I will be here for one week so if anyone wants to do some private coaching next week email me and we can set it up!

I was thinking about something on the plane that I wanted to share with all of you.
There is a certain exercise that I have all of the men and women I coach do. It’s in both my Men’s and Women’s Mastery Series.

It is: what image do you outwardly project to the world? What do other people think of you?

Ask five people what they think about you. What type of energy do you convey? What type of confidence do you convey? What do you look like? How do you dress? Ask five people all of these things.

I have a client named Rob who is a great guy. Rob took a bootcamp with me recently, and the other night we were out to dinner having a long talk. He’s a great-looking guy, he’s got a great image, he has lots of confidence – but it’s all an optical illusion.

He projects these things to everyone who sees him but deep inside he doesn’t really believe it. This is his fundamental issue. He doesn’t believe that he’s good-looking. Rob is 5’7”, but if you sat with him at a table you’d think he was 6’2”. He has this incredibly large persona.

But the problem is that he just doesn’t believe it. Everyone sees it except for him.

Rob is what I call an optical illusion. This is why many men (and women) come to me for coaching – what I can do with them is really work on the inside. It’s great that you’re able to exude these qualities, but if you don’t actually believe it, other people won’t either.

When you first glance at Rob, you believe it. When you hear him talk, you still believe it. But if Rob doesn’t believe it himself, he will never be able to go up to a woman – even though she’s feeling the heat and the energy – and close her. He won’t be able to get her phone number and go out with her.

Rob needs to believe it. And those of you who can relate to Rob – those of you who live in a life of optical illusions – you need to do something to make yourself believe it.

Rob was telling me about some of his friends who are fascinated by what Rob did at the bootcamp. They desperately want to do the same thing but they are terrified. They keep making excuses – about the money. “Oh, it’s $2495, there is no way we could do that,” they say, yet both of these guys are going to grad school. They’re trying to get advanced degrees so they can get a better job and make more money.

They are willing to invest in a degree that will help them to become more successful and make more money in the business world, but they are not willing to invest in themselves!

That’s what you need to do. If you are an optical illusion, you need to invest your time and money in personal development. You need to invest in YOU. You are your own corporation, and you need to invest in yourself.

This is not a sales letter for one of my bootcamps – either you’re going to do it or you won’t. But that’s the thing about life: what are you waiting for to change yourself?

If everyone thinks that you are confident on the outside and you don’t feel it on the inside – if you are an optical illusion – guess what? Your life is never going to change unless you start doing internal work.

So here is a suggestion – and a challenge – I have for all of you: I want you to go out there and find out if you are an optical illusion. I want you to ask five friends what they think of you.

What type of image do you project? What type of confidence do you convey?

I want you to go out there and do this today. And I want you to find out if you are an optical illusion. If you are, we really need to get you started doing some inner work on your brain. It won’t change by itself. If it could, you already would have been able to self-motivate and make it happen.

Consider this the first step – the first kick in the ass – to getting rid of that optical illusion that you may be conveying to the world.

Josh: I felt like we were doing pretty well with the women from the triathlon. There was one woman that I had a really good connection with, and I was about ready to ask her for her number, but then they left.

If I saw her again, what would you do to keep the conversation going the second time? How would you follow up?

David: We talked about that, with the whole blog on follow up we just did. I’ll answer it again because I think it’s a great question.

There is something about coaching and learning about repetition – I will repeat the same things today over and over again in different ways. Why? There are studies from sales trainings that show that you have to tell someone something six or seven times to get it to become a part of the person’s thoughts and behavior.

This is all very repetitive – everything we are going to be doing, from the places we go to the tables we sit at will be repetitive. When guys buy my products, I tell them all the time to listen to them over and over again. My voice will become your voice. Of course, you’ll process it in a different way.

So, let’s do it again. Follow up is very easy. The next time you see her, bring her back to the moment when you met her the first time.

When I ran into the couple from LA in Barney’s, I remembered they were from LA because I had already talked to them. I already knew where they were from, along with five or six other details about them.

I see them in Barney’s, and I think to myself, hmm, what do we have in LA that we also have in Seattle? Barney’s. So I walked over to them and asked, “what are you guys doing in Barney’s? We have this in LA!” and this started a whole new thread of conversation.

