Why Influence Experts Call This Diagram “A Cheat Code”

what if I told you that tonight's lesson is worth over $6 million because it shows you vulnerabilities that nobody else can see no other coach can see it no other performance expert can see it if you're doing persuasion stuff nobody is going to know how to do what we're doing tonight so after 20 years of like working with the best people in this field we' fly them out to meet us and they all had problems with their techniques they couldn't perform they couldn't deliver they couldn't do it on a whim they couldn't do it using

a random example none of them could perform and these are the people that when you think of influence or persuasion you know all of their names and they had trouble performing in front of a board in random scenarios doing the that they write books about just doing basic stuff they're like oh I might need an hour to plan for that our operatives don't have that time and you're supposed to be an expert you should be able to do this at a hawk anybody should be able to give you a scenario and walk through this so

it's after that that I developed this system and I had to develop a way that I personally could hand somebody a chart in the government I'm going to give you this chart as the government official see is this persuasion expert is this sales team good enough are they faking their way to the top and I'm going to literally give you the most detailed description of this method tonight that I've ever in any human being in my life and I'm going to show you this thing that is going to tell you where you are personally failing

in tradecraft development it's also going to show you how to find a fake expert so if you're coach or something like that you'll be able to very covertly see where somebody's blind spots are and you'll be able to fix it just about instantly and if you don't want to do it covertly I'm also going to give you just an overt system and it instantly identifies where somebody's at so really quick how often do you tell yourself that you're in total control of your life and your actions so do you agree that needs Drive human behavior

I hope so but do you also agree that when this happens that people people are going to be driven to action if the circumstances are right for them to meet the decision man criteria so if I'm driven to action and the decision matches up with my decision M I'll probably take some action but that can happen to us without really knowing it and that can happen to stales teams especially leaders of teams and I personally believe that knowing yourself is the most powerful way to be in control of what's going on in your life and

with other people so you'll see the same depth of others in my opinion that you're able to see within yourself so if you're study behavior profiling and you have no idea who the f you are you've got a problem because all you're going to be doing is seeing yourself and other people another word for that is Judgment which is kind of our national Pastime so think about your own tradecraft first and only then should we be processing this as something that's about those other people so if we're talking about a profiling system I try it

first there's three biases we're going to dig into tonight and the first one is called survivorship bias so Survivor MIP bias is something that all of us suffer from and in Persuasion it's huge it's a logical error where we're presented with some data and it's representative of some percentage of stuff that has survived through a few pieces of a process so I'm viewing data that has survived a process think about that for just a second I might be only viewing data that's survived a process and I might be ignoring the data that did not survive

the process so how many times do you hear somebody two or like an old building or an old church or Museum that's like thousand years old or if you're in the US it's like wow this building's 200 and that's super old but how many times have you heard somebody say wow you know what back in that day they just made much more stronger and More Beautiful buildings that just Were Meant To Survive but they also ignore that this is one of the only buildings that exists that has really survived that long so just about any

building you look back back in the time when this building did exist was a total piece of doesn't exist they were cheap they were easily made they were easily destroyed so our society all societies I think focus on survivors and winners and this is natural for us because four 5 10,000 years ago we're not going to go talk to all of our tribe members that were eaten by the saber-tooth tiger we're going to talk to the tribe members that survived right and that was important data we can't collect the nonata data inside of survivorship bias

Let's do an example of a company let's call it Zenith solution and and it's a big ass software company and this team is led by Martin and it's a manager who firmly believes in emulating the top performers sound familiar so Martin just meticulously studies all these strategies and stuff of these top two salespeople in the company let's call them Angela and Derek and they've consistently outperformed everybody else so Martin is just totally convinced that their methods are the gold standard so he mandates everybody on the team adopts some of these semi-aggressive sales tactics and maybe

he's got some fast-paced client followup maybe some High Press closing stuff going on so he builds these workshops and these training sessions where Angela and Derek have to share their approaches and completely ignores that there's diverse strategies going on that all the other members are using but Martin ignores the less successful sales attempts and the failures and just it's a lack of effort or a lack of skill instead of opportunities for change so he encourages team to focus solely on replicating these success stories but the narrow Focus obviously starts backfiring in any sales team any

