Hi everyone. Welcome. It is actually a month since we’ve converged live so welcome to Mindset Mondays. A very fun thirty days. Actually we’re back home for two and a half weeks.
So Mindset Mondays is a call that we’ve been doing over the last well for about six months
actually. And I thought it would be easier to do these calls from France, but the in last month we didn’t have access to Wi-Fi in the place where we live in so it was extremely difficult to be able to do it. so we sent you some recorded versions. I think you might have seen those. Remember what we’ve been talking about over these last several months are the skills for persuasion, the skills for success, and the skill number one was the skill we talked about a month ago and this has been literally a month since we’ve converged and I showed you this particular PowerPoint.
The skill number one is the oldest skill. It’s the simplest skill. It’s the easiest skill. It’s the fastest skill and the most important skill, the subtlest skill, the longest lasting skill and the most memorable skill. And I think you know what we’ve been talking about over these last month. We’ve been talking about— Hold on just a second. We’ve been talking about storytelling. Hold on a second. Let me bring that slide out. And when I find my mind getting locked on certain things that I really want to understand, I have to teach them to other people. One of the things I wanted to teach as we’re talking about is the most important skill. It’s the oldest simply you can do.
Since storytelling is the most important, simplest, fastest, easiest skill for you to have, it’s been something that I’ve been pondering. And I noticed in the day we’re watching the news it was actually in French and the reporter comes on and starts talking about the stories that they want to tell you in the news. And to use that, once you to start locking in on a certain activity, a certain thing you’re trying to learn about, you start noticing it in everything you do. And so I’m watching the news and the reporter comes on and starts talking about these very stories that they want to tell and that’s what their job is to tell stories. When you read the news and when you listen to the news when you watch the news.
What you’re really watching, hearing, listening to are encapsulations of stories and what we’re trying to focus our attention on over this next month is how you take the storytelling skill and how do you use it in a persuasive way. And we just kind of launched this conversation a month ago talking about the stories that you tell yourself and the stories that are what I call your now story and your future story and how you tell your self-stories makes a huge difference in what your future looks like.
Same thing with the people that you meet. Everyone you meet has a story. It’s the story of their life. When they talk to you they are sharing bits of their stories with you. They’re talking about their now story and they’re talking about their future story, and all of those stories are important. “If a picture is worth a thousand words” as the quote goes, what is a good story worth? Because what is a good story if it’s not a panel of pictures that somebody tells. You could spend sometimes an hour reading a thousand to ten thousand words and yet a simple quick picture can sometimes say everything you wanted to say immediately with a lot of conversation. And this conversation we’re having about stories is about how you weave together pictures in a way to sell whatever it is you’re selling.
So what does a good story consist of? If your story was to be made into a book, what kind of book would it be? Because as you talk to people and they’re telling you their story and if you could take their story and put it into a book format and you go into the bookstore and find wherever that book would happen to be, where would it be? Would it be in the history section? Would it be in the fiction section? Would it be in the drama section? Would it be in the tragedy section? What kind of story does your life consist of? Because the stories you tell yourself are really based upon the pictures you have in your head about what your life is like. And these pictures which are a thousand or ten thousand words would flash across the screen of your mind tell in instant story to you and then you explain to other people in words and what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to say in words about your life what happens to be in your mind. And then in your mind there’s this picture, it’s instant and it’s easy for you to see it. It’s the way your life, the way you imagine your life and so when you talk to people you take that picture and you convert it into a whole bunch of words. And it’s too bad they can’t just see the pictures inside your head because they would happen a lot quicker. The quickest way for you to get the story or to get the pictures of what it is you are trying to share with somebody else is having a story that you tell them.
