When you start writing articles, you get advice from all sides. But there's advice you don't want to hear. It's advice that goes against the grain. And yet, it's this advice that forms the hallmark of great writing. So how do you get from average to great? You take the road less-taken. It's harder and yet far more satisfying. Here's advice you probably don't want to hear.

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A friend wrote to me today and asked me what seemed like a pretty normal question.

She expected 5 lines, maybe 6.

Instead I ended up with 1800 words.
So what was her question? What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content?

The answer is something that most writers may not want to hear. It’s an answer that demands sacrifice, going against the grain and being persistent when things are going horribly wrong.

Still interested?

Well, here’s the question again: What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content?

The answer

1- contrast
2- lack of pandering
3- the gap between style and ability.

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1) Let’s start with contrast

It’s the year 1986. John Heritage and David Greatbatch have an itch to scratch. They’re studying applause and what causes it. So they embark on what could be considered one of the most boring tasks in the world: they analyse politician’s speeches.

476 of them.

And what were these two poor souls looking for?

Applause, that’s what they were keen to find. Why was it that one speech received total silence, while other speeches got applause? But not just applause, but applause twice per minute!

Nineteen thousand sentences later they had a clue

It was contrast. The moment the audience encountered applause, the brain was no longer dormant. Contrast brought a smile to their faces, and cheering followed.

Contrast requires you and me to work so much harder

But contrast also puts you in a strange and precarious position. If everyone says: You should go this way and there’s a writer that says, “Nope, you’re headed into sheep land. This is the way to go”. Now that is going out on a limb. Contrast is scary. It’s much easier to say what everyone else is saying.

If you want to start with the hallmark of quality, contrast is where you start.

Let’s take an example of contrast

Let’s say you’re writing about a subject such as productivity, for example. Now productivity doesn’t bring to mind any sort of rest or sleep does it? Instead the enduring message of productivity has almost always been one of focus and concentration.

It’s always been one of working out astounding efficiencies to do more work than ever before. At this point in time, let’s say your article talks about sleep. It talks about taking the weekends off. It even goes on to suggest that you take several months off in a year.

You’ve shaken up the force a bit, haven’t you?

You’ve created a counter force that may at first seem impossible to defend. Yet, that’s what great writing is about. Conceptually, it stands out and picks a topic that’s contrarian. But not all topics need to be contrarian to have that hallmark, do they? You could write articles on topics that have none of this rebellious nature and still bring out the big guns.

This calls for a bit of a roller coaster in your writing

An article needs to have a flow so the reader can move forward, but just as important is a counterflow. So let’s say you’re writing about how to “grow a curry leaf tree”, you also need to bring in the counterflow as you’re writing.

That counterflow would be a possible glitch in the planting process. It could be a couple of mistakes you’re about to make. To be able to speed ahead, brake and go in a counterflow direction isn’t easy. Some writers do it while creating the material. Others create it later during an edit process.

Flow by itself is super boring

Try this paragraph for example: We went to the airport, there was no traffic on the highway. We got through check in and immigration in next to no time. And then we sat down to have a beer.

So what are you thinking at this point in time?

I’ll tell you what. You’re wondering if the story has any purpose. And yet, the moment counterflow comes into play, you’re alert again. Let’s go back to the story. You’ve had your beer, when a policeman walks up with a grim face.

That’s drama, that’s contrast. And the hallmark of a great article is the ability to insert contrast into various sections of your article. Case studies can have an up and down. The concept can start out being all in favour of something and then diverge without warning. Now you’ve created contrast and lifts the tempo of your words.

Counterflow needs to head back to flow, however

Too much counterflow and your reader is turned off. The grim policeman, the spilling of beer on your white shirt, the missing of the flight—and the article seems to be falling right out of the skies. Which is why contrast matters so much. Contrast is about a constantly evolving set of words that get you to slip slide through like—yes—a roller coaster. Up, down, up and down.

But contrast is only one hallmark of good writing. The second is a lack of pandering.

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2) The second hallmark of great writing is a lack of pandering.

Clients often ask me if I write articles with keywords in mind.
The answer is no.
I never have. I’ve been told I can get ten times the traffic if I pandered to keywords, but frankly I don’t care.

The moment you pander, you’re not really writing for yourself

Most of the greatest writing is not done for another. Most outstanding writing is done to clear the cobwebs in your own mind. You know this feeling well if you’ve tried to do a bit of a project like writing a report, presentation, or a book. There are a million thoughts floating through your mind and none of them seem to sit well until you put them down on paper.

The reason why I wrote a book on the Secret Life of Testimonials wasn’t because a client asked me to do so.

I wrote because I had these floating ideas in my head. And when I started writing the book, I expected to complete between 20-30 pages. There was good reason for me to have this pagination estimate. I’d already written a book on testimonials earlier and the first edition stopped quite firmly at 30 pages. Imagine my surprise when I went past 30, onto 50, then over 75 and sailed past 100, before settling at 125 pages.

When you pander you lose your soul

You stuff keywords into your headlines, write less than interesting opening paragraphs and do things that just don’t resonate with being a writer. And we know this to be true with one simple test. Would you use those same words if you were writing the article back in 1995? Pandering means a compromise that’s not necessarily walking step by step with producing the best possible work.

No one is saying you have to be this crazy, independent soul forever

All of us end up pandering in some shape of form. The great artist and sculptor, Leonardo da Vinci was known to be a lover of nature and hated war. Yet he created some of the most destructive weapons.

And his patron, Cesare Borgia was one of the most hated men in all of Italy. Pandering at some level is almost inevitable, yet Leonardo didn’t stay in pander-land forever. He moved on creating work that was enduring and mostly for him. He didn’t want or expect you to see La Gioconda, better known as the Mona Lisa. He did that for himself, to make himself happy.

Galileo stopped pandering.

The father of geology, a Scot named James Hutton, refused to pander.
Charles Darwin wrote 400 pages of stuff that rocked our world forever.
The biggest exposés, the most interesting movies, they all refuse to buckle down and pander even when they know that pandering is profitable.

So where’s the happy medium between doing what you love vs. pandering?

