90% of people say they need more skills, but what they need is authority or comfort and they can't be comfortable in a conversation. So, I could give you like I would talk to these clients and I would say I could spend $10 million, write the best persuasion script for whatever your ideal outcome is, hand you this thing on a silver platter, and if you're not comfortable in that conversation, you're not going to be successful. So, I could give it to somebody with social anxiety and have them go read this out loud.
It's not Harry Potter. We're not reading spells. It's not a spell.
So, a lot of people's problems come from comfort, a lack of being able to be comfortable in in a conversation and the level of authority that they might have. And I don't mean hierarchical authority. I just mean personal authority.
But they don't know it. They think it's I need more social skills. I need to learn small talk or I need this little technique.
So every time the one thing I tell every client is if I give you a flight checklist right now for a a small plane a Cessna 172 are you a pilot? No. Having this little checklist of what to do does not give you the skill.
So a lot of that so much of that comes from comfort. And the problem that a lot of people have is they're competing with other people on height, on looks, on social status, money, hierarchy, confidence, all this other stuff. The number one thing you need to compare yourself with other people on is comfort.
That's it. Is can I be more comfortable than the other person in in this conversation because our brains are naturally wired to compete. We can't turn competition off, but we can change what they're focused on.
And if they're focused on comfort, we win a lot more conversations. Comfort. Yeah.
How does that manifest? Is that just like being like physically comfortable? What is that?
[laughter] Yeah. It would be physical comfort. So, one of the challenges I give to people is for your first week.
All the only thing I want you to focus on, I'm not going to give you this long list to go look into your phone and have to read it before every meeting. The one thing I want you to focus on this week is can you move slower than the other people in the room. That's it.
Just adjusting the speed limit on your body. So if you were standing in a swimming pool, how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater? And make that the speed limit for this entire week.
That's all I want you to focus on. And that makes so many changes in people's mind because we change our bodies and we change how our emotions are feeling. And there's one thing that fear does.
It speeds our body up. So if you see someone doing these rapid jerky movements, you're you're seeing mostly fear or stress in their body. So get more comfortable in an interaction conversation even if it's on the phone or in person.
Yeah. So on the phone it would be speaking at a normal composed pace. Okay.
And then so step two is composure. Can I get you into a place where you have some composure? And the left and right side of composure, we have collapse and we have posturing.
So we I have a person that makes themselves small so other people can be comfortable or I make myself big so other people can get away from me. And we have we see that with every aspect of our lives. Like when I first started my business or when I first got out of the military, this people called me for a keynote.
So, this guy calls me and he's like, "What's your hourly rate? " And I said, "6K. " Uh, and I said, "That's including travel and all that.
" And the only thing he did, he didn't say anything on the phone. He just goes, "That's it. " He just made that noise.
And right away, I said, "Oh, yeah, but we could do a discount. I could probably do like 5K. We could even take some off, 50%.
I could even take 75% since you're here, here, and I have to do this. " It just made up excuses. And I almost got to the point where I was like, "Let me pay you.
I'll give you some money if you come let me speak on stage for you. And that's collapse. So that's I'm in collapse in some areas of my life.
I might posture in some areas of my life. And our goal is to get out of that swing. But the problem most people have if I'm living in collapse, the solution looks like posturing.
And we see this in like guys that learn pickup. Like I'm going to learn how to posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing. It's not the center where I need to be.
And what is the center? That's that's composure. That would be composure.
And I would say composure is the combination of the things that make up authority. And authority is made up of five things. And that's confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment.
So I have an authority inventory. This is day one. The first thing that I give to intelligence people or I've got a guy that owns a car dealership, whoever the client is.
And it's the authority assessment. It assesses you on those things. And wherever your lowest point is, that's what's keeping you from being successful in most conversations when you need to persuade somebody.
And it pinpoints it very quickly. And if I could go into this a little further, um, the way that we live our lives off camera, I'm sure you would agree. You just had Vanessa Van Edwards on.
U, it it bleeds out in our body language. It bleeds out in all not just body language but how we breathe, how we talk, how we come across. So even if I read that article on LinkedIn of 19 ways to look more confident and it says, well have better posture, sit up straighter, shake hands, make better eye contact.
I did all of that and I look really presentable. But back home I've got a 8ft pile of laundry sitting in the bedroom. My bed's nasty.
I've got dishes all piled up in the sink. There's a part of our brain that's somehow dedicated to reminding us I'm faking it right now. [clears throat] And that comes across.
So whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously, we're manufacturing gut feelings in other people. So our job is to manufacture better gut feelings. And the five most common ways that those bleed out in our everyday life is how we manage five areas of our life.
And that is our environment. like do I take care of my environment, my uh time, appearance, my social life, and my financial life. Because those are the those are the five things we worry about in the back of our head that start bleeding out these gut feelings because we've all had a conversation where everything on the surface looked great, but afterwards we were like something was off.
I don't know what it was, but something was just didn't feel right about that guy. And we've all had that little experience. And getting a hold of your those five qualities that make up authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life.
So, it's really that the controllable element. It's our environment, our time, our appearance, our social life, and our finances. That's the like controllable foundation to all these other things um that we talked about.
Yeah. So that would be the the bottom foundation of that little pyramid. And the far left side of that triangle would be confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment.
Yeah. And those elements alone produce feelings in other people that make them see an authority figure. And you've heard of the Mgrim experiment.
Oh gosh, it reminds me of something I read when I was 16 in psychology class in a textbook. Probably did. That was the one where they got people to shock each other.
Yeah. Please explain. All right, let me give you a quick recap.
It's Yale University. I think it's 1962 and Yale runs an ad in the paper. It says, "Come help us with this study on learning and we'll give you 20 bucks or lunch voucher or something like that.
" So, all these volunteers come out and there's a tall guy in a lab coat and official clipboard there and there's one other volunteer and you draw straws. One of you is the teacher, one of you is the learner. So, you're led into this room.
You watch this learner guy get strapped up. He's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine. And every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong, you've got to shock him.
You have to hit the button. And every progressive question, you increase the voltage on this machine that goes all the way up on the far right to XXX danger. Severe shock is what it says on there.
But the whole time you're shocking him, the you can hear the guy screaming on the other side of the wall. He's screaming and midway through the process, the guy's banging on the wall. He's like, "I have a heart condition.
I don't want to do this anymore. I'm out. I quit.
I don't want to do the experiment. " And 90% of these people will turn around to the guy in the lab coat and the guy in the lab coat's like, "Please continue. It's important that you continue the experiment.
" So, they keep going and going and almost to the end, no more response. It's just silence. The guy doesn't even respond to questions.
And the guy in the lab coat says, "Any non-answer has to be treated as if it were an incorrect answer. Please continue. And they keep going and going and going.
And you you can watch some of these are on video and you just watch this their faces toward the end. These psychiatrists at the beginning of this predicted less than 1% would go all the way. 67% of people go all the way.
And 250 volts is enough to kill you. 100% went up to 250. The presence of novelty and authority did everything.
It made a person commit murder. And that's I would say I would argue that's more difficult than selling someone a car. And that authority comes in that particular example came from going to the university, the lab coat, etc.
But how do we establish authority ourselves? Is it going back to the things you said there about environment, appearance, etc. , finances?
Yeah. Yeah. Is there like are are there physical expressions of that authority in a day-to-day basis?
There are slowness of movement is one of the most common. So we have slowness of movement. So the right side of that authority triangle has five letters on it and that stands for movement, appearance, confidence, connection and intent.
Is our intent visible? That outward sign of authority is what a lot of people tend to look for. What does authority look like?
But what we're really doing is I want to look up the symptoms of authority, not the cause. Because we're all these LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos that are saying how to have more confidence, how to do X, Y, and Z are how to have the symptoms instead of the cause of authority. So people with authority tend to sit up straight, but they don't sit up straight because they read an article.
They sit up straight because they see the world a certain way. And that's so much of a difference between changing my world view versus changing my posture. That's very different outcomes and we're still generating those gut feelings in people.
Interesting. Have you worked with many people that come to you and they've got a clear authority problem? Is there a particular example you can think of where you were able to help someone turn their life around?
Many. Hundreds. Give me your favorite example.
My favorite example was a big CEO. He's in Los Angeles and he asked me for skills. He starts off, I need I need the flight checklist.
I don't need to learn to fly. I just need the checklist. But it takes me a while to kind of walk people back and say like, let's get to the root of this because you can't just openly say you have an authority and and comfort problem.
And his employees would like openly make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that. And he didn't like it. And it it his company was going downhill so fast.
And I took him through this process of gaining let's let's build up your confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment, all of those things. And let's [snorts] find where your lowest point is of those five. If I could just find your lowest point on that five list, then I know the highest leverage thing that I can do.
So if the highest leverage that he can do would be confidence, that's the number one thing I'm going to start working on. And the moment we took him through that process, it was only a couple of months and we used a lot of hypnosis. We used a lot of um I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him.
