Category Archives: Charisma

Nothing Is Real Keep Going Forward

The Illusion of Perfection

They say that practice makes perfect.

And like most “truisms” that we all tend to agree are more or less correct, this one, while well intentioned, is not entirely accurate.

As a motivational statement, it does just fine.

In that regard, it IS true. Whatever you want to get better at, the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

And all else equal, practicing something MORE is better than practicing something LESS.

If they had a violin playing competition, for example, whoever practiced the MOST would end up winning.

You’ll find this is true in all people with world class skills.

They are the ones who have practiced the most.

They say you can “master” anything, and be “world class” with 10,000 hours of practice.

At an hour day, that is a little over 27 YEARS.

Which, in a world of instant gratification, seems like an eternity.

But it’s well within a normal life span.

Meaning if you start in your mid twenties, you’ll be WORLD CLASS in your chosen skill by the time you’re fifty or so.

Or, if you don’t want to wait that long, you can be world class in 14 years (two hours of practice a day) or seven years (four hours of practice a day) or three or four years (eight hours of practice a day).

Of course, you’ll NEVER get to a point where you say, “OK, I’m done, now I can rest!”

Because the idea of being “perfect” doesn’t really apply in many areas.

Sure, you can make a “perfect” circle, but how the heck are you supposed to bake a “perfect” cake? Or paint the “perfect” picture?

Paradoxically, “mastering” something is not synonymous with perfecting any skill.

No matter WHAT you are practicing, so long as you are drawing breath, you can get better.

Whether you are the world master, or you’re just starting out.

So, what would YOU like to get better at?

Get Started:

End Self Sabotage

Build Your Own Roadmap

Re-Gain Your Childlike Excitement

Why are little kids so happy?

Well, obviously not all of the time. But when they ARE happy, why do they look MUCH happier than adults? (on those occasions when adults are happy)

Do they know something we don’t?

Or do they know something we’ve forgotten?

One reason might be that they are always discovering things.

Especially right after they learn to walk and run confidently.

Their brains are like sponges, desperate to be filled in.

Now, there are a lot of ideas that we somehow “stop” learning when we get to age seven or so.

But that can’t be true, otherwise the only inventions we would have would come from seven-year-olds.

Since many inventions (especially medical and scientific inventions) come from people WAY older than seven, there’s something else going on.

Why does it SEEM that we stop learning at seven? (or at least for many of us)

Because we fall into the trap of needing to BE TAUGHT by other people.

People that continue to invent things are always thinking, “what if…”

And then trying a bunch of stuff out.

Truth is we ALL have that capacity.

Only in most of us, once “school” is over, we shut our brains off.

But your learning capacity is still there.

Your capacity for discovery is still there.

How do you use it?

Just like a little kid does. Just like a scientist or entrepreneur does.

Ask “What if…” and try something.

And see what happens.

Obviously, you want to try something that will get you going in a direction you’d like to go.

Like making more money, or having better relationships, or getting healthier or smarter.

The tendency for many is to wait around and BE TOLD what to do.

But that isn’t any fun!

It’s more fun to discover on your own. To continuously INVENT your life, one small step at a time.

To RE-DISCOVER that thrill of having curiosity and excitement about your future.

Because it’s out there, waiting for you.

Make It:

End Self Sabotage

Monsters Are Coming

Epic Journeys and Monster Fights

Why do we humans love stories so much?

Anything that is ubiquitous across all time and all cultures usually has a LOT of reasons for being around.

Imagine what it was like in ancient hunter-gatherer tribes.

Before written language was invented.

What kind of stories would they have told and retold?

They would have to be entertaining.

Nobody likes boring stories.

But they also had to be inspirational.

After all, living back in those days wasn’t easy.

Imagine your typical hunter-gatherer, going to “work” every day.

They had to find an animal to kill and eat. Usually the bigger the better.

What kind of “story-memories” could be helpful to have when chasing down a big wooly mammoth?

Fairy princess stories?

Or the little guy kills the big monster story?

How about when the weather changed, and they had to migrate into unknown territory.

What stories would be useful to tell each night during those long journeys?

Frog into prince stories?

Or epic adventure stories?

When you watch a movie or read a book, what character do you imagine to be?

The good guy or the bad guy?

The main character or one of the supporting characters?

The Greeks knew long ago one of the reasons we love stories is it gives us a feeling of emotional release.

We get to feel the “tension-release” without having to actually go through the risky or painful “event.”

Books and movies that flop are usually because they don’t “move” us.