It’s impossible to tell, but when you create a benchmark for yourself, you can decide whether you have time and the resources to create better work, or just work that’s good enough for the masses. At first you may have no option.

You’ve got a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed and life is about meeting those obligations. To go down in flames before starting is not a good strategy. But then as you get a little more comfortable, it’s time to go out on a limb.

At Psychotactics, we set a benchmark for ourselves: we wanted to work nine months a year and take three months off.

Our income has been almost identical since 2007. We don’t need to double our income, double our clients or do any of that stuff that others find so endearing. This allows us not to pander. We know we can reach our goals easily and still do only the projects that are exciting and rewarding.

Pandering is an obstacle we all have to learn to overcome.

It applies to life, just as it applies to your writing.
You can be enslaved by headlines like “7 Ways to attract clients”. You can stuff keywords into all your content to attract the search engines. But every time you do you’re running your soul on the pander-grater.

That’s the second hallmark of great work: the move away from pander-land. Which takes us to our third hallmark of great work “achieving style through cross pollination”.

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3) Which takes us to the third element: The gap between style and ability

When you first start writing, getting an 800-word article on paper is enough to drive you to devour a tub of ice-cream. In time, however, your brain works out what needs to be done. A combination of writing, learning, resting and confidence bubble up to the point where writing is never exactly a joy, but no longer a frustration.

Yet, when you’re done with the writing it seems to have no soul

It reads pathetically like the work you see all over the Internet. Yet as Ira Glass, host of “This American Life” says: “The reason we get involved in something is because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good.

It has ambition to be good, but it’s not that great. But your taste—your taste is still “killer”. And your taste tells you that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people give up. A lot of people quit. And it’s only by going through a volume of work that you can close that gap.”

Ira Glass is referring to the gap in your brain

But what he doesn’t say in that video is what he and every other great writer or creator knows to be true. That style is about getting worse before you get better. Your work is bad but then turns crappy.

The reason why you give up is because you’ve pushed your boundaries and ended in crappy land. And you figure out: well, if I’m going to go from bad to worse, I must have no talent whatsoever.

And you’re right

Talent isn’t inborn. Talent has to be acquired. You have no talent whatsoever. And that seemingly stupid thing you just did when you pushed your boundaries—well, that just made the gap between your ability and taste so much greater.

There’s a reason, of course, why your work goes downhill

The brain is stepping outside its comfort zone. When the brain steps out into this frosty land it has to read a lot more. But not just a lot more in your own field. No, who told you that nonsense? Read about how continents were created, how birds took flight, why diamonds should logically never exist.

When you read, read many authors, copy many authors. But also push your reading and copying way beyond your immediate field of knowledge.

If you’re a designer, put your design books in a safe

If you’re an architect, go look for books on gravity.

If you’re going to really learn style you have to push up and wide at the same time. You’re going to have to learn your craft, yes, but you’re also going to have to get into other worlds. And there’s a good reason why. Style is an amalgamation of thoughts. You may consider your style to be unique, but every style is simply a melting pot, bubbling slowly and deliberately.

A lot of style seeps in when you’re reading, but there’s also a factor of copying

The greatest works of our times have involved copying (not plagiarism, but copying) to the point that you become a sort of style-clone. Then when you’ve had your fill of one, you copy someone else—and then a third, fourth and fifth.

One day you wake up and you have a style

You know this to be true because everyone around you says so. They comment on your unique style. They say it’s so different. And what they’re commenting on isn’t just a look.

It’s a culmination of your taste and your skill. A combination of the ideas of the masters that have gone before you. An amalgamation so deep that you feel the style is all your own but know deep down, that it’s come from that cavern of knowledge that’s too deep to go back into.

And then just as you’ve reached your pinnacle of taste, you realise you’re not the guru you aspired to be. You’ve climbed one mountain and there before you lie the Himalayas of taste. You have so many mountains more to climb. The gap continues to exist.

Let’s summarise, shall we?

Contrast is crucial. There must be flow, then counterflow and back to flow again. This is what makes for great content.

The lack of pandering is scary but that’s where originality springs forth. Pander if you must, but move away from the evil as quickly as you can.

The gap between style and ability is incredibly frustrating, but sooner or later you close that gap enough to be amazing, but never quite at the level you want to achieve. And that eternal gap is what keeps you interested in the game forever.

Useful Resources:

1) Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game
2) The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly
3) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling

We all want to create profitable products but aren't sure where to start. We hope for some amazing formula, when all you really need are three core questions. When you are clear about the answers to the three questions, you can take an amazingly pedestrian, everyday concept and make it hugely profitable. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today?

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How to Create a Profitable Idea for Business

Around July 2000, I was made redundant from my job at a web design firm.

Life wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. I’d just moved to Auckland, New Zealand from Mumbai, India a few months prior. And here I was, barely a few months later, without a job and with a mortgage that hovered around $200,000 (yes, we’d just bought a house).

What do you do when you’re hurled into such a situation?

I turned to Photoshop, but not quite. There’s a story behind the Photoshop story and it began back in India, in July. Back in Mumbai, I freelanced as a cartoonist and work was pretty steady through the year, except around July.

For some inexplicable reason, the phones would stop ringing at that point in the year. At first, it drove me crazy and I’d do everything I could to drum up business. I’d rant and rave and complain about the fickle nature of July when my mother pointed out that things were always quiet for me in July.

From that point on, we’d use July to learn how to use Photoshop

One of the big games at the office (yes, I had staff) was to learn to use Photoshop in Tab, F mode. If you were to turn on Photoshop and hit the Tab key and press F (full screen) you’d find that all your toolbars disappear.

The game at the office was to keep working in Photoshop without any toolbars. A bystander would look in awe as you were able to use the brush tool, increase opacity, decrease brush sizes etc. You could do almost anything in Photoshop without needing the tool bar. It looked like pure magic.

It’s this magic that I had to use when I was made redundant

The moment I was made redundant, I went back to trying to get work as a cartoonist. Since most cartoonists at the time were still using pen, ink and paint, my work in Photoshop stood out when I went to meet art directors at the advertising agencies.

