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With a catastrophic tragedy in the news, the Ricochet mood is a bit more serious; but that doesn't mean bad policy or sentimental grandstanding are appropriate courses of action. That's why this week, we've invited a Second Amendment expert and parent on to the show. The one and only Charles C.W. Cooke. He fields questions on the horror in Uvalde, the reaction from politicians and the press... Source

With a catastrophic tragedy in the news, the Ricochet mood is a bit more serious; but that doesn't mean bad policy or sentimental grandstanding are appropriate courses of action. That's why this week, we've invited a Second Amendment expert and parent on to the show. The one and only Charles C.W. Cooke.  He fields questions on the horror in Uvalde, the reaction from politicians and the press; the DPS, and a few potential resolutions to hopefully prevent so many of these terrible acts of violence. Peter and James also talk about the collapse of civic and moral norms that get far too little attention when these senseless crimes are discussed.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With a catastrophic tragedy in the news, the Ricochet mood is a bit more serious; but that doesn’t mean bad policy or sentimental grandstanding are appropriate courses of action. That’s why this week, we’ve invited a Second Amendment expert and parent on to the show. The one and only Charles C.W. Cooke. He fields questions […]

Today Jon takes a look at how to improve your category pages on your website. He'll explore what you should know about headers, footers, navigation, bread crumbs, and more! For help optimizing your category pages: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Hello Jon, and welcome to the podcast. Ryan: I was digging through one of our shared clients analytics, and this is a rather large international brand that most of our listeners would probably recognize if we mentioned their name. And outside the home page, the largest volume of traffic to their site is condensed into just a couple category pages. Now that's not unusual for a lot of major brands because of Google's algorithm, on the organic side, favoring category pages over product pages. But it also means that there's a huge opportunity for a brand capturing a lot of this traffic to really make that traffic work better on category pages specifically. Ryan: So through this, I'd really love to hear some of your suggestions and best practices on improving those category pages. And maybe even at least some tests people can be testing as they're looking at their category pages to make some improvements. Kind of like our CRI name we coined. What do you think of that category pages and the importance of them? And should we continue down this path? Jon: I love it. Let's gain some knowledge on this. Ryan: Fantastic. So most of the listeners probably haven't had the amazing opportunity I have of hearing you talk about landing pages as much, and just seeing some of your tear downs. And so as with most of these, let's start at the top and kind of work our way down, and even some of your general best practices, probably, in header navigation can be applied to other places of the site. Especially if you keep it consistent. But do we need to think about mobile and desktop separately in this scenario? Or just pick one and go with it? What's your usual recommendation? Jon: I would recommend that we start with desktop and keep it to that for today. The reason being is that even with e-com, I think we're seeing the vast majority of traffic is now on mobile, but still a very, very large majority of conversions are happening on desktop. Now that varies from site to site, of course, but I do believe in what we see here at the good on a daily basis is conversion kings is still on desktop. And so it always makes sense to start there. The other reason is that if you fix your desktop experience and you have a responsive site, that should, for the most part, filter down to your mobile website. And so there's no longer just a desktop and a mobile version of a site. It should be responsive or adaptive for the most part. And so with that in mind, I would highly recommend starting with desktop. And then of course you could look at mobile later, but I think for the point of today's show, we could just stick with desktop. Ryan: Yeah. And if you do maybe have a mobile site and a desktop site, you may need to contact us because we may have some abilities to fix that [inaudible 00:03:12], because that's probably a struggle for your business. There's maybe some lower hanging fruit for you, before you get into Jon's conversation about it. Jon: The number of sites I still see, it's dwindling. But there is still a number of sites out there that they have mobile on a separate domain. And that's always... It's like M dot, the domain dot com. That's when I know there's a bunch of opportunity there to increase sales and conversions. Ryan: God, John knows he's going to make that company a lot of money when they listen to them. Ryan: Okay. So let's start right at the header, very top as you're scrolling down this page as soon as you come onto it, a lot of companies do things that are not great in the header. What are some of the things that they're putting in there maybe that aren't needed or that distract from the actual conversion that they're attempting to get these people to take on the site? Jon: Well, I think the first thing is that it always blows my mind when I see a header, and these brands invested so much to get people to their site, right? Whether it be content marketing or paid ads or SEO, whatever it is. And then they immediately show them social icons, and show them ways to bounce off the site. Right? Social is great for getting people to your site, but once they're there, keep them on your site. Don't send them back out to those channels. And so really be looking in the header to keep people on a site, as opposed to sending them back off through something like social links or icons, things of that sort. That's the biggest one I see. Ryan: Okay. So as far as distractions, social is the biggest issue there. What are the things that maybe companies are missing out on in that header that they should be thinking about putting into them? Jon: Well, I think that the biggest thing people miss out on is just communicating very simply what the brand is, what the value proposition is. Jon: Now, most people don't think about including that in the header. And I'm not suggesting putting your entire company story there, your entire value prop. But what I am saying is you can communicate these things through perhaps your navigation and the language that's being used there through the utility navigation, through what's the lines of texts that goes right next to your logo, right? Jon: So a lot of people will just put a logo up and expect that because they're on your website, they know exactly what you do. Well, think about it through the eyes of a new to file customer. That customer just got to your site by clicking on a link that a friend posted on social. They have a little bit of context, but it would be great to get that reinforced and the first place, especially in Western cultures, folks are going to look is the top left corner of your site. That's generally where people put their logo, but then they miss the opportunity there of including additional context. Could be just one sentence or one line, does not have to be very huge and it can be blended in with the logo, even. Ryan: Dang it. I am taking notes. I think I need to go to some of my brands and add some, maybe, lines of contexts. Jon: Well, if you want a good example just go to thegood.com and look what we do in the top left hand corner right next to our logo. Ryan: No, that's brilliant. And I think as a business owner myself, and working with brands constantly, I'm in the business too often that I don't step out of it often enough and think about the perspective of a brand new user. I clicked on a link, maybe not even necessarily thinking before I clicked, and boom. Logo. I'm supposed to know what you do right before that, but probably I don't. Jon: Well Ryan, this applies to you based on what I'm hearing right now, but it also applies to almost every e-com brand and e-com manager. Is that it's, and I've probably said this a hundred times on this show already, but it's very difficult to read the label from inside the jar. Right? You are so close to this, you probably helped to wire frame out the site, design it, define the navigation, lay out all the content. And so you're so close to that, that you know what each link does, you know what the site is, you know your value prop. So it doesn't occur to you that other people might not get that, might not understand it. And it could use a little assistance there. Ryan: Yeah. And you've helped me a lot on navigation so I'm going to jump into that in a second. But before that, site search is a often misguided location on the site. Do you recommend that as high up as you can, as obviously as you can in the header? Or do you recommend other places on the page for that? Jon: I am not opposed to having search be front and center. Having search front and center is great for people who are second time visitors or repeat visitors to your site. They know exactly what they're looking for. Think about things like a car parts dealership, right? Or car parts retailer. People may come and know exactly what model number for that very specific part that they need. They're definitely going to know what car model that they want to put that on, so they might just search by that car model. So anyway you can give people a shortcut down the funnel, and skip steps of the funnel so that they can just get to exactly what they need as quickly as possible, is better. And I can tell you that search is going to convert twice as much, if not more, than just a regular visitor. So encouraging people to use search can really help boost conversions and sales. Ryan: Wow. That is an impressive stat. So just on average from what you see when somebody uses at least a decent search, because there's different levels of search quality- Jon: Of course. Ryan: ... On a site, but an average search you see approximately 50% increased conversion rate on the traffic that uses search versus doesn't? Jon: Right. And an easy win for listening to this is just look at your top five, maybe 10, search terms that people are using and search those yourself and see what the results are. They're likely lackluster. You can easily fix that, just go through your product detail pages that are relevant and add some additional meta information to those pages to have them pop up in search results. Things like common misspellings or the plural of an item. I can't believe how many times people don't think to add an asset at the end of an item because people may search for it that way. And also just make sure that the search results page... The results themselves matter, but also that search results page that shows those results needs to be optimized as well. A lot of people just forget about it and just show no context at all. They just show the title of the page and link to it. Why not have the description there? You already should be, on your product detail pages, having some meta-description that Google can pick up, why not display that there if it's already part of the page? Ryan: No, that's great. And I think making sure that a search that happens on the site has a listing of products, generally, make sure that you can look at that in an incognito window when you scrape the URL and paste it. That way you can use it, from a traffic generation perspective, you can drive traffic from a paid search ad. But also, if you're having enough people search that on your site, you should probably make that a category page so that Google can start indexing that as well, because you're probably not alone on your site in people searching for that product. Or group of products. Jon: Exactly. Yeah. And an easy way to find out what people are searching for, just go into your Google analytics. Most platforms, I mean they all have a little bit different perhaps, but most eCommerce platforms, the search results page is just something that ends in a question mark S equals. So if you figure out what that URL pattern is, and then you can just run a filter for that question mark S equals or whatever, and then you can understand how many times people are hitting each of those search terms. Jon: So it's pretty simple to figure out with about five minutes of work and I can promise you it will increase your conversions immediately. Ryan: Awesome. Okay, one area you've helped me a lot in sites and understanding how to improve the experience for the users is navigation. And a lot of companies tend to do this wrong. They seem to think that more is better. What do you often suggest to companies when it comes to navigation? Jon: Keep it to five items or less, first of all. Anything over that and people just assume that it's going to be a lot of work and they're not at your website to do work, right? So they just like, "I don't want to weed through all these options," and it becomes more taxing than it needs to be. What I would recommend here is you keep it to five items, but also have the navigation copy, be in the context of your customer, not of yourself. What I mean by that is so many brands try to promote themselves in the navigation. They have things like about us. Nobody's coming to your website to learn about us. Now they may want to learn more about you, but not in the main navigation. They typically will scroll down to the footer and look for that, or that information that's on your about us page should be throughout your site in places that people are actually looking for it in context. Jon: So a lot of people will do things like put home as the first navigation item. Really, we all know, we've been trained over years, that if you clicked the logo in the top left hand corner, it's going to take you to the homepage. So you can eliminate home out of your navigation. That's a real easy one. Also, highly recommend if you're an e-com site and you have only a handful of categories, that you just list the high level categories in your navigation and leave it at that. That will do two things. It clearly tells people what you sell, how you can help them. And in addition to that, it gives them a quick and easy way to get to the place they want to go to. So that again, they're skipping steps that are in that funnel by having to kind of continue to drill down and find it. Jon: So there's a lot that can be done in navigation. It needs to be clear. It needs to be concise. You need to keep it to five items. And you need to try to keep yourself out of the navigation whenever possible. Ryan: Got it. Now on many category pages I will see, in addition to the top navigation, a left hand navigation or kind of a filtering system on the left hand side of the category page. Do you have an opinion on if that is good, bad, helpful, indifferent? Jon: I think it depends on the amount of product that you're trying to sell. So let's talk about that. We were actually, just before we got on the recording here, we were talking about a shoe manufacturing brand that had a left hand navigation that was filtering, that contain, I think, 40 to 50 different check boxes, right? That you could filter by. Right? And the problem with that, I mean, they had every single shoe size as a filtering option. It wasn't a dropdown, it was just a whole bunch of check boxes. So imagine being a consumer and trying to filter, but you have to look through all of these items just to find the ones that are relevant to you. It's really not that helpful. In the end it actually, I would argue, makes it more complicated. Jon: Filtering in that way can be helpful. I think it needs to be a high level filter. What are the main differentiating points? And then once they get down to the product level within that category, then you could start doing some other points, like size, availability, in stock, out of stock, et cetera. So helpful, but it depends. And the thing it depends on is how many products are you selling? If you have a handful of products, then you don't need it. People will scroll and look at your six or eight categories. If you have 50 categories, so many that you really just can't list them all on a page. Then of course you need some filtering for categories. Ryan: Got it. Okay. Makes sense. I've seen some that are great on that left hand side and the other ones that I get lost and I just leave. Ryan: So on each category page, generally speaking, best practices are to have a piece of content for the search engines, usually three or four sentences talking about that category. It's great for SEO. A lot of platforms default to having a place for that content at the very top. Have you seen that impact conversion rates being at the top, the bottom, the side, or is it kind of like it hasn't mattered too much to what you've seen? Jon: Well, I think that ideally I would put it below. If you need it for SEO purposes, that is. Right? Because most of the time that SEO type of content is not going to be helpful to the consumer. You're trying to write for Google, you're not writing for a consumer. So in that sense, I would get it out of the consumer's way. But I do think that some content above the products on a category page could be helpful in letting people know A, where they are. So any type of wayfinding you can do there, that type of stuff can be really helpful. I do think that if you're running a promotion on one category, that could be a great place to do it. If you have a little bit, or just maybe even some branding stuff where you have an image that relates to that category, showing it in use, something of that sort, can be really, really helpful. Jon: Say you sell tents and you