And when they say, “move,” that obviously means “move our emotions” around.

If you’ve studied hypnosis, you know that the “thing” that “moves” us when it comes to individual language is STRUCTURE much more than content.

And guess what?

All of those epic stories of adventure, killing the monster, etc., they have the SAME structure.

Joseph Campbell called it the “Hero’s Journey.”

The cool thing is that you don’t need to be Spielberg or Stephen King to create these same structures.

You can create them conversationally, and move people profoundly.

You’ll find it’s a pretty cool party trick.

But that’s just the beginning.

Because any time you’re “chit chatting” to somebody, and you drop in a few of these similar structures, you can have a lasting effect on whoever you’re speaking to.

Learn How:

Hypnotic Storytelling

Click With Anybody

How To Click With Nearly Anybody

The idea of resonance has always been a favorite of mine.

Even as a kid, when I didn’t know what it was.

Me and my friends learned how to shake street signs.

If you push it back and forth at the right frequency, you can get some pretty huge oscillations.

Much bigger than you’d be able to push on your own.

Being a kid and leveraging some principle of science to create an effect seemingly impossible is pretty cool.

The same happens when people “click” with one another.

Most of the time we stumble through life, just trying randomly.

So when that “click” does happen, it’s extra special.

Because it’s “scarce” it seems to be more valuable than it really is.

Scarcity does that.

But this presents a problem, one we really don’t realize.

Because we perceive those situations (where we “click” with others) as “scarce” we tend to hang onto them LONGER than we should.

Luckily, this won’t happen once we realize that feeling of “scarcity” is only in our mind.

Once you learn how to CREATE that “click” feeling, the scarcity goes away.

And will make those “click” situations MUCH BETTER.

Normally, when we start to “click” with somebody we are both worried and ecstatic at the same time.

Happy it’s happening, but worried because it’s scarce.

And scarce things tend to stay that way.

So not only do we hang on for dear life, we tend to do things not to ENHANCE that “click” feeling, but protect it.

We don’t want to ruin a good thing.

But once you learn how to create that click feeling in a majority of the people you interact with, a couple of things will happen.

One is because they won’t be scarce, you can relax and enjoy them.

Two is because you’ll be relaxing and enjoying the situation, the other person will “resonate” with you.

This is what people do.

We vibe with one another.

If YOU are nervous, so will the other person.

IF you are relaxed and enjoying yourself, so will the other person.

This requires that you stop HOPING it will happen, and learn how to MAKE it happen.

Once you do, you’ll have a skill few people even know exist.

Learn How:

Hypnotic Storytelling

My Hero!

Show Them Their Hidden Hero

Lately (last ten years or so) they’ve been a LOT of superhero movies and TV shows.

Word on the street is that ten or twenty years ago, studio execs were a little iffy on superhero Hollywood movies.

Dudes dressed in tights running around didn’t seem like such a good idea.

Great for comic books, but not up on the big screen.

But then they stared making them, and the movies started making money.

Now there’s ALL KINDS of superhero’s on TV and in the movies.

Why do we love these clearly fictional superheroes so much?

The answer to that could fill a doctoral dissertation in philosophy, psychology or even evolutionary biology.

Maybe it’s because we would all love to be “saved” by the superhero.

Or maybe we all secretly wish we could BE the superhero.

Maybe that’s why a lot of them are anonymous.

“Regular people” by day, but when they put on their costumes, (so nobody knows their identity) they run around saving people and beating up bad guys.

Maybe it’s a useful fantasy. Maybe we all really DO have some kind of “super powers” but we’re afraid to show it.

So the “anonymous superhero” is compelling to us.

But there is a tricky way you can “be” a superhero in real life.

You won’t get to beat up bad guys, but you’ll be able to move people emotionally to wonderful places they can’t otherwise get to on their own.

All while remaining anonymous.

How’s that?

First, you understand the superhero structure. The deep structure that is in nearly all stories.

Then wrap your “suggestions” for them in a superhero story.

Then “hide in” in a few other stories, carefully nested in the center.

That way, it’s not really “you” telling the story.

It’s some character within the story that is telling the story to another character.

One is YOUR alter ego, the other is THEIR alter ego.

But because you’ve hidden both identities, nobody will know what’s going on but you.

And you will have hidden your superhero powers in the best possible place.

In plain sight.

Learn More:

Hypnotic Storytelling

Emotions Are Awesome

Escape The Rigid Hierarchy

I watched a pretty goofy movie the other night on Netflix.

It was a romantic comedy, and the “hero” was a salesperson for a big drug company.