So it's the same techniques. And you know what? Uh cognitive behavioral therapy was also a a form of brainwashing back in the day and aversion therapy.
Um, but within just a few months, he went from around, I think, six to 800K per month to like four million a month. All of his employees were on board. He he did he had this huge shift.
The problem comes when you're when you're a coach and you make someone's life change that fast, they have to have an excuse. They can't go back to the office and like they're different, right? So they have to say some this thing happened to me.
I had this thing. So that's the first thing I work out with every client is like you need you're going to have to go back and tell them something happened that changed your life because you have to have a reason that you're going back different. [snorts] So watching that transformation is so so rewarding and incredible.
But the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people. How do you do that? You change how what's going on inside their head.
So, you've gone on stage before, probably a thousand or 2,000 people. You were on TV for a while. Even after you've been successful, have you ever even heard a tiny voice that said, "Why am I here?
" Or like, "Do I deserve to be here? " Yeah. I mean, doing this is a prime example of that.
Yeah. Yeah. Or I'm faking it.
People are going to find out I'm I'm faking it. Well, you feel like that when you're a podcaster because you you didn't get any official qualifications and then people started listening and then there's they think that you you know what you're doing or you so you I think I contend with that as a podcaster. Yeah.
So, and they never go away. So, the difference between a person who's confident and a person who doesn't have confidence is that they hear those voices as truth and I hear them or somebody with confidence hears them as fiction. They're both listening to the same thing.
So imagine like as a quick story, if I if you and I were going to lunch and I said, "Stephen, I I'm going to come pick you up. I pull up in front of your house. You jump in the passenger side.
We're heading off and I'm listening to an audio book about a nuclear bomb going off, but it's inside the audiobook there's a fake news report about a nuclear bomb going off. Let's say it's a pretend BBC broadcast or something that's going off that it's in the audiobook. We start driving.
I'm relaxed. I'm focused on the road. I'm enjoying what I'm doing.
Your heart rates increased. You're fearful. Your amygdala is firing off.
You're in this horrible state of like, "Oh my god, what h what's going to happen to my family? " We're both hearing the exact same broadcast. We're listening to the same speakers at the same time.
But I know that I'm hearing fiction and you are worried that it's truth. I don't mean to use you as as that example, but it's that's the easiest way to to describe it. And then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice and nine times I think 10 times out of 10 that voice was developed when you were eight or nine.
What did that kid do? And this is what I would ask any of the clients. What did that kid do to make friends or keep them?
So friends, to feel safe. Now we're in the safety, like how did I get to feel safe? And what did I do to earn rewards?
And for some people that might be recognition for other kids who had a bad start in life, that might be water or food might have been a reward for those kids. So the way that we keep or earn friends, the way that we get rewards as a child, and the way that we feel what we have to do to feel safe, those develop as little apps in our brain that run in the background of our adult lives all the time. And we typically, as a kid, they're great.
They might have kept us safe. They might have kept us alive. They might have held us inside of these social circles.
But I'm going to be a dick to people so that they don't get close to me. or I'm going to kiss up to authority figures like mom and dad so I'll get some recognition and praise and that becomes an app that we carry into adulthood without knowing it without our consent without our awareness. That little kid brings these things into adulthood and they just modify.
So, I go from having to kiss up to a narcissistic mother to I'm going to I'm going to kiss the boss's ass every single day. And everybody knows me as the office kiss ass. So, they just translate from child to adult behavior.
And if I can start understanding that, then I can start getting that person to understand the fundamental way to change their life. And I make them put those phrases out in the open to where it's so I want them to be pissed off. So I will make them get a desktop wallpaper that says I don't deserve money.
Money is for other people just just to make their brain see how stupid it is on a regular basis and put it on a motivational poster. [snorts] And the second part of that is I anybody who's confident has a generalized expectation of positive outcomes. Not specific, but things are going to be fine.
Things are going to be fine. So if I can do that, you can fundamentally change someone's life. So the final point of that which leads into discipline is I need to get you to form a relationship with your future self because everything that goes into on in our life has to do with our mamalian brain.
This lower part of our brain here and it doesn't speak English. There's no affirmation that's going to penetrate that barrier. There's no like I'm going to read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's going to fundamentally change behavior.
you have to change the animal, the mamalian part of the brain. So the question I ask everybody that I'm training is, how would I teach it to a dog? How would I how would I show my goals?
If I'm setting goals for next year, how would I show that to a dog? Because I have to get it down to a mammal.