One particular art director got a bit chatty and as we talked she realised that she too could use the magic of Photoshop in her work. And so, while I started out trying to sell cartoons, I ended up charging $60 an hour, teaching art directors how to use the core tools of Photoshop without the tool bar.

Notice something very interesting in the last sentence?

I wasn’t teaching them Photoshop. I wasn’t going into the 2,459 rabbit holes that Photoshop presents to a beginner.

Instead I was just teaching them a subset—the core tools of Photoshop without the need for a tool bar. And this is precisely the kind of advice I’d give to a client if they called me up and asked how they should start a profitable business.

I’d say you need to ask yourself three questions: who, what and when.

So why do these three questions matter?

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Why Who Matters

I’ve been pretty good at drawing since a very young age. Like every other kid around me, I did the usual doodles and scribbling, and when the rest of the kids decided to give up drawing at the age of four or five, I kept at it.

So you can say I’d be pretty good at drawing after all these years, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right because I’ve never really stopped drawing for a day. But drawing is a bit like cooking.

Just because you’re good at cooking Italian food doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good at Japanese food

Over the years I became exceptionally good at drawing cartoons, loved the structure of buildings and architecture, even dabbled in a bit of caricatures. But there’s one thing I avoided: drawing animals. I’d decided very early in my life that I wasn’t too good at drawing animals.

Then, recently, I was saddled with about 400 amazing envelopes. There’s a story behind those envelopes, but for now let’s just say it was much too hard to throw away those envelopes. So I started drawing animals on them, tentatively at first, but then with a sense of a mission.

The moment I started posting the photos of these envelopes online, there was a flurry of interest

People from different parts of the globe started giving me advice on what I should do with them. You should print them, said one. You could create a collector’s item box set said another. And the advice kept pouring in, and did exactly what advice usually does: it confuses you beyond belief.

The reason you’re hearing this story is to give you a framework of how a profitable idea doesn’t arise from an ability to do something well. A profitable idea arises from the first question you need to ask: Who.
The envelope art I just started working on in early June 2016.

So why is who so important?

Without the “who” in mind, struggle is almost inevitable. Think about the boxed set of envelopes, for example. There’s no doubt that they make a great product, but well intended as the suggestions were, there’s no clue who would buy it.

Or why they would buy it? Yet if we took the Photoshop example, we notice there’s an enormous amount of clarity. Sure, the clarity came about by a fluke discussion, but as we’ll find out a lot of profitable ideas are pure fluke.

To get back to the art director, I now had a clear person (what we call in The Brain Audit as the target profile). That one job of teaching the art director not only went on for several months, but led to another job—with the daughter of another art director. I didn’t go down the path of teaching Photoshop to other art directors, but you could clearly see how the “who” helped.

The “who” matters whether you’re writing an article or creating a product or service

Let’s say you’re creating an online product on storytelling. Before you start writing a word, you are peripherally aware of the volumes of story-related material in books, videos and audio. To write another series on storytelling would be nice, but how would it stand out.

Now let’s be fair: there’s a lot of terribly average material online and offline that is very profitable regardless of uniqueness. All the same, when uniqueness is relatively easy, why would you want a me-too product when you can have one that’s clearly outstanding? When you create a product or service for someone in particular, they give you their own specific bent on the problem they’re facing.

Take for example a service on presentations

There are hundreds of books on presentations and services that promise to show you how to be amazing on stage. Yet, when I spoke to this presenter, she felt competent, but not quite.

She felt she needed that last 10% that would take her from good to great. And there you have it. That subset is what gives you the clue. Instead of writing a book, creating a course, inventing a service on “presentations”, you work on the subset of how the “last 10% can take you from a good to great speaker.”

Fluke plays an incredibly important part in this game of finding the “who”

We’re so hell-bent on finding the right person, the right target profile that we don’t dare venture far from our computer screens. When I ran into that chatty art director, I had no clue that she’d talk about Photoshop.

When I spoke to that presenter, I had no idea that a cup of coffee would lead to an idea about “the last 10%”. It may appear that a lot of products or services are built around strategy, but they’re often built around a person.

The mistake we make is we hope we run into the ideal “who” right away

And more often than not, the “who” is a complete fluke. At first, almost every product or service is like Version 1.0. And the feedback you get from that person is going to be relatively limited.

Even if you were to create a product or service for “last 10% presenter”, the product would need refinement to get to Version 1.1 and from there to 1.2 and so on. With every product or service that’s been profitable, we’ve had a Version 1.0 and then moved along refining as we go along.

Every time you fix things, your product becomes better and more profitable and there’s always a “who” who’ll give you feedback and help you take the product to another level.

But even if there’s a “who” in place, how do you deal with the “what?”

The what depends on a simple concept: the idea of a superpower.

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Why When Matters

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For over 20 years Charles Darwin postponed the publishing of his theory

Then, on 24 November, 1859, Darwin published his theory on, “Origin of Species”. Priced at fifteen shillings, 1250 copies were sold. Yet, Darwin wasn’t keen on the book being published until his death. In a letter to his religious wife, Darwin asked that 400 pound be set aside and enough promotion of his book be done after his death.

Yet, Alfred Russel Wallace got in the way of these plans

Alfred Wallace, a naturalist, spent eight years in Singapore and South East Asia between the years of 1854 and 1862 and is known to have discovered evolution by natural selection as well.

He wrote an essay while in Indonesia (while living on the island of Ternate) and sent it to Darwin in 1858. When Darwin saw the contents of the letter, he knew the “Origin of Species” couldn’t wait any longer. It needed to be published right away or all of Darwin’s work would be attributed to another man.

We are similar to Darwin in many ways

Our work may seem insignificant when compared with the work of Darwin, but if your work changes a single person’s day, it’s significant. You know from your own experience how a single line in a book may have caused you to stop and reexamine what you were doing.

Or a random comment that may have changed the way you went about your life or business. Our work seems insignificant only because we know it so well. For others it can be a major moment in their lives.

