Today we’re excited to share a presentation by Dave Frees from MaxLawCon 2021! Tune in to learn what spies, interrogators, and special forces operators can teach you about having a better and more profitable practice.
Mr. Frees heads the Firm’s Trust, Estate and Wealth Preservation Section, and Co-chairs the Elder Law Solutions section of the Firm. He serves or has served, on the boards of multiple trust companies and trust committees. Dave has appeared on National Public Radio (NPR), and is a frequent speaker in the areas of trust and estate planning and administration and communication and presentation skills. He has been awarded the designation of Pennsylvania Super Lawyer in Philadelphia Magazine in multiple years (by Super Lawyers©, a Thomson Reuters Company). Dave was named as a “Top Lawyer” in Trusts, Wills, and Estates by Main Line Today Magazine.
2:49 the handshake interrupt
5:07 force multipliers
8:48 deploying tactics
12:47 flash of blue
17:31 just keep the milk in the cup
21:03 subtle tweak in the content
25:00 direction for my law firm
30:19 yes you can
36:48 the time value of money
41:40 what are their gains and pains
45:14 loop back in
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Transcript: Force Multipliers w/ Dave Frees
Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2021. Keep listening to hear Dave Freese as we share his talk force multipliers. What spies, interrogators and Special Forces operators can teach you about having a better and more profitable practice. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Have you grabbed your ticket to this year’s conference? If not, head to max law con 2020 two.com to get yours today. Now to the episode.
Speaker 2
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Speaker 3
Welcome to the show. Good morning, everybody. There’s a story from 1966 on a snowy winter’s evening, it was a holiday party. And in attendance was a pretty well known therapist who was an expert at helping people to overcome difficulties in their lives. And to change the way they communicated with one another. He was way ahead of his time. His name was Dr. Frank usted. I don’t I was involved in the story, but I can’t tell it to you from my perspective, because in the story is Frank tells it, I was six years old, and wearing a red set of fidi pajamas, you know the kind I’m talking about. And I have no conscious memory of this. But as Frank tells it, he hears a ruckus going on at this party that my parents were hosting in their home. And he goes into the living room to find out what’s this all about there, as he describes it is this six year old wearing the red fidi pajamas. He’s surrounded by adults in what looks somewhat inappropriate, because the adults are pointing at him and angrily shouting. Frank says he is about to intervene. When he sees something strange gone, sees me, I have no memory of this talking. And then eventually, the group of adults around me sort of calms down, looks around, disperses looking kind of happy but much quieter. So Frank, who had an above the elbow amputation, came over to me. And he also had a really gravelly voice. And he said, boy, and he put out his hand to shake hands. And my hand was going up. And I looked up at him and said, Wow, that’s cool. And he goes, it is isn’t it? He goes, You have no idea how surprised people are when they go to shake hands. And there’s no hand there. Now, this is a very famous hypnotic induction technique that Frank used, because he was particularly uniquely equipped to do it. It’s called the handshake interrupt when you’re in a pattern of doing something, and it’s interrupted. The conscious and unconscious minds don’t know exactly what to do with that. And Frank was an expert at using that moment. And as fate would have it, he taught me at a very young age to be pretty skilled at it as well. Because when he asked me what was going on, boy, what was going on there. I said, Well, Dr. Houston said, I like getting people riled up, and then calming them down. And he said to himself as he tells the story. Wow. That’s weird.
