How the World Sees You

Sally Hogshead

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062230706
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Compétences commerciales

Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself.

Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early 20s, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Over the course of her ad career, Sally won hundreds of awards for creativity, copywriting, and branding, and was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters right from start of career, including almost every major international advertising award.

She frequently appears in national media including NBC's Today Show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry's highest award for professional excellence. Her advertising work hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The science of fascination is based on Hogshead's decade of research with 250, 000 participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives.

{PART I}

HOW DOES THE WORLD SEE YOU?

CHAPTER {1}

WHY DISCOVER YOUR HIGHEST DISTINCT VALUE

Let’s say you think you’re funny. As far as you’re concerned, a sense of humor is one of your best traits. There’s just one problem: Nobody else thinks you’re funny.

This is indeed a problem. Humor is a two-sided exchange. It’s a feedback loop between you as the joke teller, and your audience. Humor doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not enough to only consider how you see yourself. You must also consider how the world sees you. If nobody else thinks you’re funny . . . ​well, you’re probably not funny.

Humor is in the eye of the beholder. So are likability, leadership, and a range of other subjective qualities that are rooted in the perception of others. You get a vote, but your listener has veto power.

For example, you might see yourself as lovable, but if the world sees you as a coldhearted curmudgeon, there’s a disconnect. You might think that you’re respected or independent or practical, but if nobody agrees, you’re out of luck. You might see yourself as good with kids, but if small children cry and run to the other side of the street at the very sight of you, there’s a disconnect (as well as a serious impediment to any career aspirations you might have of becoming a birthday party clown).

By looking at yourself from the outside in, and systematically measuring the effect you have on your listener, you can improve results. Whether you’re a comedian or a kindergarten teacher or a crisis negotiator, you can become more successful by understanding how the world sees you and hears you and responds to you.

HOW DOES THE WORLD SEE YOU?

You might never have considered this question before. It might feel unfamiliar. It might make you feel awkward or self-conscious or vain, like you’re staring at your reflection for too long in the mirror.

Yet if you ignore this perspective, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. If you want your messages to be heard and remembered, if you want to share big ideas and important opinions, you need a full and accurate picture about how you’re actually communicating—and how others perceive your communication.

In the modern work world (unless you find yourself alone and shipwrecked on a desert island, where physical survival is your chief and only concern) you do need to know how to communicate and connect. If nobody hears or remembers your message, it failed.

Forbes magazine reported research findings that indicate that 85% of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15% is due to technical knowledge.

We live in a social environment, one that’s about as far as you can get from an isolated desert island. Our survival depends upon our ability to build bridges between ourselves and others. Most of us interact all day long with others, whether in person or online. We have to convince and cajole. For the 99% of life that is not a desert island, you’ll want to find out how the world sees you.

HOW YOU SEE YOURSELF

You already have a good sense of how you see yourself. Yet if you only measure your personality from this perspective, you’re missing a crucial piece of information about yourself. And that missing piece is this:

How does the world see you?

How do others respond to you? Do they pay attention to what you say, or do they ignore you? Do they seek your opinion, or do they consider your ideas irrelevant? Do your words prompt clear action?

To understand what’s at stake here, let’s turn to the world of marketing.

Imagine you’re writing a blog post intended to get donations for a nonprofit. You spend weeks researching and polishing this blog post on fund-raising. Your post is articulate. It’s insightful. It has the potential to change the model of nonprofit fund-raising. You want people to read it, share it, comment on it, apply your insights, and feature your post on other blogs or even major media. Above all, you want donors.

In a perfect world, this post deserves to be read. But if nobody reads the post because they’re distracted by YouTube videos about cute kittens and the inexplicable trend of bacon products,* then your post will never fulfill its purpose. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your post is if it just gets lost. Writing a world-changing blog post means nothing if nobody reads it.

Even the most worthy messages are often forgotten and ignored. If you fail to fascinate your audience, your message withers. This can be disheartening. If you write a children’s book that nobody reads, or send a proposal that gathers dust in an email inbox, your message dies cold and alone without ever having achieved its purpose.

No matter how you’re communicating, whether you’re writing for your website or marketing for a politician, you face the same challenge. Blog posts have “readers” and politicians have “voters,” but ultimately they are both an audience that needs to be convinced of the value of your message. (When I say “audience,” I’m using it as a catchall term to include readers and voters, as well as employees and consumers and clients and boards of directors and shareholders and family and the media and everyone else with whom you must communicate in order to succeed in a goal.)

THE BATTLE FOR ATTENTION

Say you’re running for political office, and spend several sweaty days posting signs all over town. You want people to notice and remember your signs, hoping it will sway their vote your way on election day. But it’s not enough to just create the message and put it out there. That’s wasted energy if you don’t generate a result from others. You don’t live in a vacuum.

A political campaign doesn’t live in a vacuum, and neither do you. You’ll succeed by communicating, connecting, and convincing.

You aren’t funny if nobody else thinks you’re funny. And you aren’t communicating if nobody is listening.

Who do you need to fascinate? Over the course of a day, you might want shoppers to buy, your local community to get involved, your students to learn, your start-up to grow, your forgetful spouse to put the cap back on the toothpaste. You want your messages to connect, or to educate, or to inform, or to inspire.