Which is why you need to start now

As you’ve probably heard or read elsewhere on the Psychotactics site, most of our work started out unpolished. At this very moment, as I’m writing this article, Renuka is laughing at one of my articles that I wrote several years ago. However the best example of the unpolished nature of our work must be attributed to The Brain Audit itself.

As you’v probably heard before, the “book” started out as just 16 pages of notes. We made over $50,000 selling that book simply because we got pushed into selling it. And when we sold it offline we weren’t ready to sell it online. Again, someone pushed us and our online business got underway.

If you think your work is crappy, there’s a good reason why

Your work is crappy. The Brain Audit was crappy at the start. All our courses and workshops were crappy at the start. Not by choice, of course. We did the best we could but now I can’t even bear to go back and look at the early versions. You too will need to bolster up your confidence and get your work going whether it’s through text, audio, video or presentations. Because if you don’t do it, someone else will.

Darwin had all the material he needed but was still reluctant to publish his work

And here I am giving you this advice but I’m reluctant as well. I’ve been working on the concept of talent since 2008 or earlier. So many years have passed and while I’ve written the odd article here and there, there’s no program, no book, no webinar, no podcast.

Let me ask you this question: Would you like to read about how to become talented in just about any field? Would you like to read about what holds us back?(and no it’s not genes). It’s not like I’m comparing my work to Darwin’s or any one else for that matter. But as a reader or listener, would the information be important to you?
Your work is more important than ever

It may appear raw to you, but you need to start and fix it later. You’re hoping for that one great idea but you need to start with a little idea. Will the little idea fail? It might, but from those failures you keep moving ahead and fixing things.  Even Darwin’s work was just the start of his journey. During Darwin’s lifetime the book went through six editions, with cumulative changes and revisions to deal with counter-arguments raised.

In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books. His final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (published 1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

When he died he was honoured by a burial in Westminster Abbey where only royals, generals, admirals, politicians, doctors and important scientists are buried. And to think Darwin almost never started on his journey.

Do you still want to wait? Or are you going to start today?

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Summary

So how do you create a profitable idea for business?

When you started reading this information, you may have thought there’d be a formula. And that’s the formula you’ve been missing. The formula is so simple that somehow you feel like there’s something wrong.

Like as if you have to pay $2000 to some Internet guru to get the formula. But think about it for a second. Let’s say you’ve got a really good way to grow tomatoes. You can grow thousands of tomatoes in an extremely small space. Is that a superpower? Sure it is.

So let’s start with the who: Who is going to be interested in your tomato idea?

Then let’s get to what: The “what” is about growing thousands of tomatoes in a very small space.
Then let’s get to the when: And this is where it all falls apart, isn’t it? You should start now, but there are reasons why you can’t start now. If Darwin could have reasons, so can you and I. We can all have our reasons.

The biggest problem isn’t necessarily that you need a great idea for business

You just need to start but there’s something holding you back. And we’ll explore what holds you back—yes we will. But understand that there isn’t going to be a moment when you’ll get a great idea.

The Brain Audit was not a great idea, it was just a presentation. Every product or service you’ve experienced at Psychotactics wasn’t a great idea and even today is just work in progress. Most ideas are half-baked when they start and it’s in your interest to get started.

Start now!

Identify whom you think will buy the idea, then work on the what you’re going to sell. Make it a superpower, as far as possible. And start now. If you keep at it, the road will change along the way. You’ll make mistakes and you’ll get smarter too. And that’s when the profit will roll in.

Teaching Photoshop wasn’t a new idea.

It wasn’t even a great idea.

Heck, you could even borrow the idea by learning Photoshop and finding art directors.
And the best way to get started is to get started. You’re a member of 5000bc aren’t you? Well, get to the Taking Action forum where others just like you have decided to take their ideas and run with it. They’re on their way and so should you.

Useful Resources:

1) How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibility
http://www.psychotactics.com/presell-creates-irresistibility/

2) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling
http://www.psychotactics.com/three-elements-storytelling/

3) The Brain Audit

http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/

It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie?


Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from.

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Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show.

That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running.

That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air.

I was excited beyond belief
I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic.

You know what happened next, right?

Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics.

They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before.

These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics.

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Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop

In 2004, we did something quite bold.
We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles.

That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out.
Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home.

When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up.

Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time

When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees.

Even so a uneasy calm set in

The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10.

It was too late for us to change our minds

We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne.

Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs
We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn’t cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue.

Which is when we got our next shock

The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you’d expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, “That table hasn’t moved in a hundred years, and it’s not going to move now”. The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind.

But the surprises didn’t stop at the venue and the table

On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one person turned up, the workshop would go ahead. As we always do, we started on time at 8:32 am. Then, at 8:45 the doors burst open and another participant showed up. Yup, it was our first paid participant and one who’d seen the announcement of the workshop on our e-mail newsletter and decided to come to the workshop.

We were going to recover some of our costs after all.

However, this paying participant was no ordinary participant

She happened to be the General Manager of a $500 million company that was located in Melbourne. In the break she spoke to me and expressed her surprise at the lack of attendees, but also expressed her admiration. “I was amazed that with just two people in the room, you started right on time”.

Over the next two days we went through the elements of The Brain Audit workshop and by the end of the workshop we had a bit of a reward. The GM wanted us to come and present to her company while we were still in Victoria and she was willing to pay us for the trouble.

And so, we broke even

We could have given up at the stage when the client was sending his depressing e-mail reports. Instead we decided to persevere and yes we had a happy ending, but what are the lessons?

Three lessons here:

Lesson 1: Duds are part of the game
The reason I’m relating this story to you is because I see so many people today who want to start a business, but they want to be successful in a very short time—and preferably with no downsides.

If you’re starting up a business today, how many duds are you willing to embrace? The biggest reason why I see businesses failing is because they don’t want to fail. They play safe. They want clients to come to them via a blog or website. They don’t want to go out on a limb and fail a bit. Failing isn’t a nice feeling but it teaches you a great lesson. And sometimes, like we did, you get lucky.

Lesson 2: Cover your costs
We bought our plane tickets and paid for the venue before we had enough information. We trusted that things would work out in the end and it didn’t. Since then if we’ve had a workshop that involves costs (and they all do), we make a temporary booking of the venue.

