Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just identify all of our own flaws, all by ourselves?

See, the funny part is that we can do that, however progress is much, much slower.

There’s a principal in psychology that talks about “biases”, which is basically a tendency, inclination, or prejudice toward or against something or someone, often leading to systematic errors in judgment, perception, or reasoning, and can be conscious or unconscious.

In English, this means that sometimes the way our minds work don’t allow us to (easily) see the error of our ways, and sometimes they might be very obvious. We are “too close” emotionally to our situation, and parts of our mind blind us from seeing certain things, sometimes to protect us.

Examples of these biases are confirmation bias, where our brain has the tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs or biases (EVEN WHEN THEY’RE WRONG OR UNHELPFUL!). Experiential bias, or the tendency to rely on one’s own experiences too heavily when making decisions, can cause us to become inflexible to other options that might actually be effective. There’s also proximity bias, which is very common, where people tend to favor certain people or things that we are emotionally or physically attached to (such as ideas WE created, so we defend it so that it’s not wrong, for example).

There’s also different impediments like cognitive tunnelling that can get in our way as well, where we become so focused on one piece of information or task that we become blind to other important details. This happens a lot in sales; we are so focused on trying to get the sale, we don’t pay attention to the customers body language. We become so focused on trying to “get” them to say yes, that we don’t have the patience to listen to them and understand why they’re saying no and actually hear them with our hearts instead of our minds.

A mentor is eyes on the outside that can help break through a lot of these roadblocks that may be stopping you. It allows for continuous growth. Imagine a surgeon who has been practicing surgery for 40 years, but never kept up his education on new approaches to medicine, didn’t acknowledge new technologies as part of his practice, and still performed all of his work like it was done 40 years ago. How willing are you to allow that surgeon to slice into you when there are other surgeons who can do the same thing, just less invasively, with less recovery time, and a higher success rate?

If you are in sales and you don’t constantly look for new ways to grow in your approach, seek out new opportunities to find a path forward, and instead to continue doing the same low energy approach that has produced results that you already have, how can you expect to increase your performance?

What you know now is producing results you already have made. To increase your output and change your results, you must change your approach by adopting new ideas.

What is Charisma?

Charisma is an energy you carry that says “I am confident in how I am speaking to you and am comfortable with myself and my role in this conversation, and I’m enjoying myself in the process regardless of the situation. Do you want to join me?”

It’s having a magnetic quality to you that keeps people around and inspires devotion in people. I believe it stems from being socially comfortable in most situations and managing your energy output while moderating input, because the key to keeping people around is having an energy people want more of.

Think of every interaction you have as an exchange of energy. Two separate buckets that chose to connect. When you interact, the bucket with the lower amount of water is highly motivated to create equilibrium, or make the balances even, because it unconsciously knows it is not as full as it could be and doesn’t know water doesn’t have to come from someone else’s bucket.

If your water line in the bucket is very high, you’re not focused on trying to make things equal or full, because you’re already full and can fill your own bucket. This magnetizes those with lower energetic water lines. This doesn’t mean anyone is better than someone else in any way, shape, or form; this simply is an analogy to illustrate the principal of how charisma attracts other people.

Interaction is an exchange of energy, and those with high charisma understand how to interact in a way where they do not allow their energy to be drained from an empty bucket interaction. Their bucket being empty is not your problem, and independently keeping their bucket full gives them influence when they speak to others because everything they do carries this energy, as they do not give it away to people easily and know how to retain it. Energy retention in interacting is what I love to teach.

It’s up to you to evolve if you want your outcomes to evolve.

Learn to keep your bucket full.