“The Internet lives where anyone can access it.” – Vinton Cerf

A common dream of our readership is the ability to work remotely–with just a laptop and an internet connection. Whether it be just working from home so you can skip the commute or living in some exotic location, many people desire this type of freedom.

Roberto and I are no exception. We have very deliberately shifted the focus of our business from an offline training company, to an online training company.

As I’m sure you know, Roberto is from Brazil and he wants to live part of the year in Brazil with his family and building a business with the majority of your work depending on one geographical region would not allow that.

The same is true for me.

One of my driving forces is adventure.

I LOVE to travel.

One of my first jobs as a young adult was creating and executing health club promotions around the country — I was required to relocate to a new city every 20-40 days.

Add to that the years that I traveled for the Anthony Robbins companies and I can safely say that I have lived in almost every major city on the east and west coast.

I have also lived in Australia, Mexico and plan on living in Brazil in the next year.

Building a business that supports that life style depends heavily on the internet. Not only for marketing, coaching calls, product sales and project management but also for communication with family and friends.

The internet is paramount to the life style we have designed.

But can the Internet also be a dream killer?

I’m currently writing you from Rio De Janiero Brazil and the place that I am staying at has mediocre internet AT BEST!!

Over the last couple of weeks I have had a series of total internet black outs!

No email.

No Skype.

No Facebook.

In the first couple hours I noticed that I was constantly checking my phone to see if the I had email (even though I knew the internet was out).

I was acting like an internet addict.

I was thinking of ALL the ways I could score myself some internet:

…is there a starbucks near by?
…are any of my friends that have internet here home?
…I wonder if mobile phone companies sell an USB adapter for 3g internet?

After doing this for awhile I finally came to terms that I didn’t and wasn’t going to have internet for the rest of the day.

I bravely went through my internet withdrawals…

I thought for sure my world was going to implode.

Guess what?

It didn’t.

In fact, a few of those days were MY MOST PRODUCTIVE days I have had in a long time.

That experience really forced me to look at the relationship I have with technology and the distractions it provides.

By not having internet and all the bad habits that come with it, I was really able to:

• focus on and get my tasks done a lot faster.
• spend more time ‘thinking’

I wondered how come?

I mean, I consider myself on the vigilant side when it comes to time management.

I really put some time into figuring why was I so much more productive? (… I actually had time left over at the end of the day.)

Here’s what I came up with:

The reason I was so much more productive was NOT only because of less distractions, but because of a less obvious reason.

It’s called “Transition time”.

Transition time is the amount of time it takes you to “shift gears” from one task to another and get in the “zone”.

Every time you check your email or Facebook not only do you run the risk of getting off task, but you also have to get yourself back into the zone.

I did a little research and experts estimate it takes anywhere from 10-20 minutes to become fully engaged in your task at hand once you begin.

So if you are the average person who checks email or Facebook 6-10 times a day, that is at least an hour to 2 hours of transition time a day. That doesn’t even factor in the rabbit whole that checking email can send us down.

If you are working 5 days a week, that is an extra 5-10 hours a week that you could be working ON your business.

I’m not suggesting you completely cut these activities out, most people have to check their email at some point in the day. But what I’m offering you is the opportunity to become more aware of how your internet addiction is effecting your productivity and essentially your wallet.

If you are the adventurous type, try ‘unplugging’ yourself from the internet for a whole day and see what you discover about your internet habits and your productivity.

If you believe you are spending too much time doing these things, here a couple suggestions to get this under control:

• When planning your day, schedule in your times to check email.
• If you aren’t using Facebook for business then only check Facebook after business hours.
• When you schedule time in your calendar to do these activities–honor your schedule.

All of us only have 24 hours in a day — it’s one of the only resources where everyone has a level playing field. It’s what you accomplish during those 24 hours that shapes your results so spend your time on the tasks that are going to allow you to achieve your goals the fastest.

Though the internet has enabled many entrepreneurs’ dreams to come true, don’t become the victim of this silent assassin known as the “dream killer”!

Signing off and logging out!!

Jeff

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think about this post.