They had them memorize a sales pitch, and they had to practice saying it while holding a lit match.

The idea was to finish before the match burned out.

And in order to “close” doctors (they people they were selling to) they had to hide out in the parking lot and wait for them to pull in.

Then they’d run up and hammer out their sales pitch.

When you’re selling like that, it’s clearly a number’s game.

It’s about as cold as you can get.

Meaning the customer (in this case doctors) have no idea you’re there. Then you show up out of nowhere and start pounding them with “features and benefits” in twenty seconds or less.

This is the model of almost all sales, even with warm customers.

You walk into a shop, and your sort of interested, but they still use the same technique.

They take a bunch of pre-set, memorized ideas, and try to FORCE them into your head.

This is precisely why sales is high tension, and high turnover.

Few people can handle that much “confrontation” for very long.

Why is it like this?

All the way up the food chain, it’s the same way.

The upper managers (in the movie and in real life) train the salespeople.

The sales people are told EXACTLY what to say, and then they turn around and repeat it to the customer.

A very tight chain of command.

There’s no room for dissent, no room for discussion.

The ideas are created at the higher level.

Then they are “implanted” into lower level minds (salespeople) who go out and forcibly try and “implant” them into the customers minds.

This is what happens when people aren’t allowed any independent thought.

The ideas come down from the top, and that’s the way it is.

Whoever gets those ideas (in this case the memorized sales pitch) into the most minds gets the most money.

Of course, it doesn’t HAVE to be that way.

You can be an independent thinker.

And independent idea creator, not only in YOUR mind but in the minds of people you are talking to.

When you’re going from the top down, it’s ALWAYS about content.

But when you’re an independent operator, a freelance “thinker,” you can start with the emotions.

And give your listeners the FREEDOM to “dress them up” with their own content.

This is much easier (and fun) for you, and much more enjoyable for them.

You can think of it of setting their minds free from the rigid chain of command.

Learn How:

Hypnotic Storytelling

Social Authority

How To Engineer Social Authority

Next time you’re at a party or social gather, do a little experiment.

Any time people are sitting around talking about whatever.

When one person is talking, watch the other people.

Try and decide when they’ve stop listening, and have starting thinking what to say when it’s “their turn.”

Also notice the times people that are speaking get “interrupted.”

Every once in a while you’ll get a group where one person is the clear “leader” and does most of the talking.

But most of the time there are at least two people who are vying for the social conversation “leadership” role.

This is human nature.

Humans always self organize into hierarchies.

And within those hierarchies there is also a lot of shuffling going on.

Nobody thinks this way consciously. This “social hierarchy” instinct is like hunger.

But much more subtle.

One way people notice who’s “in charge” is by the cues given by the other people.

Unless you’re in a high stakes poker game or a prison gang, the person “in charge,” especially during social situations, is usually the one doing the most talking, or getting the most attention.

For most people, this is natural and automatic. Both the talking part and the paying attention part.

But it’s VERY EASY to engineer this.

There are all kinds of very powerful language techniques to build MASSIVE interest in whatever you are saying.

And because these happen at the structure level, and not the content level, people will think it’s got something to do with YOU.

From a content standpoint, if somebody is talking about something EXTRAORDINARY, then people will KNOW that it’s the content.

But when you use regular content (normal everyday stories) but use them in a specific structure, people will be mesmerized but they won’t know why.

Some of these structure techniques are easy to learn, and can use them right away.

Some of them take a bit more practice, but are INSANELY powerful.

When you are doing your “conversation experiments,” see if you can find somebody that talks for more than a couple of minutes, while EVERYBODY else can’t take their eyes of him or her.

THAT could be YOU.

Learn How:
Hypnotic Storytelling

Secrets Of Influence

Allow Them To Discover You

Giving advice is always a tricky subject, both receiving and giving.

Nobody really likes to be told what to do, even if we have a pretty good idea that the other person has our best interests in mind.

One of the fundamental concepts of our human nature is given a choice, most of us would rather live self-determined lives rather than be micro-managed.

But sometimes, though, you see somebody doing something and you KNOW it’s not going to end well.

Or you have an idea of something they could do, and you KNOW it would work out well.

But it’s not really something you could give “advice” on.

What do you do in that situation?

If you’re in a straight up persuasion situation, where you KNOW what they want and they KNOW they it’s your job (either as a friend or your actually job) to help them, it’s pretty easy.

Like if you were a waiter and somebody asked you, “what’s good?”

You’d give them your opinion.