Speaker 3
And the reason that this is relevant to you guys, is that I spent my life after that blessedly exposed to people who are astonishingly expert communicators, and communication skills. enhanced communication skills are the thing that greases the skids of everything else we’re going to talk about today. So if you’re a little bit better communicator, just a tiny bit, if you’re a little bit more persuasive, just a tiny bit, you’ll eventually become more influential. And the distinction I make between persuasion and influence says that persuasion is hard. Influence is natural and easy. Persuasion means you’re helping somebody because you know more than they do. Once you figured out exactly what it is they need, often to take a step that they need to take. We all have this in our practices. But when you do that consistently for people over a period of time, in a place of trust, they learn that they’re able to tell you what they want and need you help them to figure it out. You give them clarity, and then you help them to get it. And that creates influence where they are coming to you with the mindset of getting your advice, and getting your counsel and trusting you. So you don’t just want as we go through all of these skills today to become more persuasive. You want to be thinking about how do I use these persuasion skills to do everything I do in life better? How do I become a better negotiator? How do I become a better parent? How do I become a better spouse or partner? How do I become a better member of my bigger community? All of these things are uniquely possible. How do I become a better leader? They’re all possible when you’re a bear Bitter communicator. So today as we go through these, I’m going to talk about them within a framework of force multipliers who here, anybody here served in the service in the armed forces. I’m a civilian, by the way, always have been. But I was blessed to work with lots of people in the armed services across a number of years. And it was fascinating to me this concept of force multipliers, a force multiplier, a good example would be night vision. So night vision is according to the Pentagon, a five times force multiplier, if you can choose to fight at night, and you have night vision, you are five times more powerful than an enemy who is not equipped with night vision. To fight at night, you have to choose your battle space, obviously. So a force multiplier could be anything, it could be a type of training, it could be careful selection of a team, it could be a piece of hardware, like night vision could be a piece of software, it could be a skill or a unique stack of skills, that makes you more powerful and gives you the ability to get more done with the same or even fewer resources that you can then reallocate to something else within your life or within your practice. Who would like that, if you could do more with less, okay, I love the people that are like, I’m not raising my hand to that. That sounds terrible. And here’s the good news, the good news. And the bad news is I’m not going to teach you anything at all today, that’s new. In fact, the problem that we have with force multiplication, is that a lot of times when people initially hear it, they go, Well, I know that or I do that. But that’s your brain trying to keep you trapped where you are. I know that I already do that. If you’re saying that to yourself, stop, because it’s probably not true. I work with lots and lots of law firms and a number of both publicly traded and privately held companies across the United States. And often when we start the process, people will say, well, I already do that. It’s basic, I already do it. But then when we look, they’re not doing it. They’ve simply told themselves that they’re doing it so many times, that they’re believing their own lie. So be careful. When you hear that I already do that. Chances are you probably don’t. And if you do, you do it in a narrow context. And if I could just get you to be better at communicating better at leading better at persuading just a tiny percentage more often. But across more contexts, in more places, you will become way more powerful and effective. So what I did was I took this idea of force multiplication, and I broke it down into a framework of three levels, metaphors, multipliers, which really have to do with mindset. How do we think about things strategic force multipliers, which is how do we organize the actions we’re going to take to make them more powerful, and in more meaningful ways that are hopefully very much aligned with the clarity that we have about who we are, what we want to do what we want our practices to accomplish. And then finally, there are tactical force multipliers. The tactical force multipliers are where the rubber hits the road. That’s what do we actually do, in order to take something from an idea to reality, Jim was telling you earlier that he and Tyson had, I think it was 30, right 30 ideas they wanted to implement by later today or tomorrow? Well, those ideas are just an electrochemical reaction in our heads. And they have to take them out of their heads and convert them into a physical reality on the ground. That’s what the tactical force multipliers are all about. Each of these things, by the way, it can be stacked. So if you protect the mind and the mindset, you’re going to be more effective at creating strategy. And when you create strategy, you’re going to be more effective at deploying tactics that are more likely to succeed than they are to fail. But most importantly, if you protect mindset, you’re going to be able to sustain yourself through times when things go wrong, which they inevitably will. So let me just give you a quick example of each and then we’ll move through them methodically. And we’ll even throw in a few that have to do with marketing, Who here would like to apply this to marketing your firmware effectively? Okay, good. So, at the mindset level, really effective communicators and leaders who leverage this type of force multiplication are generally speaking optimists. Now it’s we’re all lawyers here, we know what that means is informed optimism, which is a form of pessimism. But the most effective leaders are optimist. And a lot of people hire for optimism. When they do a pre hire assessment. They find somebody that’s very optimistic. Why would they do that? Because optimists tend to be able to survive the negatives that occur in the course of anything, and they tend to bring up the spirit of the rest of the team. Now, we all know because we’re lawyers that optimists have this flaw, where they’re not carefully figured out all the terrible things that could go wrong. And I see you’re not Thanks, sir, yes, so many terrible things, so many. They’re all here not to worry, you guys can figure out all the terrible things that could go wrong. But if you cultivate within yourself some level of optimism, you’re going to be more effective. So a lot of times speakers will tell you the what to do owe, try to be more optimistic, create Thank you, Speaker that I’d never thought about that. But what I want to do for you today is each time we talk about something, I want to talk to you about the what to do, and then the how to do it. So the how to do it part of becoming more of a little bit more of an optimist is to have a practice that involves gratitude. So again, now here’s where somebody’s gonna say, Well, how do you do this, I, I say each night to myself, what I’m thankful for, wake up in the morning, articulate what I’m thankful for, okay? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, I would challenge you to, if you say I already do it, to find out if you really do or not, like keep track of it. But the easier way to do it so that you’re assured you’re doing it is to do it in writing. Now, here’s what happens when you keep a gratitude journal, or you have a gratitude practice of some kind, where you’re taking a specific action to make it happen. It not only has the effect of making you more optimistic, because you realize there are so many things even in the dire as the darkest of times for which you can and should be grateful. But it gets you focused on resources. And as my dear departed mother used to say, you get what you look for. And it turns out by the way that she was scientifically correct, there is something within each and every one of us called the reticular activating system, our sensory organs, our eyes, and our ears, and our sense of feeling and smell and taste, all collect way, way, way, way more data than we could possibly become consciously aware of. So our brain is collecting all of that. But the reticular activating system operates as the doorway that lets in the things that it thinks are important for us to be able to consider consciously. So how do we use this reticular activating system? Well, in the gratitude practice that I was just talking about, where we’re articulating over and over and over again, what we’re grateful for, that will often lead us to write down or otherwise note, things that we have in our lives, like our education, and that we have a nice car or a home that we have people that are supportive of us, we have a good team, all of these things that we might not have been consciously aware of. But we’re really training our reticular activating system to become more aware of them, that creates a sense of optimism. And it fuels us to realize that we have more power and ability and skill and resources available to us than we ever recognized. Here’s this, how this reticular activating system developed is maybe in some time in the past, when we were living in the woods, we were running down a path. And our eye would see a flash of blue, and the reticular activating system would say wait, stop, that could be a blueberry, you’re hungry, go see it, it knew that it was important. So the data that was coming in it, put it into your conscious mind. So in modern times, this reticular activating system manifests itself in this way, anybody here ever bought a tie or car or a blouse or a piece of office equipment or piece of software? And you thought it was really unique? You’ve never seen it before? And then after that you saw it everywhere. Has anybody ever had that experience? That’s an almost universal human experience, because you spent your hard earned money. So the reticular activating system says, Okay, I get it, that’s important to you, I’m going to let that into the conscious mind. And you’ll now become aware of it, which you weren’t previously. So we can use the reticular activating system, either for good or for evil, both in ourselves and how we trigger it in those around us, our clients, our team, our family, would I mean, so I speak to a big conference of dentist one time, and I had been speaking to one of the dentists in the lobby, I asked him to come up and tell the story. And basically his story went like this, his alarm would go off, he would shut it off. And he would go
Dave Frees
Okay, today possibly be worse than yesterday. And the reticular activating system goes up? Is that what we’re looking for? Good. I’ll serve it up to you. I’ll find stuff that was worse. So that’s using it for evil. By the way, I said to him, let’s try something different. When the alarm goes off in the morning, and you hit the alarm, make the sound instead. So whenever you’re ready, just ready to ask yourself that question do this. I want you to do it with me a little bit more on this one. And then you know what to do for your talk? Oh, yeah. When was the last time you said to yourself, Oh, yeah. And then stuff went sideways or terrible. It just doesn’t happen. By the time you get to Oh, yeah, with a little nod. Everything’s gonna be fine. So he did throw me off my game a little bit because he said to me, can I add something of my own? I was like, Sure, that’s the best you make it your own. You own it. And he goes, I’d like to say Oh, yeah. And then he wanted to add, I’m a pirate. So I was like, oh, yeah, a lot of people do that. Sure, sure. And then he asked me later for my email address, I was like, I can’t remember it. But I did give it to him. And then a couple of weeks later, he sent me an email, which is not uncommon. So feel free to, he sent me an email that said, and I love these because people are making real changes in their lives. As he said, I do feel so much better. I’m looking at the world in a totally different way. It just my wife is wondering what kind of conferences are you going to? It’s because apparently, he would wake up in the morning and go, who? Oh, yeah, I’m a pirate. So who could blame her for being worried? So we have the choice of using the reticular activating system for good or for bad, but I’m gonna hop down from the mindset level force multipliers for a second to the force multiplier of tactics. How do you do this? Well, here’s just something to think about. How many times have you said somebody or to somebody on your team or to a child or grandchild? Oh, don’t do that. I wrote a book, the language of parenting, which was the one that Steve Forbes reviewed. And in it, I recounted the story that I observed over and over and over again, of parents saying to their kids, don’t spill the milk. Now, if I say to you don’t think of the color green, what must you do? Yeah, you have to biologically you can’t do it any other way, your brain has to make the picture before it can negate it. So if you say to a kid, don’t spill the milk, what are you a coaching them to make a picture of spilling the milk, right. So if you say to your team, Hey, Bob, don’t screw that case up like you did last time, you’re making Bob relive the horror of the goof up that he just went through. So instead, and this relates a little bit to the mindset of optimism, let’s try to catch ourselves more often telling people the exact opposite of what we can and should be telling them to do. Just watch now that you’re aware of it, you’re gonna catch yourself doing this over and over and over again. So I did an experiment, if you say to, to a kid picking up a little sippy cup, don’t spill the milk, they stare at it, their hands tremble a little bit, you’re enhancing the likelihood that they will, they’ve certainly seen a picture of themselves spilling it. But if you say just keep the milk in the cup and sip it, oh, enjoy it ever so gently, now you get a totally different