“Possibility destroys the impossible.”
—Charles Mulli
He is matter-of-factly sitting across the table, telling me about the environmental award he has won. At 5’7” and slight of stature, Charles Mulli is not an over-powering man, but his energy commands a room when he walks in. His wife Esther sits next to him with the quiet pride of a wife who is deeply inspired by and proud of her husband. Since 1989 Charles and Esther have been building orphanages in Kenya where they have adopted and schooled more than 7,000 children.
Maureen and Thomas Keller, who help run the Mully Children’s Family Charity in Canada, have invited me for dinner so I can meet Charles and Esther.
“We have built a large greenhouse operation to grow food,” Charles says. “The money from the operation provides many local jobs and the profit pays to run the school.”
There is a twinkle in his eye as he tells me the story of the philanthropic business man from America who decided to provide the seed money for the greenhouse operation because he was so inspired by Charle’s work.
“And now they have given me one of Africa’s largest environmental awards,” he laughs humbly, as if the idea were ridiculous that he should receive an award for doing what simply makes sense.
He pauses for moment and his face takes on a look of sadness. “Did you hear about the genocide we had in Kenya these past two years?” he asks.
I admit with embarrassment that the Kenyan genocide was not well covered in North American news, but I have spent a sleepless night reading about the killings in his book Hope for the Hopeless.
“A quarter million people were killed,” he says with a look of resigned sadness. “But we went into the refugee camps and were able to rescue many of the children. We had no resources and only our belief that it must be done.”
“However did you manage?” I ask, my own voice thick with emotion at the thought of what they must have faced.
“We believed in the possibility of what we were doing,” he says and the twinkle comes back into his eyes. “Possibility destroys the impossible.”
In that moment, my life changes.
***
How Big is Your Problem?
“The bigger the problem, the bigger the profit.”
—common cliché used in business
Habit #1: Playing Big
Do you stand for solving a big problem in the world? Do you stand for solving a big problem for your organization—or are you taking the stand that your organization is the solution to a big problem in the world?
To be taken seriously by influencers, it’s important that you can articulate why you love what you do, why it solves a really big problem for others, and who your audience is. If you’re missing any one of these elements, they will likely consider you an up-and-comer, a small player, and will likely put gatekeepers in the way of you approaching. Someone with high influence is judicious about who they help at a deep level. They have numerous people approaching them every month wanting help. Saying yes to all requests becomes a risk to their business.
Influential people tend to think, “Go big or go home.” They are of high service to others. In other words, they solve a really big problem for others. Being of high service to others is highly authentic and of high value to other people.
Influential people play big.
They are of high service to others.
They solve a big problem for others,
to the exclusion of all else.
An influencer will focus on the problem they stand for solving to the exclusion of all else. You’ll seldom find an influential person who has several businesses, unless they’ve completely delegated the running of those businesses or the businesses are closely linked.
Influential people are also highly confident. They know that their own fear is of no use to others. Influential people are not arrogant, they simply master the knowledge that fear can stop them and has little useful purpose in achieving their goals. Influencers tend to put their fear aside and deal in high self-confidence because they know that will help them be of far greater service to the world.
Exercises 5 and 6 will refine the work you did in Exercise 1.
If you are a student, this might simply look like taking on the courageous projects for your assignments. Or it may look like volunteering for leadership roles on different committees that serve the student body.
As an employee looking to further your career, you might volunteer to take on one of the biggest problems within your organization and focus on being of service to the other staff. Or you could look for a problem in your industry and volunteer to take it on in service to your customers, suppliers or the communities you serve.
Unspoken Rule #1
Influencers will not take you seriously if you play small when you deal with them. Have clarity, focus and confidence.
Exercise 5: Finding Clarity
In your area of influence, answer the following:
1. What problem do you solve for others?
2. Do those you would help know they have this problem or is it a problem only you know they have?
3. If not, what would they say the problem they have is?
4. Who is your audience?
Defining the Problem You Solve for Others
Entrepreneurs have even more leeway. As an example, let’s look at acupuncture, those who specialize in acupuncture know they can help people with arthritis, but people with arthritis don’t necessarily know that the acupuncturist can help them. It would be far easier to be influential in the conversation of arthritis or pain relief or longevity, than to be influential in the conversation of acupuncture.
