Most of them start in my mind.
The first failure I remember happened when I was two, just starting to speak.
I am sitting in the corner of a crowded kitchen, jostling for space along with my nine siblings and a dog. Everyone is in a rush to finish something or get somewhere. I, the youngest, sit unnoticed in my corner. My overworked, exhausted mother has forgotten to feed me. I watch her scrape food into the garbage.
I’m angry. Pissed off, as only a two-year old can be. I cry in frustration.
“I’m not important.” I tell myself. “I’m less than the stinking garbage.”
I accept the thought as true.
That inner dialogue sticks with me.
It does not matter that I grow up in a supportive, loving family, or that my mother and I become close as adults and she becomes one of my greatest role models. “I’m not important” runs in the background of everything I say and do. It is both the driver that helps me succeed and the trap that has me fail. This inner mantra has both caused me to make my life about becoming a force for change in the world and has motivated me to say some of the stupidest things that could ever escape my lips.
The Influence of Inner Dialogue
Everyone is writing about inner dialogue these days. What many authors fail to point out is that while your inner dialogue is inescapable and humiliating, once you’re able to see it for what it is—a story that you made up based often on one isolated incident—it’s also hilarious and wonderful. Befriending your inner dialogue that you created when you were a child and using it to motivate you rather than destroy you is the foundation for your success in the Influence Game.
Learning the Influence Game, like any other game starts with understanding the strategies and rules. One of the most important tools you can develop is to learn about and understand the concept of broad-scale or mass influence.
What Led to Mass Influence
I first became intrigued with studying and mastering the concepts of influence because I didn’t have any. As someone with the inner dialogue of “I’m not important. I’m worth less than the stinking garbage,” I was spending the bulk of my time doing one of two things:
1. Looking for evidence to validate that I wasn’t important (ask my former husband how many times I falsely accused him of not making me a priority); or
2. Looking for ways to become important through career or business choices.
Observing the behaviors of influential people and learning from those who had influence became a passion of mine.
Everyone wants to have influence in one way or another, but are you clear about what you want specifically, or what influence means to you? Influence could mean more power or more money. Maybe you want to be flown around in a private jet, be friends with Oprah, or even become Oprah. Maybe you are frustrated by something in the world, and want to change it. You want to start a movement and create long-lasting change.
The entrepreneurial world is full of examples of people who started small, whose passion and ability to inspire the imagination of others resulted in attention and energy flowing towards them.
Mass Influence embraces a simple idea: what makes Steve Jobs Steve Jobs or Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
Most people think it’s somebody else’s job to create change. Consider that it’s your job. You are the leader you’ve been waiting for and in order to be that person, influence is crucial because it helps you create change—from a small scale to massive shifts on the planet. The influential path enables you to take action, to motivate others, to spread the word, to create a movement, to be your own Bill Gates or Mahatma Gandhi.
So, what will it take for you to play at a bigger level?
My own desire to create change in the world became truly real for me just after the turn of the millennium.
I’m sitting on my living room floor, eyes closed, attempting to clear my thoughts. I am just coming out of a really bad year. My father has passed away, my health is failing, my business has failed, and to cap it all off, my marriage has ended.
I’m feeling annoyed at the world. My life sucks. There is a litany of complaints in my head. “Why doesn’t somebody fix ‘... my life, the broken sidewalk in front of my townhouse, the world.”
I breathe deeply and my mind finally settles. A crystal clear thought emerges.
“I am somebody!”
I resist the thought. “These are not my problems,” my mind insists.
“I’m somebody” my mind repeats.
“It’s not the world’s job to fix my life. My job is to improve the world.”
My heart stops. I weep.
In that moment I know, without a doubt, that like so many others, I am the one the world is waiting for. And I can either live a life of complaint, or a life of action to create a better world.
I choose action. My life changes.
How often have you thought, “Why doesn’t somebody just’...?” Perhaps you wish you could change something in the world. But how do you actually step into having enough influence to “be the change you wish to see in the world”? Every college dorm in North America has the famous Gandhi phrase posted on the wall, between a class schedule and a poster of an indie band.
What is required to actually be the change?
Enter the Influence Game.
Most people don’t understand the principles of how to play the Influence Game to become an influential person. It’s like you’re standing on the rink in the middle of a hockey game and you’ve only ever been taught how to play badminton. Understandably, you don’t know why all these people are shooting pucks past you and skating around you on the rink.
You will discover in this book the three obstacles that are in your way of being taken seriously as an influencer, and exercises to transcend those challenges:
1. What you were taught as a kid
2. The habits you created when you first learned to network in business
3. What your inner voice tells you in moments of deep discomfort.
Whether it’s change within your community, your corporation or the world at large, the principles of mass influence are the same. By the time you reach the final page of this book, you will have ingrained, at a habitual level, a solid understanding of the game and how it’s played. You are invited to work on developing routine habits that will continue to build your fame and influence. The exercises are designed to help you integrate influence into your thinking and routine. Most importantly, you’ll be able to look at where your inner game is having you fail.
Mastering the concept of what creates influence can be a hard idea to grasp, much less follow. Yet, like riding a bike, once you master being influential, you’ll wonder how you ever thought it was hard.