Capability Amplifier

“That costs too much money...” “It’s WAY too expensive...” “I don’t have the cash right now…” “What’s the return on investment?” What about, “I’m not going to pay $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000, for a virtual program! I expect an in-person experience.” What are the biggest sales objections you and your team are getting consistently that block the big sale? How frustrating is it when you realize you’ve lost a potential client because they ghost you? I’ll tell you why you keep getting these same objections. It’s because you’re not asking enough questions. And that’s what this episode is all about: gathering the right data so that you can present the right information and never feel like you’re in that pushy/salesy/yucky mode. Instead, your potential clients will be pulled into you, experiencing the moment where they say, “Wow, I already know I want to work with you—how do we start? I’ve been looking for someone just like you for a long time!” Today, I’d also like to introduce you to someone super special! Her name is Marissa Brassfield and you may know her because she worked with Peter Diamandis for years, helping build the Abundance 360 Community and the “Strike Force Team” that supported it. A while back, she left that organization and decided to evolve, grow, and build her own career, and we decided to start working together. Together, we created the Superpower Accelerator, which is a boutique experience where we help people build their brands and platforms. The biggest challenge most businesses have is that their messaging is off. It’s why prospects don’t connect and convert. Consistently having a great sales message that gets someone to enroll and pre-qualifies them, and being able to repeat that same messaging over and over again, is super important. Knowing that your sales team actually says the same things, tells the same stories, and is prepared with responses to all of the biggest objections to working with you would be invaluable, right? On this podcast, we share the deep psychology that has been proven to work. It’s the same exact system I’m building inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan and his team—part of what Dan calls the Free Zone Frontier Program.  If you’re ever in a situation where you need to have a sales conversation, whether it’s live or virtual, the first thing you need to ask is “The Dan Sullivan Question":“If you and I were meeting three years from today, what needs to have happened in your life, both personally and professionally, for you to feel satisfied with your progress?”  This will enable you to get inside the head and psyche of the person, learn A LOT about them and their values, and truly understand where they are in their lives.  If you’re talking to someone who is already financially successful and secure, they’re going to have VERY different answers from someone who is a first-time entrepreneur, perhaps fresh out of college, in debt or dealing with discovering themselves and their identity.  When you’re armed with this information, it enables you to direct the sales conversation and perfectly personalize your offer to them.  Next is the D.O.S.® question (Dangers, Opportunities, and Strengths).  Ask your prospect: 1 - What are the dangers that you and your business are facing right now? 2 - What opportunities are in front of you that you cannot take advantage of because you don’t have the right team, resources, capital, or capabilities?

Sheri Salata grew up outside of Chicago and worked with the daytime television titan for more than 20 years with one of the most heralded jobs on the planet as the executive producer of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” In this episode, Sheri gives us some AMAZING takeaways from her tenure working with Oprah.But as AMAZING as it sounds, Sheri says, “It was not a straight shot by any means! I think that when people hear about a 20-year career with Oprah Winfrey, it sounds like I just left college and sailed right into Harpo studios and started climbing up the ladder. But the truth is, I did not start at The Oprah Winfrey Show until I was 35 years old, in an entry-level position.” Over her 20+ career, Sheri was privy to EVERYTHING that was pitched to Oprah, and she’s used that knowledge to expand her depth with regard to her own business and passions—from diet trends to celebrity drama, fitness crazes and spiritual movements. Sheri had access to many of the secrets that passed through Oprah’s studios, and today we uncover what those professional lessons did for Sheri and her business, and what it can do for YOU TOO! Sheri shares with me what happened to her personally through her journey. During her professional career, she LOST herself; gained and lost 40, 60, and 100 pounds; smoked cigarettes; didn’t marry or have children; and when she made the decision to leave the show, she began her REAL journey to find herself again. THIS is a story of reinvention over 50 — RELEASING A LIFETIME OF SHAME AND SADNESS. Some of the best takeaways from this episode: * How to use life’s “Magical Glasses” and how that can lead you to fast life transformations and reinventions.* How to see a story in someone and how to use that story to teach and connect deeply to an audience.* What TRULY made the Oprah Show work.* What running a BILLION dollar media company was like, and the secret to producing 100+ shows a year FOR DECADES.* How we are “curators of our own reality” — and how to use that to increase your consciousness.* How to intentionally create the most magical moments in your life and how to utilize those to shape your mission.* The power in taking simple actions to make the biggest moves that produce the most significant results. Grab of copy of Sheri’s book, The Beautiful No: And Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation, check out her podcast, The Sheri + Nancy Show, and visit her website at the www.ThePillarLife.com.