If you cannot define the problem you solve and who your target audience is, you’re not likely to become influential. In business there’s a common cliché: if you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no one. Your audience needs to be able to identify that what you’re doing is for them. When audience and followers clearly recognize that you can help them, it will sway influencers to take you seriously as a peer.
I made this mistake early in my career with a reporter who had invited me to coffee.
She writes freelance articles for a major newspaper and several magazines.
“Tell me about your business,” she says
“I’m a speaker and writer,” I say. “I’ve started a charity to raise money for schools in Africa but my primary business is teaching business courses. I have also written three children’s books to raise money for my charity.” I give her the full laundry list of everything I’m doing. I also mention that one of the organizations I’m involved in is a multi-level marketing training business that teaches empowerment courses.
She begins by asking me about the multi-level marketing company. I think it’s part of the media interview. I tell her all about it.
It is, in fact, an interview of a different sort. She is assessing whether I am credible enough for a full-page article in a major newspaper.
She draws the conclusion that I am not. The article never happens.
An athlete who plays basketball, hockey and soccer is unlikely to make the major leagues in any sport. Those who have the ability to help you into the major leagues want to know you are focused on their sport.
An athlete who plays basketball, hockey and soccer
is unlikely to make the major leagues in any sport.
Those who have the ability to help you into the major leagues
want to know you are focused on their sport.
The Influence Game is no different. When you present yourself as scattered, people will see you as scattered.
Choosing how to introduce yourself is not about giving up all those sidelines that might pay the rent. But when you’re in the influence conversation, they do not belong. Focus on the place you want to hold influence and bring nothing else to the conversation.
A common mistake in conversation is bringing in irrelevant points of focus. As an example, several times each month I have people contact me wanting to bring me into their multi-level marketing (MLM) business.
There are some strong MLM businesses out there. But if you want to hold mass influence, doing it in the context of your MLM is not a great idea. Why? MLMs are structured to be all about one-on-one conversations. They are based in referral marketing. Referral marketing is a valid game, but a different game than influential mass communication. Consider separating the two: making the MLM subservient to that area of your business you hold influence in.
For example, if you had an MLM that sold vitamins and you want it to become really influential around the topic of health, be in the conversation of health and health products, not the conversation of wanting people to be a representative for your MLM. Staying focused on your goal is critically important when you’re approaching influencers. Otherwise, they’re going to think you’re playing a different game—making money with referrals as opposed to influencing many lives with mass influence. In this context, you’re not going to be treated as a peer or someone who has influence.
Consider that in focusing on gaining influence around the more specific problem you solve, rather than signing people up to your MLM, you’ll likely attract many people to your MLM as an incidental part of their relationship with you. People want to work with influential people.
Another way this mistake shows up is being all over the map in what you do. Do you have eight different business cards that pitch eight different products or services? When you decide who you want to be in any given conversation and focus on that one area you want to hold influence in, you will be far more effective.
Focusing on what you do to make money, if it’s different from what you want to be as an influencer, is another example of this mistake. When in conversation, present yourself as focused on the area that’s important to you. Spilling your guts and giving a full list of everything in your life is a time waster and presents you as a new kid in the game.
Take a moment and think about committing to the area in which you want to hold influence for the duration of this book. We’re going to take the work you did in Exercises 1 and 5 to hone your focus. Remember, choosing your area of influence is a lot like trying on a coat in a department store. Sometimes you try the coat on and know you don’t like the way the belt hangs or see that the coat’s too short. The act of trying it on helps you see what fits. Consider this another exercise in tailoring the coat.
Now you might notice that what you just wrote may not be the same as the actual physical thing that you do, such as acupuncture or selling holistic medicines or engineering design. However, it’s important to distinguish between the problem you solve and the actual product that you sell.
Pop Quiz
Test your level of focus. Choose all that apply.
1. I run multiple businesses.
2. I tend to be great at starting things, and then move onto the next project quickly.
3. I like to have multiple projects within an organization.
4. I change roles frequently from boredom.
For any of these items you said yes to, you run the risk of decreasing your influence.
Exercise 6: Declaring Your Focus
1. Take an index card and write down on the card. “I am influential in [your topic].” e.g., You might write “Environmental legislation” or “Helping kids who suffer from Leukemia” or “Bridge safety.”
2. “I am passionate, confident, and focused on helping [your audience].” e.g., For your target audience you might say “the food growers industry” or “the elderly” or “women in business” or “people who suffer from arthritic pain.”
