solution. Notice how your brain doesn't get very activated by something like that. Now the reason why we do is because we've been taught to talk about our benefits. We've been taught to bring out the solution but the brain kind of goes to sleep every time someone brings out a solution. When you turn that into a problem, that's when your brain gets activated. Now, to be very fair, there is nothing wrong with solutions. Problems increase the heart rate, solutions decrease the heart rate. The question is now that we know that solutions aren't as effective as problems, how do we go about creating the problem? That takes us to the second part of today which is creating the problem because we don't really want to be negative, do we? Here we are in the second part which is how to bring out the problem. Now the biggest objection is what we have to deal with at this point in time and that is we do not want to be negative. We do not want to highlight a problem, and yet to get the customer's attention when we are writing that email, we have to bring up the problem. When we are on the sales pitch, we have to bring up the problem. What is this problem? How do we get to this problem without being negative? Let's take the example of that time-tracking app that we talked about earlier. Let's say you're still a software developer and you have the solution for a time-tracking app. As we go through the internet and look at different time-tracking apps, we find that the solution pops up everywhere. One will say log, learn, optimize your life, every second counts. That's a headline, by the way. The second one says the ultimate timer, it's insanely simple, it's built for speed and ease of use. The third one is find your ideal work/life balance, and it goes on to talk about understanding your daily habit so you can focus and be more productive. The fourth one is a time-tracker that makes it easy to record your work hours and to calculate your income, and to build a customer if you're self-employed. Are you still awake? You shouldn't be because all of these solutions have put you to sleep but then let's go to letsfreckle.com. That's L-E-T-S-F-R-E-C-K-L-E-dot-com. Immediately your brain is locked in because the headline there is my team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. What is so precise about that headline? It's precise because it's not something that was invented by someone sitting at their computer. You can be the best copywriter in the world but when a client speaks, they have a totally different voice and this one shows the pain of the team going through time-tracking apps and getting frustrated with it. This is some kind of manager and that is what makes it so powerful, that emotion-built voice of the problem they've been having with time-tracking apps. We looked at both the problem and the solution. We've seen that the solution is very important because it reduces your heart rate and the problem increases the heart rate. The issue here is that your problem cannot be manufactured at your desk. It needs to come from a customer. It needs to come from a real customer. They bring up an issue that you would not think of. The best copywriters in the world, they don't sit at their desk and they write. They go out there, they meet the customers, they speak to them on the phone, they take them out to lunch, and then they get the words from the customer. They get the problems from the customer which they then put on a webpage, which they then put on emails. That has more power than you could ever dream of just by sitting at your computer and thinking what I'm going to write today. When you think of it, at Psychotactics, we have an article writing course and what is the problem with article writing? Usually you think, well, it has something to do with article writing. It is about the fact that you can't write quickly enough or you can't complete an article, things like that. Yet, when you go there, it talks about how to stop knocking on clients' doors and to get them to call you instead. Now, you might have a fluke and think of that sitting at your desk but most of the time it's the reason why customers are motivated to do something and they need to tell you that. They need to bring out that pain. You need to put that pain in the headline. Notice it's not negative, not any more negative than, say, the newscasts are telling you that there's a storm or a cyclone or a hurricane headed your way. Not any more negative than someone telling you, hey, your tires are balding and you might skid off the road. When the problem comes from the customer themselves, you will find it is very powerful and it's not negative, and it brings out this whole emotion that you would struggle to work on if you were just sitting at your desk and trying to figure it out. With that, we come to the end of the second part. We did the problem and the solution. We found out that the problem is more intense than the solution. We notice the dog poo, not the sidewalk. We notice the rain, not the sunshine as much. This takes us to the third part and the most important part of all, which is sticking to the problem. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean that you're going to stick to it. What do I mean by sticking to a problem? To go back to that problem of the software developer that has the time-tracking app, well the problem was that the team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. Now, you want to drive home that problem. Why has the team gone through that? What have been the frustrations of your team as they have gone through the time-tracking app? What have been the consequences? What happened? This is a story. This is an unfolding story. It's like a movie. It's like drama. It's amazing, it's got power and detail that you don't want to let go of. You don't want to jump into the solution right now. You want to drive home that problem before you get to the solution. The second thing is you definitely don't want to go into another problem. You want to stick to the problem. You want to drive home the problem. You want to drive home the consequences. Once you're done, then and only then do you move to the second problem, or if you like, to the solution. What I tend to do is I have a problem in the headline and a very brief solution because you want to increase the heart rate and decrease the heart rate. From that point on, you just stick to that problem. For instance, when you looked at the article writing course, it was how to stop knocking on clients' doors and get them to call you instead. Now, that was the problem. There's a bit of a solution there. It