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.

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 and 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, Strengths Finder, Myers

Briggs 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 drywall My my, 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 error audience? How did the

Pingle in your workplace see you and when you understand how they

see you at your best, and you can just get focusing on that

and deliver your highest value every time. The thing that makes

us different about a traditional test is it's not built on

psychology. But a traditional su ality test was, you know, my

grades was developed to diagnose personality disorders. Well,

there's 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,

with Nike and Nikes tagline you remember? Nikes tagline? Right?

So when Nike says just do it, you know, they're not just

talking about shoelaces and rubber. I'm not just talking

about the shoes. I'm not just 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 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

help 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 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 a 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.

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 strength came from. If you measure

somebody according to strength, the man implies that they have

weaknesses and an implied 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. So 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 companies, as entrepreneurs as

employees. If we stopped focusing on strengths, we begin

to see that everybody on our team contributes in a very

different way. And that is gonna allow each person to rise to

their highest value according to what they do the different.

That's how you create a high performing team.

Larry Winget 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 in others.

That's great. Larry's archetype was named the

rock star and the rock star is primary innovation, secondary

passion and what that means is Larry is bold. He is unorthodox.

He's artistic either 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 their

patterns of how they communicate. So the way Larry is

most likely to add value is when he's being bold, artistic,

unorthodox out of the box, he's unlikely to add value. If you

said, Larry, go pick this Excel doc, and I want you to cheap and

come back when it's other 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 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.

I drew upon my background as an advertising

creative director, I'm drawing upon all my experience with

learning one of 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, you're when

you're getting to go see a 3d movie, and you've got this dorky

glasses, and you kind of don't want to put the dorky glasses on

when you're sitting in this 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, it all just snaps right

into focus. Imagine that the book is giving you the pair of

3d glasses to decipher all the patterns that are happening and

communication around you. That instantly 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 as 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 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 Nikes. 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. It takes about 10 minutes. So here's how

this works. There's an adjective and a noun. When you put the

adjective together with a noun, you get a descriptor of who you

are 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

Cory and Cory is archetype is named the detective says 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 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 and her archetype is the

detective. So her three adjectives are clear cut,

accurate and meticulous. In other words, when Corey is set

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 when

the game name field is clear, cut accurate, meticulous.

Korea's anthem is meticulous follow through. In other words,

the way Cory is most likely to deliver her highest value is

through meticulous follow through. So when you're creating

your marketing when you're introducing yourself to people,

what is it that you need to say that for them is going to see

you as being intensely valuable even 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 your terms. So Sally, you are just, you're

amazing.

It's so great to be able to talk to you. I really

really appreciate it.