Kill the monster.
Posted on: Friday, July 21, 2017 Category: Blog (58)2 min read
As personal branders, we can brush over the 7% ( 7/38/55 rule) because that is your content. Only you can develop it. It is your knowledge, skill and eloquence.
The only advice that we would ever offer to our clients is – kill the monster. What monster and how do you kill it?
The monster is self doubt. When most of us prepare for a job interview, an important presentation, a date, we think about what we are going to say. We obsess about the content. We practice. Practice makes perfect, right? If we practice, it will just flow and we will not forget.
The thing is, if you know your stuff, you just won’t forget it. Think about a time that a job interview, meeting or date just went really well. You were in the ZONE. No question was too hard, somehow the answer just ‘came to you’. When you didn’t know the answer, you were able to simply and easily let the other person know and they were satisfied with this rather than wondering why you didn’t have the answer.
This is because you were in the moment, what we call the second circle. Real actors know that there is no such thing as acting, only reacting. When you are in the moment, the present or the second circle, you are so ‘on’ that you are focused on what the other person is saying and how they are reacting. This enables you to react to their needs rather than concentrating on what you have to say next.
When we are thinking only about what we have to say, and what we will say next – we lose the ability to impact and influence. We miss the nuances of our audience’s reactions and can often miss the really important stuff.
We might go into a pitch meeting focused on price. If we only concentrate on what we have planned to say and how we priced the product – we may miss the opportunity to hear our client say that they just found out this morning that the project has been brought forward a month and that their single greatest concern is the speed of delivery and that they will pay anything to get what they need, on time.
So kill the monster. The monster is in you – what you think have to say, what others will think of you, what you think of others. Kill it. Now.