is learn why articles do a far superior job of attracting clients you want and how the right articles make you the expert in your field. Now that's a very brief solution there and now we stick to the original problem, which is how to stop knocking on clients' doors. Knocking on clients' doors can be the hardest way to get business, yet we do it all the time. In order to get the clients' attention, we send out sales letters, we make presentations, we do everything we can to get clients. The more we try to sell, the higher the clients' hackles go up. The more we try to convince, persuade, the more the client wants to say no or avoid you. That's just the first paragraph. Then it goes on to why clients put off the purchase. The first reason why they put off the purchase, the second reason why they put off the purchase, and only then do you get to presenting the article writing course. Sticking with a single problem is very critical and the reason why it's critical is because the problem, which was in your headline, got the customers' attention. Now when you stick to that singular problem, it gets the customers' attention and keep that customers' attention. That's what you're really doing. You're getting their attention with the headline. You're keeping it with a couple of paragraphs. Then you're moving to a solution. That brings us to the end of this episode but let's summarize. What are the three things we covered? We started out with the solution. We found out why the solution is very important. It's important simply because it reduces the heart rate. If you just have a problem, it just gets the heart beating so quickly that the customer's not able to focus for very long. It does attract. The problem does attract but the solution has reason to be there and that reason is that it reduces the heart rate. The problem and the solution both co-exist. The problem comes first, then the solution. Now, the problem is very critical and the way to get the problem is not to sit at your desk but to go out there and speak to your customers and they will come up with something which is mind-boggling, something that you would not have thought of. The third thing that we covered was simply that you cannot just have the problem there for one second and then disappear. Most people do that. They put in the headline, they may sneak in a line or two, and then, poof, they're gone off either to the next problem or they've gone to the solution. You want to make it linger. You want to make it stay there for awhile. People need to know that you know how they feel about this problem. When you drive home the consequences of not dealing with that problem, they can feel those consequences and so it becomes more powerful but it also becomes more natural. This is exactly how life pans out. We look at a problem, we figure out the consequences, and then we take action. If we see a solution, there's nothing to fix so we go about our lives as it were. What's the one thing that you can do today? Maybe you're going for a networking meeting. Maybe you have to write a sales page on your website. Maybe you just have to write an email. The question to ask yourself is this: Do I have a prospect or a client and can I speak with them? Because when you speak with them, they will give you a list of their problems. All you have to do is make them pick which is the biggest problem. When they pick the biggest problem, ask them why it is the biggest problem, how it became the biggest problem, what did they think are the consequences of that problem. If you just stick to those three questions, you'll get at least a couple of paragraphs if not three or four paragraphs. The best part is you don't have to do any of the writing, just a bit of polishing and you're done. You're ready to go with your problem and your solution. To get attention, the brain requires a problem, so use a problem, get to the customer and get cracking. If you would like to learn more about problems and solutions and consequences, then you should get yourself the Brain Audit Kit. You can get this at www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and I would recommend that you get the Brain Audit Kit. You can get the Brain Audit at $9.99 but what you miss out is on the entire workshop experience so there is an entire workshop in the Brain Audit Kit, and it also has additional audio from all the questions that we've got over the years. The Brain Audit by itself is a very comprehensive book but the Brain Audit Kit goes several levels deeper. It explores the mistakes that people make. It explores the trouble that they've had so your experience is richer and you don't make the same mistakes. I'm not suggesting that you don't get the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit by itself is very powerful but if you get the Brain Audit Kit, you will find that you're able to go deeper and get greater benefits in a shorter amount of time. Not at first, you still have to go through the information but you will find that there is enormous depth that you don't want to miss out on. The Brain Audit, as you know, was one of our first books and since then we've gone on to write many books. The book I'm writing right now is about pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers but it covers the psychology of pricing, how to increase your prices, and then how to maintain and manage your prices. It's a very comprehensive series. The key to actually getting this book out is what I'm going to explain in the information workshop so it's the structure. Most people think that it's the content that matters, that if you have it in your head, that's fine, but as writers, as creators, we have a big problem. That problem is that we spin in our head. We have so much information that we don't know how to put it down on paper. We just stack it up and when you stack it up, the client gets overwhelmed. When they get overwhelmed, you know what happens. Nothing happens. They don't act on it and they don't consume your book or your product or your workshop, and then they don't come back. The information product workshop in Maryland does just that. We spend three days and not two days or one day because we don't want to hurry through it or we want to make sure that you get it, that you actually work through it. That's on May 5, 6, and 7. You can find out more at www.psychotactics.com/dc. Finally, if you haven't already left a review on iTunes, please do so today because it's really helpful to us. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying get attention today and get it with the problem, and bye for now. Arrivederci.