Until we sign up at least a few clients, we don’t book or buy anything. We’ve never made a loss on an event, but we came terribly close with this Hepburn workshop. It taught us to pre-sell and then commit to an event. We use the same concept for our product launches. We pre-sell and only once we have sign-ups do we create the product.

Lesson 3: Work your own contacts
When we started out, we didn’t have much of a list. We built that list though writing really good articles. Not just your run of the mill articles, but insightful, funny articles.

Despite the presence of a list, we didn’t have many names from Australia. And we decided to work with the client who’d promised to get 60 participants. That was obviously a mistake. When you give away that much amount of control, you don’t know for sure how things are going to work out. In the end we had no control of the venue, the participants and were stuck with a billiards table in the middle of the room.

But that trip to Australia was only one of our early adventures. The second scary one was definitely the insurance company speech.

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Story 2: The Insurance Company Speech

I don’t remember how I got some of the early speaking assignments—or maybe I’m just trying to forget.

This early assignment was in Wellington where I was supposed to speak to a large group of insurance agents. The presentation was about The Brain Audit, but I tried valiantly to get case studies about the insurance business. I met with the client many times at their local office, I did my research and found many examples about the insurance industry.

And that’s where I made my first mistake.

Well, anyway, I flew to Wellington and started my presentation

As I got through the first 15 minutes or so, I realised the audience was not reacting the way I expected them to do so. Instead of being interested in the case studies, they seemed to be bringing up objections and interrupting my presentation. And rightly so. I was the outsider in the room. I didn’t know squat about insurance and the insurance industry and there I was giving them case studies that left me open to attack.

That’s when my second mistake became apparent

I was still very much a rookie at presenting so I took whatever advice I could get in that field. And one presenter told me never to use slides. He suggested that slides were like the kiss of death. As it turned out, slides would have saved me from going to pieces on that particular day. As the audience grew restless, I got extremely nervous on stage.

And then someone walked out

Who knows why they walked out. Maybe it was just to go to the toilet or to get a drink. But as my eye moved towards the exit, I could see the entire audience walking out in droves. And though no one else was walking out at that point, I couldn’t focus and forgot what I had to say next. If I had slides, I could have used them as a guide and moved along. Maybe the presentation would have still been a disaster, but it would have been a lot better than a professional presenter standing on stage with his mouth open and his mind blank.

I still had twenty minutes to go and nothing came to mind, so I fled. I left the stage, went down the corridor and locked myself in the room until the taxi came to pick me up to the airport, later.

But that’s not the end of the story

Three years later I was asked to speak at quite a different event, but at the very same venue, on the very same stage. To say I was mortified was putting it lightly. I could see myself forgetting what I had to say, and fleeing for the second time in a row. You know how it is when you’re all wound up, don’t you? You don’t sleep very much at night and I counted every ambulance and police siren that roared by on the street as I lay high up in my hotel room.

Except I’d learned from my mistakes

The first mistake was trying to appeal to the audience. That wasn’t a mistake I was going to make ever again. When you try to appeal to an audience of people in your industry, you have at least some authority to do so. But when you’re facing an audience from another industry, it’s like walking into the jaws of a steel trap and I’d had one experience and it was enough. I presented my information as is, and the audience drew their own conclusion.

The second mistake I’d made was to speak without slides

It may sound like a good idea, but if you’ve spent the previous night counting sirens, you’re likely to be tired and prone to mistakes. That one event made sure I never left home without my slides. I’d even take a backup on an external drive and print out a sheet of the main points—just in case technology failed at the last minute.

But easily the biggest experience to draw upon was walking back on that stage. It was scary but I realised if I backed out I’d always fear that venue and stage. The venue wasn’t the problem, it was the way I handled my presentation that caused all the trouble. Going back into that seeming danger zone made me more resilient than ever before.

Which takes us to the third story: the boat cruise.

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Story 3: The Bouncy Boat Cruise

I’m not a big fan of “believing in the universe”.

I believe you need to put in the effort and you get the result. And yet I couldn’t explain how I ended up on this cruise from New Zealand to Australia. At the start of the year I’d written my goals and one of the goals was to get on a cruise ship. But as I ploughed through the year no cruise ship had my name on it.

Then in May I had a meeting with a CEO of a bed franchise

“I’d like you to make a presentation at our annual event”, he said when I met him at his office. You know what’s coming next, right? Yes, the annual event was on a cruise ship. As excited as I was about the “universe pitching in”, I still had a job to do. And the presentation wasn’t bothering me too much because I’d just made many similar presentations in the months running up to the cruise.

The first night, as we sailed away, there were incredibly calm seas

But calm seas and the Tasman don’t go together, especially in June. June is the start of winter in this part of the world and winter brings stormy seas. Added to that, the Tasman Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water. But we were in a good mood and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oily bacon and buttery-eggs. And then all hell broke loose.

The ship started bouncing about like crazy

The bacon and eggs—well, let’s just say you shouldn’t eat oily stuff under normal conditions—but on this rough sea it was pure hara kiri. Renuka and I were not only sea sick, we were throwing up for a solid hour. And later that morning, I had to make my presentation. Somehow, Renuka staggered to the medical centre to buy some overpriced pills to quell the seasickness.

And then it was show time

Luckily the presentation was in the lower part of the liner which happened to be the most stable. But I was feeling terrible and had a hard time standing up, so I didn’t get on stage. Instead I made the presentation from the bottom of the stage (at seat level) and held the stage for support. 45 minutes later I was done, and the CEO came up to continue the proceedings.

“You didn’t look too well,” he said to me as we passed. “Did you drink a little too much last night?”

“No I didn’t”, I informed him. I never drink the night before I have to make a presentation. What he didn’t know of course, was that Renuka was responsible for that advice. She warned me to stay away from any alcohol the previous night, no matter how many free drinks were being offered. And so I stayed sober, which was a very good lesson in itself.

Often you’re judged not by what you can do, but other people’s perception of you.

If I had been drinking the pervious night, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was sea-sick. My pale demeanour would have been attributed to the fact that I wasn’t a professional. I’ve found this to be true with not just speaking engagements but in every area of my life.