The reason I’m spending some time on this conversation about stories is because I want you to be a good storyteller. I want you to be the kind of person that listens and pulls from people their story, the story of their life, then they have a meaning for their life. The way you transform somebody’s life, the way you change somebody’s life, the way you persuade somebody to have a different life or better life a more empowered life is you have to change their story. You have to change the way they understand their story, and therefore by listening to somebody you literally find out what their story is and by telling your story about the way you see the things that you’re persuading them on. As you can tell I’m still learning this skill. I’m still reading all kinds of books about it and trying to understand what a good story really consist of. But the story that I’ve been living over the last month is the story of me coming with my wife to France. So here’s a picture of the city we lived in, a little town, a little village actually in France for three weeks. A matter of fact, our home where we lived you look at the church on the very top of that hill. Just to the very right of that church, drop down just a little bit there’s a house there. That was the house we rented and we lived in that house for three magnificent incredible weeks! We got a chance to go to visit all of the, not all—well actually all of the seven of what they call the most beautiful cities in France. There’s a whole series of these tiny little villages and there are probably several or dozen of them around France but in the province that we’re in there are seven cities. Seven little villages and the most beautiful villages in France and this was one of them and we went to other six of them.
So what I’m telling you right now is a story about us flying here and it was my wife’s sixtieth birthday and a celebration, and this was the time that we’ve been spending together. We spent three weeks in that beautiful city having the time of our life and creating memories and what memories are are just pictures. Snapshots of experiences. You link those snapshots together and it becomes a story. So over the last three weeks we had a magnificent incredible and amazing time in that city right there. We had a chance to travel through the countryside of France and see the poppies. I guess those are poppies. They’re beautiful aren’t they? And we got the chance to go around the upper mountains of the high French Alps. There’s a beautiful city called Sospel about an hour north of Nice and which just nestled in a beautiful little valley. It’s the kind of stories is that little village hold. It turns out to be a place that was bombed during the second World War and that’s because there were a lot of resistance fighters who lived in these mountains and so they bombed that particular city and the cathedral that was in that city got partially damaged. A lot of things got damaged. We got a chance to spend a magnificent meal there in that beautiful city. Now we came to this place. This is the view from my balcony.
The little city of Villefanche-sur-Mer, on the right hand side there that’s the old city is where we just barely came back to and there’s a dock there that we landed on tonight, about eleven o’clock tonight because we had a magnificent experience today. I’ll tell you about it.
This is a little closer view of big cruise ships coming everyday and they land bring their tenders in with the people and they land them on that dock right there and people take off across the mountains, over the mountainous Nice on the other side. And then about an hour to the left of that photo is Monaco. And so it’s a beautiful place on the French Riviera. We went yesterday to a magnificent restaurant in Cap d’Antibes and that’s the meal that I had! Doesn’t that look good? It was more tasty than that looks and that can be hard to believe. It was just magnificent! We went to the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc or I guess in Cap d’Antibes where all the famous stars come to and the Kennedy’s and it’s been there for many, many decades. Beautiful hotel. And tonight this is the photo it was taken just about six hours ago. Our apartment is right directly above my wife’s head up there. It’s on the hills. It’s kind of red apartment with white decks and it’s on kind of right inside of that photo. And then right directly above that there’s a red home with a lot of foliage around, a lot of green trees around it. That’s Elton John’s house and what an incredible mansion. We haven’t been inside it but as you drive around it the walls are high with most amazing hedges you’ve ever seen and it literally is couple of hundred meters from where I am at
talking to you right this very second! And this is the bay that my wife and I—. We had a friend of ours fly from California to spend some time with us and here we are taking off tonight to go to a fireworks competition that they’re holding here in France and it’s held in Monaco. So here’s the ocean as we travel around the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc where we spend the day at the hotel there at the beach. And here are the fireworks display as we’re sitting in this boat looking out over the unbelievable fireworks!
It was a twenty-five minute fireworks show held by the country of France and this is an international fireworks display. So this week is France and the next week is going to be China and the week after that is going to be Great Britain and four major countries around the world are going to make their firework competition and we got to see the first edition of the firework competition which was tonight. And it was just the most amazing evening that maybe we’ve ever spent. The water was so calm and the weather, the temperature was just so balmy and it was just one of the most memorable evenings we’ve ever had.