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Tue, 17 March 2015
When you're making a presentation, how do you fire up your audience? There are many ways to get that Powerpoint or Keynote presentation going. But one of the most effective ways is to issue a challenge. The audience then waits for you to succeed (or fail). But you can't fail, can you? You're a magician who has practiced the tricks to perfection. This episode is about creating a challenge?then bringing the entire audience alive with the magic trick. ------------------ Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / / Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc / Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver / / For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ / / 00:03:48 Creating the Challenge
------------------ Why Creating and Meeting Challenges Fire Up An Audience
When you're sitting in a magic show, you don't doodle. You don't take out your pen, a sheet of paper and draw weird, funny squiggles.
And that's because a magician creates action. And most of the action is centred around a challenge. And while a presentation is no magic show, there's a way to take your audience from doodle-zone to challenge-zone in a matter of minutes.
So what is the challenge-zone? The challenge is something almost magical. Something that the audience would find hard to believe. Like for instance, a magician would make an elephant appear in the room. But the audience is skeptical—yet anticipating some action. This is the challenge-zone. In a world that's full of noise, the challenge immediately ramps up attention.
Let's slip into an early example When I do the presentation for The Brain Audit, I will often start off telling the audience, that at about the 17 minute mark, I will get everyone in the room to think of the same question. To a skeptical audience, that seems impossible. How could any presenter know what every audience member is thinking, let alone making you think of the very same question?
But the question is based on a trigger And if you've read The Brain Audit (which you should, if you haven't) you learn how to create the trigger. It's composed of the problem, solution and target profile. And when you string these three together, you get a single question, "What do you mean by that?". Once the trigger is sprung, curiosity takes over, and you have the "What do you mean by that?" question at the top of your mind.
And that's just one example—so let's take another When I do a presentation on "Pricing", the challenge question is similar. I tell everyone that by the time I show them the price-grid, everyone will want to pay 15% more—instead of 15% less. And I'll create this desire for the more expensive option, without changing the core product. This means that if the core product is a workshop on ballroom dancing, the core product will stay the same. And yet, almost everyone in the room will choose the more expensive option.
You see the elephant in the room, don't you? There's no elephant, but you as a magician are creating the challenge. And the audience loves the fact that there's a challenge coming up. What they love even more is that you're promising to "mess with the minds" of the entire audience. They think the guy next to them may be susceptible, but they're not going to fall for some silly trick. And this is what gives the challenge more power. The more skeptical they are, the more you're able to convert them from skeptics to fanatical fans.
There's just one itty-bitty problem: How do you construct the challenge? The challenge must contain a method to get from A to B. It can't be just a concept. It must be something they can try for themselves. So for instance, there's this company called ioSafe. They make hard drives. And the beauty of their hard drive is that they can be dunked in water, blasted with a torch, or crushed under a road roller—and still survive. You can see how the challenge works, can't you? The challenge would be for people to try and destroy the drive.
But sure, that's a product and quite a unique product... What about if you're selling a service or even a concept? The core of any product/service or training should be that you're able to bring results. Yet, instead of picking many points of your service or product, you pick just one. For instance, we teach a course in Photoshop colouring (for cartoonists). And the way the demonstration goes is like this—we get rid of Photoshop—and the computer.