3. Then write “with [the problem you solve for them].” e.g., You could write: “I am influential in longevity. I am passionate, confident, and focused on helping the elderly solve the problem of arthritic pain.” or “I am influential in bridge building. I am passionate, confident and focused on helping city governments ensure cost-effective, safe bridge projects that last.
***
In the movie After Earth, there is a powerful scene where Will Smith’s character prepares his son to face the dangers they are about to encounter.
“Fear is not real,” he says. “It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice.”
Fear stems from what you tell yourself about a situation. It is an inward-facing emotion of self-preservation. Much has been written about fear and fear mastery dating back to the earliest religious texts. It is reiterated here, so you can see the context of how it impacts you becoming influential. Fear is not focused on the present situation or on being helpful in the moment. Fear is an anticipation of a negative outcome in the future.
I often meet people who insist they have a positive inner dialogue. If that’s you, I’d suggest you look harder. If you think your dominant inner dialogue is, “I can do it,” check if you’re really saying that in defiance of “I can’t do it,” which is the deeper inner dialogue you’re attacking. You may have mastered the ability to dismiss your inner dialogue, but there’s still power in recognizing what you’re dismissing.
True influence is an outward-facing act. It is about service to others. It holds no place for fear.
Watch your favorite dog the next time you get a chance. Their attention is primarily focused outward on loving and bonding with others. They are masters at building relationships simply by loving and focusing on those they choose to be in relationship with. It really can be that simple and basic.
Humans, on the other hand, are hard wired with a lot of inner dialogue. It’s one of the pitfalls of having language. To have influence, it helps to identify what your inner dialogue is and learn to accept and diminish this inner dialogue by becoming outward focused. Denying your inner dialogue, on the other hand, can turn that dialogue into a blind spot—something others can see easily, but that you are blind to.
Influence takes guts. It requires you to have a new take on a subject—something that is uniquely yours. There will be people who dismiss, despise, dispute, hate, or ridicule you and what you do.
I’ve been fortunate to have New York Times bestselling author Randy Gage among my mentors. No one makes it anywhere in the Influence Game without people who are more experienced investing in them. Randy is a “tell it like it is, pull no punches” writer and speaker.
Randy does a lot of work in prosperity consciousness, teaching people to create wealth, and personal mindset. How do you develop the mindset of a multi-millionaire or a multi-billionaire? How do you change from lack consciousness to prosperity consciousness? When I spoke with him, Randy was clear that in order to do relevant work, he has to be in people’s faces. He must call them on their stuff.
Randy talks about the programming people are getting from organized religion or mainstream conventional thinking—the government and the data sphere: TV, radio, movie, Internet, the blogs. Looking at what you’ve been taught as “programming” is often emotional, threatening and highly controversial to many people. He calls these mind viruses, most of them are negative and can cause people to self-sabotage.
I asked him for an interview for this book.
“What’s the most important thing someone needs to know to step into the Influence Game?” I ask.
He responds,
“In terms of playing big, and being a person of influence, the most important thing is to have a point of view. That sounds really simple, but a lot of people don’t have a point of view. Let’s say they’re a customer service person, a speaker or a consultant, and they read the ten top books on customer service and then they give book reports about what these ten experts have said.
Well, if somebody’s in that space, they’ve already read those ten books. We don’t need your book report or summary. We need to know, ‘What is the insight you have that nobody else has?’
Certainly, whatever the field you’re in, go and read the ten most influential books in that space. You should have read them and processed them, and then you need to bring your insight, the thing that you can bring to the table that nobody else can. When I go to hear a speaker, I want to hear a speaker who is the only person in the world who can give that speech. When I’m reading a book, I want a book where that author is the only person in the world who could have written that book. When I’m reading a blog, I’m looking for a blogger who’s the only one in the world who has that viewpoint, that insight.
The thing you’re going to have to really be willing to do, if you want to be a person of influence, is you have to be willing to piss people off. I promise you, if you’re not pissing some people off, you’re not doing relevant work. You’re not doing anything amazing or epic. That’s the nature of the beast.
There are a lot of want-to-be thought leaders, a lot of authors, speakers, coaches and consultants who pander to people. If you really want to have influence, you’ve got to be willing to tell people the stuff they think they don’t want to hear.