Are you still skeptical, confused, and scared about how to move forward with your business, life, and relationships in a post-COVID worldWhat if you could connect and collaborate with people you wouldn’t normally have access to? I’m talking about HUNDREDS of high-level, qualified, motivated, potential clients. How would that change your business? Or your LIFE? Think about the potential opportunity for networking, scaling, and leveling up! This week is about collaborating, enrolling, and selling in a post-COVID world. Dan Sullivan and I share our best Zoom meeting practices and how you can use them too. More importantly ... how you can think bigger. Dan has had the great opportunity to completely change the way Strategic Coach® delivers its one-of-a-kind content using Zoom. He has done over 100 group presentations and meetings, and I’ve been using the platform for years to enroll clients and customers. In fact, so much so that my rule is, I don't do anything over the phone. I haven’t in years. Although Dan had been using Zoom for five years, he had never done BIG virtual meetings with his Strategic Coach entrepreneurs before, so when the opportunity presented itself, they went for it. In an effort to make the Zoom meetings as valuable as possible, they decided to introduce a thinking process they used in their in-person workshops. They start with three quick questions that the entrepreneurs write about for two or three minutes and then they go into Zoom’s breakout rooms. The breakout rooms are terrific because they get everybody in a conversational mode and it’s done randomly so people don’t know which room they’re going to end up in. It’s a chance for people to interact, chat, brainstorm, network, and bounce ideas off of each other. It’s been a knockout success. Here’s the thing ... I love traveling to the Strategic Coach workshops. I like the physical experience of them. But the convenience and efficiency of the Zoom meetings is really great. I’ve loved the connection with different people. I’ve built relationships with folks that I hadn’t met or talked to before so it’s been a very valuable experience for me. The virtualized Strategic Coach experiences coincided with the introduction of the “Simplifier/Multiplier” concept, which is a collaborative concept. The basic thesis, for those who haven’t heard of it before, is that there’s one activity that you love over another activity. Let’s say that you’re someone who likes taking complexity and simplifying it, and that’s been the key to your entrepreneurial success. In other words, you’ve come up with simpler solutions to problems that are in the marketplace. That would make you a “Simplifier.” Or maybe you’ve made your living out of finding new simplifiers and expanding them through your Multiplier networks. You’re a “Multiplier.” I’m a Multiplier. My career has always been about growing and monetizing audiences. Oftentimes, Multipliers hang out with Multipliers because they’re “idea people” who enjoy bouncing ideas off of one another. The problem with that is that Multipliers don’t often complete things. But if they get together with a Simplifier, stuff gets DONE. Are you familiar with the personality tool called Human Design? Listen to this episode to hear what Dan’s and my Human Design types are and how this tool can be SUPER helpful in building your business and choosing your “right fit” clients. Enjoy!