No matter what your message is about, each one of your messages has an intended purpose. Each time you communicate, you want people to listen and remember that message, and to positively anticipate your future messages. You want them to take action, change a behavior, or be inspired.

WHAT THE VIOLIN PLAYER LEARNED

In certain situations, your personality is more likely to earn attention. In these situations, you are more likely to be noticed, heard, and respected. Yet if you don’t realize which situations play to your Advantages, you will be underestimated or even ignored.

In a recent experiment, one the most famously exquisite violinists of our time, Joshua Bell, played in Washington, D.C. Yet unlike his standard concert hall performance with a thousand-dollar-per-minute fee, for this performance he was rewarded with pennies.

Joshua Bell played down in the subway, anonymously and without fanfare, drawing attention to his music only with his skill and priceless violin. “No one knew it,” says Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten, “but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.” Yet a thousand people moved right past him through rush hour, oblivious. In addition to not earning a standing ovation, Bell also did not earn his $45,000 fee for this performance. Instead he earned $32.12, or roughly .07% as much.

If one of the most celebrated musicians of all time cannot compete to earn attention in a distracted, competitive environment, how can you?

Today it’s not enough to be the world’s best if no one realizes you’re there. Unnoticed communication cannot make a difference. In the battle against competition, our talents and skills are hopelessly lost unless we find a way to fascinate our listener. The world doesn’t need another violinist. Or another job applicant. Or another lawyer advertising on TV. It’s your job to show us why we should care.

Luckily, you already have the defining traits you need to stand out and be heard. Which is good, because you’ll need to call upon every one of them.

You’re doing battle in a distracted and competitive world.

Get ready to encounter the three deadly threats.

MEET YOUR ARCHENEMIES

Distraction threatens your connection with others.

Competition threatens your ability to stand out and win.

Commoditization threatens your relationships and loyalty.

Dark forces lurk in your environment, waiting to defeat your communication. They poison your results. They suck your marketing dollars right out of your company. They kill your best ideas before those ideas have even had a chance to breathe. Each threat is a formidable adversary. The first one stands in the way of you even beginning the conversation: distraction.

THE THREAT OF DISTRACTION

Distraction is a jealous seductress. It refuses to share your listener’s attention. It whispers, “Pay attention to this shiny object.” Distraction lures people away from you and your message by tempting them with a Facebook notification or a text from a friend. Distraction prevents you from earning the attention of your prospective clients.

It’s true. Your listeners are distracted. Your customer goes from vendor to vendor. Your co-worker goes from email to email. Your employees go from putting out one fire to the next. People are so distracted by voicemails and emails and tweets and retweets that each one of your messages has a lower likelihood of actually breaking through and connecting.

How do our brains respond to all this distraction? We may think more quickly in this age of media assault, but we also become distracted more easily. One of my favorite quotes on the subject is from BBC News: “The addictive nature of Web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds—the same as a goldfish.”

Nine seconds? Like a goldfish? Yikes. That’s all we might get before people’s brains make a decision to either stay focused or relocate to a new topic.

Every time you introduce yourself, you have about nine seconds to engage your listener. This is your window of opportunity for connection. If you earn their interest during those nine seconds, people will be more likely to engage further. If you fail to add some sort of value in that golden window, they’re less likely to listen to what you say, let alone remember it or take action on it.

This can be frustrating, especially if you are trying to lead a meeting or make a point or have a real conversation. In such a crowded and noisy world, you have ridiculously little time to introduce yourself, let alone make a strong first impression.*

Now you need to “front-load” your value. Cut to the chase. Get to the point. Make it short and sweet. The pressure is on.

It’s almost as if people have developed collective ADD, swimming like a goldfish from one message to another, jumping from one email to the next. And what does this constant distraction really look like? Let’s take a look inside your brain, and see what goes on when you feel stressed by distraction.

HOW DISTRACTION RUINS FLOW

Imagine you and your team have been working hard on a great project for a client. The deadline is getting close, but you’ve got it under control. Your brain doesn’t have to work as hard to concentrate. You feel focused and energized, primed to operate at peak performance.

But then, distraction enters the picture.

Suddenly you get an email from your client. The deadline changed. Now your work is due tomorrow. Bam! Instantly, your brain goes from cruising along in fifth gear to careening all over the place. Emails and calls start flooding in from your team, with everyone going into panic mode. Including you. Your brain was cruising along in fifth gear, and now it slams into a grinding crisis mode.

On an MRI scan, a fascinated brain is in a state of relaxed focus. On the other hand, a distracted brain lights up in an unpleasant state of crisis and confusion. As you kick into high gear, you burn more glucose and oxygen. Your brain is only about 2% of your weight, but even under normal conditions, it consumes about 20% of your energy. When stress kicks in, your brain consumes even more oxygen to cope. Blood flow can increase up to 400% as your entire body heightens its response to increased demands.

If your listener becomes distracted while you communicate, they are more likely to feel confusion or doubt about your message. If you’re not communicating clearly, you’re less likely to add value.

You might even damage their perception of you, thereby disincentivizing them from connecting with yo...