And imagine we're at the cafe, instead And the audience is asked to pick a letter for the "brush" tool in Photoshop. Of course, you chose B. And then to choose any number (on the keyboard) that represents 60% opacity. You may fumble, but you'll settle on 6. And then you ask them to choose between the left or right square bracket, to increase the size of the brush.
And they choose the right one—they always do. Whammo! You've shown them how to use the three core tool to colour, without so much as going next to a computer.
But it's not enough to create a challenge You have to make sure there's a space between issuing the challenge and showing them the "elephant in the room". Usually a good way to do this is to issue the challenge right at the start of the presentation. And give them an approximate time when you'll solve the mystery. e.g. In 17 minutes, or at the end of the first section. This keeps them focused not only on what you're saying, but on edge, anticipating the moment when you solve the mystery.
But won't the gap distract them? Yes, there's a gap between issuing the challenge and solving it, but the audience doesn't get distracted at all. Why? Because you've been clear. You've told them the time at which the problem will be solved. Now they're ready to focus on anything else that you have to say, expecting fully well that you will keep your promise at the right time.
And even if you're an expert, you don't want the audience to take over Notice how the magician doesn't ask your opinion when he does the magic trick? Well, the same applies to you. In every audience, there are likely to be hecklers. Or super-skeptics. You could put twenty elephants in the room and they'd still find fault with your method. If you ask the audience to raise their hand, or do something that involves audience participation, you're more than likely to run into the heckler.
That's when you've lost control Now your carefully executed challenge is the mercy of the heckler and his agenda. It's better to meet the challenge, pause for a few seconds and let the awe seep through the crowd. Then, move along. The ones in the audience who've felt the change will come along with you, and the hecklers won't—but at least they won't get a chance to drive you off tangent.
Every product or service has a bit of magic Every product or service can demonstrate that magic, but you can't fiddle with all the features. You have to pick one feature—the one that creates magic. And every product or service has to have this amazing "something" or it's just another me-too offering. Finding that magic is what causes the audience to gasp in amazement and come along for the rest of the ride.
So let's summarise, shall we? 1) Look of ONE element in your product or service. What is that one? 2) Introduce the challenge right at the start of your presentation. 3) Then DO NOT solve the problem. Let it linger. 4) The lingering should have a fixed point. e.g. 17 minute-mark or end of first section etc. 5) At that point, not earlier, you should reveal the solution. 6) Do not get the audience to participate. You're opening yourself up to hecklers. 7) Losing control is one thing. A heckler can make you lose status. And that's death on stage. 8) Once you've got the audience gobsmacked, linger for a few minutes. Let the moment sink in, then move along.
When you read this piece, it may seem almost impossible to figure out what to do next. Does your product or service really have a magic trick. Yes it does. And you will find it only if you stick to ONE feature or benefit.
That one trick is a pure attention-getter! It pulls the audience along with you, and sure stops the doodling!
Direct download: 029_Fire_Up_Audience_With_Challenges.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:08am NZDT |
Thu, 12 March 2015
The Three-Month Vacation, that's one of the things that make me really happy. But what else is required to keep that happiness level up? The key lies in identifying the obstacles. When we remove the obstacles, we know how to get to happiness. This may seem like a weird topic to take on, but check it out for yourself. Happiness isn't some weird pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn't some Internet marketer promising you endless clients. It's reachable, you know. So check it out. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver
For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
-------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: The Secret of Happiness 00:01:23 The List, the list, the list 00:03:56 Obstacle 1: Inefficiency 00:07:07 Obstacle 2: Greed 00:09:32 Obstacle 3: Self-doubt 00:11:30 Summary 00:12:29 US Workshop + Book on Pricing ------ Transcript:
When I was 8 years old the highlight of my week was "coconut water".
On Saturdays, I'd go with my father to get all the provisions for the week. There was no drive to the supermarket ten times a week. Instead, once a week, we'd get on the train, then walk into a market filled with fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. And in the middle of this market was a guy who sold coconuts—and coconut water.
Almost nothing brought a smile to my face as much as the thought of drinking coconut water on Saturdays. It was my moment of pure bliss.
