What To Say Now: Episode 17 

How To Achieve big goals

Prefer the PodCast version? Here you go!

Show Notes and Links:

Full Show Transcript:

Dan Stewart (00:13): Hi. Hi. So it is Tuesday, September 15th. This is tax day for some of you people, right? For others it's just another Tuesday. But most importantly, it's 2:00 PM on Tuesday, which means it's time for another episode of What To Say Now. My name's Dan Stewart, I'm the founder of Happy Grasshopper, and my passion is teaching people the communication skills and strategies they need to become more connected with the people in their life, such that they achieve big goals, right? Big goals. So today I'm going to lay out some framework for you that I think you're going to find fascinating, I know I do, and I know it's been absolutely fundamental to the sorts of things I've been able to enjoy in my life.

Dan Stewart (01:01): So let's be really clear about what we're after today. The whole concept of building relationships in our lives has a purpose. One of them is purely financial, through relationships you have the opportunity to enjoy more financial prosperity. You can earn more money if you have more and better relationships. Perhaps more importantly, you can experience a lot more joy. That's a very important thing to me, I hope it is to you as well. I don't want to just go through life, I want to have a fantastic freaking time while I'm doing it. And of course, when you put all these things together, the idea is that we can make a larger impact. I've always been fascinated by the concept of punching above your weight class, taking something small, a finite resource, and doing something that's exponentially huge and makes a big impact. So that's what we're here for today, that's the content that I've put together for you. I want to say hi to Brian and to Red, thanks guys for joining us here, I appreciate you and today we're going to definitely dig into some things.

Dan Stewart (02:08): So first we've got to defeat some myths here, the idea that this is such a huge challenge needs to be just completely erased from your mind. There's nothing that I'm teaching today that you're not equipped to actually do and do at a very high level. You do not need to be rich, you do not need to be famous, you do not need to be movie star attractive like Red and Brian are, all you need to do is have the willingness to reach out and engage with people in a more effective way, and you can create these meaningful results. So before I explain how, I should probably tell you that I know this firsthand from my own life.

Dan Stewart (02:48): I was raised in a circumstance I did not like. My parents were alcoholics, we moved every six months to two years, I had 14 schools before I graduated from high school, and those experiences early in life have accumulated to allow me to teach you what I'm teaching you today. So, what you need in order to create really great results for yourself is nothing more than a framework. It's a simple framework and I'm going to give it to you. So remember the goal, the goal is to have enough meaningful relationships in your life, such that you can accomplish your purpose. And we're not going to get into purpose today. We can say, it's a GCI goal, a number of sides goal. We could say it's a recruitment goal. Whatever that goal is, that's fine. All of your life's goals should stack up to a big purpose and relationships are necessary to achieve those goals that let you build momentum towards achieving your purpose. So again, the goal is to have enough meaningful relationships, such that you can achieve your purpose.

Dan Stewart (03:54): And guess what? To do that you need relationships. Pretty simple, you have to have relationships. Well, how do you get those? Well, I would encourage you to become a collector of people. Throughout your life, wherever you're meeting people, wherever you're engaging with them, your job should be to build enough of a relationship with them so that they actually have a sense of who you are. The world, the universe, God, does some pretty magical things, when we put out there into the world what we're looking for, we have a much greater likelihood of actually finding it. So I'm going to encourage each of you to go ahead and engage with the people in your life, from your mailman, to the people who live next door, and I know a lot of you don't even talk to your neighbors, right? You could build great friends and relationships there.

Dan Stewart (04:46): So the first thing you must do in order to become a collector of people is get very good at building rapport. And I'm not talking about just the, you know, walk into somebody's office and say, "Oh cool guitar" or "Oh, nice fish" or, "Oh, wow, that's a big grasshopper head". That's easy and obvious, I want you to go deeper than that, to where you can actually see into their heart and you can make these big, meaningful connections with them. Because once you have the power to do that, you become instantly memorable to the people that you engage with. So to build this instant rapport, there are five approaches I'm going to teach you today.

Dan Stewart (05:28): The first is assumed familiarity, and I love the example of assumed familiarity in sales, let's use the example of someone who's selling cars. Think of the last time you went to the dealership, you walked in somebody who was all over, "Hey, how can I help you today?" You go into a retail store and someone's like, "Hey, how can I help you? What can I help you find? What are you looking for? What are you interested in?" And you feel targeted and attacked, and it kind of pushes you away.

Dan Stewart (05:57): A much better approach for that sales person would be to walk up and assume familiarity, so let's imagine we're looking at a brand new car together, maybe I'm the customer and you're the sales professional. Well, if I'm standing there looking at the car, when you walk up, don't say to me, "Hey, how are you? What can I do to help you? Are you interested in a car?" Walk up and say, "That's a really beautiful car, isn't it?" That's assumed familiarity, you're skipping all the pretense and getting right to joining them on their side of the table and admiring something together. That puts you on their team rather than the typical adversarial relationship that exists between most people who sell stuff and most people who buy stuff, we want to partner with them as much as possible to achieve that goal.