reaction. Now admittedly, it’s weird if you use that tone of voice with people in the office. But like, Now, Bob, I just want you to work hard and smart on this case, and follow the checklist of the procedure we sent out easily now, won’t you? Admittedly, that would sound a little weird. But it is way more effective. So we’re at the top level of the mindset force multiplier. Now we get down to strategy, I wasn’t going to talk about it. But since Jim mentioned the 8020 rule, this can be a major strategic organizer of how you do things, and especially in your marketing. So I’m going to tie in a strategic force multiplier, to a tactical force multiplier, strategic force multiplier, really good leaders, really smart people that manage their practices and their businesses. And lead teams really well. All do this. They do it with an astonishing frequency and kind of a smooth list, but they do it just at one place. So at 20 to Jim’s point, you know, another good example would be we spend 80% of our time and 20% of our apartment or home, we wear 20% of our wardrobe 80% of the time, this is just like baked into the reality of the world. Somehow, Elon Musk will tell you because the world is a simulation. But we can use this because we can focus on the top 20% of the clients. What do the clients look like? Who already come to us because they like us. They’ve heard about our process. They like the way we do business. They feel that we hear them, because I’m going to show you some ways to enhance that trust and that feeling, what if we could get more of them, and what if especially we could get more of them that have the kind of work that we really enjoy doing and that our team is uniquely built to handle, our team can handle these kinds of cases better. So you’ve probably heard that before, let’s try to slice the top 20% and find out who within that are the best ones that bring us the best kind of cases and that also make referral. If we could get more of those clients, that would be fantastic. But Jim alluded to this as well. There’s the other end of the spectrum, too. There’s the 20% of the clients that come in and cause 80% of the problems. They take up 80 or 90% of your time and they actually prevent you from giving the top 20% the attention that they deserve and that they’re paying for. So what if we didn’t just use the 8020 rule one way which was to try to identify better is two ways where we used to identify the type of clients we were bringing in, that were causing all the trouble. So I’ll give you an example of this from my own practice, we used to have content that said, we help a client married or divorced with these things. And I’m gonna show you more of that there in your materials in a second. But we were putting out content that said, married or divorced, married or divorced. But we found that when divorce clients that had multiple children by multiple spouses or casual friends would come into the office, thinking that their planning was as easy quote as anybody else’s, and shouldn’t be any more expensive. And it was very difficult. It was very expensive. So we were actually using our marketing money to attract clients that not only weren’t in the top 20%, but that for a variety of reasons, were taking up a disproportionate amount of time. So we made a subtle tweak in the content that we were putting out into the advertising, where we didn’t say we didn’t spend our own time, trouble, money, currency resources, attracting some one to our practice that we weren’t built to handle, and that was less than optimal. So by working both ends of this, you can have a dramatic effect on your practice.
Speaker 4
Have you ever felt overwhelmed with everything there is to do within your legal practice? How do you keep up with your legal work while making time for growing your practice and attracting clients? do important things like deadlines and even your family fall through the cracks? This is why you should join us at the number one conference for legal entrepreneurs Max law calm, we’re going to be focused on helping practices scale and bringing calm to the order. This conference is curated in order to accelerate your implementation. Based on where you are in your legal practice, we’re going to help you identify exactly what is most important right now. When you leave Max law calm, you go home with complete clarity, focus and a plan to make 2020 to your best year ever. And not only your best year in terms of revenue, but your best year in terms of time, time back with your family, more time to do the work that is in your zone of genius, only taking the clients that you like, and more money in your pocket. It’s all at the maximum lawyer conference. Max law con is a two day event on Thursday, June 2, and Friday, June 3 In St. Charles, Missouri, seats are filling fast grab yours today at www dot max law con 2020 two.com.
Speaker 3
But this doesn’t just happen, it takes some time and some energy. So I’m going to take you through two exercises right now the first is, as my mom told me, you get what you look for. So I want to activate the reticular activating system now so that in the next half hour that we have left, and then throughout the entire rest of the conference, that you’re more likely to see the things that are going to be most useful to you. And that will help you to achieve the goals that you want. Because this conference is going to speak to a different way in every person that’s here, you each have different goals, you each have different desired outcomes, you each have different styles, what you need is not the same thing as the person next to you needs and the voice that will give you what you need is not the same voice for each of you. So you can both hear the same speaker come away with very different outstanding ideas that you’ll use in totally different ways. So this particular exercise we’re going to do right now is designed to help you to open that reticular activating system. So you’re looking for the blue berry that’s most relevant to curing your hunger. So if you would just take out a pen. And on the front of this page, there’s a thing that says you get what you look for the neuroscience of achievement. And give me three things that you’d love to have either in your practice or in your personal life as a result of being here today in this talk, or at this conference more generally. So three things you’d really like to have that would fundamentally make your life or your practice better if you get them as a result of taking the time to be here to think about work on your practice. Because we don’t have that much time, we’re just going to do one minute. So put down the three that first leap into your mind. This matter, so try to do it. Because the neuroscience is also good that taking it from a verbal internal dialogue or articulation to writing it down, has a kind of magical alchemical effect. And there are lots of reasons for that. Okay, who would be willing to share one because I often find when I’m doing this, that the audience has way better desired outcomes than I do. And then I just steal there’s so it’s a harvesting. Yes. There direction for my law firm. So tell me what you mean by that.