“If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be too late.” Seth Godin

According to our recent survey, thank you if you were one of the participants, (we will share the results soon) the number one challenge that entrepreneurs are facing right now is:  Client Acquisition

In this training video, you will learn a very simple 7-step process to help you (or someone you know) to solve this problem in 2012.

“We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.” – Antonio Damasio

One of the major mistakes that sales professionals, executives and entrepreneurs do when presenting their ideas is “dumping way to much facts, statistics and information without creating proper emotional states.”

In this training video, you will learn how to use the SPIF influence strategy to help you “emotionalize” your product or service.

The best communicators in the world use the SPIF strategy to acquire more clients, make more money and experience more influence.

“The existence of forgetting has never been proved:  We only know that some things don’t come to mind when we want them.”  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Lately I have been reading books on how the mind works and more specifically: how we learn things, how we develop and encode memories and thoughts.

How would you like to put science on your side to either make YOU more memorable or to create a strategy to recall MORE information, MORE accurately?

Read on to learn how.

In a nutshell, the more elaborate we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory.

John Medina in his excellent book, “Brain rules” explains it like this:

“…there was shoe store I used to visit as a little boy. This shoe store had a door with 3 handles at different heights: one near the very top, one near the very bottom, and one in the middle. The logic was simple: The more handles on the door, the more access points were available for entrance, regardless of the strength or age of customer. ….”quality of encoding” really means the number of door handles one put on the entrance to a piece of information. The more handles one creates at the moment of learning, the more likely the information is to be accessed at a later date. The handles we add revolve around content, timing, and environment.”

So, how can you make people remember your message better? What can you do to recall information more accurately?

…by adding these ‘Handles’.

Handle #1: Powerful First Experience

One of the best ways to make someone remember you or your company is to have a powerful first impression.

We remember what we learned first the best (and last).

This isn’t a new concept, that’s for sure, but many ‘gurus’ have started to stress it as ‘less important’ and the fact is: this IS the memory that the person you are meeting is MOST likely to remember you by.

As I’m writing this, I am reminded of a memory that happened many years ago while living in Las Vegas.

We were all out celebrating a friend’s birthday party.

It was a mixed bunch of friends, they all knew my buddy, but we didn’t all know each other.

There was one guy there (his name slips my mind) who was a pilot in the navy.

He just flew in briefly to celebrate our buddy’s birthday and then he had to fly out to Korea for flight school because he was a real-life Top Gun pilot.

Here’s the kicker, he was 6′ 4″, tall dark and handsome (yes, secret man crush).

To top it all off, he did cage fighting for fun! I know it’s like a character out of action adventure.

That night we are all having a great time, partying hard (it was a long time ago ) and suddenly some guy starting to bow-up to our birthday boy (who was the smallest, frailest guy out of the group.)

Apparently, the guy starting the fight didn’t see our birthday boy’s crew because within moments there were 10 of us there standing behind him, and NOT one of us was under 6′ 2″!!!

I can remember seeing Top-Gun-fly-boy saying, “I’m ready to do this” as he put in his pink mouth-guard!!!

That’s right, he brought his mouth-guard with him out to the club!!

In that very moment, I leaned into my other friend and said, “this is the guy we tell girls we are…!!”

I can’t remember his name, but boy do I ever remember his first impression all these years later!!

First impressions do count.

For this very reason, when it comes to presenting information, Roberto and I tout that the opening is one of the most important parts of a presentation.

Handle #2: Intensity and Emotion

The second way to make yourself (or your message) more memorable, is by making the experience either intense or emotion laden.

And one of the fastest ways for you to make any interaction emotional is by using stories. Become a master story teller and you will command people’s attention.

Handle #3: Add Meaning:

• The more something means to us the more likely we will retain it.
• In your presentation, use people’s first names
• In your emails or marketing personalize it as much as you can
• When speaking to children, use the words: “What that could mean to you is…..”, then follow up a question to them asking, “What does that mean to you?”
• use examples

Handle #4: Make it more complex??

Yep, according to Medina, “It’s a fact: More complexity means greater learning”

Handle #5: Similar settings

Try to make the encoding and retrieval environments similar as possible. For example, if you have to perform a feat, or recall information in a particular environment, then do your best to learn that information in that setting. This is the primary reason, the navy seals (and all military branches), perform their trainings in the most realistic settings as possible.