What’s your favorite country? Favorite location? What’s your favorite CURRENCY? How would you like an audience of clients from all over the world? Singapore? Paris? Dubai? Japan? New Zealand? Sweden? India? Israel? Dan Sullivan and I both love to see new trends emerge and watch old ones end but the best is when we get to actually CREATE trends, and that’s what we’ll dive into today on the podcast.And in this episode, you’re going to learn why we have NOTHING to fear from China or any other country or their currency, and how to prepare yourself for a bigger and better future and world.  Ok, I’m going to say something wildly unpopular, so brace yourself ... I’ve LOVED COVID. Don’t get your panties in a bunch—I have a very good reason. I’ve loved hibernating. I’ve loved the simplicity of life. I’ve had more client activity than I could ever imagine, and a lot of things I’ve been talking about for years and years have happened three to ten times faster than I anticipated because of this pandemic. And, full disclosure: I’ve had a record number of new client engagements and enrollments from all over the world. Singapore. Europe. India. Canada. Alaska. It seems everyone wants (and needs) help figuring out how to digitize, virtualize, and dematerialize their business and find ways to automate their business, marketing, and sales. And I’m taking U.S. dollars and Bitcoin as payment. That leads us to the tactical part of our conversation today. As business owners and business leaders, how can we tap into international audiences? Dan brought up Mexico specifically, which is something I’m really fascinated by. What we call the global society, global capitalism, and the global market are the result of decisions made by one country (the U.S.) that has the greatest military in the history of the world. The U.S. also has the biggest consumer market anywhere in the world. Practically anything you want to create someplace else in the world, Americans will buy it. The other thing that’s very, very powerful is that U.S. currency is actually the only currency in the world. Everything else is just an investment that you hope works out against the U.S. dollar and that’s because 100% of all commodity trades in the world are done in U.S. dollars. All trade coming out of China and all trade going into China is done in U.S. dollars. Ask the drug and weapons dealers what their preferred currency is. It’s the U.S. dollar. But historically, the U.S. has always been the seller. As Dan says, the seller is someone who can get rejected. The buyer is the person who does the rejecting. So it makes sense that you always want to be the buyer, right? In 1945, the U.S. decided that they would sell the rest of the world on the idea that making war with each other was bad. They did this to repair their economies and to get into what became a global economy. They sold the rest of the world that if they use lots of energy, all the energy would be safely protected. The American people didn’t profit that very much from it (in fact, they lost all their factories to places overseas), starting when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was one of the greatest geopolitical events in history that nobody talked about because they didn’t want things to change, as the U.S. had created a really wonderful world. Now, we think, Americans have fundamentally come to a decision. They’re not going to be the seller anymore; they’re going to be the buyer. They’re going to focus on their own economy, and if you want to be part of the game, make us an offer, and we’ll consider it. That brings us back to Mexico. The U.S. has looked at all their supply chains around the world and said anything that requires high technology comes back...

I’m ready to focus on all of the good that’s come out of the last few months. How about you? It takes a VERY special person to be able to see the opportunities in something as devastating as a global pandemic, but those who take action and turn those opportunities into something unique are the brave ones. What if YOU could be that brave person? This week, Dan and I are talking about how to amplify possibilities, increase your luck, and see massive potential on a local and global scale.  We’ll also cover some of the BIG IDEAS we see coming out of this cycle of one of the most disruptive times in human history and how you can find the opportunities to accelerate, create incredible leverage, AND use some of the tools that come from Dan’s and my personal arsenals. Dan recently spoke with author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan about what’s currently happening in the world. Peter predicts movements in the world’s economy and has written some very provocative books. Dan asked him, “What impact does this crisis have on your predictions?” His answer: “Everything is going to happen faster than I predicted.” One of the things he was predicting is that this is officially the end of the Second World War. What he meant by that is, at the end of the Second World War, there was only one country that had the military and financial power to organize the rest of the world, allowing the rebuilding of many places that had been destroyed at the center. That was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the one country supervising and protecting the rest of the world. It got to the point where the Soviet Union suddenly dropped out of the game and everybody wanted the U.S. to take over protecting and financing the rest of the world. That became a big political problem in the U.S. because a significant number of American voters asked, “Why are we paying for any of this?” That's where we are right now. Let’s look at this through the lens of time. Imagine for a moment that aliens were observing the Earth at this moment, paying attention to our behaviors and trying to make sense of them with no basis, just observing. What they would probably say is, “There's a little ‘bug’ going around and people are dying.” This might not be a popular thing to say, BUT we know now that lot of those numbers are probably the same as what's been going on for a long time in terms of deaths from the regular flu. Those who are sick or old and practicing bad behaviors, meaning not taking care of their physical bodies, are dying a little bit faster, but it's a blip in the grand scheme of things. Listen … I am not tone-deaf to those who may have lost loved ones during this crisis, and I'm not trying to make a value judgment. I just think that in the future, when we look at the numbers, we'll see what happened as a statistical anomaly. I believe that much of this “crisis” has been politically motivated and more about power and money than reason or thought. What is interesting is the opportunity that exists to rebuild the world inside your mind. Instead of building bridges and infrastructure, think about building your inner strength, becoming more resilient and strong for the inevitable changes that are going to happen, and being prepared mentally to innovate, manifest, create, and collaborate.  I believe that the power struggle that's been going on, the massive power grabs, are going to be manipulated and used to create more regulation that probably will not be pro-business and certainly will not be pro-growth. That's my gut speaking.  Our goal is to see through that garbage to see the positive opportunities; create courage, capabilities, amplification, and more leverage; and also be able to interpret what Peter and other economists observe, both locally and globally. 