The fascinating thing you will discover is that they actually desperately want to hear it, they just don’t know it until they hear it. They’ve never had anybody challenge them, get in their face and say, ‘No. The problem, the reason you’re facing this problem, is because you created it. You have these beliefs or you’re taking these actions or you have these habits — and that’s what got you here. If you want a better result, you have to change that.’
You don’t do it just to get in their face. I’m saying, where it’s appropriate. Tell your truth as you know it. If you want to be a person of influence you’ve got to be willing to tell your truth as you know it.
Doing that kind of work, if I don’t have someone every day unfollow me on Twitter, unfriend me on Facebook, block me on some site, unsubscribe to my blog, then I don’t think I’m really being relevant. If you’re doing work that’s amazing, it’s going to be work that threatens people. Because whether it’s Marconi and the radio or Walt Disney’s vision for Disney World and Disney Studios, writing a great opera, the great American novel, building the World Trade Center, founding your foundation to change the world—it’s going to threaten some people if you’re really doing something big, something that hasn’t been done before, bigger, better, stronger, faster. The real innovation, that’s change and people are afraid of change.
They may ridicule you sometimes, they tell you why it can’t be done, they attack you sometimes. They try to talk you out of it. On my YouTube channel, I have a show titled ‘Piss Someone Off.’ It’s really resonating with people because they understand, Wow, you know what? Yeah, if everybody around me is happy and everybody around me says I’m doing fine and everybody likes me, I guarantee you, I’m living a life of mediocrity.
I do it with love, I don’t insult people to insult people, I don’t shock people for the sake of shocking people. I tell my truth as I know it and I’m not responsible for the people who follow my work. I’m responsible for my work. And the work is the work. I don’t defend the work. I don’t explain the work. I’m happy to debate the ideas in the work, but I’m not going to defend it.
I’m not responsible for the people
who follow my work.
I’m responsible for my work.
You have to be willing to do that.
What I can tell you is, my influence keeps increasing. My influence is greater today than it ever has been—even though I’ve been willing to alienate people who say they’re going to unsubscribe, unfollow, would never hire me, would never recommend me.
When you’re in your truth and you just do the work that matters, it’s important to say you have the highest good in mind for your reader, for your seminar attendee, for your consulting client, for your coaching client—whoever your audience is—whether it’s your citizens if you’re a politician or your viewers if you’re a television host. If you are coming from a good space, where you really are looking for their highest good, then people respect you and love you for the fact that you’re willing to challenge them. When they come to your blog or they read your book or they listen to their speech, they know their mind is going to expand, they know their thoughts are going to be challenged and they’re going to grow as a person.
And you know what? That means that they are influenced by you and they choose to be influenced by you. It’s an extraordinary privilege and it’s a privilege that comes with extraordinary responsibility.”
This brings us to the final part of unspoken rule #2, “An influencer will not take you seriously if you are motivated by fear.” Influential people are not arrogant or callous about people being nervous or in fear. Influencers know fear just like everyone else does. They have just learned to not be motivated by it.
Influencers intuitively know that fear is selfish. Consider that your fear is all about you. In some ways fear can lead to a lot of very socially weird behaviors or personal dramas. Influencers often experience people approaching them and doing all kinds of nervous and odd things, like making huge asks of them before they’ve even been introduced. Fear convinces them that they will never get another shot at meeting them or asking them for a favor.
When you’re in fear as you’re talking to the influencer, consider that it changes the way you appear. It flags you as someone who’s up-and-coming, not someone that they would take as a peer and highly influential.
There’s nothing to hurry up and do. Relax. Build some relationships and what you need will come.
Exercise 7: Build Confidence
1. Which of the following inner dialogues do you struggle with?
2. Notice that all of these inner dialogues involve a fear of how others will judge you.
3. For the next day, every time you are upset by something, step back and consider:
a) What are you telling yourself?
b) What are you are making that situation mean?
c) Is the meaning you are putting on the situation empowering to you?
Unspoken Rule #2
An influencer will not take you seriously if you are motivated by fear.
Recognizing Fear
Fear may be showing up in a number of different ways, such as: you’re taking way too long to make a point or you’re over-apologizing for something you’re worried about. Maybe you’re not talking enough because the fear has you paralyzed so that the influential person can’t understand what you’re saying.
Do some self-reflection.