are showing a family and you're on the category page for four people tents, right? And so you show a family camping and are sitting around a campfire with the big tent in the background. Right? Something like that can be helpful. You're setting the context and the tone. Ryan: Now also at the top, a lot of times you're going to see bread crumbs. And I've heard some good things from you about breadcrumbs and some bad things about breadcrumbs. So how do you decide whether or not breadcrumbs are helpful? Or are they always a terrible idea? Jon: I'm not really a fan of breadcrumbs. I think at this point that what has happened, it's a hold over from SEO practices of yesterday. It's not something that I see quite often anymore that is actually helpful for a consumer. And typically you're just giving them information either that they're already aware of, or that they don't really need. And if they want to go back up a level to the homepage, for instance, because you're only on a category so you're probably one level deep, maybe two. At that point they're probably just going to click the logo and go home or look at your main navigation. So overall, likely not that helpful. It's just another piece of content you're asking your visitor to wade through before they get to the content that they really are at your page for. Ryan: Okay, good. And so, just a general question going deeper, do you like them more on product pages that can get you back to a category page? Or is it just kind of across the board breadcrumbs are not a great idea? Jon: I think that it's helpful to have a navigational item that takes people up one level. Now, when you say breadcrumb I think that it starts out with homepage, next page down category page then, then your product detail page, right? So now you're four or five items long. Most people put the entire page title in those. It's not just so and so category. Look, the breadcrumb typically is dynamically built and the way that the platforms do it is that they will use the entire page title. And so they put that into the breadcrumb. Now your breadcrumb ends up being like 300, 400 characters long. It's massive. It's stretched across the entire page. It's distraction. It's not really helpful either at that point. And all of the eye tracking that we've done at the good over all these years, people never look at the breadcrumb. It becomes blindness because they see it and they stop, maybe for a split second, but they're definitely not reading the entire breadcrumb. And that's why I say it becomes a distraction and it gets in the way. Because you're making people stop and think before you're giving them the content you want. Ryan: Got it, okay. So sitting on a category page, you see a list of all the products. More and more often on a lot of these SAS platforms, I'm seeing the ability to add to cart from the category page or even just a kind of a quick view, popup JavaScript. Have you seen some direction on whether either one of those or both of those as good or bad? Jon: I personally am not a fan of those. Unless you have a product that's like a refill or something like that, where you have a limited number of products and you have a product that somebody is coming to the site and is quickly looking for that product and knows they're going to want to buy it without having to see any additional details. Jon: Here's the thing, on category pages people are still looking and browsing and trying to find the product or service that is going to solve their pain or their need. And the challenge here is that you're putting a really high intent to purchase call to action by saying add to cart, likely when they're not at the stage where they're ready add to cart. And if you just give them one image and a title, and maybe it shows the stars and the price, and then says add to cart, I would think most products, that's not enough to get somebody to purchase. So you're blowing an opportunity to send them to a page that you can convince them and show them all the wonderful benefits of your product and how great everyone else says it is in the reviews, and show it in use, and all these other things. So you're shortchanging yourself by just having the small little thing that comes up, gives minimal details and then asks people to add it to the cart. Likely not a good idea. Ryan: Probably [inaudible 00:21:29] in the quick view as well, just from, if nothing else, an analytics perspective. Where it's going to be much more complex to track that process or that funnel like category page, product page, purchase. Whereas if I go quick view, it's got to be an actions in Google analytics, if it's a JavaScript overlay, you don't get to do as much optimization on the JavaScript overlay popup necessarily. Jon: Yeah. Ryan: That's what I would say. Jon: You end up recreating that funnel in Google analytics and it's a lot of extra work. And I just think all of the negatives outweigh any of the positives. Then people say, "Well, I added this to make it easy for people to add to cart." Well, if they're not ready to add it to cart then it's not easier. Ryan: Moving down, anything else that I kind of skipped in that middle page where we jumped into the footer? You've seen products, is there a good way to put products? How many across? How many deep? How many products on a product page makes sense? What's your default response to that? Jon: I think on the category page, there's so many times where people will do a couple of things. They'll list hundreds and hundreds of products here. I think that's obviously the best use case for filtering, and I would do that filtering at the top of the page. Jon: Great example of this is we helped, a handful of years ago, to optimize Easton Baseball's website. Now, if you don't know what Easton Baseball is, they're the number one supplier of little league aluminum bats. In little league college, about 99% of swings are done with an Easton bat. They don't do anything in the major league baseball because they don't do anything with wood and aluminum's outlawed. So what does that mean? Well, the vast majority of people coming to the site are parents looking to buy their son or daughter a baseball bat. Or a softball bat. And if you went to their category page, all you saw was a wall of grid of bats. And if you can imagine what a little picture of a bat looks like online, they all look the same. Jon: They're all these sticks that are different colors, maybe. Right? But you can't communicate out of that picture. What the benefit is between the different bats, right? And they have wildly different prices. I mean, you can get a hundred dollar Easton bat and you could go all the way up to, I think, a five or $600 Easton bat. And so if you think about it, you're a parent, you get really confused. And right away, you're just upset, right? You're like, "Man, I don't know what bat to get. I'm going to be here all day clicking through all of these." And you just get frustrated really quickly. You probably just log off and go to your sports sporting goods store and just ask the guy which bat you should buy. Who's just working the counter. Not a great experience. Jon: And so once we dug in a little bit, what we found was that there are four or five different leagues, little league being one of them, that have certifications for different bats. And if your bat that you start swinging with does not have that logo of certification on it, then the umpire is supposed to not let you swing with that bat. And so the big problem is that all these parents were buying the bats based on price or the color they thought their kid would like best or whatever that is, and would end up getting to the game and the bat wouldn't be able to be used. And that's a huge let down, not only for the parent who just invested all this time trying to figure this out and got through that frustrating experience, but then the child who is up at the plate to swing, and they're being told that they have to use someone else's bat. Jon: It was creating a really poor brand experience. And what we found was that there were a couple of things parents knew about their children. What league they were playing in, and then they knew what style of hitter that the person was. So were they swinging for the fences or are they somebody who's just trying to get on base or something in between, perhaps. And then they generally knew what size of child they needed. So right? The bat is going to be different weights based on the size of the person swinging it. So they would say, "Okay, well I have a 12 year old. He can probably swing a heavier bat than my six year old," for instance. Right? So generally you have an idea of what weight you need based on the child who's swinging the bat. Jon: So what we did was we added some filtering and we made it three quick questions. With easy dropdowns. What league is your child playing? What type of hitter are they? And then do you know what weight bat you should be using? And usually what we found, we came to that third one because coaches would often tell the parent, "Buy this weight of bat for your son or daughter." So they already had that knowledge that they could bring. So what was really great there was we turned a wall of bats into something that now became three to four options. You answered those questions and it gives you a couple of options and a range of price points. And then you could decide, for your budget, what would work best and what was the bonus of stepping up a level? Jon: And it took all the frustration out of it. And their sales went up online 200, I think, 240 something percent Euro per year. Just by taking the pain point out of their category page. Ryan: So you're saying CRO has a return on an investment? Ryan: Little shameless plug for Jon's skill set there. Jon: We wouldn't have been doing it for 11 years if there's not a return here, I can tell you that. But at the same point, I think that it's all about just increasing that consumer ease of use. And if you just have a laundry list of products on a category page, that's not very useful. Especially if they all look the same or there's very minimal difference, or if they're all wildly different products. That also was a problem. And so it's like, "Where do you start as a consumer?" You think about walking into Walmart. If you didn't know what you wanted, when you walked into Walmart, you're going to be really overwhelmed because they sell everything. Jon: Yeah, it's a very similar type of experience to that feeling that somebody would have, and you want to make it as easy to use and help them to... Let them know they're in the right place, and help them make that decision as quick as you can. Ryan: Got it. And so I would advise people, a lot of times what I've heard you say, is take your category page to Starbucks. Buy somebody coffee and have them try to do something on it, to try to see some of that, because I'm guessing the Easton people didn't even conceptually think about that. Like, "No, we have all these bats. We know which one you want. Just get this one." Rather than, "Oh, you're not a parent trying to buy a bat." Jon: That's exactly it, is that they were too close to the product. They were inside the jar, and they didn't understand the pain points that the parents were having because the parents don't know as much about the product as the staff did at Easton. Ryan: Got it. Okay. So in conclusion, we've got all the way down to the bottom of the page. We've seen all the products. What are some of the things and quick best practices to be looking at in the footer of the category page? And what are some of the things you see that people do wrong down there? Jon: Well, the first thing in the footer that most people will do is they just dump all their links, extra links, down there. And it's just a grid of link after link, after link, no order to them. Maybe they put a header above them, but generally not that helpful. Jon: The first thing you should do in your footer is you should repeat your main navigation down there. And it should be the first thing on the left hand side of your footer. That way people don't have to scroll all the way back up to continue the shopping experience. If people scrolled all the way down to your footer, they are interested in your company and in your products and they want to continue shopping. So give them an easy way to do that. Ryan: And then do I add in all the navigation links you made me take out? At the top. Jon: I think there's a place here for a secondary navigation, and there's generally room for it. So that's a good thing you could add here. I think that another thing that you could add in here is your email sign up. That's always a great place. If people are still interested, but they're not ready to buy, they reached your footer, that's a good time to say, "Hey, you know what? Sign up for email and we can stay in touch." Ryan: You mean if they ignored my popup giving them 20% off their first order if they signed up with an email? Jon: Yeah. If you have those popups around by now, we're going to have some big issues because you obviously have not been listening to the questions you ask me. Yeah. Ryan: Yeah. Do not have popups. Everybody listening to this, do not have popups for email. Please put it in the footer. Jon: And maybe we'll do a whole episode on popups. And then I- Ryan: It'd be very short. Ryan: Simple answer, don't have it. Jon: Yeah. You can get me really riled up if you just keep asking me about them. Jon: Yeah. And I think the thing that should also be on the site in the footer there is your contact information. And that should be in the bottom right hand corner. And I'm always surprised by the number of sites that don't have contact information in their bottom right hand corner. But here's the thing, it increases trust if people see that you have a way to get ahold of you, but more importantly just put a physical address there. Let them know that you're not running the site out of your parents' basement. I mean, even if you are, just list your parents' address on there. It doesn't matter, right? Nobody's going to show up to this address. What they do want to know is that you're a viable business that's not just drop shipping and with no care. That you are actually reachable by either phone or support email. Ideally the physical address is really just a reassurance tool. We see that trust increases dramatically if you list one. So I would highly recommend that. Jon: So having your contact information in the bottom right hand corner is just standard practice. That's where people are going to go if they want to get ahold of you. Somebody comes to your site, they're immediately going to scroll to the bottom right hand corner if they want to reach out to you. Ryan: Yeah, I can actually vouch for this. Recently I actually didn't purchase from a site because they didn't have an address. That just, it made me concerned like, "Oh, you're just drop shipping, you're living on the internet, you're a fly by night organization." Just surprised me after I got done. I was like, "They just didn't have an address and that's all that caused me to not buy from them? That was weird." Jon: Yeah. It's surprising, right? I mean, the return on investment in this is pretty darn high because all you have to do is go to mailboxes et cetera, or a UPS store or any of those places, right? And just get a box from them for, what is it? Five bucks a month? And nobody knows that that's the address, right? People aren't Google Mapping this address. They're literally just saying, "Is it there? If it is, okay, I feel better." Ryan: Yeah. And I mean my wife and I, we have five businesses and live where we registered a lot of the businesses. And I have them on the internet, you can find my home address and nobody comes to us. Thankfully. Because I want to keep it that way, keep my privacy. Jon: Well now we're all going to show up. Ryan: Yeah. Ryan: But I think it does. I think it's a very simple thing that I've never really thought about, even until last week when I just didn't buy from a company. And I spent all day online looking at sites. And just the simple act of putting an address in a footer would have gotten that company a sale. Jon: Exactly. Ryan: Okay. Anything we've ignored or haven't touched on on a category page that you think we should be aware of? Jon: Yeah. Don't have popups. Ryan: Just email sign in at the bottom. They're not going to get a discount, it doesn't matter. Jon: Yeah, I think we've done a pretty good job of working our way through the entire page. So I feel pretty comfortable that we've answered the majority of concerns that I would have on a category pitch today. Ryan: And understand too, you'll never be done optimizing your site. You can't. Jon: There's always something. It's interesting you mentioned those tear downs that you see me do quite often at conferences and the like, and I'm never at a loss to find content for those tear downs. You can continually optimize the site and always be iterating on the site for a better experience. It's just a fact of life, but it's something that gives you a big return on that investment. It's well worth it. Ryan: Yeah, it's kind of like that Gordon Gekko thoughts. Like, "How much is enough?" More, well what's a good conversion rate? Better. There's no answer. Jon: One that is always improving. Ryan: Yes. That's your perfect conversion rate. Ryan: All right, Jon, thank you for the time and enlightening me as well as the people that are listening into us. Jon: Yeah. Thanks. It was a great conversation. Hopefully everybody's learned a lot today. Ryan: Thank you.

Confusing title? Guess you'll just have to listen to learn what it means. In this episode, the guys breakdown the Sheffield United result and whether they feel we are stagnating or whether we are continuing to build. They also have a few words on the play of some of the youngsters and some of the more established players.