And that, just that, is the secret of life We go around trying to find the purpose of life, when the answer is right in front of us all the time. The purpose of life is to be "happy".
Except I wasn't entirely happy with just the coconut water After we bought a ton of meat, fish and vegetables and headed back to the train station, we'd eat a potato snack dipped in a mixture of green mint chutney and tamarind sauce. Now that too, was my moment of bliss.
So wait, this happiness story is getting weird, isn't it? I mean here we are trying to establish happiness, and it seems we're jumping from one point to another. And that's exactly the point! No one thing makes us happy. For me, my current moments of bliss are the walk to the cafe with my wife, the coffee, let's not forget the coffee. There's also the time I spend with my nieces. My painting, my work, the music on my podcast, single malt whisky—and yes, the 3-Month vacations.
And yet, most of us never write down what makes us happy So do it as an exercise. Get out a sheet of paper. Make the list. It won't necessarily be a very long list. And the funny thing is that it will consist of rather mundane things like gardening, a walk on the beach—I even know someone who is super contented by ironing. Making the list enables us to know what we really want from life, so we can start heading in that direction.
Because frothing, right in front of us are the obstacles. They’re determined to reduce, even eliminate our happiness.
So what are these obstacles? They are: - Inefficiency - Greed - Self-doubt
Inefficiency? Really? Yes, really! Though you'd never expect to see inefficiency in a happiness list, it's the No.1 killer of happiness. That's because if you were to look at your list again, you'd find that everything that makes you happy, also takes time.
Time that you're spending being inefficient Look at the software you're using. How efficient are you at it? Let's take for example the "Three Month Vacation" podcast that I create. Well, the podcast recording itself is just 15-17 minutes. And I can usually do it in one take. But each podcast is matched to music—often as many as eight different pieces of music (you have to listen to it, to believe it). And all this music, and production, and editing—well, it takes 3 hours.
So the question that arises is just this: How do you save 10 minutes? Just 10 minutes in a three-hour exercise, adds up to 20 a week—about bout 100 a month. Which totals up to 1200 a year. That's 20 hours of happiness deprivation and for what? For inefficiency? That's a stupid, yes stupid, way to go about things isn't it?
But we do it routinely—we stay inefficient We know that one of the best ways to get clients is to write a book, or a booklet. To create information that draws clients to you, instead of you chasing after them. And we know that the book can't just be "written". It needs structure. But no, no, no, no and no. We just sit down and write the book. And many, many hours later, we're not sure why we're struggling so much with the book. Or why a client is even going to read it. And we're stepping deeper in the doo-doo of inefficiency.
So what are we to do? Well, we have a list of what makes us happy, right? How about a list of the things we do; the software we use; the books, video, audio we have to create? How about a list—and not a very long list, that enables us to see where we can get more efficient? Instead of slogging for a year over a book, would there be a way to write it using structure? That alone could shave off 10 months of twirling round and round.
If you're using a piece of software, how about learning just two shortcuts a week? Just two a week! See how that brings inefficiency down to its knees, two shortcuts at a time. Yes, inefficiency is a big problem, but greed isn't far behind is it? Let's examine greed, shall we?
So what's the big deal with greed? I think greed is good. Whenever I'm greedy, I've almost never felt bad. I'm pretty happy when stuffing my face with one more helping of biryani (that's a rich, rice dish) or another heap of maccha ice-cream. So greed itself isn't a problem.
But it sure can get in the way That's because it takes time to wash off the greed. Too much ice-cream, too much wanting this and that—it all takes time. Because I now have to balance out that greed and atone for it in some way. I have to walk more, exercise more, work more. It doesn't make sense, does it?
Yet we have all the dollar signs in our face We have marketers that show us how much they earn. This month I earned x. no of dollars. The month after, I earned so much more.
Oh, look a dip in income!
That's not good. Let's work twice as much to obliterate that dip. And so we follow along like idiots expecting that the dollars will show us the way.
And they do. Without the dollars we're just spinning our wheels But there's a point of enough. Again, this comes down to a definition, perhaps even a list. What's your enough? Do you know? Even though I love my nieces dearly, I do have a point of enough. Coconut water? Even an 8-year old could tell you what was enough. And yes, the dollars. Do we really have to keep doubling them? Are we working for the joy of working, or are we slaves to the smile of our bank managers?