When there’s a course on, I don’t tell clients what’s happening in the background. If I have a workshop, I focus on the slides and not about any other issues. When you let your audience know that you have other issues, they automatically attribute some slip up to that issue, even though that issue may not be connected.

Oh, and that universe thing.
I still don’t believe too much in it, but I write things down anyway.
I put in the effort and then it comes true.

Funny that!

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Epilogue

Often in life we’re waiting for that miracle moment. We are sure that if we simply put up the website, or start writing that blog, things will happen.

What I’ve found is a bit different. With the Australia one person workshop we found that persistence paid off, but it was less a story of persistence and more about learning how groundwork and preparation avoids failure. We still need to get out from our office. We still need to push ourselves into the unknown, but we can do so without taking nutty risks.

The Wellington presentation story was also one of willing to go beyond the computer screen. But it was also one of facing your demons and conquering them. Once I found that I could win that battle against fear, I feel comfortable taking on a scary situation time and time again.

Finally the boat cruise could have gone horribly wrong if Renuka wasn’t around to give me advice. Her advice kept me in the good standing of the CEO. Perception is far greater than reality. And I’ve learned over the years to manage perception, because what people believe is what they feel to be true.
No one is saying you need to be fake or feed your audience what you think they should hear. I openly share what we do, where we’ve succeeded and where we’ve failed. But in the middle of an assignment, you need to focus on the assignment and keep any additional stories for later, much later.

That’s it. Stories from the Psychotactics vault.

Don’t forget to listen to or read: #50: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand

17 questions? Why have 17 questions in a testimonial?

And what if the client won’t answer the questions?
The reason for the 17 question testimonial is simple. It’s not a testimonial any more, it’s a experience on paper. When other clients read it, they can sense the ups and downs. They can see the final result.

It makes your testimonial stand out. In order to get this 17 question testimonial going, you have to have a strategy in place. This podcast shows you exactly what you need to do so that you can get the answers your business deserves.

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions
Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation: Bento Box Style
Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

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A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time.

If you were to go back into Earth’s history, you’d choke and die quickly

And that’s because the Earth’s atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor.

A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun’s energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it was oxygen. Life-harnessing bacteria began to spread to any surface in the sea and  creating huge amounts of oxygen. But this oxygen didn’t go very far.

The oceans were packed with dissolved iron, and you know what happens when iron mixes with oxygen?

Sure you do. You get rust. The oceans literally rusted and for hundreds of millions the iron in the ocean sucked up the available oxygen. For about 700 million years of rusting, the oceans ran out of iron. There was just one minor issue: the cyanobacteria were still producing immense amounts of oxygen.

Where would all this oxygen go? Into the atmosphere, that’s where it all went

The oxygen had to escape and it made its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the billion years that were to follow the Earth began to change from a place where you could hardly breathe, to one that had a bounty of oxygen.

Something similar applies you’re dealing with testimonials for your business

At first the testimonials you get are weak, almost impossible to use. Then as time passes, and if you use the six-questions from The Brain Audit, you’ll get testimonials that are more oxygenated. But for you to create a great oxidation event, you need the power of the 17-Question testimonial. And the reason why you need this 17-Question testimonial is because it catapults your testimonials into an experience. Instead of just reading yet another testimonial, the prospect feels the ups, down, twists, turns and final result.

Let’s go into the land of the 17-Question testimonial and explore three elements:

1) Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions
2)  Creating compartmentalisation: Bento box style
3) Why it’s a mistake not to send examples

First, what are the seventeen questions? We’d want to get that out of the way, so here goes:

1) What was your primary reason for taking this course?
2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began
3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course
4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course
5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made?

6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped?
7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology)
8- Describe Sean as a teacher

9) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc).

10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course?
11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help?
12) Why would you recommend it?
13) The course is called the toughest in the world. Can you describe how tough it was, and what sacrifices you had to make to keep going?
14) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it?

14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why?
15) What advice would you give to future participants?
16) How did the course personally help you?
17) Anything else you’d like to add?

Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions

Yesterday my wife Renuka was filling in a form for an online visa. She’d fill in a page of details only to be confronted with yet another. Then she’d fill a second page and the third would show up. Mother’s name, father’s name, previous visa number—details after details popped up to the point of frustration.

When you’re asking clients for testimonials it hard enough when you ask a few questions, but a seventeen question form can be quite tiresome. Which is why you need to prepare the client in advance. This preparation calls for instructions.

When we ask clients for testimonials, we forget one important fact

We forget that for many, if not most of clients, giving testimonials is not a common activity. Even if they’ve agreed to give you a testimonial, the sight of seventeen questions may appear a little over the top. Yet, without that voluminous amount of detail you’re unlikely to draw out the entire experience. To make sure the testimonial plan goes well you have to prepare the client.

It’s important to send them information in advance

Whether the testimonial is done via the phone, in person or via the Internet, you need to make sure the client knows they’re going to go through a 17-question testimonial. And if you suspect the client is going to be reluctant to write, you should immediately reach for the phone or in person.

There’s a big advantage to getting a testimonial over the phone

When we write, we tend to edit. And if a client is sitting down to write answers to a bunch of questions, you’re asking him to invest a lot of not just writing time, but editing time as well.

On the phone or in person, you have no such problem. The client is merely answering a bunch of questions and is likely to be happy to speak for between 10-12 minutes. In comparison, a written testimonial may take well over 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why you need to let the client know you’d like to speak to them, and that you’ll be recording the session. This is the first level of preparation involved.

The second level seems minor but it’s just as important

When clients agree to giving a testimonial, I also send them this information:

This isn’t just a client testimonial. It’s more of a case study describing your ups and downs and final result. The experience is what counts and so I would really like you to answer these questions in as much detail as possible. Short, one-line answers become pretty useless as they lack detail.

They also can’t really be used, so I’d prefer you put in as much detail as possible in your answers. This detail helps me understand your journey better and is also a really ego booster. So I would appreciate the maximum amount of detail in the answers.