For example, if you are a bilingual family and you are having trouble with your child learning both languages, here is what you can do: Create a separate room that is decorated differently than the rest of the house-hang art that reflects the language of origin, put up pictures from that country- and create one simple rule: in this room, you are only allowed to speak the second language.

These influence ‘handles’ are very easy to start using TODAY. Incorporate them into your daily communications. Incorporate them into your repertoire and watch as you begin to increase your effectiveness, power and influence

Loving, Living, Giving Large:

Jeff

PS: want to work with me personally in 2012? Let me show you how to grow your business using 1 to many communications (presentations, Video Marketing, Webinars)

“There would be nothing to frighten you if you refused to be afraid.”
~ Gandhi

In your opinion, can you an entrepreneur, salesperson or executive use Video Marketing to promote her company, get more clients and make more money WITHOUT ever being in front of the camera?

Today I’m going to show you how to say YES…..

Even though I personally believe that anybody can become an effective presenter in front of camera, there are many ways one can use video marketing to:

• Get new clients
• Make more money
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase traffic to the website
• Train and retain employees
• And more

Without ever being in front of the camera…

A conversation that I had last week after a presentation I gave sparked me to record this training video for you.
In this video you will learn 4 strategies to implement Video Marketing without ever being in front of the camera…

Roberto

PS: want to work with me personally in 2012? Let me show you how to grow your business using 1 to many communications (presentations, Video Marketing, Webinars)

My challenge as a satirical artist is how to present ideas to people to enable them to question and reexamine their beliefs. My hope is, that my work provokes people to look at things in a new way. ~ Joey Skaggs

When it comes to public speaking and presentation skills training, there are 4 areas one must improve to become a Master Influencer:

Presentation Psychology:

How you eliminate the FUNDA (fear, uncertainty, nervousness, doubt and anxiety) so that you can present with confidence in any setting;

Presentation Delivery:

How you avoid to be a “sleeper” (a speaker that is so boring that puts people to sleep) so you can deliver your message with power, charisma and impact;

Increments of influence:

When you utilize the science of Influence (e.g., law of commitment and consistency, reciprocity, etc) into your presentation so you can increase the likelihood of compliance (people will say yes more often to you), and

Presentation Structure:

How you organize your ideas into a framework that allows you to achieve your presentation outcomes.

In this blog post you will learn a quick presentation structure for you to use in any presentation scenario (video, webinar, live group presentation, and one-one-one presentation).

Before I share this structure with you, I want to give you a disclaimer.

There are infinite ways of organizing your ideas, and they change dramatically depending on your outcome (influence, inform, entertain, etc), your audience (how much you know about them, if they know you or not, etc), the time you have, etc.

What I am about to share with you it is just one of the many ways to organize the body (the major part) of your presentation.

It does not include other elements of a persuasive presentation such as opening, pre-framing, pre-close and close (I will cover them in future blog posts).

This structure is a great way for you to organize your major ideas and I call it OCS:

Opportunity, Concern, Solution

Opportunity: In this section, I use market driven-data to describe the opportunity that I want to introduce to my audience. For example, let’s say I am a Real Estate agent doing a First Time Home Buying seminar.

In this section of my presentation, I will use market data to describe to my audience (first time home buyers) the opportunity we currently have.

I will be using statistics, stories, analogies, studies, articles, etc to describe the overall opportunity we have in the marketplace right now: declining home prices, low interest rates, great inventory, etc.

Concerns: After you describe the opportunity, the next step is to tell your audience why some people are not taking advantage of it, or, what stops some buyers from capitalizing on this opportunity.

In our example, we would elegantly address the fact that some first time home buyers are not taking action because they are afraid houses prices are going to go down even further, or maybe they have been “hurt” before (lost money in a Real Estate transaction) and have some resistance.

Some presenters don’t like to address the objections; they wait for them to come up.

It is my opinion, that in 99% of the persuasive presentations, you know in advance the possible concerns, objections and resistance points that your audience may have.

So if you know these concerns upfront, why not address them?

Solution: The last piece of this framework is about the solution, the steps or the process that one must take in order to capitalize in the opportunity previous described.