The last three months have been unprecedented and unsettling to say the least, wouldn’t you agree? The entire world has changed FOREVER in almost every imaginable way in just the blink of an eye.  But rather than freaking out, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could embrace the changes and use them to benefit and improve, not only your personal life but your business as well? Think about it... people’s values and habits have changed. How is that going to affect the economy, business, buying behaviors, the value of talent, and other things? It’s truly extraordinary.  Dan Sullivan and I really dig in on this podcast to talk about the importance of virtualizing, digitizing, and dematerializing our businesses, and how the ones that DON’T are already on the mass extinction list.  Let’s start with Dan’s business, Strategic Coach, which has traditionally been an “in-person” experience (for over 30 years). In a matter of a few days, he took the entire operation VIRTUAL and IT WORKS. It was a really big deal, but he and his team put their noses to the grindstone and made it happen.  They conducted their first Zoom mini-workshop and it was a huge success. Since then, they’ve done 100 more Zoom workshops and, recently, for the first time, they had their first sales presentation on Zoom to fill their London UK workshops. So far, so good! The funny thing is, if you would have talked to his clients three months ago and said, “Hey, would you accept Strategic Coach as a virtual event?” a lot of them would have said, “No way! There isn’t the same level of value or intimacy and connection.” There are lots of members that I know personally that thought their businesses were completely over because they were 100% dependent on live events to get new customers. But ... they sucked it up, they virtualized their businesses, and guess what! Their “show up” rates have been higher, their conversion rates have been about the same or better, and the intimacy level in the perception of connection has, in fact, been higher as well.  Bottom line: more income, less work, fewer expenses, no travel, and MORE INTIMACY AND CONNECTION! I’ve been doing this for years; I flat out refuse to have enrollment or sales conversations unless we do a Zoom call. The reason for that is I demand to own the eyeballs, the fingers, and the ears of anyone I’m talking to. I don’t accept multitasking. If I can hear someone ruffling around with papers while we’re on a phone call, I simply end the conversation and say, “If this is the way you treat important things in your life, then we are not a match.” It’s a matter of how you value someone’s time and attention. I’m in the business of ruthlessly eliminating chaos, overwhelm, and low-frequency and low-quality relationships. Dan and I agree that the face of business has completely changed forever. Time and distance are no longer an issue, and we’re able to get an enormous amount of stuff done. We believe business has made five years of change in about three months.   