persuasion strategy whatever the team gets increasingly increasingly frustrated because there's a one-sized fits-all strategy and if you've been in M more than like 24 hours you know that doesn't exist here I don't teach anything even remotely close to that sales figure stagnate customer feedback is like growing dissatisfaction with this aggressive sales approach what does Martin do he's going to Tin it he's going to 10x that sales process he's going to do 10 times more he's going to 10x the business by doing 10 times more training UPS the trainings by 10x and the customer complaints go

up by 10x sales probably go down by about 10x now we're going to cover confirmation bias and I want you to get this in a persuasion way not in a way like how I learned about that in college I wrote it on the back of a note card so I know what it is and I'm I'm very familiar with the chase cuz I you know I passed that exam please delete that just temporarily if I could access the spot that doesn't know if I could talk to that piece of you right now so confirmation bias

is our tendency to search for interpret prioritize and remember information in a way that confirms our beliefs all the stuff that we personally belief and our hypotheses social media is a confirmation bias machine it is artificial intelligence programed to manufacture cognitive bias you're looking at one of the people who helped initially with that stuff so let's do another example here just to kind of show you how it might look in a sales team and I'm only using sales team not that I think everyone here is in sales I'm using sales team because it works no

matter what you're talking about your own strategies your own techniques it's exactly the same so let's do a different character now this guy's name is Dwight shuit he's a sales consultant for a paper company and he's super fascinated by the power of language and Linguistics and sales and he firmly believes that the perfect sales script which is just load booted down with persuasive language and patterns and psychological triggers is the magic key to closing any deal in the world so Dwight spends countless hours crafting refining and memorizing these elaborate sales scripts so he reads really

extensively about linguistic persuasion techniques goes to these workshops learns all these Linguistics and stuff so Dwight then goes and trains his team to strictly adhere to these meticulously perfectly scientifically designed scripts and he's convinced that deviation from the script leads to Lost sales so he collects data on the successful sales calls attributing all the success to the effectiveness of the scripts so when sales people bring up the importance of like building Rapport uh being a good person having empathy listening to somebody adapting to another human being's personality Dwight says false and he dismisses these aspects

all just off him and he says it's all in the Power of Words it's proven but sales start to hit a l they start getting feedback about disconnected salespeople and calls that maybe just feel impersonal so Dwight what does he do he needs a new script he needs a he needs to improve that script so he doubles down he's going to 10x it he's going to 10x that script so he tells the team they aren't following Linguistics correctly every lost s is because somebody deviated from that script that magic formula so Dwight was convinced that

the scripts run the show this blindfolded him to sales skills like listening empathy and all that stuff that you know about so the confirmation bias LED this person down a pathway to becoming ignorant of actual skill just relying on scripts and this is the one-size fits-all mindset so the third bias it's called overconfidence bias but you're like Chase you're telling us to be super confident more confident than everybody that's not what we're talking about here so overconfidence bias is the tendency to hold this unjustifiably high level of confidence in your own judgment abilities your predictions

that just lead to decision making so let's walk through the same sales example let's go to a tech firm like a tech startup and this guy's name is randomly Jim Halper so Jim Halper is fresh in sales at the tech firm he got a quick seminar boost he just went to this seminar he latched on to these basic selling tricks like the foot in the door the lob ball and all these other tactics that they teach you in sales school so he thinks that he's nailed the salesmanship he's got it all down so he kind

of swaggers into some meetings and he leaned on just that stuff and neglected plant connection neglected the all the entire six AIS model is kind of what gets neglected here but early on he had some small winds and those small winds pumped up his ego and they make him kind of shrug off this seasoned advice from his boss let's call him Michael Scott about understanding human beings but when he talked to bigger clients this one trick Style starts failing so the deals that he bet on started falling apart feedback back to Michael Scott was that

he was pushy he was rigid but like most people what does he tell you about sales when you ask him how how is it working in sales he's going to say it's a numbers game if you hear the words it's a numbers game this is the bias that you're dealing with if you ever hear numbers game you're definitely dealing with this bias and maybe a blend of another one which I'll show you in the graphic here in a second but let's say Jim continues Jim Halpert clings to the overconfidence blames the client's a the Market's