Speaker 3
Okay, so you’re at a natural place where this often happens. You’ve been at this for five years, and you’re at a sort of a point where you have to make some decisions. Okay, so here’s one more question for you. How would your life or your practice be better if you had more direction for your firm,
Unknown Speaker
I have more times, I’d have more time.
Speaker 5
I would like to take the path that I’m going on right now. And be more helpful for me to know where I’m going right now, I feel like I’m just trying to figure out what next steps to take. And I, I need some direction. So
Speaker 3
so. So here’s something she’s showing us, by the way, because a high level skill of great communicators is this, they become more they have greater acuity and they watch this. So she said, it would be better if I had direction. And she went like this. And she said right now all over the place. So she’s physically gesturing what’s going on in her head and the articulation of the problem. One last thing, if you had more time, how would your life be better? I’ll just repeat it again, real quick. If you had more time,
Speaker 5
more freedom more time was family, and I would just have a better sense of control. Okay, beautiful. I’m looking for so
Speaker 3
All right, beautiful. So who would like any of that, that you just talked about? Direction control more time, Freedom time with family? Sure. Okay. So I can make you a promise. You can have all of those things as a result of what you’re doing here today. And over the next few days, the reticular activating system is now for her searching for what is the speaker saying what is somebody else that I’m saying that I’m networking with? That can help me to get clarity of direction, and you’ve hit upon another really powerful strategic force multiplier, which is the best performing law firms. And the best performing businesses have that in a way that I don’t think you do. Yet, this isn’t a criticism, because it’s changing for you. And once you get it, it only lasts so long, until you need to revise it again. So everything I’m talking about is a moving target. So here’s what I mean by that. There are some exercises to give you real clarity about your purpose, your value, and your mission. And when you have clarity of those things, aligning with them becomes easy. It’s impossible until you do until you can articulate what your purpose is. Why did you form your firm? And why does it exist right now, until you can articulate the values that guide you and your firm. And until you could articulate your mission over the next few months or years exactly what it is that you’re going to do in measurable ways. You can’t possibly align with it because you don’t know what it is. So as you are here today, and over the next few days, and over the next few weeks, as you go back set aside the time to really explore what is my purpose? What is my value? What is my mission, and then we’re going to do something else here in just a second, which is this avatar exercise on the page of the materials. Because if you have clarity about purpose, value mission, and who the best avatar is, for each of the things that you offer, within your firm, you’re going to magically transform your firm, you’re going to have much clearer direction, you will naturally then get a higher level of freedom, and more time to yourself. Can I have one more?
Speaker 6
So I think what I’m one of the things I’m looking for would be practical knowledge and tactics that I can implement in my practice.
Speaker 3
Okay, so practical knowledge and tactics. Here’s the only thing that I’ll say about that is that tactics deployed without the clarity and the strategy and the mindset will be way, way less effective. I could teach you that I’ve already taught you a few that I’ve modeled up here for you, I can teach you little language patterns that will be more effective than most others. There are some that are have an almost magical effect, like don’t spill the milk versus the other. It’s because of how we biologically develop the ability to understand language. But you want to climb back up before you adopt the tactics because otherwise you might be adopting the wrong tactics.