I Interview My Wife And Biggest Capability Amplifier Real talk: right now, life seems unpredictable, uncertain, and uneasy for a lot of people. In our current COVID-19 world, we’re dealing with things that none of us have ever dealt with before.But what’s coming next? How do we prepare? How are we going to cope, stay sane, and move forward?This week’s Capability Amplifier podcast is a very special one for me. I sat down with my wife, Vivian Glyck, as we celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary in the mountains of Idyllwild, CA, to talk about family, our son, our future together, our dreams, dealing with conflict, and life after COVID. Vivian and I are both in an interesting state of reinvention and transformation right now, as I suspect most of you are with the virtualization, digitization, and dematerialization that’s going on. (Vivian, specifically, is in a really fascinating turning point in her life and career.) On top of this, our son, Zak, just graduated from high school in the midst of COVID, which meant no ceremony or celebration. Weird. AND we had our first real confrontation as father and son. I had to get really, really firm to establish whose house this is and what behaviors are acceptable in our home. That was a really big deal for us. Vivian has run a non-profit, philanthropic organization for 14 years called the Just Like My Child Foundation. It was founded after the birth of our son, Zak, and two subsequent miscarriages (the whole story is in the interview).  She was so passionate about the potential of children that she thought, “How could it be that there are children who are just like my child that live or die based on where they’re born in the world?”  As she educated herself about the health and well being of children around the world, one thing led to another and she ended up in Uganda, East Africa. The very first night she was there, she watched a 14-year-old girl die in childbirth at a hospital. The girl left behind a very vulnerable infant baby girl, who was named Baby Christina, in the care of the baby’s grandmother who was also vulnerable, uneducated, and didn’t have the means to care for her.Fast forward. Just Like My Child Foundation did a lot of work to build hospitals, schools, and so on, and very quickly realized that nothing would change unless they interceded in the life of an adolescent girl before she fell off track and was forced into child marriage like that baby’s mother was. As her knowledge about international development grew, she realized that there are 100 million girls who are out of school like Baby Christina’s mother was.  Thus, the Girl Power Project® was born. The Girl Power Project is a replicable program that has been scientifically proven to change the belief system that girls have about themselves and enables them to get the community support they need to stay in school, have their legal rights enforced, and become leaders in their world. It’s an empowerment training program that takes place over a two-year period.  Vivian has been able to reach well over 20,000 kids and 200,000 community members. Just Like My Child has saved thousands and thousands of lives. But what they’re focused on now is how to take this work global so that every girl in the world has access to this information in a way that has massive impact and transformation.  And let’s face it. If more women were involved in leadership, what we’re seeing now in the way this pandemic and worldwide health issue is going down, the response, plan, and solution would be very, very different.

In the very first episode that started it all, Dan Sullivan and Mike Koenigs set out to help you expand your business and your personal life, and provide helpful tips, ideas, and strategies with examples to get you there. Every human being has a natural desire to increase their capability, however possible. As someone increases their skills over time, they don’t always perceive their own value as having increased as much as their customers’ perception of their value has. The truth is, if you double your prices and get better customers, you’ll have more time to think, create, and manifest. A worldwide survey showed that when organized by profitability, the bottom 80% of customers that accounting firms worked with were actually costing the firms money to work with them. By dropping the bottom 80% of your clients, you not only free yourself from something unprofitable and uninteresting, it also lets you jump into bigger opportunities and play a bigger game. Looking at your most profitable clients, figure out what activities you love doing most and if there could be a business in doing only that. This formula can be applied to anything. So ask questions that reveal what someone is interested in and passionate about and, more importantly, what they see value in and where there’s a history of repeated value. In any capital-intensive, evolutionary, entrepreneurial business, you’ll either outgrow your customers or your customers will outgrow you. You have to decide to elevate, escalate, and evolve on an ongoing basis. If you admire someone else’s growth, and they reciprocate, the relationship will last forever.

Welcome to Part 2 of my interview with the incomparable Dean Jackson. During this episode, we discuss removing your mental blocks in order to get more quality referrals without feeling gross about how you got them.  We show you how to build an army of referral partners and grow customer relationships, and we provide lots of tips and strategies that Dean has never shared before. Let’s get into it!  Dean has been fascinated by referrals for a very long time, and it’s something he’s spent many years studying. He sees the practical applications of “how to orchestrate referrals.”  Through his study, Dean figured out that “the reason that people often don’t get as many referrals as they could is because they have a mental block about asking for them.”  They think that’s what they’re doing. They’re actually asking for referrals, and as soon as you say that, you’ve automatically put it in the category of “somebody is doing a favor for you.”  But that’s not at all what’s happening. That’s not why people refer.   A lot of times, people who are business owners or service people feel reluctant to ask for or even bring up referrals because it feels like showing weakness or it feels like they’re saying, “I can’t get business on my own and I need you to help me,” so they block themselves.  Let’s clear up this misconception right now. The reason that people refer anything is not as a favor to you, but as a favor to their friend. They want their friend to have the result or the experience that they had. And the only way they’ll do that is if they feel that you are definitely going to make them look good because what they want out of it is to feel good. And how they feel good is when they recommend something to somebody and are acknowledged later for having recommended it.   There’s no difference between this and the way we recommend books, restaurants, and movies. We are social creatures. We’re genetically wired and predisposed to share good things with our “tribe.” It goes back to our tribal instincts, and the reason we formed a society was so that we could pool together for raising the quality of life and the productivity of the whole group—everybody using their strengths and what they’re good at for the benefit of everybody.   There’s a motivation that Dean calls the secret psychology of why people refer. It’s that moment when I recommend something to you that you have never heard of, and it brings value to you and you acknowledge that value. What happens is, for that moment, I am now at a higher status in the tribe than you are. It raises my status right away because I’m bringing value.   If I’m a taker, I’m not bringing value; I’m not contributing anything new and that puts my position in the tribe in jeopardy. We’re wired to continually add value among our friends and closest people. We want to do that.   Now, we need to look at the mechanics of how referrals actually happen to bring it down to something actionable. What Dean has discovered is that all referrals happen as a result of conversation, and in those conversations, three things have to happen.   First, the person needs to notice that the conversation is about your category of business. Second, they have to think about you. And third, they have to introduce you to the person they had the conversation with. These three things all have to fire in order for a referral to take place.   For example, Dean used to do big real estate seminars all over the country and had the opportunity to do live testing. He would ask 10 people to stand up and tell the story of the last referral they got. A typical scenario and response would look like this: “I got a call from Joan who said that she was friends with my client Bill,

It’s no secret that the world is changing rapidly, requiring us to adapt and pivot in ALL areas of life, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or business owner. Virtualizing your business is more important now than ever before. What does it take to transition your business and teams to work remotely and efficiently? How do you reframe your offers in a way that you can deliver without coming into direct, physical contact?  RIGHT NOW could be the greatest opportunity you and your business have ever seen. Chaos and confusion can translate into establishing your leadership, creativity, and innovation skills that your clients and customers will remember you for in the decades to come.  My guest on the show this week, Dean Jackson, is excited about what we’re seeing right now AND what the future holds for business and marketing.  Dean fell in love with marketing as a young boy when he first realized that selling stuff on commission was way easier than renting himself out by the hour for a regular job. He’s carried his distaste for real work into his adult life and has focused on a lifestyle-centered approach to business with marketing as the ultimate lever to a life of freedom and fun.  Right now, he’s excited about what he’s calling “the great migration to the cloud” and the concept of virtual gatherings. We were forced into it with the COVID situation and this is the by-product.  The silver lining is we’ve become a virtual gathering-enabled and -accustomed population.  Not the leading-edge businesses, coaches, or online marketers that have traditionally been online and used to meeting like this. Instead, you’re going to see now, on the backs of the kids having to be equipped for virtual schooling, hundreds of millions of households in the United States are overnight equipped for virtual gathering.  Parents may have never been exposed to it, but because of the kids, every household in America has a computer, a webcam, and the ability to access Zoom, Skype, or some other online visioning tool.  You don’t have to be tech-savvy these days. Kids are Zoom chatting with their grandparents. Families and friends are gathering virtually, and most are AMAZED at the quality of the video and audio. So much so that they’re realizing there’s an intimacy you can achieve in the absence of being able to be with someone in person that’s almost equal.  Of course there’s a fear that we’re going to lose our intimacy without actual, physical contact, but the truth is that when you’re doing larger virtual meetings where there are 60 people, you can have a direct one-on-one relationship with each person simultaneously through chat and so the intimacy in the side conversations increases.  Another silver lining moment that I wasn’t expecting to come from the current situation happened a few weeks ago. A bunch of my wife’s and my friends, including JJ Virgin, who usually go to Burning Man every year decided to do a virtual music night. We had a virtual DJ and all danced together from our iPads and TVs. It was a total BLAST! Even my 17-year-old son was completely captivated and had a great time.  From that dance party, a few fundraisers have developed, supporting several charities, including Native Americans and people working in the bar industry. Nothing I planned, but something I’m super proud to be able to do.  Dean and I feel that people are going to find that this is a superior experience without having to deal with things like traveling, especially when the information can be conveyed in a great way.  What’s going to come out of this is the creativity in generating a ton of new experiences, like what a lot of musicians are doing right now.