really tough it's not his narrow skill set to go sell to this one person in this blind spot is what really becomes the downfall of whoever starts working for him so let's say Michael Scott join Mastery learned about the six AIS model started talking about it to them boom pulled them out of that line of thinking so this leads us to what I call the tradecraft blind F I'm going to bring up a VIN diagram here in the second but I want to show you where all of these biases over laugh and it's kind of

a map on these three main biases that we talked about tonight where you can identify yourself you can literally identify any client you're working with I don't care if you're teaching persuasion sales self-development the person needs more confidence whatever it is I use this in jury selection as well as everywhere else so I'm going to go ahead and bring it up now so here's what it looks like so we have survivorship bias that's on the top here and this is just our concentrating only on success stories and the people most likely to feel the survivorship

bias are they sales managers and the sales team so we're not hearing a lot of trainers talk about this stuff so if we mix the survivorship bias and the overc confidence bias we have unquestioned success fallacy I made all of these names up so they're not like you can't Google them but when those two are mixed we're not questioning which parts became successful we're overconfident in the data that survives and we're not looking at data that has anything to do with failure so that's the unquestioned success policy so if we overconfidence bias with confirmation bias

we have blind certainty so the overconfidence is I'm overlooking all these risks and errors and I'm mixing that with confirmation bias I'm only looking at the positive numbers I'm only looking at the sales that we won if I lost a sale it's because the guy was a or I was off that day or I was feeling a little bit sick or maybe the guy was having a bad day or biggest of all sales is a numbers game that's why I didn't make that sale oh we'll hear that there if we mix confirmation bias and survivorship

they fall into the echoed success policy this is where they're reconfirming surviving data not looking at failure data and they're just looking at Survivor data over and over again so you saw this with a couple of examples that we talked about the Jim Halpert situation is an echoed success fallacy until somebody intervenes into that and obviously all three of these are mixed together this is the I just call it myopia or myopic but the full name that I use to describe this is the blindfold collapse when a person learning persuasion is failing it's because you

are or the sales team is because the sales manager sales trainer is focused on one of these areas so I'm just using the sales example this applies to everyone but this is where you're most likely to find sales managers this is the manager of the company who's managing the team he looks at survivorship this is this is the data that's proven to work these are from sales that work and overconfidence overlooking the risks overlooking the mistakes my team is good I'm responsible for teaching them or I'm responsible for their numbers so I'm over confident in

their abilities this is where sales managers are the sales team is right here they're focus on the same data because their manager focused on the same the data that survives and then they're they're confirming it on themselves so they're echoing their own success then we have sales trainers which are down here on the bottom these are the people with the sales tactics and techniques this is the blind certain this is the absolute method that works sales scripts are the only way we did this with with Dwight I think in the Dwight shrew example we have

to do scripts you have to have a perfect sales script this is the blind certainty that Dwight went to that seminar wherever he went learned about these scripts and learned about Linguistics and developed a confirmation bias because now you play him from another company you play him a video of a sales call whether it's a zoom or phone call or whatever what's he going to be doing doing he's listening for those Linguistics and in every sale that worked he'll hear how the Linguistics made the sale happen every sale that failed he'll find linguistic fault because

he's only looking through the one lens which is the confirmation bias lens which is where we develop blind certainty this is where we get people that think stuff like neurolinguistic programming is all you need for persuasion like okay what if I gave somebody with severe crippling social anxiety 20 years worth of training in neural linguistic programming in all the coolest Linguistics that planet earth has ever come up with they fail they fail every single time okay so we talked about all kind of those overlaps there and that center part being just the collapse so this

is the central point in what I would call an error analysis diagram the bin diagram I just showed you is error analysis where we have Confluence of all three of those things and it is a nightmare so this is perfectly shows us a state where somebody's Vision or a whole team becomes just narrowed down blinded by their own probably unchallenged assumptions and overconfidence and all the that's going on in their company so the results of all those things coming together is collapsed and it's a failure to recognize adapt or even consider some alternative Viewpoint I'm