Speaker 6
Well, and I guess that maybe I was incomplete. But that fit in with the vision and the mission thereof that I have for the firm. So it’s not not just the naked tactics, but trying to fit into the larger
Speaker 3
but let me reword your lust for tactics, though. So here’s a quick one. Also, from that book that I was mentioning to you. I call it the six word question. So I’m just going to toss this out there because you asked for tactic and I’ll give you a good one. And if you have clarity about the other things is going to be more powerful for you. Has anybody here who here has children? The rest of you who have any of you seen them? So you know what I’m talking about. So when I first started doing this, I would talk about my own kids now I talked about grandchildren. So kids, anybody here as a parent ever tried to convince a kid to do something that would be great for them. It would give them a whole new skill, it would give them an ability to do something in life they couldn’t otherwise do. You know, it’s important for them, you’re their parent, you care. And they go, Well what happens when a parent asks a kid to do something that doesn’t want to do it? What do they say? If they say what if they say I can’t? What do you say as a parent? Yes, you can. The way you are like a plant. Yes, you can. That is the most common. We’ve studied this. Yes, you can as the most common things that parents say, when they’re trying to get a child to do something that the child fears that they can’t do for one reason or another. Here’s the problem. If we look at this from an enhanced communication standpoint, yes, you can is just pure argumentation. If you want to convince somebody, and they said, x, would you say no, you’re wrong, why you would not start from that place? And if you do start from that place, just No, you’re not great at this yet. So I used to say that to yes, you can. What’s the matter with you? You dumb little? No, I never said that. Parents say yes, you can. The problem is it’s argumentation. So the kid goes inside, and they list all of the reasons that they’re right, that they can’t and you’re wrong. So you’ve actually perpetuated the problem at a pretty profound level by trying to say yes, you can. So what do you do? Well, I would do this thing where I would say, I know you feel like you can’t notice the difference. Am I argue with them? They’ll not they because they do feel that way. That’s what they just told you. I can’t and I go, I know you feel like you can’t. And then I’ll add a presupposition yet. So one I’ve agreed with them to when I add the presupposition yet what does that presuppose that they will be able to in the future? Yes. So the human brain makes them make a picture of being able to do it in the future. So I just agreed with them, but broke their model that they can’t, just in that little thing. And then here’s the six word question that builds on that. I like to use something called the Zeigarnik effect. So there’s our guyhnic effect is where you create a little bit of anticipation, followed by what it hopes a surprise. So if I was talking to a kid, I would go, where’s your mom? Because anytime a dad says, Where’s your mom? They know it’s gonna be fantastic. Especially me, because then I would say, Where’s your mom? What typically followed was super dangerous. So So I would look around, okay, where’s your mom? What would they do Lean In or become disinterested, right? They would lean in, they would look around because they would go, this is going to be good. So they’ve triggered their own super attention to what I’m about to say. And then I would ask this question, I’d say, I know you feel like you can’t, yet. But I’m just curious. So when you say I’m just curious, or I’m just wondering, you’re taking away all judgment, you’ve changed the way that this is going to be perceived? And I’d say I’m just curious, what would happen if you did? Or what would happen if you could? Now this makes them full on do what we triggered earlier and imagine themselves being able to, especially teenagers won’t give you the generally the satisfaction of saying like, Oh, well, then I’d be able to do this, this and this, but that’s what’s happening in their brains. And often, little kids, will they go like, Well, I would have fun and this would happen. And that would happen. Because you’ve given them the ability to imagine themselves having the skill that they’re afraid they did not a very cool tactic. I’ll give you one more, we’re getting into the tactical stuff. So a lot of therapists call these embedded commands, I prefer to think of them as embedded suggestions, because a command implies that you’re going to tell somebody to do it, they’re going to follow you, but there is this element of human choice. But let me give you a good example. When I finish up a trust and estates planning conference, I will often say to the client, is there any other question you need to ask me now in order to feel completely sure and certain that we accomplished everything you wanted to? So I’m gonna break that down for you? Because by the way, how cool would it be if clients left your office feeling that they had accomplished everything that they wanted to at least for that meeting? So I said, Is there any other question? How many questions do I want? How do you know? Because I’m making a gesture? Did anybody see it the first time I did it? Is there any other question? And I use the singular? Is there any other question you need to? And then I tilted my head, I said, asked me now, I bracketed asked me now I tilted my head, and I changed my tone of voice. Is there any other question you need to ask me now, in order to feel completely sure and certain that we accomplished everything you wanted to today? It’s an embedded suggestion. But what is it a suggestion about? Is there any real question you need to ask me now ask me the question now? Don’t think of it on the ride home that’s not that effective for you or for me? And then what is the way I frame this? Is there any other question you need to ask me now in order to feel completely sure and certain? So I’m asking them to search for a question, which if they asked, it would make them feel completely short and certain. So they do what’s called a trans derivational search. When I asked them that question, they go like this, only get two answers. No, no, that’s good. That means they don’t have any questions that are profound and that they need to ask. They already feel that way. They already feel sure and certain that they accomplished everything they wanted to that day, or here’s the second type of answer. Yes, yes, there is, what about my son Johnny? I named as executor. He’s addicted to heroin. Is that bad?