She replied, “oh my god, you’re right! But I hate the one in LA because I hate shopping with Beverly Hills snobs,” and BOOM! – we had a whole new conversation topic. I asked, “what about the Beverly Hills snobs do you hate? And by the way, you live in Beverly Hills! You live among those snobs!” I teased her a little bit and that got the conversation rolling again.

You’re going to see that you’ll run into the same people throughout the day and that is how you follow up with them. Even if you don’t see the same person for another week, you can still bring them back to the moment by saying, “oh my god, Barney’s girl!” “Oh my god, Pomeranian girl – how’s your dog doing?”

You can bring them back with that follow up. What makes top salespeople amazing is that whenever they go to a meeting with someone they remember details about that person. They remember things from that first conversation.

Whenever you talk to someone on the phone, find out things about him or her. I used to teach sales seminars, and I would always teach that the object is not to sell something, but to relate and to bond with someone and to sell yourself. We all want to do business with people that we like.

There is a reason why I will never take money from anyone for coaching him or her until they call me. You remember this from our phone call, when I talked to you during a hail storm in Santa Fe – if I don’t like you, I don’t care how much money you have – I’m not going to work with you.

I have to relate to you and spend a weekend with you. I’m giving up my time to spend a weekend with all of you guys. I have to like you. You have to fit in and be part of what I want to coach.

In the early days when I was still building my business, I would take anyone in. After the first 20 minutes of the weekend I’d want to jump off the escalator because I just didn’t click with the client.

So when it comes down to it, you want to do business with people that you like. When I was teaching sales, I used to tell guys to go into an office and look at the personal photos and begin to bond with someone.

It’s all about abundance again. There are plenty of people that I can coach, and there are plenty of sales deals that a person can close. I fill up bootcamps every month. I could probably do two per month but I like to do my own thing the other three weekends! My coaches in LA always want to do them more often, but I like my life the way it is. I like the balance I’ve struck with everything.

Chris: I’ve seen a lot of different stuff in personal development – lots of small transformations – and when I was talking to you on the phone you weren’t trying to close the deal on me. You were just being laid-back and cool and you were very straight with me. Not everyone is like that, and I really admire it. It’s one of the reasons I wanted you to coach me.

David: Well you were also thinking about doing the more expensive weekend, and I told you it wasn’t worth it.

Chris: Yeah, you were just straight up with me.

David: He wanted to do my 101 weekend and I listened to him and found out what he needed. I’ll do 101 weekends with people that really need it. I tell every single guy that calls me up about the bootcamp – I think the bootcamp dynamic really teaches you a lot.

There are guys who just need that 101 handholding all weekend. It’s 48 hours of very intense training. And I listened to you and where you were at in your life and I said, “no! Do this bootcamp first and if you want to do 101 down the road, sure, but I don’t think you need it.”

Chris: Yeah, I appreciated that honesty. I appreciate that ethic. It’s one thing I really admire about you.

David: When I started this business ten years ago, I didn’t have this abundance. I had to learn about abundance. I lost $300,000 in 1997, which is a lot of money. And I have no problem talking about it.

That was the worst year of my life. I was young, I was at the point where my business life was on this escalator going up and I made three of the worst decisions ever. It was just one after another. I could not believe I made three awful decisions like that in the span of like three months. I went from being very smart to being ridiculously stupid all of a sudden.

But I did it, and I needed to learn those lessons. Those were important lessons for me at that time. I also didn’t have abundance, so I was trying to be very greedy. I was trying to do things I didn’t really like and trying to make money however possible. I learned an incredible lesson.

I learned about abundance from taking on business in the beginning that I wasn’t really interested in. Life is abundant. There is always another one.

If you see a pair of jeans you like, but you miss it – don’t worry! There is always another pair. If you travel the world, there is always another place to go.

Women? We’ve been sitting now here at the escalators for about 45 minutes and there has been an abundance of women going up and down the escalators. We could sit here all day long, and I guarantee that every one of you could have a dinner date by the end of the day.

I believe in abundance in everything. I’m looking for that house right now. Someone else could put a contract down on that house today. I’ll find out on Thursday, and I’ll say to myself, there will be another house!

Todays podcast is all about how to get clear about life. Have you heard of the term optical illusion?

Today we create a whole new meaning of the term.

Click here to download…