going to give you a way to identify where somebody is on the blindfold map you can literally just ask these questions and figure out where somebody is question one is can you recall a recent instance where you changed your opinion after you received new information so the Insight here this question is aiming to identify if somebody's more prone to confirmation bias by examining their openness to new ideas and I think it reveals whether they're primarily influenced by confirmation bias or if other biases are also at play there so question two is how do you typically

react to feedback or criticism about your work and if you're talking to a narcissist the question changes or if you're talking to like the sales manager with a cocky attitude it's how do most people typically react to feedback or criticism about their work then you'll get an honest answer that's about that person because of course they think everyone is just like them so the Insight checks overconfidence bias so it's a factor that's kind of based on their response to criticism and if they're being honest it really helps us identify if they're rooted in that bias

or it might intersect with something else on the chart so question three so when you're thinking about the success of other people in your field what are the factors that you attribute most of their success to now we're probing this person for survivorship bias you can do this to yourself so we're looking at how they perceive other people's success and it can indicate if they're viewing things just through the lens of survivorship or if they're maybe overlapping on something then we move into question four and this one is a really good one and if you're

talking to an honest person this is going to rip everything open so you want to talk to like the people who hire me are never the people that I'm teaching or training or reprogramming those people are just full of their own it's typically their bosses bosses bosses boss who I can invoice for like 300K or something to go fly out and do something so I tell him on the phone give me the person with the lowest ego on the entire team and then I'm going to use a ton of interrogation strategies on this stuff but

here's question four so describe a situation where a strategy that worked well for other people failed when you tried it and what was your takeaway and this question were specifically targeting both survivorship and Confirmation biases so it shows if somebody is in the overlapping area of those two biases just depending on how they interpret and learn from other people's outcomes what is something that work that supposedly I usually use the word supposedly in there what's something that supposedly worked well for someone else and it didn't work well for you question five how do you personally

prepare for a situation or a job or task where you don't have a ton of experience how do you get ready for a situation where you don't have a lot of experience so this seeks to uncover if overconfidence bias is present so the reason we're asking multiple questions about multiple Parts here is because we're coming at it from different angles as if you ask these the right way and you kind of minimize socialize if necessary you'll get a good answer so if they rely too much on their own beliefs or their past successes it it

can show us if the bias overlaps with confirmation bias at the same time let's go to question six can you share an example of a time when your initial estimation your initial Judgment of a person or even a situation was proven to be totally wrong and this will tell you who you're working with right away so this question is pretty effective in detecting confirmation bias obviously but it's very powerful especially if they're resistant to changing their initial beliefs and it really shows that they're going to be resistant to new training and that kind of stuff

it also indicates that overconfidence might play a role here too so question seven when you make decisions how much do you rely on your past experiences versus seeking out new information so where would you put it so like if we had a scale of one 100 ear and 50 was I do equal both exactly perfect in both amounts identically obviously I'm saying all of those words because I never want them to choose 50s I want them to admit that they're not perfect right I'm saying all those words so that to push them out of the

50 Zone not left or right but out of the 50 out of the Midway zone so we're really examining with this question is the intersection between confirmation bias and overconfidence bias so depending on their Reliance on past experiences compared to new information is going to show us the mix of those two things so question eight I always start this one with I'm curious I'm curious what's your personal process for evaluating either the success or the failure of a project a task an event how do you evaluate whether it's successful or failure so this is all

about survivorship bias so if very particularly if they focus only on successful outcomes it helps you to determine instantly if they're situated inside the cozy little survivorship Circle or in an area where it overlaps with another bias question nine I'm curious in your view or your opinion where's the role of luck or what's the role of external factors in your successes and failures as a sales team so this addresses overconfidence and survivorship both at the same time just by exploring how does this person explain and describe successes and failures and I think it can very

very quickly pinpoint if they're at the intersection of those two on the chart number 10 you should always preface this question with I'm glad you and I are talking so many people are so dishonest when I ask them this final question here so we're using a negative dissociation to make the person more open and honest because this is this is a question that peels back all of the skin of an onion not in a psychopath way and I'm glad I'm talking to you CU there's so many people I asked this question to and it's hard