Speaker 3
Yes, it is, we need another conference. So two really, really good tactical tools to use in force multiplication. Now, all of these things have been leading up to you getting better with your marketing your leadership your persuasiveness. Before we do this avatar exercise, go back to my elegantly hand drawn diagram on the back. What I’m charting is positive, intentional change, on the up access across time. Here’s the thing, if you look at that first line, that’s going way up faster. That’s where people take the tools they’re learning here and apply them that means that they’ve created the time to come back from this conference. And then to test and apply these tools. Now notice what that line does, it goes up steeply, then it levels off a little bit, it drops off, performance drops off, and then they catch it and it soars. Again, here’s the thing that you need to know is that you’ve got to create the time to test the tools. And you have to create a mechanism or an ability to observe the effect they’re having, so that you catch it when they’re dropping off. If you look at these other lines, down below that, you’ll see that the drop offs are more massive look at the one at the bottom. This is somebody who doesn’t go to conferences, or if they do go to conferences, they feel like that’s the same as doing something about their practice, that bottom line just hovers along the bottom. But also think about these changes you’re making like the time value of money. If you make massive positive changes sooner, and you’re able to catch when they drop off or stop working faster, you don’t drop down as far and you make more changes, you get up if you look at that top line combined, compared to the bottom line, that practice enjoys the benefit of all of these things for a much longer period of time, and the benefits compound and compound and compound and compound. So that should make you fairly interested in going back and deploying these things sooner rather than later. Because not every one of the things you’re going to do is going to work. And some of the ones that you do employ will stop working, and you got to catch it sooner when they stop working. It’s just the nature of the beast. So let’s do this avatar exercise. Now I know that there’s lots of marketing geniuses in the room. But I want to help you to have a tool when you go back. So you’re going to do this superficially right now. But then when you go back, I want you to really work this. So this is a process that I’ve sort of developed through time I keep adding things to it. It’s I help, this is who you help. And you want to do this for each product or set of services or bundle that you offer. So in my case, I have trusted Estate Services, we do planning, I have estate administration services or an executive represent executors, trustees and banks and Elder Law, the avatar for each of those is not the same, even within the trust and estates representation, we’re representing some civilian executors or representing some banks and trust companies. So they’re two separate avatars are the type of person or entity that we want to work with there. So in mine, who I help I help people 55 to 67. So this is who I’m appealing to bring into the planning process, who live within eight miles of one of my offices, and who have a net worth at or above $5 million in this particular way that we calculated, and who are married or widowed with children or grandchildren, and who wants to protect their heirs from losing their inheritance to a marriage followed by a divorce of one of their heirs. Why why do I have all that in there? Because that gives me so much clarity of who I’m looking for that when I’m writing content, I’m asking myself, is this content going to appeal to that person? When we’re doing advertising? We’re asking, Does the content of this ad do the images of this ad appeal to that person? Are we putting it in the right place? Like I could go to the King of Prussia Mall and hunt for alligators all day, I’ll never get one. But if I go to the right retention basin in a development in Tampa, I’m gonna be able to get alligators all day long. So having clarity about who it is that we’re helping, magically transforms everything else you do, because you could do this test is this thing I’m about to do in alignment with getting this kind of person. Next, I help them to what is it that you’re helping to do? So we help them to create an estate plan that helps them to build and protect their legacy for their heirs. So okay, there’s more detail to mind. But the more clarity I have about that, and how do we know this? This is reverse engineered from who our best clients are. We’ll do our best clients tell us Oh yeah, I want to protect my children and grandchildren, will they spend more for estate planning that does intergenerational planning than they will for a simple will? Yes, they will. So I’ve fleshed all of this out by this is the process that you use? How is it that you help them to achieve their goal as they articulated, not you, let me be clear, this is your understanding of how they articulate it, but it’s how they articulate it. And then we have even if these are all the objections, so in mind, the objections are, oh, I’ve gone to attorneys before they weren’t able to understand what I want, I wasn’t able to understand the solutions they were offering me, it was too expensive, I don’t have the time to fill out a 32 page questionnaire, which is what we have. So here, you want to flesh out all the objections, not just that you think they may have, but that they’ve told you they have. Why? Because you need to be able to answer those objections in the content that you write in the videos that you post in the advertising that you place in the appropriate spots. If you couple that with this diagram on the next page, you’re going to become extremely powerful. So once you have in mind who that person is, if you have clarity about who this person is from the exercise before, then you could go back and say, Okay, what is this person thinking and feeling? What’s going on in their day to day life? What are they hearing from the wall? Like in my case, what are they hearing from the Wall Street Journal, or Barron’s? Or the places that they get their information? What are their gains? Or pains I articulate that in my version of it is what are their aspirations? And what are the fears and anxieties? If you know and understand at a profound and deep level, what the fears and anxieties are of your very best client avatar for each of these products, services, bundles of things that you’re providing, you are going to produce much different content that’s much more effective. And then