What I’ve been telling you and then showing you pictures are of the story. The story of something we did today. Now we’re going to be exploring over the next several weeks how you tell a story in such a way that somebody is inspired and motivated and persuaded to come to your side of the story. As they’ve said many, many times, and you’ve heard this before, that stories sell but facts tell. And most people when they sell things they tell things. They tell how big the item is or how expensive the item is that they tell about the item. They talk about the features of the item. They talk about the qualities of that item. They tell lots of things and one of the things that I’m going to try to persuade you to do is to stop telling as much in your selling and start telling facts. Let’s start telling stories. So in my PowerPoint presentation when I’m delivering something about a real estate conversation when you look at any of the PowerPoints the I deliver like any speeches you’ve ever heard me deliver, you’ll notice that I have a lot of pictures in there. I’ll show a picture of me climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and how I made it to the top.
I’ll show a lot of stories like that and then I’ll tell specific stories about individuals and their success stories and how their success stories relate to what it was that I sold them. And one of the most important parts of my PowerPoint presentation I just delivered it—. Well I delivered it over last year in all over the world: in Malaysia, and in Singapore, in Japan, in Hawaii, all over the United States in several others places, London, and I’m going to be speaking and delivering the same kind of PowerPoint presentation when I go to Geneva in about two and a half weeks. So I’m speaking to an audience of about five hundred people in Geneva and I’ll show a PowerPoint presentation. And throughout that PowerPoint presentation I’ll show some of my stories. Some of my famous stories are me doing these challenges that I’ve done. And I’ll say send me to any city, take away my wallet, give me a hundred dollar bill and send me two hours I’ll buy an excellent piece of real estate using that of my own money. I strain together a series of stories like that. And they’re just experiences of me being challenged by the Los Angeles Times or somebody famous challenged me to go to a city and select somebody and work with them go to the unemployment line and select somebody to go on a television and select somebody. Essentially all these conversations that I’m having in this PowerPoint presentation are really just a series of stories about me showing that some of the things that I’m going to share with them have actually been used successfully.
I’ll tell a story about an elder gentleman who came to one of my seminars in Tampa, Florida. I’ll never forget this. And I’m finishing up the seminar. It’s about ten o’clock at night and I’m just closing up, finish up. The audiences left he’s kind of hanging around the room I’m packing up my PowerPoint presentation and we’re closing up the boxes and I’m getting ready to head back to my hotel. And the gentleman comes up to me and he says—. I call him Jim by the way and he was about sixty-five years old. And he says, “Bob, I understand your seminar is five thousand dollars and I really want to come to it but all I have is five thousand dollars to my name. That’s all I’ve got. I’m sixty-five years old and I just can’t give you my last five thousand dollars.” And I say to him, “Well, Jim, that’s what the price is.” You don’t go to Harvard and say to Harvard, “Hey, I can’t afford you. What would you let me come for free?” And what would Harvard say to you? They’d say, “I’m sorry that just doesn’t work. So I said, “That’s the price Jim and that’s just it. You want to come, great! Write me a five thousand dollars check and if you don’t then hope you have a good life. And I get you a copy of my book and let’s see if that will work for you.” And
he’s not happy about that. He leaves and I’m still finally finishing up packing up and he comes back up to me and he goes, “If I’m going to give you my last five thousand dollars, you got to give me a guarantee. I mean you got to guarantee me that I’m going to succeed.” And my answer to him was, “Well, Jim, that’s exactly why you are where you are. The reason that it’s five thousand dollars to your name is because you’ve never risked it all. Fine, you keep your five thousand dollars and I’ll keep mine for the rest of my life. Have a long and good life.” But you got to give me a guarantee.
We’ll risk everything. Telling that story about another person in a—how do I want to say this—in an indirect way. The way I tell that story goes right straight to them. So hold on a second on the—. Since it’s a little chopping, Angii. Hold on just a second.
So, as I finish up our conversation tonight, what Jim said to me, “Don’t play with me.” I said, “Listen, Jim. that’s what the price is. I’m not responsible for the fact that every time that you had an opportunity and didn’t take it because you were afraid of risk therefore you never got the chance to capture an opportunity, to take advantage of an opportunity. Therefore you end up with five thousand dollars instead of five hundred thousand dollars.” Sometimes you are going to lose everything but you can start all over again until you find an opportunity that can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for you. You might lose it all. And so by telling Jim this story what happened is I teach my audience through the story that I’m telling about Jim, then what they’re going to have to do is risk it all too.
And then I tell a few stories about how I did risk everything for myself, my challenges. Yeah, I risked everything when I do these challenges and sometimes you lose and sometimes you have to start all over again. Sometimes the economy goes south. Sometimes you’re left with nothing but your information in your head and the inspiration in your heart. And you just start all over again from scratch. And so Jim says, “Okay. All right. But you got to give me—. Come on Bobby you got to give me a guarantee.” I said, “Okay. I tell you what. I’ll guarantee you this. Jim, if you write at least a hundred offers on a hundred properties but you evaluated the way I teach you to how to find them, if you write a hundred offers and get rejected a hundred times and show me those rejected offers and you still haven’t made any money, I guarantee to give you your money back.” And he said, “You’re on.” He said, “All I got left is time.”
And so now I had his five thousand dollars and he had my information. And he went to our seminar and he learned the information and he learned how to do the techniques and the strategies. We worked on his mindset and we gave him some strategies and ideas to follow through on. And he called me about ninety days later on the phone, and if you ever heard me tell the story before, it’s an absolutely true story. I’ll never forget. I’m walking through the aisles of—. My telemarketers are on the phone and they said, “Bob, we got this fellow from Florida. He said you made a guarantee with him and he wants to talk to.” And I said, “Okay.” And I was on the phone with Jim and I remembered the conversation. And so Jim said, “Bob, I want to tell you that I wrote seventy offers and I got seventy rejections. It was terrible.
It was a horrible experience. It was awful.” He said, “But the first offer I got accepted it turned out to be a little profit and I made enough money to recoup my five thousand dollars. I got my five thousand back and so I’m okay. It took me seventy offers, seventy-one offers for me to get my money back.” He says, “But then I got the big one. Then I found a property that was being held by a bank.” And I won’t tell you the whole story but the bottom line from the story is he flips this property that he finds with no money. His estate deals hasn’t closed yet. With a nothing down technique and he flips it and makes a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. He does it in about a hundred and twenty days and he’s just calling on the phone to tell me that he’s divided the seventy-two offers into a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he’s realized that every time somebody said no to him all those seventy-two— well actually seventy rejections and two successful yeses—hat every time somebody said no to him when you divide seventy by a hundred and fifty thousand, it turns out to be two thousand some dollars per rejections. If somebody offered you two thousand dollars every time you made an offer on a piece of real estate and it was rejected and in the process of the rejection they handed you a two thousand dollar check wouldn’t that make the rejection a little easier to take?
Well the reason I’m telling you this story, there’s a lot of reasons but one of them is to share with you how powerful a story can be. Because this one true story is a story that I tell almost every time I do a real estate sales presentation because it’s a true story and I’m telling it because it is true. It’s totally authentic and I don’t have to make it up. I don’t have to remember to say it in a certain way to make it sound right. I just literally have to do what I just did with you there. I just remember what happened and tell it. And when you sell something, when you try to persuade somebody to do something, if you have a story about somebody else who’s had a challenge in the same way that they might have a fear of, a fear of rejection or a fear of being taken advantage of or a fear of—. Well there’s five major fears and this is an acronym that I created so that I can remember what they are.
There’s the fear. F-E-A-R-S is the word.
F stands for the fear of failure.
E is the fear of embarrassment.
A is the fear of abandonment.
R is the fear of rejection.
S is the fear of success.
One of those fears is attacking you right now. If I could find a story about somebody similar to you who had a fear similar to your major fear that they were able to overcome, it would be ammunition for me to help you overcome that fear. And if there was a sales process involved in it, it would be a way for you to resolve that fear when it came to the sales process.