Dan Stewart (06:47): Another technique, the second one, is called shared observation. This one's fantastic, we get to do this almost every day in Florida when we can look at the sky and say, "Hey, it looks like it's about to rain". There's all sorts of stuff that's going on in the world all the time, and when we can make a shared observation with other people, we invite them into a conversation, conversation is where relationships live. Super important. Those of you who are members of happy grasshopper, you'll see that we use this technique in a lot of our content, we find something interesting that's happening now and we use it as a topic to engage them in conversation.

Dan Stewart (07:27): Right now, the hot headline this week is the discovery of gases on Venus that indicate the possibility of microbial life existing there. So people are hearing that, they're talking about it in the news, it's a great message topic to spark a conversation with someone. We've all seen movies like Men in Black and Contact and, and, and, and. All these space movies, Alien vs Predator, it goes on and on and on. People have opinions about this and we can engage with them and build rapport, so that's the second one.

Dan Stewart (08:00): The third is recognition, if you can recognize someone for their performance, that is a fantastic way to build quick rapport with them. Maybe you're at a restaurant, maybe you're at a retail store and somebody is taking great care of you and you can comment about that, you can recognize them for the quality of the work they're doing. They feel fantastic. Better still, if you can compliment them for that in front of their peers. That super elevates you in their esteem, they regard you very highly when you do that, so that is number three.

Dan Stewart (08:35): Number four, also one of my favorites, you'll see this as something we do in our messaging techniques, we like to ask for help. The reason we do this is because human beings are hard wired to help each other, it doesn't mean 100% of the time people will stop what they're doing and help you, but we just had an example from this last [inaudible 00:08:57] cycle, where a member said, "By the way, if you know anyone who's willing to move, if we get enough money for their home, I sure would appreciate an introduction", and they got four transactions from that one message. That's pretty amazing. So you should regularly be asking for help from people in order to build rapport with them.

Dan Stewart (09:19): Next, and the final one that I'll cover here today, is called confirming understanding. This really carries onto the topic we talked about last week, which is validation. If you're in conversation with someone and they've just told you something, when you repeat that back to them and then ask, "Did I get that right?" They really feel heard, they feel like you understand them. That's where we're opening their heart, we're getting them to see that you really see them, and in a world where we're constantly being bombarded with information, that's a very meaningful thing to do.

Dan Stewart (09:56): So we've just covered five things there, I'm going to recap them for you real quick. These five approaches; assume familiarity, shared observation, recognition, asking for help, and then confirming understanding, those are five approaches that will help you build rapport instantly with anyone. It absolutely works, it's super effective to do that. Now the challenge, once you've built rapport with someone of course is, well, how do you stay in touch with them? What's the right frequency to reach out to them? What do you even say when you do? How do you do it? Do you use email? Do you use texts? Do you end voicemail? Do you send handwritten cards? What do you do? There are all these different approaches you could take and the big challenge you've got to overcome is just figuring out which of those you're going to do as well as how to actually do it, what to say when you do it, and then who to say it to.

Dan Stewart (10:50): So I'm really proud of the work that my team does at Happy Grasshopper, we have solved those problems for you. If you just go to happygrasshopper.com/agents, you can learn exactly how we do that. We lay out a program that makes it simple for anybody to continue to stay in a relationship with people once you've established rapport with them. So I like to think about the dividing line between not having had rapport and having had rapport as whether or not they know you, if that person can look at you and say, "Yeah, I know who that person is", you've built rapport with them. And it might be you're just that nice person who shows up in their life every now and then, but they recognize you. You need to take it just a little deeper by having ongoing regular communication with those people.

Dan Stewart (11:42): So now I'm going to pull the screen back up, I see my buddy, Anthony Malafronte is here, I love to see that, always good to see you buddy. So there's a few things here, guys; I've got all of a whopping 15 minutes that I dedicate to this each week and yet I have like 30 years of business experience that I'm dying to pour into people. So coming up in the very near future, I have an opportunity to do that through my friend Matt Fagioli and his Xplode Conference. 2020 has been a weird year for the live event business, and I'm really proud of the way Matt's pivoted, so if you go to xplodethis.com, you'll see that there's a link there for his event on September 24th. The event is running from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM Eastern time and it's going to be a fantastic event, he's built a great lineup of people, I'll be pouring my brain into the content there, doing everything I can to help people, and I hope that you'll join us there.

Dan Stewart (12:47): So there, we did it guys, we got through another episode of What To Say Now, we've done it. So I'm going to sign off here in just a moment, going to just check the Facebook Live, there's a bunch of comments here that I want to make sure I've replied to people, I think I have. As always, myself and my staff here at Happy Grasshopper, we're available for you in our Facebook group at facebook.com/groups/whattosaynow, that's where the impetus for this video you're watching comes from. So I'll encourage everybody to join that group if you're not already a member, you can post any communication challenges that you're having there, and myself and my staff of writers will do what we can to answer your questions. So guys, September 15th, tax day, can you believe it? Here we go. So let's all get back to work and go build better relationships. Have a great afternoon, everybody. Bye now.