So in our example, the presenter would talk about his or her own “home buying process”.

It is my experience that most professionals don’t have created a process for their solution.

Yes, they may have a solution, for example “I can help you buy a house”, but they don’t have a branded process for it.

A branded process would have a distinct name, for example “Home sweet Home” buying process and clearly defined steps (first, second, third steps, etc).

A branded process adds tremendous value to your offer because it pre-supposes that you have helped previous clients many times before, it is result-driven, it is proven and it distinguishes you from your competition.

The beauty about this format is that you can craft a persuasive presentation very fast, here are the steps again:

1) do a little research and incorporate some market data and stories about the opportunity you are describing,

2) understand the major concerns that your audience may have and address them elegantly and

3) develop a unique way for your audience to take action in your offer.

I would love to hear your feedback and the results you got when you use the OCS formula to present your ideas more effectively!

Roberto

PS: want to work with me personally in 2012? Let me show you how to grow your business using 1 to many communications (Presentations, Video Marketing, Webinars)

“It is not enough to conquer; one must also know how to seduce” ~Voltaire

I’m planning a trip to Brazil in a few weeks so I called one of my buddies down there to see if I could influence him into picking me up from the airport, make some plans with him and to catch up.

I asked what he had been up to and he shared with me this project he is working on that teaches men how to attract women. I should preface that my friend is the real deal.  It’s not one of those cheesy ebooks filled with nonsense.

He is a licensed medical doctor that specializes in sexual behaviors.

He went on to share with me the numbers behind this business (5-6 figures a Month) and what they are planning to do in 2012. He explained that people actually pay them large sums of money to go to the clubs and ‘coach’ them on how to score woman.

I quickly realized, I might have made a mistake in career path. (wink)

I recalled the last time I was down there he had mentioned that he was teaming up with some guy from England that had published a book on the art of seduction and that he had given me a copy of the book to read.

After speaking with him for about an hour… he had peaked my curiosity, so last night I pulled the book out and began to read it…

After perusing it and creating an outline (always a good idea so you can keep your notes with your books) I began to see many similarities to what we teach at InfluenceOlogy.

Our standard persuasive presentation structure goes like this:

Opening

Pre-frames (in those is rapport)

Body

Pre-close

Close

Here is his seduction system in a nutshell:

Openings

Mid-Game

Rapport

Comfort building

Isolation

Close

Can you see they have a lot of similarities…why?

Because if you think about it what is a guy or girl trying to do when courting the other?

INFLUENCE them!

Each step’s sole purpose is to advance to the next step.

What they have done is taken a systematic process of influence and applied it to dating…

I always say, “If you want a predictable result, you need to a create process. Because if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”.

So it is no surprise to me that their system has been so successful, because “having a process” vs. “winging it” is going to outperform the latter every time.

So what is the take away from this?

That I should be super depressed because I could be traveling the world getting paid huge amounts of money to party, lead seminars and teach men and women how to use influence to attract the opposite sex…?

No, but you have a GREAT point!

The point I’m attempting to convey is, in your business, you need to design and integrate a process of influence into both, your marketing and your sales process.

Most entrepreneurs that I work with don’t have a predictable system to generate and close business. And if they do, they haven’t optimized it for maximum influence.

It doesn’t matter if you are trying to get a date, get a job or get more discipline, it’s all Influence (Inner-fluence, Intra-fluence, Enterprise Influence).

Influence and mastering the APPLICATION of it to any and all areas of your life and business is, in my opinion, the single greatest skill you can master.

So today, take a moment and if you don’t have a sales process, create one.

And if you do have one, ask yourself where can you improve it and make if more influential?

Loving, Living, Giving Large

Jeff

 What is the difference between “Reach and Influence”?

That is one question that I ask audiences when doing presentations
about influence.

In this quick post you will learn this critical distinction between
reach and influence, and what to do in order to leverage this concept
to get more clients…

I define reach as how many people you have in your network, on your
list, or your total number of connections.

Let’s create a hypothetical example, let’s say you have 2,000 Fans on
your Facebook fan page, 500 connections on your Linkedin profile and
you have 500 people on Twitter. And let’s supposed that they are all
different people (you don’t have any overlap).