There’s really no reason to have a twiggy, anaemic testimonial

You want one that’s well rounded, full of juicy experiences and stories. And when you put the client in a situation where they can quickly give you the information (via phone or in person) you’ve made the first and most important move. When you clearly bring up the issue of detail, you’re priming them to be effusive—and yes, it does make for some pretty cool testimonials.

If the testimonial isn’t via the phone or in person, things get a little dicier

Well, not quite. It really depends on what you’ve delivered in terms of product or services. If a client buys a product like “Chaos Planning” which is a short, yet intense book, there’s really no point in sending the client a seventeen question questionnaire. However, if there’s a lot of involvement and a slightly long drawn process, you’re more than likely to get a far better response.

Let’s say you’re a web designer.

You’ve just spent two months of back and forth movement building a client’s website. Now there’s been a bit of a relationship and it’s far more likely that an e-mail based set of questions will work.

We tend to use the 17-Questions only for courses

We conduct courses such as the cartooning course, the Article Writing Course, copywriting, First Fifty Words etc. These aren’t courses where you sign up and then the teacher disappears. They’re pretty hands on courses and with just a few clients a ton of back and forth is involved.

To give you an example, in the 2016 Article Writing Course we have our normal limit of 25 participants. And we’re now in Week 8 of the course and so far 9,374 posts have been generated. Yes, it’s impressive at over 1000 posts per week, but what’s important to note here is the involvement. If the client is fully involved, then it’s more than likely that either a phone call or an online questionnaire will get an equally powerful response.

Of course if you have 25 clients, it’s better to have them answer via an online medium because the exercise gets very complicated. You have to figure out available timings and time zones and anyway the exercise may take several days. But if you have just a few clients, it’s a better idea to use the phone or record via Skype.

We started this journey to get our 17-Question testimonial but realised there’s a lot more to consider.

We realised that planning the strategy and choosing whether to use the phone or an online questionnaire is important. And that while the online questionnaire is definitely less time consuming, it depends a lot on the involvement of the clients. The more involved, the more likely you are to get great testimonials for such a lengthy questionnaire.

This takes us to our second part: The logic of the questions.

Do we really need 17 questions? Would 13 be just fine? Or could we go up to 19? The answer lies in the logic. What are you trying to achieve? That’s what we’ll have a look at next.

Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation

If you were to head back in time to Japan—no, not 2.4 billion years but closer—around the 12th century, you’d have run into quite a different sort of evolution: the start of the Bento box.

During the Kamakura period, dried meals or hoshi-ii was introduced and bento was nothing more than a small bag to store dried rice. But if we speed up through the Azuchi Momoya Period, in the 17th century, we find bento boxes everywhere. Wooden, lacquered boxes that consisted of rice, chestnut, seafood, mushroom, pickles and yes, bamboo shoot.

And that’s what a bento box does best

With all those tastes and textures and different types of food, it’s critical to compartmentalise the food. Similarly, if you want to get results with your 17-Questions, you have to compartmentalise the questions so that each set tackles different issues.

Bento at one of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Auckland

Let’s take a look at the compartments for one of our courses, for starters.

They’re split into:

– The experience: Before, during, on completion of course
– The elements of the course: the group, the forum, the notes, the audio.
– The teaching system: How it’s taught, the responsiveness of the teacher etc.
– Comparison: How they’re compare with other courses
– Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the course to others? Why?
– Any other comments

And while we ask 17-Questions, what’s really vital is the creation of the bento box. You need to create the compartments for your own product or service first, before considering what to put in the individual boxes.

Let’s go back to the web designer: What would the compartments look like?

– The experience: Before, during, on completion of website
– The elements of the website: the layout, functionality, ease of use etc.
– Dealing with the developers: The responsiveness, ease of instructions etc.
– Comparison: How they’re compare with other website developers or even other similar service providers
– Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the service to others? Why?
– Any other comments

While most of the compartments of the bento box has already been created for you, you may still need to work on a compartment of your own. Or, you may need to add, subtract or change some of the questions. This compartmentalisation allows us to get the information we need and it allows the client to see at a glance what they’re expected to answer.

We started out this journey by sending the instructions in advance. We then moved into compartmentalisation.

And if you stopped right at this point, you are likely to get an outstanding testimonial. But why stop here? Why take the chance that something might still go wrong? The way to ensure a mind-blowing testimonial is to something so simple, it’s easy to miss. It’s called: sending an example.

Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples

Let’s say I step into a bar.

I have no intention of drinking that cold glass of beer.
But there in front of me is someone drinking a cold glass of beer.
Guess what happens next?

The reason why I’m sipping a beer is because of a mirror effect.

This mirror effect also plays out to your advantage when you’re getting a client to give you a 17-Question testimonial. To understand why the mirror effect is so important, we simply have to take away the example. Now the client has no benchmark and their testimonial can be similar to what you’re expecting or wildly off course.

A simple way to solve this problem is to send an example

As you’d expect the example will be long and detailed. And the moment you send it to the client, they realise what’s expected of them. Despite this example, some clients will still give you terse testimonials. There’s really not much of a point in running such testimonials. However, most clients have a look at the example and proceed to give one just as good.

But what if you don’t have an example in place?

Well, it’s a good question but the answer is more than obvious. Be persistent and go in search of a client who’s willing to give you a longer testimonial. Just throwing your hands up in the air isn’t going to get you the testimonial you seek.

If you need to do an assignment free of cost just for the sake of the testimonial, then make sure you get it done. Without that example testimonial in place, you can still get good 17-Question testimonials, but an example almost always guarantees great results.

And once we’ve covered that last bit, it’s time for the summary.

Ok let’s summarise

The first point was one of instructions

When you give clients instructions well in advance. Letting them know that they need to give lots of detail is very important. Without the detail you may have a testimonial but not a complete experience. The whole purpose of the 17-Question testimonial is for it to be like an oxygenation event. It needs to bring life to a testimonial in a dramatic manner.

The issue of phone vs. online questionnaire is also something that needs to be tackled. Using the phone is far superior if you have fewer clients. If you have a large number, then you have to make sure it’s all online or it  may take too much time and never get done.