If you sell something and somebody walks into your shop, it’s a fair assumption they will EXPECT you to help them decide.

But what if you’re hanging out with friends, or even socially, and it’s not really appropriate to say, “Well, what I think you should do is…”

What then?

Telling stories is perfect.

Give them an example of somebody else, who was in the same situation as them, and explain how THEY solved the problem.

But you’ve got to be careful.

Because sometimes you KNOW what they should do, but not only do you suspect they won’t like your “advice,” they also don’t think they should be doing anything differently than what they are.

Maybe they’re about to make a huge mistake. Or maybe they don’t recognize the opportunity that is standing right in front of them.

If you aren’t careful, your “story” will sound VERY MUCH like “advice.”

Luckily, there’s a way to mix up a few stories so they will easily be able to “discover” your “advice” on their own.

What’s more, is you can set it up so they will REALLY LIKE this “advice.”

And they’ll have the pleasure of thinking they “discovered” this advice on their own.

All in a couple of minutes of regular social conversation.

And once you figure out how, you can use this powerful technique in any situation where people are talking.

Learn More:

Hypnotic Storytelling

Wrap Their Minds In Mystery

The Wall St. Journal Pattern

One of the longest running sales pages was for the Wall Street Journal.

The same ad ran for nearly twenty years.

Why was it so successful?

It told a simple story.

Once upon a time there were two guys.

Both had the same degree. They both lived in the same sized town.

But one guy was ultra successful, while the other guy was average successful.

Why?

One had access to information the other guy didn’t.

Which meant one was able to see things, predict changes, take advantage of situations and opportunities, while the other guy didn’t.

The information, of course, was the one guy’s subscription to the Wall St. Journal.

Think about your favorite commercials on TV.

Very few of them are of some goof standing there saying, “I’m an expert and I recommend you try brand X!”

They’re usually a short story of some type.

Or if not a story, a short scene within a story.

The most famous commercials are serialized stories, with each commercial an unfolding of the tale.

Why do we love stories so much?

Think back to before we humans invented society.

They’d go out hunting, and then come home for the night.

Sit around the camp fire and talk.

What would they talk about?

Who knows, but judging by the plethora of mythology around the world, they probably told each other stories.

About heroes and monsters and angels and devils.

Humans are hard wired to not only enjoy stories, but to tell them, and resonate with them.

Which means no matter what idea or message you’d like to convey to somebody else, if you can wrap it in a story, it will be much more effective.

Learn How:

Hypnotic Storytelling

Scary Forests

Raining Buckets In Their Brain

Language is a funny thing.

Written language has only been around for a few thousand years.

Spoken language maybe a hundred thousand.

Nobody’s really sure, since there was no way to record when people started speaking.

They can only guess.

Interestingly, this is also why we can’t really pinpoint when phrases were invented.

We can only look back and see when they appeared in print.

Even this is iffy, since lots of books and newspapers were printed and that was that.

If the actual paper or book isn’t around, we have no way of knowing exactly WHAT phrases were used.

So when researching phrases like, “Raining cats and dogs,” there’s no way to KNOW when it started being used that way.

Sure, there are plenty of interesting theories, but since things are spoken for a LONG TIME before they are written down, even the guy who first WROTE, “raining cats and dogs” maybe didn’t know why it meant that.

Only that it meant that.

This is an interesting subject for linguistics.

They can actually test whether we think of a phrase as a singular thing, or as a collection of things that mean something else.

They flash words and sentences, and by recording how quickly (or slowly) our facial expressions and other non-conscious behavior responds, they can tell if we need to TRANSLATE that phrase into a meaning or if we IMMEDIATELY take in the whole phrase to “mean” something.

Like the phrase, “kick the bucket.”

We interpret that phrase the same way we interpret the word “die.”

Linguists have a theory that when most people associate a phrase (like “kick the bucket”) with a single meaning (die) then it’s part of the common language.

Once it gets to this point, nobody needs to know WHY it means what it does.

Of course, that doesn’t keep us from having fun guessing.

The cool thing is that this is just as true for each WORD in our language.

Nobody knows when or how or why the sounds were put together to mean certain things.

All we need to know is that when we make these certain sounds in certain orders, we will conjure certain ideas in the brains of other people.

Which is pretty cool when you think about it.

(Which most people don’t).

By taking the time to learn how to put words and sounds together, you can purposely create some amazing ideas in other people’s heads.

And since YOU’LL be the one making those crazy ideas in their mind, to them it will seem like you’ve got super powers of mind control!

Street Hypnosis