what is it that they’re seeing in their lives? So if we take the time to do that, while you’re here in a profound and deep level, you’re gonna say, Okay, I just spent more time on that than I ever have before. It’s probably right. But what you want to do then is involve your team in it because they’re going to have insights. So the person that answers my phone is one of the most important team members when we get together periodically to do this, because they are hearing exactly what’s being said in real time right now, not what we based our advertising and marketing on when were the last time we did this six months ago. So this brings us to the last really powerful strategy, which is the OODA Loop. Anybody here ever hear of the OODA loop? Okay, so we’re gonna start at the start. Colonel Boyd was a fighter pilot instructor, and he was teaching American fighter pilots to fight a superior at that time superior MIG jet during the Korean War era. And what Colonel Boyd determined was that there was this four step process which if you could execute it continuously and faster than the MiG pilot, even though the MiG pilot had a better aircraft, you could consistently defeat them. It’s observe, orient, decide act. I’m going to grossly simplify this for this purpose, but observe is what’s going on in the battlespace, orient, what are the most important things we have to take into consideration, come up with a plan, decide to implement that plan, take action on that plan. And then it’s called the OODA loop because you go back and do it again. So most people never come to a conference like this. Of the ones that come to the conference like this. Many of them don’t act of the ones that act, many of them don’t act in alignment with the clarity they have of the purpose value mission. So there’s a lot more friction, and there’s more likely to be failure, either of leadership and or of marketing of the few that do act, most of them just leave the stuff out there and never go back to look to see did that work, or we just rely anecdotally on the thought that it did, deploying the OODA loop and using it periodically, whether that’s a quarterly staff meetings monthly, or even just annually when you do a SWOT analysis is a magical transformational tool, because what you’re going to do is you’re going to go back and say did the thing I do work? And if it did work, did it work in the way that I thought it would? And if it didn’t work optimally, we’re gonna go back and redo it. Does that make sense? Or we’re going to eliminate it if the thing like I was telling you about advertising and content that we put out that brought in these blended families that were very hard to plan for? They were very different from the other stuff we were doing. They therefore weren’t in the like, sweet spot of expertise of my team. So they took longer so the margins were lower. So we made a tweak. And we went back and eliminated the content and the language that was really appealing. I mean, we were to blame for that. We were not completely I mean, sometimes people come in with unrealistic expectations. But we were really to blame for the fact that we struggled with this in the practice. So we were able thanks to the OODA loop to go back, catch the problem. Don’t fix it and optimize it. Does that make sense everybody? So the different OODA Loop timeframes. So if you’re doing something with an email or digital advertising, you’re going to want to loop back in and check and see what just happened faster and sooner than you would if you’re going to run a direct mail campaign. Or you want to see the effects of a newsletter where you have to build readership. So they’re going to be different, and you need to be aware of that. But the more of this, you could do in alignment with clarity of purpose, value mission and who the avatar is. And the more of this you could do with the enhanced kind of communication skills that we’ve been talking about today, the more powerful it’s going to be. Now, one final one, I said, I promised you a tactic that if you used it would help to build that trust bond, more likely encourage referrals sooner and faster. And so I’ll end with this one. And then I’ll say thank you to the organizers of this fantastic event. And to you guys for having me here and letting me be able to share there are some additional materials that build on this. Those are just more things that you guys can use to build on this. But this was a really simple one. I’ll tell you a story. So I built a lot into the stories by the way, how who remembers what year it was? Because that was an hour ago, almost. When I was in my Well, what was I wearing in the store? The store? Six years old and red fruit 3d Pajamas? Yeah, that was 50 minutes ago. Who was Does anybody remember the name of the doctor? Frank Houston. Yeah. What was unique about Frank invitation and he had a gravelly voice. Yeah. So you guys remember amazing detail from story. So remember that. So I went to a doctor recently, pre COVID. So that just shows you by sense of what recent is. The doctor says. Okay, so tell me a little bit about why you’re here. So I tell him, but what I’m telling him is the pre rehearsed version slash story of what I expected to tell him. And he did something that was really magical. And you should do it too, all the time. He said, Ah, yeah, that sounds that sounds right. That makes all makes sense to me. What else does it it just sits there. So that’s like, I listen, I do this for a living. So I was like, huh, I like what he’s doing. But I can’t resist. I’m like every other human being, I gotta fill in the gaps. So I do I tell him more stuff. And then when I tell him more stuff about while I’m there, by the way, I’m starting to realize some of the stuff for the first time consciously myself. He goes, Ah, and dammit. He’s running my own game on me. But I tell him more. And he goes, yep, anything else? So he went through for him. He goes through four iterations of why I was there, where I’m going deeper all the time. Now, do I like that guy better than I like my other doctor? I do. Did he have much more information about me? He did. Is he more or less likely to help me to be able to achieve the health goal? I’m therefore he is. So number of takeaways from today. But remember, go deeper. And remember that the things they’re saying to you don’t always mean exactly the same thing that you think it does. Sometimes it’s important to go deeper on meaning. Like when you say that exactly what do you mean? So thank you again. You guys have been awesome. I hope this helped. Take it do great stuff with it. Have a safe trip home. Take care.
Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.