So your total reach is 3,000 people in this example.

Influence, on the other hand, is how much engagement you have with
those 3,000 people.

Do they respect your opinion?

Do they listen to you?

How often do they engage in conversations with you?

Are they sharing your ideas, strategies and comments?

How often do they take action when you recommend something?

The reason that is a very important for you to understand this concept
is because:  There is a lot of people out there who are concerned
with the number of fans they have on Facebook or followers on twitter,
but they have no influence because these people in their network don’t
respect his or her opinion because he or she is not an
influencer.

So they keep trying to ‘add people” and make their network bigger
without realizing that are growing their reach without any influence
and that is pretty much worthless.

It is just like spending millions of dollars and countless hours
building a water pipe and then one day you realize you have no water to
run through the pipes (pure waste of time, energy and money)

Also, it is very sad to say, but there is a ”questionable” industry
out there selling number of views for your videos or fans for your
pages.

For example you pay $ 1,000 and you get 100,000 video views or 10,000
fans for your page.

I know, it is pretty bad.

Ultimately, these people are selling you “fake credibility”, trying to
manipulate the system.

Basically you pay $1,000 and you have 1,000 11- year kids watching your
videos in Bangladesh, which does not do any good for you.

In my humble opinion, it is stupid and a waste of money.

Furthermore, it is a questionable way to manipulate the system, not
only are you tricking yourself but ultimately you are deceiving your
clients.

So how do you go about building influence and reach?

In my opinion entrepreneurs should focus on becoming Influencers first,
by providing and communicating value to their clients, prospective
clients and community.

One of our principles in InfluenceOlogy is the 3W, where everything we
do is win-win-win (we win, our clients win and our community wins).

Apply 3W principle in your business and you will dominate your
market.

The fastest way to gain influence is by providing useful
information such as:

• “How to” videos and articles
• Interview with experts and leaders in your community
• Success tips
• Mistakes to avoid
• Life lessons, etc

(If you want to learn 52 ways to develop content marketing ideas check out
our Video Marketing Content)

I believe that by providing ideas and solutions to your community, you
gain influence, and ultimately your reach start expanding because you
have true fans and friends who support and respect your message and
they are the ones that will help you promote your community.

Speak soon. (seriously… you should)

Roberto

I have written extensively in the past about how our reflection of “self” impacts our daily actions and therefore is a significant driver for our current results.

Our self-image and our habits tend to be significantly correlated.

Change one and you automatically change the other.

In his book, “psycho-cybernetics” Dr. Maltz gives a great metaphorical explanation for a habit:

“The word “habit” originally meant a garment or clothing…. This gives us an insight into the true nature of habit. Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self-image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern”

Habits are the things the we do automatically, most of the time, without thought or decision.

95% of your behavior, feeling and responses are habitual. If you are a saxophonist, you don’t have to ‘decide’ what to do, you just strike the pads. If you are a native english speaker, you don’t “decide” how to conjugate a verb… it’s automatic.

Attitudes, emotions and beliefs can and do become habitual as well.

In the past, whether right or wrong, we learned that certain attitudes, reactions or emotions were “appropriate” for certain situations.

Now, whenever confronted with the same “situation” or stimuli, we react “appropriately”.

What you need to understand, is that these habits can be installed, modified, reversed and eradicated by simply making a conscious “decision” to change them.

The saxophonist can make a conscious decision to hit a different key, the dancer can consciously decide to learn a new dance step – and in time will become a new habit, thoughtlessly performed.

If you wanted to learn another language, you could with time become fluent.

If you want to be happier, right now, decide for the next 30 days to have happy thoughts, be mindful of the way you speak to others and yourself. No matter what, even when you don’t feel like it, force yourself to act happier.

If you catch yourself behaving different than how you want to, immediately acknowledge it and then say out loud “ok, enough of that, now back to being happy”…

See what happens in 20-30 days from now. My guess is you will have become ‘habitually’ happier!

You can install any new habitual behavior, thought or emotion that you would like to experience.

It DOES require constant vigilance and and practice before a new emotion, habit can become permanent and automatic, but it certainly can be achieved.

And YOU can do it!!

I believe in you!

Living, Loving, Giving Large

Jeff