The second point was one of compartmentalisation

You need to split the main facets into something resembling a bento box. For us, we break up things into the experience, the teaching system, comparison, advice etc. And your compartments may be slightly different but still remarkably similar.

All you need to do is sit down and create the compartments before putting in the questions in each bit. You can have fewer than 17 questions and possibly more. But you should get tons of material with 17. We’ve filled up entire booklets (just the Article Writing Course prospectus has over 80 pages of testimonials).

The final point is one of beer—sorry, examples

Send an example to a client. When she can see the example it’s a form of instruction. She knows what’s expected of her and will deliver accordingly. Without an example a client may meet your expectations, but equally they may go wildly off in some weird direction or not meet your quota. The example needs a mirror effect and it’s your job to provide the mirror.

Start with the bento box.
Create the compartments
Fill it with questions.

An example of the questions and answers

Example: Alison’s answer

1)What was your primary reason for taking this course?
I wanted to write in a much more engaging way. And to write faster. And I wanted to know when I had succeeded and failed in my attempt – to have some way of assessing for myself the quality of my output.

2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began
I had the Psychotactics Outline stuck to my wall behind my computer screen. And I had tried like heck to implement it but I was trying to do it all at once. So it was hard and I knew I was failing or making such slow progress. And I did not really know how to get better on my own.

I tried to outline and write in the same session. And I did not plan ahead, I just tried to write. And it took a long time, but I just thought, “hey, that’s life.”

3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course
Mid way through the course we were doing disconnectors and the first 50 words. And man, that was hard. Trying to figure the right way to disconnect, trying to reconnect smoothly, trying to ‘bottle’ the drama and tip it onto the page at just the right point. It was hard, hard work.

4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course
Now I’m feeling confident. I can get a sense of my ‘One Word’ quite easily and once I have it, it’s pretty simple to come up with a disconnect. And I have a more trained eye, so I can quickly goback and ‘audit’ my work to make sure I have put in all the elements I need. It’s much, much easier.

5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made?
I was the only girl in my small group, so sometimes I would ‘sneak out’ and read what was going on in the other groups, with people I knew from the Cartoon Course.

But my small group was fine, and we kept nudging each other along and the accountability to do the work was excellent. We didn’t lose anyone!. Now that the forum has opened up to Group 2 I really appreciate being in a smaller group most of the time – sheesh, having all of us buzzing around would have been overwhelming.

6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped?
I love working in the forum because it’s so flexible. And you get almost instant feedback because of the different time zones. Instant feedback is so motivating. And you could get so many different comments on your work. And go back and correct it to make it better.
And read other peoples work to learn from their mistakes

7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology)
It’s like working with a gemstone – you are polishing a single facet of the gem before you worry about any other facet. And you just trusting the process that when you finish, the gem will look magnificent. That’s where you have to trust Sean (and I did, because I had seen great results cartooning!)

Describe Sean as a teacher (yes, even the irritating part).
I did not find Sean irritating at all. I found him to be unfailingly (and surprisingly) patient and prepared to revisit things and help even further (like the extra calls, the Mistakes audios etc) and explain again and differently. He was very insightful and excellent at deconstructing errors and showing how to vapourise them.

I also noticed on other threads that he is very robust and unprovokable. A very mature teacher who does not take complaints personally.
And overall, he was just everywhere. Don’t ask me when he sleeps or how he keeps up with everything. I’m just grateful he does. And inspired to push my own envelope more to achieve what I want to.

9) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it?
I did not have a particularly low point. I knew it was going to be hard, I had been warned, I expected it to be hard and it was! But I made a pact with myself that I would show up every day and post an article. So in my mind I was never going to miss a day, even if I wrote a crappy piece that I was not happy with and just could not stay up any later.

10) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc).
‘One word’ was certainly my biggest breakthrough because a break through there flows into everything else.

I have been reading Sean’s stuff for a couple of years now and struggling to pin down this One Word thing. But it suddenly clicked and I don’t know why. It’s not that I hadn’t seen its prominence on the first chapter of notes and audio – I just could not wrestle it into submission. And with writing mostly travel stuff, different angles etc felt elusive.

So the breakthrough came when I was outlining about different towns . And each place had a very particular character. So I realized that what I wanted the reader to take away was what the feeling or vibe of that place was. And that was my one word. So one place was ‘party place’ and another was ‘tranquil’ and so on. I have now managed to capture that for other types of topics the baby stuff and the finance stuff. It’s a really powerful feeling.

10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course?
Being able to assess my own stuff better, to know where I am most likely to fall short and hone in on that.
Outlining so fast! And seeing the outlines more clearly and easier.

I think the most unexpected learning was the work process/ work flow. Of choosing a series, and outlining it, and then writing. That is of immense help to me, I struggle with strategic planning.

11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help?
The Audios on mistakes were invaluable. And having the calls recorded. The extra calls, these last 2 Thursdays, were very valuable too. Surprisingly so, who would believe so much benefit could come from recapping stuff this late?!

12) Why would you recommend it?
It works. If you are prepared to follow the process through, Sean gets you to the other side.

13) Can you describe why you (personally) find it unique?
I love the ‘Psycho’ approach Sean uses to punch you through the Bully Brain zone.
I love working with people from all over the world. And I love working hard with others who are determined to work hard and succeed too.

14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why?
Cartooning – for fun and to get my creative brain working and to challenge myself to do something I had never thought I could do.

I would consider doing the Info products and the Copywriting and Pre-selling course once my bank balance has recovered from AWC.

15) What advice would you give to future participants?
Decide beforehand that you will not quit.
Clear your decks if you can, and expect it to be hard

16) How did the course personally help you?
It gave me a good realization of how often we make excuses.

So I started asking myself in other areas of my life “Do I want to do this? Yes? Then how will I make it happen?” instead of putting things off and being passive. Getting an insight on Sean’s personal program has encouraged me to push my own personal envelope to achieve what I want to.

17) Anything else you’d like to add?
Thanks. A huge whole lot. It’s been great and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Useful Resources

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2)  Find out: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk)

3) About 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems