The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Fascination, Persuasion and Captivation, with Sally Hogshead (Author, Speaker, Advertising, Success)
Tue, 09 Jul 2024
Bestselling author and Hall of Fame speaker Sally Hogshead breaks down the importance of focusing on differences vs strengths, getting the magic glasses to reveal how the world sees you, being a specialist, and creating your own anthem, and why you don’t learn how to be fascinating…you UNlearn how to be boring.
When you begin to understand how people see you at your best, when you understand why people love you and champion for you and buy from you and hire you and promote you and adore you, then you can focus on that. You can just do more of what you're already doing right and stop focusing on the rest of it.
And it's incredibly freeing to be able to say, look, you don't have to be perfect at everything, but you do have to be extraordinary at something. So instead of trying to be kind of good at a lot of things, be incredibly good and very, very different in one particular area.
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Such an exciting show for you today. Sally Hogshead is a Hall of Fame speaker and her first book was called Fascinate, Your Seven Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. And she is an expert in branding, in personal branding, and particularly the world's leading expert on fascination. And she's made a few minutes to be with us here. Sally, thank you for joining us.
I'm excited to be here today. I'm excited to talk about how the world sees you.
Can you just give us like a quick rundown of what Fascinate is?
Yeah, sure. Well, StrengthsFinder, Myers-Briggs, those tests are really great in getting us a critical piece of information, which is how do you see the world? But what I found from drawing on my branding background is that there's another piece of information that we need to know. It's not how you see the world. It's how does the world see you?
How does your customer see you, your audience see you? How do the people in your workplace see you? And when you understand how to see you at your best, then you can just keep focusing on that and deliver your highest value every time. The thing that makes this different about a traditional test is it's not built on psychology.
A traditional personality test was, you know, my rig was developed to diagnose personality disorders. Well, this is a very different way of thinking about it. It's drawing upon the best of branding to see how does the world see you? In what way are you most likely to impress people, to influence them? And in what way are you most likely to turn them off or push them away without even realizing it?
One of my first clients that I ever worked on when I was back in advertising was Nike and Nike's tagline. You remember Nike's tagline, right? So when Nike says just do it, you know, they're not just talking about shoelaces and rubber. They're not just talking about the shoes. They're not talking about the company. They're talking about the whole mindset, the attitude.
Well, what if you could distill your personality down to just two or three words, like just do it, that when people thought of you, they knew exactly what words to associate with you. And over the last few years, I used to do this for clients. I would write headlines. I would write taglines for these big companies, but I didn't know how to do this for people.
And it wasn't until about a year ago that I had a major breakthrough that I realized that there are specific words that are associated with specific personality types, according to how people see them at their best. In other words, there are certain ways that your personality is primed to be able to add value.
And when you perform in this way, when you communicate in this way, people see you as intensely valuable. On the other hand, you also have places in your career, things you do that are disadvantages, that do not put you in the best light.
And when you can get really clear on the areas in which you're likely to add value and be seen in a positive light versus those areas where you are unlikely to add value and be seen in the negative light, you can really steer all of your communication so that you're more likely to win.
Well, and one of the things, I've heard you say this before, you say you don't learn how to be fascinating, you unlearn how to be boring.
Yeah, you don't learn how to be fascinating. You unlearn how to be boring. A lot of times people think they need to change in some way in order to get better. And this is where the whole philosophy of strengths came from. If you measure somebody according to strengths, then that implies that they have weaknesses.
And it implies that the way that they're going to be most likely to stand out in a crowded marketplace is strengths. But that thinking is inherently flawed. You're not going to outdo somebody at their own strength. If you focus only on strength, you're on a competitive cycle that you're incrementally trying to improve yourself to outdo somebody else. So I propose something different.
Don't focus on your strengths. Instead, focus on your differences. And when you focus on your differences, you don't have to try to outdo somebody. You simply focus on becoming more of who you already are. So you're not changing who you are. You're becoming more of who you are. And this is a different way of guiding our careers and guiding our company as entrepreneurs, as employees.
If we stop focusing on strengths, we begin to see that everybody on our team contributes in a very different way and that it's going to allow each person to rise to their highest value according to what they do that's different. That's how you create a high performing team.
Larry Wingate one time said, you know, the whole challenge of the speaking profession is to discover your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others.
Isn't that great? Larry's archetype is named the rock star. And the rock star is primary innovation, secondary passion. And what that means is Larry is bold. He's unorthodox. He's artistic. He's out of the box.
When we measure people, when we assess different personalities, we find that the way that they're most likely to add value is very predictable according to the patterns of their personality and the patterns of how they communicate. So the way Larry is most likely to add value is when he's being bold and artistic, unorthodox out of the box.