So for instance when it comes to Jim, the story that I just told, Jim was afraid of the guarantee word. He wanted a guarantee and I laughed about it by saying once he gave me all his money I’d guarantee he’d never see it again. I created some laughter there. And you could finally see that he was afraid and needed a guarantee and I wouldn’t give it to him. And finally the guarantee I did give to him was a very, very hard action oriented guarantee. It was going to require him to do a lot of work and what I was trying to teach the audience through that story is that if they want a guarantee they’re going to have to work really, really, really hard. I’m trying to teach them that what I’m going to share with them works if they work hard at it. And if I told them directly by saying to them, “Hi everybody. I want you to buy my program and you have to work really, really hard at it. And you might have seventy offers before somebody ever says yes,” that doesn’t do anything to help a person understand what it’s going to take. But by me telling the story of Jim and essentially what I’m really doing is I’m talking to the audience through Jim. Jim is my straw man if you will. Essentially by telling that story, I’m saying to the audience through Jim this is what it’s going to take. And it slips right through as they say it comes and goes below the radar screen. It slips through their conscious mind and then to the unconscious and then conscious gets it! If I’d said it directly out to the conscious mind it wouldn’t get. It would resist it. Let’s put it that way.
So as I continue to tell the story of Jim there’s all kinds of little pieces in that story that I haven’t told you tonight. Takes me usually about ten twelve minutes to tell a full version of that story with pictures and things like that. What I’m really trying to teach that the audience is that they need to take some risk. They need to risk it all. They need to work hard at it. That if they follow the techniques and strategies the way I teach them that—. Actually I even teach some of the nothing down techniques in that story. So that I show the whole audience through the story of Jim how they could find a property and realistically buy an incredible real estate deal and make an incredible cash profit in an incredibly short period of time using a few simple strategies through the story of Jim.
Now I’m going to ask you about a story that you would tell to somebody. First of all, you need to find like I’ve been sharing with you a story of somebody else who succeeded at the thing you’re trying to persuade somebody else to do. And I’m going to give you a week to find that story whatever it is you market. If you market real estate, if you market any other kind of widget or product, if you market network marketing product whatsoever, I need you to find a success story. But I need you to find a success story similar to the one that I shared with Jim here. A success story about somebody who struggled and finally was able to overcome the challenges in a way that is similar to the person that you’re talking to. And then I’m going to ask you to get some more details of that person’s story. For instance, supposed it’s a network marketing company you’re involved in and you know somebody in your up line. Somebody who’s more successful. I want you to go to them and asked them for their story.
Just say, “What it was like for you when you got started? Did you have a lot of money? What caused you—.” In other words get some details from that person so that your story becomes more real, more detail. Every little detail adds some credibility. And so when you tell somebody else that story with some of those extra details, remember what you’re trying to say is you’re sharing the story of the person who’s had the success in a way to teach the person who you’re trying to convince to buy your product or your program that there’s a way for them to achieve it. And by you telling that story just like I told you the story of Jim it lets the message slide right in. Now that’s what all great persuaders do. They have stories that they tell that contain the lessons that overcome the objections that each person has to what stops them from saying yes. And your story process is teaching a person how to get to the yes. The story eliminates those objections or—. What’s another way of saying it? By telling a story in the proper way, it teaches your prospect how they can eliminate their objections simply and easily and effortlessly in a way to get them to say yes more quickly. Does that make sense?
So my challenge to you is next week before we talk again is for you to find a story of success that you can tell to somebody that you’re trying to convince. Okay? That’s your job. That’s your homework assignment. I wish you well everyone. It’s been a wonderful three weeks here for my wife—. Actually, we’ve been here for four weeks almost. We’ve been here more than a month now. And we got a lot of stories we can tell about the things we’ve seen in this incredible country and how difficult it was for us to get ourselves prepared so we can come and make this trip, the kind of hurdles we had to jump through but we had a dream. We wanted to spend some incredible time together in this most unbelievable country. We were able to overcome those obstacles and now we’re here.
So this is a success story in a sense, isn’t it? If you ever want to come and stay in that apartment I’ll show you how to get there. Okay? All right everyone, you have a great night and a wonderful, wonderful week. And I’ll talk to you next week on Mindset Mondays with Bob. Bye-bye.