Greed is nice in small bursts, but terrible as a strategy We pay the price and it becomes a form of inefficiency—and the second barrier to our happiness. Which slides us into the third big hurdle, which is just as surprising. Namely, self-doubt.
Self doubt is a big rocking chair, isn't it? You know the concept of a rocking chair, don't you? It gives you the feeling of movement, but it goes nowhere. Self-doubt is like that, doing cartwheels in the velodrome of our brain.
But run into a person who's always second-guessing themselves, and you realise that you can't do much about it. And it's terribly inefficient, this self-doubt. It fills your brain with a load of nonsense that keeps you from being happy. And there's nothing much you can do it about it, because the damage isn't new. It's something that has been part of you for a good chunk of your life.
So learn to say thank you! That's it. The inefficiency comes from the fact that someone won't like your article, your book, your painting, your garden, the muffins you just baked , etc. And if you just assume that you're at the point of "thank you," you've saved yourself a lot of grief. Because if you're saying "thank you," it means you just got complimented on something. Even just the thought of saying thanks is making you smile right now, isn't it?
Now you no longer have to apologise, or back track. The thank you is your way out of the mess, every single time.
The secret of life is in knowing what you want—what you really want It's the inefficiencies, the greed and the self-doubt that get in our way. Can we save 10 minutes of inefficiency? Can we define our "enough" so we can earn what we want, but then stop? Can we get off the rocking chair by envisioning the "thank you" that is to follow?
Just recognising the barriers and getting out of their way, that's the goal, isn't it?
The secret of being happy isn't as hard as it seems. Well, it can be.
Right at this moment I can't decide: coconut water or coffee? |
Fri, 6 March 2015
It might seem that it's impossible to get ideas for your articles. And it is. You go completely blank. Of course, there's a reason for all this blankness. And just as you can go blank, you have more ideas than you know what to do with. Wow, can this really be possible? Can you really have tons of ideas? Yes, you can. Provided you use all, or at least one of these systems. But hey, find out for yourself. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/
-------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Where To Get Ideas
----- Where to get article ideas: An endless source
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Tue, 3 March 2015
We are prone to think that the opposite of success is failure. And it's not. It's decay. The opposite of moving forward, isn't standing still. It's decay. Like a pool of water that gets stagnant, we decay. Our businesses, whether we're in an online business, or offline?it decays. So how do we overcome this decay? Contact Details and Links Time Stamps Transcript: Sean:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you are 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. What is 15,000 multiplied by 365? Why would you ask yourself such a question? I'm not really sure but I ask myself the question at the start of the year and the answer was mind boggling. It was 5,475,000. That's 5,475,000 steps that you can do in a year if you do 15,000 a day . It was mind boggling to me for a very simple reason: I could never reach that goal. At least that's what I thought. I could never, ever reach that goal. Then I thought about my parents. I thought of my grandparents, my great grandparents and all of them would have reached that goal. Every single one of them would have reached that goal every single year. My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they'd never known what it was to go to a gym. They never knew what it was to diet. They ate pretty much anything they wanted and any amounts of it and then they drank stuff. In the case of my dad I know that he smoked a lot as well and at 75 he was still riding his motorcycle. So why did I got down this bizarre path of calculating these 5,000,000 steps a year? The reason I went there was because I heard an interview somewhere. This doctor was talking about the opposite of success. In his case, he was talking about obesity and weight issues. He says, "The opposite of it is not standing still. The opposite of it is decay." That struck me like a thunderbolt. The opposite of success is not not being successful. It's decay. It's almost like you've decided not to brush your teeth anymore and what happens. We're not really talking about standing still, are we? We're talking about decay. We're talking about stuff going really bad. In today's episode I want to talk about three things. The first is about learning, the second about fitness and the third is about achievements. Let's start off with the first one which is learning. I'm not a neuroscientist but I know enough about the brain to realize that the brain works on a [dimmer 03:20] setting. When we don't learn something it doesn't exactly forget that something, but it sets it on dimmer. Last year, my niece Marsha and I we learned 150 countries and 150 capitals in sequence. We would go at high speed going across the continents Europe, Africa, North Asia, South Asia, The Pacific and of course, South, Central