(silence) Okay. It's not frozen. I was going to maybe be a silent picture live stream. Like a silent movie. Why do you think I chop my own head off all the time? How do you like my gangster unicorn? Hello. I was gonna do the whole live stream as a mime. (silent) I think I could be quite good at it if I practised. I don't think I care enough to practise. I think that's the problem. This live stream comes to you, obviously, from a place of great power and depth. I don't think anyone understands the gravity of what is gonna happen in this live stream, and I'll tell you how I know that. Hello, badass people who I see joining me. Firstly, something is happening inside the system of Katrina Ruth. I feel things happening. I feel that my voice is possibly making some kind of argument that it should get to go on vacation. Can you hear that? I'm all blocked up. I don't know why, what's happening. And my voice is a bit croaky. So I was like probably I shouldn't live stream at fricking 11:34 pm at night. Or yell. Clearly, welcome to breaktheinternet.com. But you know, when you gotta live stream, you gotta live stream. What's up Mac? New viewer. Welcome. Then though, here's how I know for sure, for sure, that this live stream is going to be beyond. Beyond what, you ask? Beyond your wildest fucking dreams and imaginations about life, about the universe, about the internet, and about yourself. Have you joined breaktheinternet.com, because it freaking closes tomorrow, in less than a day. What day is it even right now in America? It's definitely Monday morning, for sure. For sure it's Monday morning. For sure it's probably as late as like 10 pm in some parts of the US, 10 am I mean. What that means is I don't even know. I don't even know. The doors are gonna close at midnight eastern standard time. [Giana 00:03:19] is ready. Of course she is. Join. If you haven't joined Break the Internet, run, run, run to the back of the room and join the programme. I'll give you the details momentarily. There's no back of the room. Get to wherever the back of your own room is, to wherever your credit card or whatever it is that you've got is. Okay. But here's ... Ready. Here's how I know for sure that this live stream right here is gonna be insane, because not only was I like I probably shouldn't live stream when it's nearly midnight and I'm having surgery tomorrow. Don't worry, it's for exciting, fun purposes only. But still, it's surgery. I don't know, maybe it's not a big deal. Although I can't have any fucking coffee or water from five am. I find it very upsetting to the psyche, more nerve racking than the idea of the surgery itself to be frank with you. And then that, and then my voice is not really working, and now apparently I'm gonna yell at the internet with it anyway, and I've already done like four live streams today, two ones in my members group and one public one earlier today in the park. And then, and then, and then, the other thing was not once, not twice, but ... I can't use that nail, that's the one where the whole nail ripped off ... Three times, three times this live stream tried to crash its own ass, and it would not let me go live. We know what that means. All right, I'll give you the details right now about Break the Internet. I just popped it in there so you don't miss out. You would be next level insane to not be part of breaktheinternet.com. Do not go to the URL breaktheinternet.com. You would think that that would be a logical thing to do based on the fact that that's the name of the programme. You would need to think again. This situation here does not really know or understand logic. I don't know why I clicked my fingers at the end, it just kinda happened. Kind of embarrassed now. You'd be crazy not to be part of this. It is beyond, beyond, beyond whatever your idea of of beyond already is. But, but ... Okay, just reminding myself of those people that go to those circuit gyms and think that they're boxing and they're just like "Aah." All right. Three times this live stream crashed before it would let me go live. So put the title in - actually it was a less interesting title than the one I ultimately went for. It was more boring. So maybe it was meant to be. I put the title in, the title that I put in originally was Are You Selling or Are You Selling? There's a Difference. Like that. I think it would have gotten some good traction anyhow. And then I was like nah, fuck that title. But my whole phone shut down. It just black screened its own ass. It was quite traumatic for a minute or two as when your phone just dies for no reason and it was fully charged and it was a relatively new iPhone X. So I plugged it in, I found it charged, but nothing, nothing. I was like okay, I do have at least 89 backup phones in this house. But still, I want this one. And then it came back to life. I'm like fuck this shit, now I have to type the whole title in again, I already did it. So it did that, and then it just exits itself out of the screen and won't let me go live and blanked out the whole thing again. And then finally the third time ... Oh no, three times. It blanked out two times. Or one time I accidentally exited and didn't save the title. I had to type it like four times total, by which time I changed it, and maybe it was meant to be. But there was a moment where I stood in the kitchen and I was like maybe this is a sign that I shouldn't go live and I should go to bed, because it's blanked itself out X amount of times now. And now here we are, and you know the whole story, and you're all up to date. Except for how do you think this cushion ... Because I feel that I can't really communicate anymore until you've seen it. And by the way, I established with my private empire ... Rich Hot Empire 101 clients earlier on in a live stream this evening that this unicorn, which Linda, my friend, brought for the kids I think, but I've commandeered it. This unicorn, which lives now on this couch set, is the most gangster unicorn in the world. The reason we know that is because he's extraordinarily fluffy and cute looking - I'm gonna hold him by the scruff of his neck. Too bad. And I think that makes him a gangster unicorn, because he's extra cute. Don't you think? It's logical. I'm all about logic. And then this pillow, if you've not seen it, I normally do a whole show around it, but I really don't have the time or inclination for that. But I'm still gonna blow your mind. I did put a ... Maybe I'm gonna blow my own mind by not remembering how to use it. I did put a blow mind emoji in the live stream title so it would be rude if I didn't blow your mind. Here you go. You ready for it? We're gonna do it quick, we're gonna do it hard and fast. That's how it's needed sometimes. Look at what it says. The message in the cushion. Life is now, press fucking play. Okay, so what you should be ... And then we bling it back up again, because you can never have too much bling. It's a rule of life. And then, and then ... Okay, I forgot my point. I don't know if I have one at all. But I think what I was gonna say is breaktheinternet.com is off the hook. There is no URL. I feel like I've gotta say that every time. Don't type it in. You don't know what you're gonna get. Maybe Kim Kardashian's ass, I don't know. I haven't even looked. I don't care. The first live training went down today. It feels like it was 700 years ago. Exactly. The more bling, the better. I've got blinged up cushions everywhere. Everywhere. There's about 40 of them in this house, for sure. It was about getting angry. The first training, the first deep dive training was today. There was already two badass pre-work trainings last week. People were having shifts and transmissions and transmutations. I don't know if that's ideal. But things were definitely happening in the group already from last week before we even started, just from the pre work. Before even the pre work. I need that URL then, Lea. Send it to me energetically. That's shocking. Don't you think that's shocking? Is somebody storing it? I feel like I need a wine break to recover from that information. Anyway. Don't go there, though. No need to do that. The vibe is off the hook. The whole thing is off the hook. You would be crazy, like batshit crazy, like do you want to die crazy, are you seriously telling me you're not joining this programme, you're going to die if you don't join this crazy programme. That's how crazy you would be. No, the only disclaimer is if you kinda hate me and you think I'm a hoity toity bitch - sometimes I am, it's true. I don't know if maybe you're only here for the unicorn, or I don't know, why the fuck are you here if you don't love me? Just give me a reason already. But at the end of the day, say what you want, if you're watching this right now and you're like, "That Katrina fucking Ruth." I'm sorry, but if you're here, technically, you're magnetised to me and you love me. It is what it is and that's all it is. So you might as well join and just find out why it is you can't look away, even though you're just looking in horror half of the time. But for those of you who are looking in fascination and with great amounts of love, and maybe you're only a little bit abhorred from time to time, then the reason you'd be crazy ... Like do you wanna die, that level of craziness. Because, don't you fucking wanna know how to be magnetic? Well, you already know anyways. It's nothing I have to tell you about it, except I will show you, and I will reach into your soul and wrench forth whatever's in there that needs to come out. Mandy knows all about it. She saw it already many times. She's doing it already herself many times. It's what happens. Watching a bad movie. Exactly. See, Sarah Jane's making a fantastic comment here. This is a perfect example of somebody who maybe thinks that they can't stand me or maybe they think what the hell is she doing and when is she getting to the point but yet cannot watch away, cannot look away. Love your audacity, so horrific, macabre, fascination, you haven't said anything yet. That's the exact fucking point. But those who know and are ... See? This is one of those, is that a backward compliment, or is that a forward insult? What was that exactly? Somebody decipher what Sarah Jane just said. I'm gonna decipher it myself in my own way. For those people who think I haven't fucking said anything yet, oh, it just makes me be so happy to be one of the 1% within the 1% people who actually fucking gets it, and it makes me so happy that the people who are here, which is everybody, sorry, except for Sarah Jane, are my people. It makes me so fucking happy to be this good. It was totally shade. It's totally shade. She says she may love my audacity, or maybe many people love my audacity, but I haven't said anything yet, it's horrific, it's macabre, fascination. I don't know, maybe it is a backward compliment or a forward insult. It's an in between one, isn't it? Whatever it is, it doesn't feel like the most obvious expression of love that I've ever received. So there we go. But I'm gonna decipher it anyway. My deciphering is this. There's nothing to fucking tell. What am I here to tell? I'm the Katrina Ruth Show. I'm a show. I'm not a show and tell. I don't have anything to tell. I just be. That's what I do. But actually, if you wanted to break it down ... I'm in the wrong app, Leah. It's gonna be embarrassing if I admit why I'm in a different app, but I think you could probably figure it out, Leah, based on what you said yesterday. It's actually all your fault. That's why the sticker's not here. Whoops. You know, if anybody who actually had a brain on top of their heads somewhere up in there, or some sort of access to soul and higher being and self, wanted to reverse engineer what's already happened on this live stream, you'd find that there's enough fucking content there to expand out into an entire book on how to make millions of dollars alone on the internet each year just by being you, which is indeed precisely what I do, and all without saying a single fucking thing. It's a mystery. It's not a mystery to those who actually get it, but it will eternally be a mystery to those who are not us. I feel like I could have found a better way to say that, but it came out that way, I'm sorry. So, you know, the point is that the less you say about anything, the more you actually reveal from the soul. Thank you Kiana, I appreciate it. It's a talent and it's also somewhat of a entity that has taken control of oneself. It's sort of a mix between that. Hello from Denmark. Thank you for saying where you're from. It's interesting to me to know. Thank you Christine. It's the gangster eye makeup. I don't know what happened to my eye makeup, because I didn't put that much on, but it seems to have taken on a mind of its own. It's like another entity now. And then it's obviously the art, and it's also the fact that it's 12 pm and I'm supposed to fricking stop drinking and eating at 5 am in the morning, so I figure I should just stay up until then and drink and eat until then. Not a mystery but definitely a wonder. Well, it's all about, it's all about, it's all about the slate of [inaudible 00:15:10], it's all about the pattern interrupt. I kinda hate that expression just because it's overused, but it still makes very good sense. It's all about the oh, oh, oh, oh, you thought I was over here, you thought I was doing that, you thought this is how you sell online, this is how you market, you do this thing, you do it like that, you thought it was that. Oh no, now I'm over there, and you didn't see, and you're still there. Oh now you're trying to catch up here, that's cute, because I'm over there. That? You're doing that? Oh my god. I'm sorry for you. No, no, I'm over here, 45,000 fucking steps ahead of you, and you'll never catch me. And by the way, when I say I, I mean the royal I, which is not a thing, but I've just created it into a thing, which means I mean the I of all of us who are the actual ones, the ones, the chosen ones who know about these things, who know about the mysteries and the wonders, and don't need to put them into words. And if anybody just tries to ask us how it works and what we do and can you explain that to me, I mean, yes, but no. Please go away, please don't ask me that, because it makes me want to claw my own eyeballs out, because you should just fucking magnetically, energetically know. Even if you don't fully have it in implementation yet, that's fine, but you definitely should fricking know. Your soul should be like, "I see what is happening here." You should recognise that we are each others' spirit animals. Exactly. Exactly Talisha. Your soul should be like, "I completely ..." I mean, this is what it's about. When you see how I show up, here's how you know if you're one of my people and I'm your person too and we're just each other's I, because your soul says "Aha." Maybe not aha. Your soul says "Yes, I recognise you, there you are." Right? Something like that. Your soul is like, "Oh, she's me. I'm her. Oh shit. Okay." Maybe you still don't fully quite get the pieces of how it all works together, which is obviously precisely why you're gonna join breaktheinternet.com. It closes tonight, midnight eastern standard time. Not this current night that I'm living in in Australia. I mean, I'm many places all at the same time. But it closes Monday night US time. Right, because your soul is like, "I fully recognise and understand this situation. It makes total soul sense to me. I 100% have always known that this is how it's meant to be. I still can't quite explain it, I don't really quite know what she's doing, but I know it's exactly who I am and exactly what I'm here to do and exactly how it fucking works and all the other bullshit that they may have told you about." They, not the royal they, because obviously there's nothing fucking royal about them. All the other bullshit that they may have told you about, you're finally able to be like, "I fucking knew it. I knew I didn't have to do that shit. I knew it." That's how you should feel when you watch me. But some people are gonna feel more like how Sarah Jane felt where it's like she's appalled and fascinated and it was ... What did she say? Did she say barbaric? I don't think barbaric, but it was something along those lines. Macabre. She said macabre. Which is a great word, really, if you think about it. Michael says he feels my soul. This makes sense. I read your comment wrong and I thought you said you feel for my soul, kind of like I'm praying for you. I was like oh well. Then I read it properly. Thank you. See? He said it exactly how I'm trying to say it. This goes both ways, what I was saying. He feels my soul. This is what I mean. You feel it. You're like, "Yes, this is what I've been looking for. Holy shit, she's reading my mind. I can see that she's clearly bat shit crazy and I love it, and how am I gonna let that shit up myself," and then you're just gonna do it. You're just gonna do it. I'll show you. And then the other thing was, which was my original live stream title ... What time is it? My laptop says 5% battery left, so I guess that's exactly what time it is. What's this over here? Doesn't matter. Don't concern yourselves with it. The other thing, the other thing was ... I feel like I should go to a higher level in order to talk about this. I'll get up on some more cushions. The other thing was ... Okay, now this one halfway up inside of me. Not in a weird way. The other thing was how are you selling? I don't really wanna talk about it, because it feels like a boring conversation already. But it is important. "This is why I can only listen to a handful of people," says Angela. Well, I got a throne right there. See, I could sit on the throne. I just really loving this art that my sister in law made for me. She downloaded it from her soul for all of our souls. Sorry, I just killed the unicorn. Yes, they either get it or they don't. Exactly right. Exactly, and we don't care for the ones who don't. But we do use them to create fabulous jokes and things, which sounds horrible, I'm sorry. Maybe just quietly. I think they like it. I think they appreciate it. That's what I'm going with. The other thing which definitely sounds a bit boring but I'm gonna tell you anyway because I'm gonna make it exciting for you. It's not even boring. I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the whole reason I was doing this live stream, because I was telling this to my clients earlier, and I was like, "The world must know about it." The whole reason ... Ooh, blue unicorn. How good is this shirt, right? It's badass. The whole entire reason that I was originally gonna do this live stream is because I was giving a live demonstration, a live demonstration you understand, to my clients earlier on this evening in a live stream training in our group. It was about the energy. Are you selling, are you selling, or are you selling. All right? I'm gonna explain it to you. It is a huge part of what we're doing in breaktheinternet.com. Reminder, again, it closes tonight, midnight eastern standard time. You would be off your tiny little beautiful head if you didn't join this programme, unless you're one of those people that's like, "She's macabre," right? I still think it's a fancy word, and you get points for using macabre. But whatever. When I get really in flow, I feel the need to stretch when I'm on my live streams. What do you think that's about? I don't understand it at all. If you like the crazy and if you are the crazy and if your soul says yes to the crazy and if when you saw my crazy your soul was like, "Holy shit, that's my crazy," then you would be a crazy person in a not good way though to not join breaktheinternet.com. If you never buy another programme of mine again, make it this one. That's the wrong way to say it. If you only ever buy one more programme of mine, or you're never gonna spend any more money again, this is the money you should spend before you never spend any money again, except that really, based on the results that are already coming through, and we only just started, then once you join the programme and you do the programme, you're gonna be like, "Kat, just take all my money all the time, because I get so much fucking flow and so much results from your stuff. How much can I pay you?" You will do that. I'm just letting you know, and you'll do it with glee, because you'll be 10X-ing every dollar back to you. It's just how we do. Already, already, already epic results, and I only did the first deep dive training today. You can still get it. You'll get straight into the Facebook group. So I think I'm making somewhat of my point. I'm just gonna shake my head and whoa at you quite frankly if you don't join. I'm just gonna not even understand it. But I mean, maybe the reason you don't join is you're like, "Bitch please, I am fully already in my magnetism, I am owning my shit all the time, every day, I don't need any of your magnetic juju, I got it all sorted." Well, you probably do, or you wouldn't be here. Of course you've got it all sorted. The question is are you letting it the fuck out? Are you the only one who knows it's sorted, or does everybody else know as well? Okay. Amanda told me not too long ago that nobody knows what I mean when I say sorted, except she's appropriated the word and started using it with her team. [inaudible 00:23:44] Amanda, who many of you know. If you don't know what I mean when I'm saying sorted, I mean organised, like fixed up, done. But just take on the language. Please just adopt all Australian language and mannerisms and cultural behaviours and knowledges. Otherwise it's just gonna be difficult. I'm just saying. On a side note, because I said this earlier as well. If you come to my house and it's established at some point during your stay here that you don't have a tripod on your person, I may have to ask you to leave, because it would be very odd. Very odd. I only feel a little bit bad that I'm rolling that joke out again. I only said it two hours ago with my Rich Hot Empire clients. But it was so good and it was so true, like legit true, that I had to say it again. Nobody's gonna ask, Talisha, why you're talking Australian. They're gonna understand that it came from me because you'll tell them. Okay. There's a difference between selling and selling. That was really the primary point that I came here to make, and then I was supposed to be going to bed. The difference is nobody fucking cares if you send 7,000 sales emails. Well, some people might care, and they might unsubscribe. But you might send all the sales emails in the world, and you might do all the messaging and all the content online, and many things about many things ... I need a purple cushion just there. Right? Christine. Well, you know to get one before you come here. I mean, I have many backups, but I would just be a little concerned for your mental well being if I found that you were travelling without a tripod on your person. And preferably a selfie ring light as well. I'm just talking practicalities of life, really. Posting shit on the internet. That is not a thing that makes you money, by the way. I post a lot of shit on the internet. I just make shit up all day long and post it on the internet, messaging and stories and blogs and live streams and then a sales call to action. And then the wrong people are like, "She hasn't even said anything." Never mind them. But if you think that the system is post a lot of shit on the internet or email out sales emails or yes, I'm promoting my launch and doing my shit all the time, you're getting the skeleton of it but not the one that it wants to live in. You're getting the ... What's it called when the caterpillar leaves behind its scaly exterior? What's the exterior bit of a caterpillar that it leaves behind called? I'm gonna Google it. 1%. What is shell of ... There's only one percent on this. That's a problem. But, stop the phone, so I don't know why I'm freaking out. But I really wanna know what it's called so I can tell the story properly. It's a chrysalis. No, when it gets excommunicated out of it though. Fine, whatever. The scaly old shell. No, the actual shell itself is called a chrysalis. Interesting. I'm sure you're glad you came along to learn that today. Valerie just knew that. Did you just know that? How did you guys just know that? What are you, some kind of scientific experts? That's fascinating. I didn't know that at all. I got stuck on a symmetry question today on my third grade daughter's math quiz. It was very stressful, and then she only got 97% or something on the test. It was like an online, maths online. I just freaked out. And I'm like an A plus math student. I couldn't help her with the question, and she was not happy with me because she only got 97%. And it's not even a required test or homework or something that she had to do. I literally had to say to my child like four times, "Stop doing math now. That's enough math." Because we had to get ready for bed. She's obsessed with doing extra homework that nobody asked her to do. She just goes onto the online curriculum websites for the government, for the standard maths curriculum or whatever it is and just does extra homework like a weirdo. I mean, it's amazing, but I still think it's super weird. I'm listening to myself, and I'm saying, "Alyssa, that's enough maths now. Stop doing math. I already asked you to stop doing math. Put the math down." I literally was like ... She's like, "Just one more." I'm like, "You're a little addict." And then she's like, "I can't believe it," when she got 97%, because I didn't help her properly with the question about symmetry. It was very confusing. And now I feel upset about it. I feel like I'm gonna have to go study up on it. Anyway. So when you step out of your caterpillar shell and then you discard the old shell behind you, right? Ooh, I'm gonna read that comment in a moment from Michael. Then you discard the disgusting old shell behind you. Well, it's beautiful still because it was part of you. But my point is that when you're just doing fricking sales emails ... Okay, I gotta say one more thing about the homework. When my daughter had been in school for a full year and a half, I remember I was suddenly like, "Do they still do homework at school?" I've gone, "Do you get homework?" She's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "How often?" She's going, "Every day." I'm like, "Who helps you with it?" She's like, "I just do it." This is bad, but she had been in school 18 months before it occurred to me that she might have homework. Now I'm a very hands on mother in many areas, but not the homework area, apparently. But I was top academically, always. I got in the top 3% of the whole country, and I was always the top student in each class. I just expect the same from Alyssa, and I just assume it. It's just freaking manifestation. It's an identity thing. It's like this is just who we are. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't really concern myself with matters around doing work to get results, because results come from belief. But I definitely felt bad that it hadn't occurred to me. But she was like, "What are you even asking me for? I'm all over this shit." Okay, she didn't say it like that, obviously. It's very relevant, anyway, to our topic at hand. Yeah, but isn't the parent supposed to help? Aren't you supposed to know when your six year old child is doing homework? I don't know. Maybe they've changed their systems. Now there's an app where you can text the teacher. You can text them on an app, and they send you photos and shit. It's amazing. It's all very high tech. Digital age, I really don't know much about it. I just know how to make money with it. Actually, what I just said is so relevant to what I'm even freaking talking about here as far as how to make money online and how to make sales online and all that good stuff, which is there's nothing you need to do. You don't need to concern yourself with how many emails you should be sending or what you should be posting or fricking what process to use in your sales copy. It's making me wanna bash my head on the table in front of me just thinking about it. Here's the difference between selling, like selling, like you're kind of like an old caterpillar shell. I don't know why that, but that's what came to mind. And the difference between selling, where people are like, "Give me the thing, give it to me now," and I don't freaking ... Like money, whatever, it's an energy exchange. But people are like, "Yes, I'm gonna be in, and then they're in, and then the second they even sign up and pay, before the damn thing even begins, they already get results, of course, because they said yes to their soul. The difference is, of course, the whole fucking thing that I'm demonstrating on this live stream without saying anything, apparently, according to some people ... Okay, maybe I'm a little bit defensive. It's fine, I allow myself to be human sometimes, on occasion. The caterpillar shell is the chrysalis. We discussed that. You're missing bits. Keep up. Do your fucking homework. It's the protective shell. It even said it on Wikipedia. So there. Said protective shell. The difference is the energy, the energy. People will buy from you when they feel your energy. Alyssa would know all about it. She probably has 49 caterpillars right in there in her little toy room, where I go in to see if she wants to play something with me, which I find a little painful, to be perfectly honest with you, depending on what it is, but I do it anyhow. And then she's like, "Leave, I have to do my homework." Then she comes out. I'm like, "Okay, let's spend some time together relaxing, like relaxed time." And then she makes me do fucking maths online with her in her play time before bed. It's the energy. I was gonna scroll back and look for comments. Fuck them. But, but, but, leave me a comment anyway. Leave me a comment anyhow, because I'll ... Look at that other picture. Did you see it? Rachel made that one too. Isn't she a genius artist? It's on its side. Oh, fuck you phone. Okay, the phone just did not care to be turned on its side. Okay, it's a very long picture. My sister in law Rachel painted it just for me. It's supposed to be sitting above another couch. Anyway, now you've seen the mess that was behind there. But we just had to come in here to get some more wine, didn't we? It's logical. Look at this little gift area that Linda left for me. She left me an amazing card. I'm not gonna read it to you. She left me some Vegemite. She's a true friend. And these pictures of her and I, we [inaudible 00:33:28] some really cool sayings on them. And the flowers. And also a box of seashell chocolates, which have been hidden, hidden in order that the children don't get them. Tonight we're drinking Yangarra Estate Small Pot Whole Bunch Shiraz. Whole bunch. Whole bunch of what? I'm putting you up there, even though you can only see the top of my head. I can't hold a tripod and pour wine at the same time. The seashell chocolates are right there on top of the toaster. I didn't hide them very well. I'll show you. That was the other part of Linda's offering. She knows they're my favourite chocolates. What an amazing friend. I came in off a flight yesterday. She'd been in my house while I was away for a few days. She's now left. But I came in off my flight feeling quite fucked up, to be honest with you, because there was a small infidel on the flight, which was my four year old son, who did his utmost best to break the psyche of every person on the flight, starting primarily with me. There were a few moments when he prevailed. There were a few moments where instead of trying to be the good mom bringing him to some sense of order, the stewardess coming up and trying to be polite and helpful but really being fucking pissed off, where I just had my hand on the tray table and I was just like ... And I was in, I don't even give a fuck, I'm broken, there's nothing I can do. Then something deep within me went, "You're stronger than this cat. You're growing stronger. You're turning into a warrior right now on this flight. Arm yourself with inner strength and power and go back into the fray." Then I turned to the tiny little curly haired monster that he was being, who was jumping up and down, standing up on top of the seat, and flinging a bowl of fucking lamb meatballs with red sauce in it, which seems like a perfectly logical thing to give a four year old on a plane, flinging it atop the person in front of him. He was perfectly sweet on the plane on Friday, and then on yesterday's flight he activated all known terrorist systems. Repeatedly. Which was actually somewhat valid, because when we got on the plane, they told us the entertainment system's not working, and the kids have the Virgin app on their iPad, and they can use the entertainment system and watch movies. It had been already like a two hour drive from my brother's. So I was like, "You're gonna watch a movie on the plane, we'll put a movie on." We get on there, it's not working. There's literally no entertainment for the kids because I didn't bring anything, because it's only a two hour flight. And then, the plane doesn't take off. We sit on the tarmac for an hour. I should have understood. I was like, "Well, he's going through the stages of grief now, and everybody's gonna have to suck it." And that's exactly what happened, and it went for the entire two hours plus the extra hour on the tarmac. All right, let's have some wine in honour of that terrible moment. What was I up to? Energy. It wasn't just meatballs. There was pretzel sticks, there was nuts, what else was on that tray. He took the whole tray. He's nothing if not grandiose in his behaviour. He picked up the entire tray, and I tried to bluff him, because he picked it up, and he was looking at me, and he was like, "I'm gonna do it," and he started to raise it slowly. And he was like, "I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna pour it over the seat." And I was like, "Okay Nathan." I was calling his bluff. And he just went higher and higher, and I was kinda like ... And he just kept going. Yeah, it went down over the top of the seat. It was very embarrassing. But I'm very proud of myself because I maintained an aura of calm. I was like ... On the inside I was screaming. Screaming. But externally I was a perfect example of conscious parenting. I was a delight to behold. I think everybody was quite delighted to see the back of us by the time we left. It was really hard. It was really one of those flights. It was the second worst flight that I've had with him, which means that I must get many blessings that are given to me this week, I imagine. They've already begun, so. What was I up to? I'm making some kind of point about energy. Is this like the time he came in and maintained eye contact as he ... Oh. Oh. Oh, wait until you hear what he did to Linda today. I don't know if I should even tell this story. He's the sweetest child. He's a fairy child. He's an indigo child. He's a crazy one. He's like us. The problem is that when you've got somebody like us in the ... Oh, I gotta tell you what he did. It's so bad. Like, so bad you can die. Before you die, join breaktheinternet.com, because if you didn't join that you might die just from woe at your own recklessness and foolhardy behaviour. He's one of us, right? But when you've got some ... Oh, it's way worse than the boob grabbing. You'd love to have your boob grabbed anytime over what happened tonight in this house. It was so bad, I was like ... I couldn't even ... I didn't even know how to communicate about it when I found out. It happened while I was out. And Serafina was here. Yeah, so when you've got somebody who's like a crazy rule breaker soul person like us who's in the body of a four year old boy, that person can be kinda hard work, alternated with incredibly powerful and charming and you just love and adore him, and of course you do anyway. He may ... I'm gonna tell you now what happened. He may have spread faeces all through Linda Doctor's bag of her possessions as she was about to leave the house to go on her next trouble adventure. I was out. She was about to leave. And he went and used her bathroom. Then for whatever reason unknown to anybody except him, and maybe probably not even him, he then took that shit, literally, and he put it in Linda's bag. It was apparently everywhere through the bag, and all over her toiletry bag. I'm not laughing ... I'm laughing in horror, you understand. It's a similar horror to the horror of that girl earlier who didn't like me. So I get home and Serafina's finishing tidying up, cooking dinner for the kids or whatever, and I'm like, "Did Nathan eat his dinner?" She's like, "Yeah, I've gone." "Cool, what else?" Like what else went on tonight, what else is news or [inaudible 00:40:13]. She's like, "Oh." And then she told me. I was just like, "I don't know what ... Oh my god. He's never done anything like that. Like, never." And then I'm messaging Linda, I'm like, "I'm so ... I'm mortified." I mean, she just laughed, but I don't think she was impressed. She didn't just laugh. I think she had whatever internal reaction that she obviously had. Then she told me what she said to him, which was very perfect, really. I was like, oh my god. Oh my god. Why? Why would he do that? And, by the way, he completely adores and is in love with Linda, just in case you've got only questions around that for anyone who doesn't fully know the story of Linda and everything. Like, he loves her. He is in love with her, and he thinks she's the most beautiful, amazing person, and he talks about her all the time, and he calls her Linda the unicorn, because the first time the kids met Linda, she stayed overnight and had a slumber party, and she wore a unicorn onesie the whole time, then gave the children unicorn rides on her back. That was the same time when she brought this cushion and some kind of unicorn pillow also. So he loves her. Why would he do that to a woman he loves. Men, answer for your gender. All of you. Now. Of course, he threw some undies with poo on them off the balcony a few weeks ago. That's quite different to spreading poo through somebody's bag. That was also an isolated event. I feel that he's starting to build somewhat of a rap list of some kind, and I should probably keep some of his stories quiet now. This was definitely the worst thing that I've ever known him to do, or just the most ghastly thing, I must say. So anyway. I think we've said all that we came here to say. I just wonder, when you're selling things, are you selling from a place of reaching into their souls and telling them why they must buy and really fucking meaning it, or are you just like, "Yes, I've got this thing, and it's quite a good thing. I think it's a good thing. It's something of a thing. Here's 49 bullet points as why you should buy it, and then yeah, now here's 29 more emails that get sent out every day, and I'm gonna keep telling you about it, but I'm a little embarrassed, and I'm a little self conscious, and I wouldn't ... I don't want you to think I'm selling to you. I don't wanna be salesy." So you're kind of like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna meekly pop it in the corner here and hope that you see it, then I'm gonna apologise energetically even if not literally, then I'm gonna do it again, because that's what you're supposed to do, but I won't say what I'm really thinking, because that might scare some people off. And I don't want people to think that I'm trying to make them buy, so I'll just kind of casually mention my thing and maybe they'll just know that it's for them and that they should pay me a lot of money." No. Are you crazy? Not the good crazy. Why are people doing that? Why? Why are you doing that if you're doing it? I'll tell you why. It's because you didn't kick your own ass properly. It's because you didn't join breaktheinternet.com. Join before we close. Why would you not just tell them that they're gonna be off their tiny little beautiful minds if they don't join your thing? Why would you not just tell them that if they never spend another cent with you again, they better fricking join the thing? Why would you not bring the energy and the passion and the fire to what you're selling? Or is it that you don't really believe in it? If that's the case leave and never return. But presumably you believe in what you're selling. Right? Right. Hi. Hi Janine. Thank you for saying hi. Send me a love heart shower if you believe in what you're selling, because if you do, and you're carrying on like that, it's a travesty, and it's an embarrassment for the entire fucking community and yourself. You should fucking sit up straight and stick your boobs out and have some wine and own your queen power. Who the hell do you think you are? You're a queen sitting on top the throne. Be in the fucking energy of that. be gracious in your power. And be bold in your message. And don't take any fucking shit from that other voice inside of your head. That's basically the main point that I'm trying to say. I mean, why don't you just act like you fucking believe in it, if you believe in it, right? You can say you believe in it. Why don't ... Oh, fuck that was one of those moments where I nearly threw the glass of wine at the laptop. But it would have been for a worthy cause. Is there any way that I could show my passion and fire more than throwing a glass of beautiful organic red wine at my rose gold MacBook. It can be so tiring to keep being around, being this person when there's struggle around you. I thought you meant it's so tiring sometimes to around me. It's so energising to be around me. The more that you're around me, the more your energy raises, your vibe elevates. Just being in my presence makes you more powerful and you become more abundant and you make more money. So really you should join for that reason if no other reason. And I'm not making it up, it's obvious. Won't stick your boobs out because someone might lose an eye. Well, bully for you. Me too, as of tomorrow. What else did I miss here? It can be so tiring to keep being this person when there's struggle around you. I don't fully understand that, but I think there's wine all in the corners of my mouth. What does that mean? I'm missing something that I think is important. Okay. Stick them out. What do you mean? I don't understand. How am I missing this? It's going straight over my head. I think I've gotten too hyped up on my own excitement. You gotta fricking own it. You gotta own your awesome. I did a challenge one time, a free challenge called Own Your Awesome. It's really a similar type of thing that we're talking about here. You've got to fucking own it. Thank you. Thank you [inaudible 00:46:22]. You've gotta fucking own it. That's my whole point. It's not enough to just be posting shit on the internet. Nobody cares. I'll stick them out already. I've been doing a fabulous self pleasure routine, actually, on my breasts and on other parts of me. I've been covering myself with love. Not in a gross, sticky way. And just taking the time to love my body. I had a beautiful moment in yoga earlier this evening where I was like, I think ... I'm being super serious now, so sit up straight and pay attention. We turned into church now. I had this moment in yoga where I was like, "Well this is my last yoga class with these breasts before I do the surgery tomorrow." But in that moment in yoga, I suddenly was like, "I think I'm experiencing right now in this moment the purest love and acceptance that I've ever had for myself. I've spent most of my life completely fucking hating myself, and never even able to look my own self in the eye in the mirror. Took me like eight freaking years of doing 90-minute yoga classes nearly every day to finally be able to look myself fully in the eyes and not look away. I went into self love, true love of myself last year sometime I feel, but in that moment earlier today, I was like, "I think this is the purest moment of deep self love and acceptance," where I was just like, "I fully fucking love myself in a completely non-ego way." It was just beautiful, and I feel like it's quite a contrast that I'm saying that now to everything else I've been yabbering on about. But it really was, and I was like, "This is the most perfect moment in time ever, because I'm doing something tomorrow that's changing my body, that is daunting or whatever." And I know it's [inaudible 00:48:17] in the right decision. But there's still that part of me that's like, "Um, am I gonna lose a piece of myself, or something, that I'm changing myself?" Something like that. And it was just this moment of no, this is perfect, and it's exactly as it's meant to be, and you just get to fully honour and love yourself right now, and tomorrow's whatever it is. Something like that. It was a glimpse. Thank you Angela. It was a glimpse. And also all these things just fell down where I was just like, "Oh my god, I see everything so clearly now." Relationship stuff mainly. And I was like, "Holy shit. It's just so fucking clear and so fucking obvious." And I was like, "This is just how it is." I was in my queen energy. That's what happened. I was standing there and I was like, "I'm like a queen." I was elevated into a queen in that room somehow. Like, my posture changed, my whole presence changed, everything changed, I could see it. I don't know. I'm gonna write about it later. Now I feel a bit self conscious. That's the truth. It means you step in it again and again. Sometimes I feel like I've run out of poop. I'm like Nathan, who never runs out of poop. Aah. Unagi. I understand. Sometimes I feel that way as well. Sometimes fuck the full on live stream. Sometimes I'm gonna be super quiet and not even turn the fricking light on. The real one or the ... Well, this is the real one. But the other one over there, or the you know one. So that's fine. You can be whoever you need to be each day. But as a general rule, if you're gonna sell something, then you're gonna fucking sell it, right? You're gonna be like, "Buy the damn thing." Speaking of the queen, I'm feeling coterie. That was a great course, hey? What a good course that was. Many people were transformed by that course. Okay, I gotta go. What time is it even? Should I even go to bed or just, should I just stay up all night? Oh, this laptop died. I forgot about that. Breaktheinternet.com has already begun. It is off the hook. We cover many things about many things. The details are in the pinned comment. You would be out of your mind, and not in the good way, to not be part of this. If you remotely resonate with the way that I do business in life, with my soul speaks and your soul says, "Oh my god, yes, there you are, I was waiting for you." Not in a lover sort of way, but in the same sort of way but different. If you experience that with me, and you know that it's 12:22 am, two two two right here in Brisbane, thank you Lisa. It's not Brisbane, but close enough. Then join breaktheinternet.com. Details are down below. I'll see you inside. Doors close fully midnight eastern standard time tonight, Monday, May 28th. So you have a little bit of time left, but I don't know what the fuck you would be thinking if you would just wait until that final countdown. Join now. If you do it super quickly, I might even let you into the group before I go to bed. Otherwise, I'll be up in several hours, and I'll be doing many things, mostly going to hospital. But I'm sure I'll run a whole fucking business while I'm there somehow. All right. Love, love, love the badassery of this community. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you. Thank you for remembering. Life is now. Press play.

Every journey begins with a step in a direction that you want to go in . . . I think. Right? Something like that.

Steve Larsen: What's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. So here's the real mystery. How do Real MLMers like us create and cheat and only bug family members and friends who want to grow a profitable home business? How do we recruit A players into our downlines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That's the blaring question in this podcast. We'll give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. What's up guys? Hey, hopefully you're doing awesome. I know it's been a little while since I've published here. I've been at several events. I've spoken at several events. Been flying like crazy. It's been a lot of fun. What I wanted to do for this episode was, I wanted to drop in a recording of me coaching the people who were inside of the program that I sell called Secret MLM Hacks. And it's been a lot of fun coaching them. I realize that I've now brought almost 900 people through this process or similar process as well, and had a lot of success with it. I've been able to go through it and help create millionaires, many of them now, and it's been great. And so one of the things that I notice, there's always this point as people start to learn something new, that they will go through, it happens to pretty much everybody that I've ever seen and watch. And what they'll do is, they'll sit back and they will start to question the very process that they're going through. And what I wanted to do is, I wanted to drop in. It's kind of special, guys. It's unique. There's three things that I ask every single person that I am coaching to go through internally. And so the next, it's like 20, 30 minutes, something like that, but it's totally worth it I promise, for you to go through and see what those three things are that I drop out to my students to help them know what I expect from them as they move forward inside of my program. So if you're sitting on the fence or whatever, every Friday what I do is, I always want people to know that I am there for them to help them answer questions, to coach them along the path, to push them when they need pushing. I look at myself as a coach. I tell them I'm a coach. Now, one thing about a coach is that coaches don't always make things comfortable. The purpose of the coach is to cause progression. And sometimes progress requires a little bit of pain, or discomfort, or things that are new, things you never ... Anyway, this is me going through and setting kind of the premise as far as hey, here are the three things that I require. And what's kind of cool is, regardless if you're in my program or not, these are things that you can use inside your own downline that I think that you will be able to help set the bar so that you create people who are people of action. One of the things that is most dangerous is when you recruit a whole bunch of people, which I've totally done this before, and probably most of us have, but you recruit a whole bunch of people who are not expecting to run on their own. Right? How do you get someone past that? And so this what I tell my people. This is what tell not just the people in my group, but also people inside of my very downline to help set the bar and help people realize that, yes, I'll run, but I'll run with you, not for you. These are the three things that I have people go through and understand. Anyways, I'm going to cue this over here. You can even take notes if you'd like to. These three things though, drastically, drastically, I've always found increase the speed of success for the person who is either in my downline, or the person I'm coaching, whatever it may be. Anyways, hopefully you guys enjoy this. Thanks so much. Guys, I'm excited for today. I hope you're doing well and I am just thrilled to be part of this group. I'm so touched by the number of you guys that are just out there just killing it, just doing everything that you can to just run forward. One of the hardest things I have as a coach is, I've had a total of about 900 people, ish. Let me think. Yeah. It's almost 900 people, 900 people in the last year that I've coached through these kinds of processes and similar thing as you guys are going through right now. And the thing that gets heartbreaking for me is this whole idea that, you guys, no one's teaching what I'm teaching. You've got the material, in my mind, the best tools, in my mind. You've got the best stuff that's out there, your complete Blue Ocean Strategy. You've got all this stuff that's out there. And the thing that hangs people up, it's like, well. What is it then? It's actually the ability for the individual to believe that it can work, and that's it. That's it. The ability to believe that it actually can work. And yes, Stephen, I totally get it. And yes, I will marry the process. One of the things, every once in a while I get someone to reach out. They're like, "Are you telling me that I actually have to put a few things into this? I actually have to work on it?" I was like, "Well, yeah. It's a business. Of course you have to." But it's not completely turnkey all the way? It's like, no, it wouldn't be valuable then. Are you serious? Are you serious? I've turned key to everything that I can. You know what I mean? And it's hard for me to see that as a coach. So those of you guys who are, you're out there, you're hustling. You're trying to apply all the stuff that I'm teaching. You're going through and you're just going through the motions. You're just doing it. I thank you. It means a lot to me. It's heartbreaking for me to see that. I've been where you are. And two years ago, I was broke, guys. And I went through and I started putting all these pieces together and putting these ... And it's crazy. I ended up getting my first Two Comma Club award. What? That's crazy. Million dollars through a single funnel. Crazy. Changed my life. And I started coaching people on this process. And over the last year I've had over almost 900 people in, which is crazy, that I've had a chance to bring through at this, both personal coaching students, you guys, Russell's group, which is huge, another group of mine that I have that's big. And it's been just, it's so fun. But it also is an emotional roller coaster for the coach. And those of you guys who have an existing team and you're trying to get people to take action, you've been through that before and you know what I'm talking about. And so I'm very appreciative of you guys and just going forward and just doing it. There's been a ton of success stories already in this group alone, and it's not that old. It's pretty new still, actually. And I've had a lot of people reach out, and it's the classic excuses. Well, I don't know that I have time. It's like, "Are you serious? This can make you a million bucks. What's the worth to you?" It's not going to be done in a week? No. How long does it take for my four year old to grow into an adult? Years. Right? I want to shortcut that process for you by a ton if you just do what I tell you to do on it. But one thing I want you to know and understand and be a part of and realize is, I wish people would just stop questioning the process. The process works, but people get so caught up in questioning whether or not the process works that they're not actually doing the process. So sit back like, "Will that actually work?" Why don't you get there, try it, and find out. You know what I mean? It's so much better to do it that way and do it that model than it is to go the other way and start questioning every little thing. Something, doing something, is always better than sitting back and questioning. You just won't get anything done. At the very bare bolts of it, I have never seen anybody who actually is failing when they just have pig headed discipline running towards stuff. It may not even be the fact ... They might not even be running towards the right thing, but just the fact that they're running, they drastically increase their chances of actually being successful with something. Rather than sit back and go, "Oh, what about this? What about this? What about this?" So I'm so thankful because, especially those of you guys, typically it's those who get on these calls with me or will see them later that are the ones that are actually doing it, pushing forward. And not to be a jab at anybody, I hope that it's a teachable moment though. If you want to look back and think to yourself, "Am I actually teachable?" Right? A lot of what I teach you guys, I think it was model three, goes through and teaches you more about internal beliefs of your customer, or your prospective customers, of people you'd want to sell both on your product and your downline. And what I want you to do, what I invite you guys to do, is to take the time to sit back and think to yourself, "Self, what are my false beliefs about what Stephen's telling me?" And do the same thing to yourself as what I'm trying to teach you to do to your customers. Start asking yourself, "Am I believing him or am I?" Because I know it works. I was just at Funnel Hacking Live in Florida this last week. And it was so cool to sit back and watch 90 more people get their Two Comma Club award and sit back and go, "Wow. They were from my program. They were from my program. They were from my program. They were from my ... " Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Holy crap. And it's cool to see that. I know the process works. The issue I run into is the person's individual belief. And funny enough, I have to treat you like I do a normal customer like you have to. Right? Just because you're in this program, it's not over for me. Just like when you get someone in your downline, it's not over for you. You've got to continue to look at them and go, "What is the belief? What's the belief that these people are struggling with as far as taking an action?" I an put a cattle prod to your back and get you to do something for a little while, but that's not sustainable. It's better for me to sit back and think, "What is the belief?" Behavior is driven by belief. So if I want to affect your behavior, I've got to [inaudible 00:09:10] your belief. What's the belief you have about this program's success, or my product's success, or my downline's ability to make you ... Does that make sense? And then I go, "Hey. Now that I know what the vehicle related beliefs are, now what are the actual internal beliefs?" Which, typically go towards things that are insecurities, meaning someone will go, "Oh, this looks like it could work for me, Stephen, but I'm not a coder. I don't know any ClickFunnel stuff." I'm not a coder either. Or, I'm not going to know what to say. I'm not going to know what to do. I'm not good face to face with people. I'm not either. That's why I freaking built a funnel for it. Right? Does that make sense? I constantly am looking at what you guys are doing. I'm constantly, and I'm watching. Just so you know, I'm watching and I'm seeing where you guys are and I'm seeing what you're doing and I'm watching. I'm trying to be reactionary to what it is he's doing in a way that we've been more successful with it. So I am going back and as far as the external, that's the next one. And people will blame their ability to be successful on things that are away from them. I can't be successful with this program, or I can't be successful with this downline, or with this product, whatever it is, whatever you're selling. I can't be successful because of this, and they blame it on that. They blame it on things away from them. Time, I don't have enough money. I don't have enough energy or resources. I work a nine to five. So did I, guys. That's how I bootstrapped the whole way. Okay. My ability to be successful, I can't do it because, boom, look at this. My spouse, they're not going to be supportive enough. Right? Those are the internal and then external things that people deal with, and so I'm watching. I'm watching you. Not in a creepy way, please understand. But I'm watching you. And I'm watching and I'm going, "Oh, gosh dang it. That's the thing right there. They're struggling with this, or they struggling with that." And the thing that just will wreck me on the inside is when I sit back and I watch people and I'm like, "You wouldn't be saying that. The reason you are saying that is because I sound like you're believing that in order to be successful, you have to have zeros and ones running through your veins." Not true. Or, you feel like you've got to have a ton of time. Well, yeah, but I'm going to short cut the five years I've taken to do this hopefully down to five weeks. You know what I mean? And shorten it down if you're just willing to feel ... So the thing that I have to ask you to do and I know that I'm preaching to the choir here because you guys are on here with me and you're typically the ones who are doing it, which I'm very excited for and just so appreciative. I can't tell you how much mental kudos that gives me to see you and watch you be like, "Oh, man. He's doing it. She's doing it. They're doing it. Yes, yes, yes, yes." Road block, sure. Right? Something unexpected, something hard, absolutely, totally going to happen. But to stop questioning the process and just marry the process and be willing to give yourself to the pieces of sacrifice it requires to be vulnerable, to sit back and go, "I don't know this. And the first time I start publishing, Stephen, I'm going to look like an idiot." Well, yeah, duh. I did too. And you go back and you're like, "Oh, my gosh." And you start backtracking, backtracking, backtracking, backpedal, backpedal, backpedal. And you've got to be able to know and marry the process as you go. I'm thankful for you guys like crazy, those of you guys that are doing it. It makes it worth it for me. At this point of where it am, it doesn't have anything to do with money. I want to be able to be building something that has direct impact and is able to go. If I can get you to do it, think of the dozens and maybe even hundreds, maybe even thousands of people it will affect as you teach your downlines this stuff. I know it works better. I know it does. I'm doing it. Right? You guys know it does. You're in it. And if I can get ... This is how we change an industry. And so I'm attacking it from several levels. I'm trying to help you guys, us, the little guy. I'm trying to help us get this done. And then I'm also starting to work through some possibilities of working through a few different MLMs from the corporate angle who are willing to accept this stuff, who are not trying to use it to crush the little guy. You know what I mean? I'm very careful. I do not want that to happen. So anyway, it means a lot to me, so if I can get you to believe that the process is the way and that you marry the process and set your own feelings aside and understand that there will be moments of embarrassment. You're going to be feelings you have no idea what to do. Sometimes you'll be like, "Oh, my gosh. Tech stuff, or not enough time in my life." There's never enough time in your life. That's all an excuse. Or this, or that, if you can get past that piece of it, holy crap guys, the world is your oyster because you're able to go through and actually make progress on these things without actually sitting back and going, "Is this actually going to work?" You're never going to find out if you just keep asking that. You know what I mean? So I'm thankful for you guys. And then the second thing I would encourage you to do is find somebody to teach quickly. Find someone to teach quickly the things that you are learning. It will solidify it in your head. It's the way I got through school was by ... Even random people, I would just teach random people the stuff I was learning from teachers that day. And it's what got me from completely failing and getting kicked out of college. True story. And going back, reapplying, getting back in and almost getting straight As the rest of college. And it was that piece right there. A few other things as well, obviously. Very religious, I certainly believe that God helps me with that. But one of the things I did on my part was to make sure that I was teaching people what I was learning, so please do that. And keep learning and teach what it is that you're learning. So I'm like, "Publish. Publish. Publish." That's what you're publishing. You're publishing the things that you're learning. Someone had asked me the other day, "Stephen, when do you think you'll run out of podcast content?" I'm like, "I never thought of that." Maybe at the very beginning when I started, but that is it. I brainstormed over 100 episode topics just like this last Monday, or Tuesday I mean. And 100, and someone was like, "When are you going to run out of stuff?" And I was like, "Wait a second. You believe that I know all this already." When I started publishing a year and a half ago, no. I was like, "Whoa. Okay. Thanks for saying that." Here's the big secret. Here's the big secret. You are learning with me and I publish as I go. And if you can get to that spot, start publishing what you are learning, it will change your life because it will solidify the message in your head. You're teaching what you're learning will solidify it. You're bringing people along with you and if you wait to be the guru on the mountain, nobody's going to follow you when you're this expert already. They're going to look at you and go, "I don't know if I can get where you are because look where you are." And since you haven't documented your journey down in the spot when you weren't up here, when you're down here and you're still kind of figuring it out. And you mess up and you've got the blunders. It's the reason why my first few episodes are not that good. But I leave them up there so that people understand, yeah, Stephen's gone through his own transformation. Right? So if you're like, "I'm brand new," you're in the perfect spot to start publishing, which is why ... What is it, model four that goes through that? Model four or five goes through and actually teaches you more about the actual publishing parts and why I do what I do. That's why that's in there, so that you can go through and do it, have the funnel and start actually implementing this stuff because you're in a prime position to start publishing as you're just one chapter ahead of everybody. And they'll see the transformation and your speed will increase. And it's not a linear curve. It's an exponential curve. And it'll take a while and you'll feel stupid for a little bit. And you'll blunder up and there'll be things that people will not be able to follow you on. And then suddenly one day you're just like, "Wait a second. Today I didn't take one step. I took five, but it felt like one. Huh." It's happening to me right now. I left my job three months ago and it's happening right now. And I can feel myself on this curve and it's been really weird, but it's been really cool. And since I published before I felt myself kind of like leveling up fast. That feels weird to say that. But since I was publishing beforehand, I have a lot of people reaching out going, "Stephen, it's so cool to see you out there just winning and doing it. Oh, my gosh. It's so cool. It's so refreshing to know that there's some guy out there who's actually pulling it off. It's not just all a whole bunch of smoke." And I'm like "Of course not. What are you talking about?" And so I was like, "Well, if I follow this guru or that guru, I don't know. Were they always like that?" There's no documentation of them being somebody down here. And so publishing is your safety net for this entire game, all of it. I know I've said that before, but it is. It's your safety net for the whole game. And if I can get you just to publish, oh my gosh, that's so much better. That's so much better because if you jack something up on some ... Whether or not we're using ClickFunnels, I don't care if you're using ClickFunnels or not. It'll speed up your progress a lot. It will. But if you don't want to and you don't have the cash for it, that's fine. Start asking yourself. How do I afford it? And get it eventually. My first funnels were on YouTube. Literally, they're just YouTube videos with links on the bottom. There you go. Until I could afford and asked myself the question. How can I afford ClickFunnels? And started developing little assets that paid for it. I just want you guys to do it and I'm excited for you to be part of this. Just marry the process. Be willing to go through some of the cuts and scrapes that are required for any individual as they start to move up, I should say. Increase their income. Increase their influence. Gain a following. For you to have a following by definition means you must be a leader. And that's what I wanted to do was to help you develop into that person. And if you can publish and you can start building these funnels and you start doing all this stuff and start learning, I know I dump a ton of stuff on you guys on that course. It's a lot. I know it's a lot. But I'm trying to overwhelm your brain in the right ways that cause growth, not scared-ness, like oh crap, I'm never going to make it. I hope it doesn't do that to you. But if I can cause overwhelm in the good ways and decrease the time. Guys, I have all of college I slept maybe four to five hours, maybe a lot of times three every night, all of college, learning this stuff. I would after, in the middle of my nine to five job, I would get to the office at 6:00 AM. I did this for such a long time. I'd get to the office at 6:00 AM and then I would go and I would be working on my own stuff until 9:00 AM for three hours. And then I would be on the clock for my employer, Russell. And then I would stop at about 6:00 PM. Hang out with our kids. At about 8:00, I would start again. And 8:00, I did this every day, every day. 8:00 PM, I would start again and I would go until another three hours, until about 11:00 PM. I'd go to sleep. I'd get back up at 5:00 and I'd do it all over again. And what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to shortcut the time. You have to know some of this stuff. The only two tasks you need to know in this whole business, you've got to figure out how to innovate and how to market, which ultimately is exactly what the course teaches you. Everything else is a cost on the business. Don't worry about your logo. Stop worrying about what your colors are. It doesn't matter what your mantra is. How do you market? That's not what a mantra is. How do you market? Which is storytelling and belief shifting. And how do you innovate, offer creation? That's it. And then once you can understand those things, then I bring you into this whole thing called funnel building. If you want to you can take it to the big leagues in the ClickFunnels area. But before that, it's just fluff. It's all noise. Anyway, I want you to know where this path is. And if you can just stick to it and just do it, man, it's so rewarding. It's so rewarding to look back. I was telling one of my buddies the other day. For the first time in my life, and I'm about to turn 30 in like three weeks, yeah, about three weeks. For the first time in my life, I feel fulfilled. Isn't that interesting? I mean, professionally. Fascinating, isn't it? And it's affected all these other areas of my life. But it came with a crap ton of grinding. And so I'm trying to cut out the crap and the fluff and the noise and the junk that does not matter for you to actually get there. And if I can do that ... Just marry the process and don't spend time doing that. Make the sins of commission, not omission. Meaning, just act. Make mistakes of committing, committing, committing. Maybe you're in action. You're actually doing stuff. The status thing is when people sit back and their making the mistakes of omission, meaning they're just sitting back and they're just questioning. Well, I'm not going to start until I go beginning to end. That's garbage. You're not going to do anything. Total garbage. If that's your belief, please be coachable in this moment and let me tell you that is not a correct and accurate belief. That is not. You do not ever know beginning to end ever. If you wait to, you'll never see. You'll actually never do anything. If you instead sit back and you say, "Look. These are the three steps that I'm going to take right now." And in fact, I only care about step number one. And you put your foot out there and you take that step as perfectly as that step can be placed, boom, you take that step. Funny enough, after step number three usually, for me anyways, I can see a thing. It's pure black. I have no idea. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing on the 25th. You know what I mean? I don't know. But I know where the peak is and I'm just heading towards the direction of that peak. Is there a way for me to get to that peak with the most efficiency? Yeah. Totally. But I don't know that until I'm there. And hindsight's 20/20. I don't know that until I've gone through it. So if I can sit back and look back and go, "Oh, man. Next time I do this, I should do it that way." What I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to make it instead of a line up to that peak where it's like, all over the place, I'm trying to go through and help you know, look, the straight line is by doing this and then this and then this and then this. But don't worry about this, this, and this, until you do just step number one. And funny enough, a new step number three will appear when you place your foot down. Boom, new step number three. That wasn't there until I placed my first step. Interesting. What if I placed my next step? You don't learn anything else until all you're learning is, you're learning how to place the next step, the new step number one. Boom. Oh, sweet. What? A new step number three appeared. Right? And that's how it happens the whole way through. And the thing that will ... It rips me up on the inside, guys. I know I'm totally on a soap box right now. I'll get your questions in a moment here. The thing that rips me up on the inside, I'll be coaching these people. I just had a chance to speak in front of 3000 people last Friday. It was super fun. It was amazing. And the thing that eats me up on the inside is when I sit back and I watch people and they're like, "Stephen, that sounds really good. And I see what you're doing. I actually think it works, but there's these other areas over here. I just don't know how they work, so I can't get started." No. That's not how it happens. That's not how anything is built. That's not how any progress is made. This is enough for me to get motivational and passionate over. And yes, I'll shake my computer screen and I'll let you know that this is the way it works. It is as much of a faith game as it is anything else. Entrepreneurship is really the story of the relationship with you. And as you sit back and you're like, "Oh, man. This whole game, I've got to get good at this game. I've got to get good at this game." You'll find that half of it is having an idea of what to do next. The other half of it is being okay with the fact that you don't know what to do next. And so being okay with this ambiguity and you've got to sit back and go, "Here's the step I see that I can take." You take it. You don't sit back and try to figure out step two. You're not even there yet. Don't worry about it until you take that first step. Right? Don't worry about step number three until you've taken step number two. Don't even worry about it. And so I applaud you is all I'm saying. Develop that mentality of it. I got voted the nicest kid in high school, seriously, the nicest kid in high school out of 600 people who were graduating. It shocked the crap out of me. And the reason why is because I was not the nicest kid in high school. And not in my mind, I was not expecting that award at all. I was the shyest kid. That's why I was nice. I just wasn't saying anything. I was a little rage machine on the inside. And what I had to learn, especially in this game, is that it's all about being able to develop yourself and get over those barriers. So what I'm telling you is, I had to go and I had a serious fear of adults. I had a hard time talking to people. Doing this, oh my gosh, it would've killed me. Now it's like breathing. It's totally fine. But take it from a guy who had a really hard time getting over this kind of stuff. I've told you this in the course. I would take my computer and I would stand in front of a mirror and I would mute the audio and I would literally just physically mimic because I was buttoned up physically, emotionally, speaking, nothing. I had all this anxiety on the inside. And the way I broke myself from it was by being willing to be uncomfortable. And this whole game, like I said, it is about the relationship that you have with yourself. It's like the second story that's actually happening. And for those of you guys who've gone through the training piece where I talk about the heroes through journeys, that's what this is. We think that the main journey, which it is, the main journey we're going on is this whole thing. We're like, "Hey. I'm going to go and I'm going to try and make a million bucks. And I'm going to build a sweet downline, a sweet team." That's cool. That is the main journey. The real journey though, is the journey of transformation that's happening underneath. It's the internal transformation that happens that's going on, on the inside of you. And I'm trying to teach you to be cognizant of it. Because if I can teach you to look back, be introspective and go, "I don't know if this works." Or, I think one of my false beliefs is, I believe I don't have enough time. And you can self solve, oh man, your speed to success is so much faster. It's like, so much faster, because now you'll be in a spot where you can start self teaching and have a relationship with you where you can