One mistake we tend to make is when we model other people.

Since humans have been around, we’ve learned much of what we can do by copying others.

When we were young, we copied our parents and those around us.

When we were in school, we learned by paying attention to social triggers.

I remember once in third grade, there was this brief but intense “yo-yo” fad.

At the end of second grade, nobody had a yo-yo. But by the first couple months of third grade, EVERYBODY had a yo-yo, and everybody was trying to outdo each other with all the different tricks.

Since this was WAAAAY before the internet, the only way we could learn new tricks was by watching and copying others. It’s not like that they had a book of yo-yo tricks in the local library.

With yo-yo tricks, what you see is what you get. You can either do the trick, or you can’t. You have feedback right then and there that tells you if you are doing it right or not. (My big trick was “around the world”).

It gets pretty complicated, pretty quickly, when the skills we are “copying” from others involve human interaction and communication.

In sales, they try to make this as simple as possible. I’ve had a couple of face to face, in-home sales jobs where they wouldn’t let you go out into the field unless you had a complete, 20 minute presentation fully memorized.

Funny thing was, that even though everybody was going out and spitting out the same memorized pitch, some people sold a lot, some people didn’t sell anything.

I’m sure you know that communication is only about 7% verbal. The rest of the 93%, all the body language, facial expressions, indications of confidence or lack of confidence, that accounts for the sales, and the non-sales.

So even if you take a perfectly written script, and memorize it line for line, it will only take you 7% of the way.

(This is one reason why really good actors get paid so much, they can “fake” most of that 93% where “bad” actors can’t).

How do you get that other 93%? 

It’s all about your inner game. The energy you carry with you, and subconsciously project everywhere you go.

Funny thing is, when somebody comes along that is REALLY solid in that 93%, the words won’t really matter much.

They just show up, and everybody knows.

The good news is that building up that “inner game” is pretty easy. You just need to know HOW to practice, and be willing to spend the 5-10 minutes a day that will get you there.

To learn how, check this out:

Frame Control