to be honest to a lot of people are dishonest not because they're Liars or anything like that just because it's scary for lot of people to to answer so question 10 personally how do you react when outcomes don't align with your expectations or your beliefs where's the reaction that you have when an outcome doesn't fit what you believe so we're aiming right here we're really just digging a shovel underneath confirmation and overconfidence bias together so it shows us how flexible somebody is in changing their beliefs maybe they search for things they want to be grateful

they want to Express gratitude and you can tell if they're bullshitting you're a profiler at this point so another way to ask this is about past disagreements about training skill development especially if it's a sales team like how do you react when a disagreement with somebody doesn't really end up the way you expect it what that question secretly does is we're asking them what do you do when you lose an argument what do you do when you lose a sale that's what that question is secretly kind of covertly addressing if we just take that it

is extremely powerful this framework I want you to maybe try it out this week and let you know run it on your kids you could take an 11-year-old through this process and show them these biases there's really cool videos for kids on YouTube about bias that show them this it's not just like the woke stuff that's out there it's all kinds of stuff that where they talk about these biases that we talked about tonight and just going through some of that stuff and really change the way we see other people and hopefully we can kind

of go through this on our own and go through all these 10 questions if I'm really raw the answers that I'm giving is going to pin point where I am on that map so the the moment we go through these biases here we'll bring this little chart up this is how you do it and this is precisely how you do it if you don't do it like this you're going to not get hired again or you're not going to have a future with this person so here's the way you present this you lay this out

what's even cooler is if you kind of draw it out or have a semif filled out diagram on just black and white Pap it doesn't have to look like this the first step every sign there's no exception to this especially if you're talking to a person and addressing concerns you're saying like well when we map out the Fortune 500 companies they tend to fall within either this uh bracket right here and you'll kind of move it to where it's just barely touching you see this how it's just kind of barely coming over the edge I'll

draw a little circle right there they kind of fall in this area I typically make a circle about this big if I'm doing it on paper so they're typically right in this little area here occasionally we deal with a company where they have cultures about receiving advice from people out outside the country like Japan so when I went to and I was training we had a whole different process where they were down inside of this and where they were starting to touch into this area and sometimes it's just repeated confirmation bias because the boss is

a total so when I work at or when I went to Motorola which is not in Japan even though it's a Japanese company it's in Austin Texas uh we talked to them and we found out they were kind of over in this area we have just a tiny bit of it coming out so what we're doing doing is price anchoring but it's not with price we're anchoring bad news so that what we show them about their stuff is good news that's all we're really doing first so and then the next time wherever they wherever I

have them pained out on this thing I'll make the dots smaller than all of those companies and in a different location does that make sense smaller and in a different location so like I'll put it way over here like this like you're miles and miles away from being at a place like this everybody's on this and that's one thing I'll say everyone one is on this thing somewhere the good news is that you're right on the edge so there's not a lot of work to do no matter how much work there is to do I

say the good news is you're right on the edge so there's not a whole lot of work to do no matter what so if you're using this to profile yourself and you've kind of figured out you have an overlap of two of these biases the good news is you're right on the edge and you don't have a lot of work to do hopefully that was fun but I wanted to show you there's a lot of biases out there and remember when you're showing somebody on that chart if you're ever coach somebody walking somebody through that

process you start in the center so when I talk to other people they're a lot more narcissistic I talk to these people that are right here always showing the center first and them being on the edge that's the best way to deliver bad news that's all we're really showing is that transition and even YouTube has confirmed this like if you have a a YouTube thumbnail that just shows two pictures they don't even have to be different so let's say it's two of me going like this that's it there's one of me right there there I'm

going to be right there and then there's a giant fat green arrow that goes like this that's all it does that's the only thing on the entire thumbnail doesn't say before and after nothing just the Green Arrow the little transition from one place to another increases click rate by 1, 800% just showing like a transition from one thing to another thing unbelievable so that's what I'm doing there it's the exact same thing I'm doing like here's all the bad stuff here's the transition to where you are and here's where we could be so two of

those little fat green arrows is essentially the exact same thing I'm doing with this person's psychology