develop. You can change. You can grow. And you can look back at yourself and go, "Oh my gosh. I'm not performing in this area very well because I have a hard time with this, this, and this." And just acknowledging the fact that you know what those things are, it's self discovery. And be like, "Oh, man. The way I was raised taught me that, yeah, there's no such thing as anyone who's actually going to make it." You know what I mean? Whatever that is, whatever that is for you. And as soon as you become cognizant of it, you can do something about it. So I'm trying to teach you to be introspective. Look back on yourself and go, "Sweet. All right. These are the areas I'm struggling with. Tactically, this is what Stephen's telling me to do. Okay. But you know what, he doesn't know me personally. And this whole area here I'm struggling with. What am I going to do? What's the thing I'm going to do to help break me and move forward and develop in a spot where I can actually get to the spot and start moving forward on this?" I'm just going on. I'm going to town right now, huh? That's the thing that I try and get people to understand. That's what I'm trying to help people take on and have ownership of. Okay. Do not put the roles of personal development on others. It is not in a course. It is not in anywhere else. Those things can jumpstart you, but it's ultimately on yourself. And if you can learn to be introspective, self medicate in the correct ways where you can go forward and literally craft your own path, oh my gosh, this game gets so fun. It gets so fun. Are all the answers for you personally inside Secret MLM Hacks? Yes. For offer creation, for message creation, for funnel building, learning how to build and automate systems, things like that, yes. For you as an individual, no. There's no way anyone could ever do that besides you. And I believe, God, and your relationship there. But if you can look back and be like, "Oh my gosh." I had to realize. I remember the day I was ... I don't remember where, but I remember the realization, oh my gosh. I suck at talking to people. Isn't that interesting? And a lot of people walk up to me now and they're like, "There's no way, Stephen. Are you kidding me? You're so good at that piece, that part." Well, let's go here. Let me take you back. If you guys want to, go three years back on my YouTube videos and watch me try to do a periscope. This was back when periscopes were big. One of the funniest things you'll ever see. They're terrible. They're terrible. Right? But it's me publishing when I'm not really far down the path yet. And if you can do that, it's so cool, guys. It's so fun. And your ability to transform other people will also increase because they will be ... You'll take them with you, which will break a whole bunch of beliefs that they'll have if you come at them when you're already here. And if you're already here, that's fine. But you've got to get vulnerable, and not just with other people, with yourself. And that's how the whole things happens. That's how you speed this thing up. Anyway, I just talk like crazy. Hopefully that's helpful to you, though. I'm very passionate about this and entrepreneurship itself because if I can get you to be introspective, to stop questioning the process, to marry it in a way that says, "You know what, I don't care how long it takes." Those are the people who put their head down. They don't look at a timeline. They put their head down and they just work. And suddenly they look up one day and they're like, "Holy crap. Look where I am. Huh, I really like that. I'm going to put my head back down again. This is cool." That's exactly what happened to me. You're like, "Whoa. Okay. Sweet." And it happened one day when I was sitting there next to Russell. And I had been teaching a lot of stuff in his place when he couldn't get up on stage. That's crazy, by the way. I was able to do that because publishing, I was practicing. I was telling stories. I was re-breaking, rebuilding belief patterns. What I'm trying to help you guys understand is that I sat back and I remember what happened to me one day. And all of a sudden Russell turned to me and he goes, "Dude, you're better at teaching offer creation that I am now." I was like, "Bro, you're Russell Brunson. Are you sure you just know what you just said?" He's like, "I'm being serious, Stephen." I was like, "Whoa. How did that happen?" And I started looking around again and I was like, "I'm publishing like an animal. I'm looking around. I'm coaching. I'm being coached and I'm also coaching." That's very key. I'm teaching people what I'm learning. And nothing but even just a year, that was technically a year and a half has passed. What if everybody did that? And I started looking around and I was like, "I'm going to put my head back down and do this more." And it just increased my speed and it feeds on itself. And now there's nobody who's sitting back going, "Come on, Stephen. Do the next step." I wake up just smiling. And I'm like, "Let's go take on the day," because I've created my own testimonial of myself being able to do it. And I'm trying to get you there. It doesn't happen, I can't cause it for you. But I can get you in an environment and teach you the environment where it happens. And you will have to develop it on your own as you do this process. It's so freaking awesome when you get to this spot. It causes belief on a level that no one can teach you because it will come from inside. And you'll learn a better relationship with yourself. It's really exciting, anyway. Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to rate and subscribe. Whether you just want more leads or automated MLM funnels, or if you just want to learn to get paid more for your product, head over to secretmlmhacks.com to join the next free training today.

This Episode’s Focus On Strengths Jason Treu joined me to chat about using your natural talents to build better relationships at work. He gives lots of ideas for building real connections.   What You’ll Learn Jason reminds us that business is not the only thing about your life. And he translates it into asking simple questions like, “what do you have planned for this weekend?” Those questions can build rapport very quickly. It’s about being human. And getting beyond conversations about spreadsheets. And he shares ideas on: Tapping into emotions (don’t worry, you don’t have to be a walking Hallmark card). Rapport, likability, and trust – getting beyond the surface in small talk so you can get to know a person. Being magnetic and irresistible, even when you feel awkward or quiet. Listening. I mean listening actively. And not thinking about your next topic while your conversation partner is still talking. Spreading the contagion of high fives. Allowing vulnerable moments. Stop trying to be perfectly perfect. Build on people’s ideas with a “yes, and” philosophy. Learn how to lead through a person’s strengths to be a better manager. Why you should consider offering the gift of a book (and Jason did this for me–what a delightful surprise to receive a book as a gift). Jason, if you’re reading this, I’m digging right in to Give and Take. Thank you for walking your talk!   Resource of the Episode Check out Jason’s book Social Wealth when you’re ready to go deeper on these topics.   Subscribe   To subscribe and review, here are your links for listening in iTunes and Stitcher radio. Subscribing is a great way to never miss an episode – let the app notify you each week when the latest question gets published. You can also stream any episode live on the website. Just click through the title you like and there will be a player waiting for you on each page. See you there!   Episode URL http://pinchyourselfcareers.com/build-extraordinary-relationships-through-your-strengths-with-jason-treu/   Read the full Conversation:   Lisa Cummings: Today you'll get some ideas on how to make career transitions and how to increase your success through the relationships you nurture and you'll get to do all of this with Jason Treu. So Jason is the author of a book called Social Wealth, and just like the title implies, the wealth part, it's not about the blinky kind of currency, it's about building extraordinary relationships and that's why it's social wealth. So Jason, thanks for joining. Jason Treu: It will. Thanks for having me on. Lisa, in speaking to your fantastic tribe. Lisa Cummings: They are fantastic and as you know, these fantastic people are all about exploring their strengths, how to find them, leverage them, and what it's like. What's your life is like when you do that. So let's give him just a little glimpse of your life before getting into your expertise. So think about your life and a peak experience or a peak moment where you can think about when you were in your relationship flow and can you tell us about what that was like for you? Jason Treu: Well, before I found the job that I have now been in business and executive coach, I was working as a marketing executive and I noticed that when I was on the road and doing roadshows with my usually my CEO of the company, I was with, you know, I'd be on fire. I would just be so passionate because I'd be speaking to different people. We'd be evangelists to whether it's financial analysts or media or customers or whatever it is. And I just be loving it. And you're right. And that was when I was in my peak because connecting and belonging are my core emotions, are my top emotions. And so having that ability to connect and feel that belonging and be passionate about speaking and evangelizing with something that I really got me excited in my life. Lisa Cummings: And I love that. You know, that the connecting and belonging matters for you. How did you find those values and how have you come to that to determine that those matter that much to you? Jason Treu: Well, one of the things is finding your purpose, so people typically mixed up a mission statement with a purpose because they say to themselves, well, my purpose is to help entrepreneurs or help you know my clients do better work, or whatever it is, but that's something external to you and everything external to you will let you down. So if you have your purpose outside of yourself, what happens with people as they go through some precipitative crashes in their life? Because eventually when that purpose lets you down, whether it's something you've unconsciously made or consciously, you really go through some significant trauma. But if your purpose is inside you, you don't. And when you attach it to emotion and your top emotions and figure that out, life really opens up for you. And how you really do that as an exercise. You know, you go back and recall your earliest happiest memories in your life. And from those you can extract your emotions that are in each of those memories. And then ask yourself what emotion would you rather feel and you can really uncover that. And what's really great about that is that although as you age, you will want your different experiences will be different. The structure and form of bad emotions will not. And so then when you can say to yourself, am I living my emotion? Am I living my purpose? And that's a little bit more than that, but that's really an easy way of taking a look at it for someone. So to see what they're doing. Because the problem for me in my job before was I was great when I was connecting and belonging, but I was, as I was going up the corporate ladder, I was sitting in my office more and more about myself and I was dissatisfied more and more so I realized at some point I connected the dots and realize well I'm better with people and I need to be with people all the time and not just part of the time. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, and your hitting on a topic and getting into things like emotion. I love that you brought that up straight away here because a lot of people shy away from that and the corporate space and they're afraid to talk about it or use that word and I think that one thing that's important as, hey, there are a lot of emotions that go well beyond the hallmark kind of emotions. I mean you might go through that exercise and recount all of the times where you just felt jubilant because you were riding your bike faster than anyone else on your street or because you won a track meet or something like that and you can start tracing back those. And those are emotions too. So that's cool to hear that terminology in this context because a lot of people shy away from it. Jason Treu: Yeah. And I think the great thing about it, I have a client of mine who's a CEO of a large company here in Dallas and he is extremely unemotional. His father was in the police force in Boston area and you know, they never showed emotion and I went through exercises like that earlier on with him and you know, probably like a month ago and then I working with about three months. He's like, I got to tell you a story, and I'm like, okay. And he was like, he told me he dropped off his daughter at summer camp and as he drove away, he cried for the first time in 25 years. Oh Wow. And he felt so good. And the ability, he said, the ability for him to actually open up to people, be more vulnerable, be authentic speak his truth and be generous, has transformed his ability to lead, manage and actually run his entire organization, which is a very large company. And I thought that, you know, that's a really critical thing because when you're not in touch with your emotions, you don't understand what drives you, you really become lost because you can't connect to other people. People don't buy facts and figures. They buy emotions and buying could mean anything, any part of the organization, right? It's everyone's selling something right and idea of thought or to a client partner or supplier, etc. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, and let's talk about that part where you get into the other. So building relationships, it's great if you can feel your own emotions and also watch what other people are feeling because it's going to inform you about how your connection. So okay. One of your key principles I've heard you talk about is that your career potential, your success happens because of your relationships with other people. So give us a tip on making the brand-new connections and not feeling awkward about it. Jason Treu: Right? So the building blocks of any relationships are rapport, likability, and trust and how you build a relationship quickly or you can take an existing relationship significantly farther is on the rapport side. You have to start tapping into people's emotions because emotions are what runs people. That's why they do everything that they do. So I find that people ask questions to other people that are just surface level questions. You know, where do you work, what are you doing or how's your weekend? And that's fine, but if you never get any farther than surface level, you will never really get to know a person and that's going to hurt you in your career because people make promotion decisions, they give you money, they do everything because they like you. And the more passionate they feel about you, the more they're going to advocate for you in anything that they do. Jason Treu: So in an easy way to ask this, I've done this to strangers all the time, is I ask people, what are you passionate about? What projects are you working on that you're passionate about? And in fact, I did that a month ago to a woman. I was at a charity event and I asked her, you know, what's, what are you passionate about? And she told me she's passionate about, you know, cancer, charity events. And I was like, well gee, that's awesome. I am too. And my mom had leukemia and I told the story about how she almost died and etc. And you know, this woman just lit up. She didn't. She told me a story about her sister having breast cancer and literally in a couple of minutes later she was crying and I'm sitting there and I gave her a hug and she introduced me to her friends like, this is the greatest guy you got to meet him, and so we carried on a conversation and all that. Jason Treu: My conversation between me and her was less than 10 minutes. Right? And then I created an emotional connection at that point that I could have done anything else. And in top of that, what you do then is you ask a person, well, what do you need any help with that? Are you having any challenges around that passion in your life? And then you can actually help people with the things they actually care about the most. And if you can do that, people will do anything for you, right? Because one, if you lead with giving, people know that you don't have a scorecard and the only people that don't have score cards with them are people in their inner circle. The closest people to them. And also there's a thing called the law of reciprocity. Meaning, people don't like to get things too far out of whack typically, so when someone gives the other person many times will at least give back in match that in that relationship and get back to even. So either way you can get pretty far and take relationships pretty quickly or take existing ones and really move them forward quickly. Lisa Cummings: Yeah. So okay. There's a situation that I keep hearing happening with the audience and they will buy what you're saying and when it comes to their peers and where they get tripped up is with exec senior executives that they want to build a relationship with, but for some reason the hierarchy gets this thing all out of whack for them. So let's say because you mentioned promotional opportunity in there, so that’s what prompted me to think about this. I keep hearing at where suddenly people feel more awkward or they feel that the opener that they might be pushing. Strangely if they come in and they're trying to make emotional connections. So when somebody is approaching a senior executive, they don't yet know who would be in a promotional power kind of situation or even just an org chart kind of power situation in their company. What would you do if anything that's different or would you do it totally the same? Say you're nervous around that person. How do you work through that? What's your first step? Jason Treu: I realized they're human beings too and they’re having a connection with me too. You need to understand that you have to learn about them. Right? And the business is not the only defining thing; their personal life really is and what their passions are. So I think a great thing is I ask people all the time is what did you do this weekend? What's on your agenda for the week? Right? Something like that. So I can try to find some things that they might really like, that I can find some common ground and build rapport quickly with them. Especially if I don't have very much time because at least you can build some quick rapport with that. The other thing that you can do is some more technique on mirroring and matching them, and that's a very powerful way because most communication is nonverbal, so you can, if you mirror how someone is, speaks, the tone of their voice, if it's high or low, if they're animated, not animated on the space in between them to make sure you have the proper space. Jason Treu: If you can actually match their movements a little bit, you don't need to be like mirroring every possible thing, but the more that you can do, the more helpful it will be because people like people that are like themselves or the people that they want to be like. So you need to build that rapport on both sides of it, the verbal and nonverbal because then it's a way a quicker way to build a relationship that matters for them. Right? And how they see you in view and you because people make snap decisions really quickly. So you want to go in there and do that in plus most people are not really interested in the other person, right? Or they're trying to ask them business questions or they're trying to get it and they're trying to an angle and when you try to do that, the other person knows because again, most of communication is nonverbal so people know when you're trying to get something from them or you're trying to run your own agenda on them. I try to go into with a contribution mindset, like how can I help someone else and how can I get to know them? Right. And that is what I'm always acting like in everything that I do and everyone I meet. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, I love those. And I like the weekend one because it's easy. It's repeatable. I mean, if you give someone that tip alone and they go ask five people that same question, then they have something also to follow up and take the conversation beyond later because you can say, hey, how'd your triathlon go that weekend? Or how was your son's play? And then it fuels future conversations as well. And then on the mirroring part, one of the simplest of all of those is the kind of the pace and the tone of that person. So that's an easy one. If it's too much mentally to handle having all sorts of things to watch, for just the pace of their conversation. Trying to match that and bring it up a level or down a level can really be helpful. Jason Treu: The other thing to do too is that if you know, something I think often we don't do is trying to do that little bit extra. Like perhaps you find out when their birthday is and you know, you give them a card or perhaps that you decided to get a book and just buy a book and you know, write a little note saying, I thought you might like this book and you know what? You may not even know what they like, but if you go find a business book that you really enjoy, odds are that person will. And even if they never even read it, the fact that you were thoughtful and did something like that, you're immediately going to stand out because you know what, no one does that. I've talked to senior execs all over the place. I've asked them that question because I bring people books know, and I ask. So when's the last time someone's brought your book? Never, Jason Treu: You know. And that's the question. That's almost always the answer. Never. Or it will be someone that they know really, really well. So if you're an organization you want to stand out, why would you not do something like that? Because it's a $10 investment in your future and it's an easy thing to do for other people and, you know, you won't ever be wrong because someone will least appreciate the thought. And that's what matters the most. Lisa Cummings: Yes. And it could really go well as an opportunity to notice something that you appreciate about their leadership style, where if you read this and say, hey, when I read this, I thought of you. It's almost as if you contribute it as an author. And then they realize, of course they liked the generosity and that you thought of them and that you would, you know, get grab a book for them. All of that is great and you noticed something that they're doing well and you're reinforcing their strengths and just because they are a higher level in the org chart, then you are at that point, doesn't mean they don't like to be appreciated as well. And those things they stick in the memory. Jason Treu: Yeah, because often as a pretty lonely existence because my clients that are that level, you know, they have no one to talk to, right? Because they have a board over them or they're on the board and the people on the leadership team like, you know, that's a difficult challenging conversations. They can share something but people below in the organization, they really can't. Right. So they're often very alone and lonely in that role. And so they want people to actually embrace them. And I think the way to do that as well have been talking about today and realize that they're not sitting on some high mountain and they want to be a part of something else in the organization itself is just filling a role that makes it many times very challenging to do so. Lisa Cummings: I like how this topic is really getting into a feeling of being a magnetic person and in a lot of ways you're doing that by offering that same sentiment out to someone else. And I think you've gone as far as calling it irresistible, like you believe anybody could be irresistible. So for a lot of people when they hear that term, that feels way far away from where they are today. So what are a couple of steps? Let's just start with the first one. What do you do out of the gates? When you don't feel like an irresistible person, you want to build better relationships at work with all the people around you. Get us a starting point, Jason Treu: Listen. You know, very few people actually listen. How many people do you know are thinking about the answer? And everyone listening, ask yourself, how many times are you really listening to someone or are you finding the answer in your head before they finished the sentence? Right? And I think being an active listener is one of the skill-sets that seems so simple in like, oh yeah, how can they make a difference? But it makes all the difference in the world because when you actually listen to someone and give them positive feedback, it's amazing what can happen, right? And be an active listener along the way because you know they have feelings too and they have emotions and I think that's something that is really important to do in the process. The other thing is just be excited. Be passionate and be enthusiastic. You know what I mean? Jason Treu: They've proven that happiness and enthusiasm is contagious so you can actually change someone's state right in front of you by being happy, enthusiastic, and being excited. And I do it all at a time and prove it out. My friends were. I go anywhere what I do anything or done it all the time in organization. I might go in and I've hired five people and it's wonderful, right? If I see a client's really down, I get always more exciting and I’ll five them, or I'll do something just because I want to get them excited. You know what? Instantaneously their state changes and if you're around in doing something like that with people, that's amazing. I think the other thing is what we don't do is actually share vulnerable moments with other people and we don't really tell them about ourselves. We try to be perfectly perfect instead of imperfectly perfect. And when you actually are vulnerable and authentic with people, you make it okay for them to be dumb selves around you because they don't need to worry about being perfect. So I love to lead with being vulnerable and telling stories about things that are going on in my own life or things that are not going well so I can actually create a level of… it's not even beyond rapport. It's that emotional connection as a human being and what's going on and people's struggles. Right, and that again, then and you can listen to what they're saying and you don't solve it. You don't know. You don't need to come up with a solution or try to fix it. All you need to do is be empathetic and listen. Right, and a lot of times that's the best thing because sometimes when you're offering solutions and trying to help people, people look at it as you're not really listening. You're trying to fix them. Lisa Cummings: Yeah, I love the phrase “perfectly imperfect” too, and that sharing that stuff is. It's not about the thing itself, it's that you're willing to share the story and that you've become human to them and then you get the emotional connection and the listen thing. Let's back up to that because, this is big and there are many factors. There's obviously the huge number of distractions that people have that keep them from listening and then when I've been around people are trying to listen better, I've also noticed that one thing that's missing from the equation is actually acknowledging back that they actually heard what the person said. I mean, they might be watching, they might be hearing the words yet kind of to that point of pre planning what you're going to say next, even if they're trying to focus intently, just bringing the conversation through instead of it being a choppy, you know, you're saying your part. I'm saying my part. So I think that's another good step is acknowledging, oh, I loved, oh, okay. Here's a perfect example. Let's get real meta here when you said perfectly imperfect. And I said, oh, I love that phrase. Perfectly imperfect. This is a small way of listening and paraphrasing what you said yet it's at least acknowledging I heard that and I made some meaning out of it and let's break it down a little bit more. Jason Treu: Yes, and that's the thing, that important point, if you can bring part of what their content of what they just said to you back into your first statement or two that will make the other person's feel like they've been heard and that you actually listened to them because otherwise you wouldn't have been able to do it. And that's like that's what they call active listening. Right? Versus focusing on what you're going to say and getting out what you need and not in just asking them a question, not because you want to hear what they have to say but more because you want to get your point made. Lisa Cummings: Exactly, and I noticed something that in the way that you hold a conversation personally that you say a lot of yes and not literally. You do a lot of “yes, and” and that can be another great one and listening that you're modeling is instead of saying sometimes you're going to disagree with somebody and instead of jumping right in with your defense or your butts or your other way to view things can say yes, I see where you're coming from on x and here's another way we could also consider it. And that is a way to throw in another perspective without shutting down what that person said. And I love how you've been modeling that here. Jason Treu: Yeah, that's important thing. “Yes, and”, and the other thing too, for managers out there I think is really helpful to do is when someone comes to you with a problem or a challenge, you spend five percent on the challenge and making sure you define specifically what it is, but 95 percent of the solution and what I tell people all the time is when someone comes into your office or your cube or wherever it may be an ask a question, you should ask back, okay, well what are three suggestions to solve this problem? Right? Or what are a couple ways that you believe they can solve the problem? And if they say to you, well, I don't really know, then I say to them, well, if you did know, what would you say? And if the person continually doesn't give an answer saying, well, you know what? I tell them to come back when you have some things; are there some ways that you think you could possibly solve it, right? And it doesn't have to be right, but I want to know that you actually thought this through more and you force people. It's like fishing, right? If you teach people to fish, they can continually do that, but if you give them this fish will always need your help and when people walk away from that conversation and they've solved their own problem, he feels smarter and they feel like, wow, like that's awesome. Like I can do this on my own. right, and that's a really powerful way, again, to build an irresistible brand for yourself and other people because people want to be around those people because you're lifting them up, right and you're helping them and it's a fantastic way and very few people do that. Jason Treu: Most managers give the solution and they say, well, no, that's not right. Do it this way. Right? Well, the other person then feels like they walked away and that they were broken or they did the wrong way and it will because the manager didn't take the time which would have helped the manager have a better relationship and the employee be way more motivated and proactive moving forward because they're excited about being in a learning environment where you know where being wrong isn't panelized. What's wrong is not having any thought or any idea and not communicating it forward. Lisa Cummings: And it's such a fun skill to practice as a manager because it's actually easier to ask back and the tendency is, okay, well yeah, I have an idea in my mind I could offer up this advice and instead of doing that, I love how you did the three options. That's cool too because the person who's coming in with a problem, they might have an idea of a solution. They probably feel stuck, but they have a solution that they don't love yet. Or they would have taken action and started solving it, so to say what are a few options? It gets them feeling open enough that they could throw out bad options and then it's good options and then work through them. So that's a really cool too. Jason Treu: And if you're a manager, what you can’t say back, let's say someone throws out an idea and you're like, wow, that's not really right. You can say to someone, you know, I can see how you could think that that can be an option. Right? And you know, and then you can sort of guide them by asking another question. We'll have you have you thought or considered, you know, doing x, y, or z, right? And you can lead them down the path by asking them questions and having the other person then give answers back, right? In guiding them through the question sets to get to the answer right then. And then you can say to him, see, you knew the answer, right? I may have had to help guide you a little bit, but all along you had the answer inside of you. So I want you to continually start looking inside of yourself because you're a smart, motivated, intelligent individual, and you can do anything you want if you set your mind to it. Right? And I helped you a little bit along this process, but now you see that you can do this yourself, right? So I'll be excited next time when you come to me and we go through this process and we see how much quicker you're going to get to the solution. It's got way more motivating. Someone was walking out of an office like that or somebody who's been told the answer, what do you think is going to motivate and get people excited? Right, Lisa Cummings: Right. Obviously the second one, and it also, if you tie this to strengths, it's such a beautiful way to have a conversation because everybody problem solve a little differently. We have different thoughts, patterns of thoughts and behaviors and that influences how we solve problems and how we process what's going on around the world. So when you as a leader asks somebody else how they're thinking through the issue, you're helping them use their strengths to solve the problem and you're also learning how they think and then you're learning how to lead in a way that supports that person individually. So it does so much beyond even just getting the answer to the problem; it really does help you individualize your style to that person. Jason Treu: Yeah, I think it's really important. And you know, the last thing for managers to. I think it's important to really understand your employees and understand where they're at, because you know one of the challenges I've been finding, I was just doing some sales training a few weeks ago and I was talking to people and I was doing more inner work than I was doing actual strengths that they would be using in the external world. What I found when people were coming to me, marital problems, some people had abuse other things that had gone on in their life and this is the things that were holding them back. So I think we've got to realize that when people walk into a business or organization or work remotely or whatever they're going to do, they don't leave their personal life at the door. It goes with them. So you have to get to know people. Jason Treu: You have to understand what people are doing and you have to support them and be empathetic and possibly even get them help because that's affecting their work performance and affecting the bottom line. And if you try to gloss over that, you're missing a huge opportunity to uplift people and really improve the bottom line. Because people who are more happy and motivated work harder because when you are in a negative mindset or sad or frustrated or angry; the first thing to go with self-discipline and momentum and motivation. Every time. You've heard this before, people say, well, I'm not motivated. I'm not this, I'm not that. Well, you know, one, if you get happy, excited or really joyful in your life, you're going to be more motivated. The other thing is you've got to take action in your life, but you're less likely to take action when you're in a negative place. Lisa Cummings: Yes! And there are stats from Gallup that they've put out and have studied this really deeply and those who focus on their strengths and focus on what's right about them in the workplace are six times as engaged with their work. So it's a significant difference in the way that you feel. Jason Treu: Yeah, and I think that's how you find out your strengths a lot of the times too is you know, you got to help people figure those out and see where their challenges are as well. Right? And help them with their own blind spots and weak spots and help them alleviate those or bring those up, work around it. Right. And figure those out. And I think that these are ways for you as a manager and also to manage up and you can see that in other people as well, once you get more in tune with them on an emotional level and started connecting with them and they've done all the studies that the managers today that are succeeding and the people they lead are succeeding because they have vulnerability and authenticity; they are key leadership traits because end of the day, that's what influences other people. And that's what creates charisma. That's what creates persuasion and at the end of the day that creates leadership. Lisa Cummings: So I know a lot of people are going to want to get their hands on social wealth because there'll be thinking about the charisma and building their leadership and building those relationship skills. So for everybody who wants to get more of Jason, where can they find you, where can they find your book and how can they dig into your stuff? Jason Treu: So you can go to https://jasontreu.com/(updated, February 2019) it's all one word and you can find my coaching. There are tons of free guides on branding, networking, you know, how to email busy people. There's tons of things and self-development as well and there's stuff on my coaching as well there. And then you can go there also to Amazon to get my book and audio book. Lisa Cummings: Wonderful. And that is called Social Wealth. So thanks so much for joining Jason. This has been really cool to look at relationships and emotional connections. Jason Treu: Well, thanks a lot. At least I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and your audience and know they're all fantastic and just go out and take on the world.