and North America. A year has passed and if you asked us to go through that sequence at high speed, first we couldn't do it but also, we can't always remember the capitals. We know where they are. We haven't forgotten, but our brains are on a dimmer switch. When you look at most of us, our real learning took place when we were in school and university and we spent many hours a day learning. Then after that we've done very little. We've learned to program here and there. We've studied some course and done some workshop, but that's about it. Technically, we're in a state of decay. The problem with this lack of learning is that we're not working at our full efficiency. We're working in our full capacity but not our full efficiency because full efficiency means that you could do the same job in one-fifth a day or maybe one-tenth a day, but you're spending all day doing stuff. Like writing an article for instance. Most of us would spend a half day or a day writing an article. You might spend a month or two writing a book. You could do it in a week. Better still, you could do a better book in a week than most people could do in a month or two. The decay really takes its toll and it takes its toll in terms of energy because now we're so tired that we can't do much. Of course, because we're working all the time we don't take breaks. I'm not even talking about weekend breaks or month-long breaks. I'm just talking about breaks during the day. Just half an hour here, an hour there, two hours there. We've entered a state of decay. We no longer have control over our lives. It's almost like being unable to brush our teeth. We're not really standing still. We're moving backwards. Of course, the same thing applies to our fitness. Several years ago I went to the doctor and he called in my wife and he said, "This guy, his blood sugar is up, his cholesterol is up, his pressure is up. I don't know what you've been feeding him but he's got to change his habits." I'm a bit of an iconoclast. I didn't actually change my habits. I wasn't that bad, anyway, but I definitely wasn't exercising as much as I should have been and so I started working. We started doing 10,000 steps a day. I got a Fitbit about two years ago and that caused me to park further away from the store instead of getting the closest spot near the store. It caused me to walk to the store. Often, I just leave my car behind. In fact, the car got so useless I had to sell it. We still have one car but the point is we had a couple of cars but I was using the car so infrequently that we had spider webs on it. Even so, it was inconsistent. We'd walk a few days then not walk some days. If it is raining we wouldn't walk. That consistency wasn't in place. Then I realized we could do 5,000,000 steps. Actually, you could do 5,475,000. To do 50,000 steps a day is phenomenal. It is very hard to keep up to that level, but almost all of us could do about 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year that most of us aren't doing. The reason why we aren't doing it is because we're not tracking it. We're not tracking it because we don't have a goal in place. We don't have those 3,000,000 or those 4,000,000 or those 5,000,000 steps. Track it. Get a pedometer of some kind. It doesn't have to be a Fitbit, but start tracking it. The reason why I chose Fitbit is simply because it sinks up with all my friends and of course, we are competitive and that causes me to do better. If I'm trying to compete with myself it's very easy to just give up. The Fitbit works for me, it might not work for you. Choose whatever you like. Get those 3,000,000 steps in, get those 5,000,000 steps in because the opposite of that is decay. How do we know this to be true? Well, in my case, at least, I went back for the next test. The doctor said, "Whatever you're doing, that's great. Whatever you're eating, that's great." But I hadn't changed anything. I just changed the walking. The opposite of success becomes decay. We have decay in learning, we have decay in fitness and we have decay in our achievements. Let's talk a bit about achievement, shall we? I was sitting at the barber the other day and I had all these papers and pens in my hand and he was cutting my hair and he says, "What's all this stuff?" I said, "Well, that's my planning." Of course, you can see the amused look on his face, but that's what we had to do. We went through maybe a year or two years of not planning on a regular basis. We'd make a plan but then we wouldn't look at that plan again. It didn't work for us. We pretended that Fridays didn't exist. Fridays weren't the day that we could meet any clients or do any stuff. We were going to plan on Friday. Of course, you don't take the whole day to plan, but in the morning we'd go out, we'd sit at the café and we'd plan. It takes an hour sometimes, an hour and a half to plan the month and the year that's about to unfold. It's bad enough to plan the week, but the month and the year, everything starts to shift and all your priorities start to shift and suddenly it's taking a good hour and a half to just get that plan moving. Then as you're going through the week you're looking into your plan you'll find that hey, the plan is going off tangent. So even during the week you have to keep looking in the plan and you have to keep shifting your priorities and things that you have to do and the