He's unlikely to add value if you said, Larry, go take this Excel doc and I want you to start turning out bridge sheets and come back when it's set. It's not that Larry couldn't do that. That's just not likely. That's not how he's likely to add value. So for each of us, the the The point is you already have what you need. You don't have to learn how to be valuable.
You don't have to learn how to be fascinating and different. You have to unlearn all those things that you've been taught up to this point about trying to focus on your strengths and outdoing other people.
So the new book is called How the World Sees You. And this thing is like, it is awesome.
Well, I drew upon my background as an advertising creative director, drawing upon all my experience with learning what are the best practices of the world's leading brands, the world's most loved brands. And I wrote Fascinate about how brands become fascinating and the messages they create.
But everybody kept coming up to me and they would say, okay, I get how to make my brand fascinating, but tell me about me. How do I make me fascinating? So I realized I just needed to pivot my business. And so instead of studying brands, I started studying people. And I found that There are patterns in how people communicate.
But if you can reveal those patterns, suddenly it becomes incredibly clear why people do what they do, why certain people irritate you and why certain people can charge more money for a commodity product.
It's almost like, you know, when you're going to go see a 3D movie and you've got those dorky glasses and you kind of don't want to put the dorky glasses on when you're sitting in the theater, but you're standing there and you're when you're watching the screens and it doesn't make any sense. It's just a jumble. But then you put the glasses on and suddenly, boom, and all the snaps right into focus.
Imagine that the book is giving you the pair of 3D glasses to decipher all the patterns that are happening in communication around you so that instantly it becomes crystal clear why certain people are attracted to you, why you succeed in certain types of situations and fail in others. It's a real aha to see yourself not through the lens of how you see the world, but rather how the world sees you.
What we find is people, when they begin to look at themselves through the lens of how the world sees you, they feel self-conscious. They feel awkward or, oh, what if there's going to be something negative? Or sometimes they feel vain. Like, well, why do I want to focus on how people see me?
But when you begin to understand how people see you at your best, when you understand why people love you and champion for you and buy from you and hire you and promote you and adore you, then you can focus on that. You can just do more of what you're already doing right and stop focusing on the rest of it.
And it's incredibly freeing to be able to say, look, you don't have to be perfect at everything, but you do have to be extraordinary at something. So instead of trying to be kind of good at a lot of things, be incredibly good and very, very different in one particular area. And this is what we see with high performers in teams. They're specialists. They have some area that they're specializing in.
And so what this book is showing you is that your personality has a natural built in specialty. There's something that you're just naturally primed to do. You're already great at it, but you just may not be. You may not have identified it and you probably don't know how to articulate it to other people. So if you read the book, the book identifies what you're naturally suited to do.
In other words, how does the world see you at your best? How can you do more of that? How can you articulate that in your marketing? And then how do you distill that down to a two or three word phrase that we call your anthem? Your anthem is the tagline for your personality. It's kind of like the Nike's just do it. It's a phrase that describes who you are at your best.
And we've taken about 20,000 people through this process. We've distilled it down to a really, really simple system that takes about 10 minutes. So here's how this works. There's an adjective and a noun. When you put the adjective together with the noun, you get a descriptor of who you are at your best. The adjective describes how you're different.
The noun describes what you're doing when you're doing what you do best. So, for example, I have somebody on my team named Corey and Corey's archetype is named the detective. She took the same assessment that that people will take when they get how the world sees you. And when you take the assessment, it tells you an archetype that describes how the world sees you at your best.
And it starts feeding you the actual words you need to be putting in to anytime you're describing yourself, like a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter bio, a resume, a business card, anytime you need the words to describe yourself. So Corey is really detailed and her archetype is the detective. So her three adjectives are clear cut, accurate, and meticulous.
In other words, when Corey is sheet up to perform in a way that's clear-cut, accurate, and meticulous, she has a very high likelihood of winning. She has a great advantage there. But me, I'm not likely to win when the game field is clear-cut, accurate, meticulous. So Corey's anthem is meticulous follow through.
In other words, the way Corey is most likely to deliver her highest value is through meticulous follow through. So when you're creating your marketing, when you're introducing yourselves to people, what is it that you need to say that for them is going to see you as being intensely valuable? You can just keep coming back to those words, those words that describe who you are at your best.
Sally, this is awesome. I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, to use your term. So, Sally, you are just you are amazing.
It's so great to be able to talk to you. I really, really appreciate it. Are you interested in advertising with The Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email at info at theactioncatalyst.com.