things that you haven't done. A lot of people get very stressed with that. They go, "Well, I haven't done this." The idea is that you're re-negotiating. Most people think that somehow they have to conquer that to-do list and you never have to conquer the to-do list because you're never going to conquer the to-do list. A to-do list is like the Himalayan mountain range. You climb to the top of one mountain and what do you see? There are hundreds of other mountains. It's a mountain range. That's your to-do list. All you have to do is re-negotiate it. When you haven't achieve certain things, well you might see it as a sense of failure. But in reality, it's how life unfolds. There are millions of things to do and they're not going to go away and all you have to do is to keep planning and keep re-negotiating. As someone once said, "Planning is priceless but plans are useless," and in planning too we have decay. The opposite of planning is just randomness. The more you're planning, the more you're keeping control over things, the less you're allowing decay to set in. The biggest problem with decay is we're not able to see it as it's happening around us. We moved into this house 10 years ago and it was a beautiful house. The garden looked pretty good and the fence looked pretty good. I never really saw the decay. As we lived in the house I didn't really notice that decay happening. We were tending the [inaudible 13:01], we were pruning the hedges, mowing the lawns, doing what you do. Then we had someone come in and do a landscape design and redo the garden. I took some photographs. I took some photographs before and after. It was amazing, especially when you look at the photograph several months later. It's absolutely gobsmacking amazing. It's amazing how much decay had set in in the previous gut; how terrible the tiles looked; how battered the fence looked. I couldn't believe. It. Our lives are filled with things that we need to learn, the fitness that we need to keep and the achievements that make us who we are. If we don't have that time to learn and we don't have the money and we don't have the resources to learn, then decay sets in. The same thing happens with our fitness. We may be told by everyone that this is okay and yet we know when we're unfit. We know exactly when we're overweight. We know exactly when we're obese. We know that we have to make some changes. You set the goal, in our case it's the 5,000,000 mark, and you go for it. Finally, you look at your achievements and all of that planning make such a big difference because the future is now. We all hope that in the future we will write a book, we will go and visit some place, we will do this and we will do that. That future depends so much on the planning that we do today. The re-negotiation that we do every week and probably every day or two. All of this stops to decay the rot from setting in. I used to think that the opposite of success was to be unsuccessful. Now that whole paradigm has shifted in my head. The paradigm is that it's decay. It's rot. We are the only people who can stop the rot. What's the one thing that we can do today? Well, there is the 5,000,000 Club and it's not $5,000,000, it's 5,000,000. Those 5,000,000 enable us do a lot of other stuff as well because I'm able to listen to audio books while walking or a podcast and so I learned and then the achievement comes from there. From that fitness of body comes a fitness of the brain and the fitness of our business and our downtime, our vacation time, our relaxation time. The first of January has long passed, but we can have our resolution today. Get on the 3,000,000 step mark or the 5,000,000 step mark or the 5,475,000 step mark. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you like this episode you probably also like episode 14 and that is about getting things done and how the trigger plays a role. There was also a very popular episode, that's episode 17, which is how to slowdown even in the midst of chaos. If you haven't already done so, when you leave a review on iTunes or if you send us your review, you can also get a free book which is Outwitting Resistance. It's a really cool book and of course, it stops you from this whole rot and decay. There's also the workshop in Silver Spring. That's outside Washington, D.C. at the Sheraton on the 5th, 6th and 7th of May. This is about information products on how to construct that book. It's not about writing the book. That content you already have in your head. This is more about what makes the book consumable. You'll learn how to construct a book that customers read from start to finish or a course or a webinar or a report that they go from start to finish just like you're doing on this podcast right now. What is it that causes people to abandon stuff in the middle and not complete it? That's what we're going to cover in this workshop. It's pretty much one speaker and we're going to cover one topic and we're going to go three days. You're actually going to implement stuff rather than just sit there in the audience and listen. To meet us and to meet Elmo go to psychotactics.com/dc.
That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye from psychotactics.com and the three-month vacation. Buh-bye.
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The Three Month Vacation Podcast
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