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Areas of Impact – Audio

Hi this is A.J. Welcome to this month’s VIP lesson our topic is Areas of Impact.

How do you achieve greater influence and success in your life? What is that? We all these ideas influence and success and for some people it means, you know ,something physical– big houses, cars all that stuff or maybe it’s traveling around the world or maybe it’s money or maybe it’s lots of girlfriends and boyfriends whatever. But, that’s not what we’re talking about.

I define influence as affecting other people very simply affecting other people. And so, there’s a very simple formula for measuring your influence.

The first part is the number of people you affect. The second part is how deeply you affect them.

So, quit simply the more people you affect and the more powerfully you affect them equals your influence, your level of influence and typically your level of success in your career or in whatever area of life you’re focused on.

The reason this is important is that we only can do so much by ourselves. Alone you can accomplish a certain amount of work, you can accomplish a certain amount of change in the world, but there’s a very clear hard limit to what you personally can do, no matter how good you are. And to create bigger change requires other people and to get other people to help you requires influence. So, how do we do it how do we influence other people? How do we build our own influence so that we affect more people in a positive way and affect them more deeply there both important?

We all have strengths. We have areas in our life that were passionate about, that we are excellent in, that were intensely interested in. These are our natural power centers. They’re the areas of life were we naturally and most easily can have the maximum amount of influence. There are other areas of life that for whatever reason we’re just not as excited about, we’re not as passionate about, that we struggle in more and those areas of life are typically much, much, much more difficult to develop influence in. Let me give you an example from my own life.

Way back many years ago when I wanted to learn public speaking I took the Dale Carnegie speaking course. I have mentioned this many times, it’s a fantastic course go take it if you would like to improve your public speaking. At that time I was terrible and terrified of speaking publicly, and I still remember in the beginning that they had us come up and give speeches. The first few speeches I was shaking. My hands would shake. My voice would get really bad because my neck was tight and I’d tense up and then I knew that I sounded strange, and I knew that my hands were shaking and that made me even more terrified.

I thought I’ll never do this; this is horrible I’ll never be good at this. But the instructor was fantastic and the instructor identified just one thing that he liked about my speaking or he thought was my strength which was enthusiasm. I was really excited about what I was talking about and despite all my nervousness and fear and horrible speaking and tension in my throat all of, despite all of that somehow my enthusiasm and excitement came through. He gave me great advice. He said A.J. I don’t want you to think about anything else. Don’t think about your hands. Don’t think about your technique. Don’t worry to much about the actual words your saying, just focus on your enthusiasm that’s a natural strength of yours, so I just want to see that energy.

So, each week when I gave a speech that’s what I focused on, just being energetic and truthfully I was kind of crazy eventually. By the end I would run around and jump and scream and it was not the normal kind of advice you would get in a public speaking course, it’s not the normal technique that most people learn in a public speaking course, but it worked for me. And over time, you know, I continued developing my enthusiasm and my energy.

As I did that I became better and better and better as a public speaker. I began to enjoy it more and that helped me improve even more and because I was enjoying it and I improving I did it more often and then my audiences got bigger and bigger and bigger. It all just seemed to grow naturally and now when I give a speech to really large group I’m not nervous I’m excited. And when I’m in the middle of it I’m having a great time its fun for me and I’m more affective. I’m influencing more and more and more people, because I focused on that key area of influence, that key area of strength, which for me was enthusiasm.

This was an important lesson for me in my life. It showed me that the way to influence people and to develop my own ability to influence was to focus on my strengths. To focus my time and energy on my areas of impact, the few areas in my life that I just seemed naturally to be good at. And that if I focused on those areas and made them even better that I could make much more progress, affect many more people then if I constantly worried about what I was not good at.

This is the same for you it’s the same exact lesson. I think in school mostly, we get this idea that we should focus on our weaknesses, focus on what’s wrong and that we have to develop all the things that we’re not good at and if we do all that then we’ll be successful. We think that’s the secret of success eliminating our weaknesses but it’s not, because focusing on your weaknesses just uses so much time and energy and it’s in many cases fighting a losing battle.

All that energy can be better focused on your strengths, so don’t waste time on your weaknesses. Time is best spent on your strengths or what we’ll call areas of impact or areas of influence. They the few areas in your life where you can really make a big difference.

Let’s talk about the steps. How can you do this? Step number one is to identify your major areas of impact or influence in your life. What do you just naturally seem to be good at or passionate about or interested in? Physically, what are your areas of influence or impact? What kinds of physical activity do you naturally seem to do well? You know some people are built more like endurance athletes so they’re runners. They’re great for doing long hikes that kind of activity.

And if you were focused on getting healthy or healthier or more fit than you need to know this. Other people are built with more muscle and they benefit more and enjoy more and are more passionate about lifting weights and doing that kind of physical activity. So we all have physical abilities you just have to identify and find the areas that you naturally seem to do well. I found this in myself. I lift weights sometimes to try and just stay in shape and more fit, but I’m never gonna be really muscular, no matter how hard I try I can’t really built a lot of muscle. I’m more of a runner and that’s fine. So I know that about myself and when I really want to focus on getting healthier and more fit then I focus on those kinds of activities… running, long hikes that kind of thing.

You need to know that about yourself. What is it you do well physically? Professionally this is vital in your job or career you must identify this. This is probably the key thing that will distinguish you in your career that will help you gain the maximum amount of success whatever that means to you. So, you have to find the skills and also just the emotions that you do best and develop those within your job or career.

Again, I’ll use myself as an example the way I went from just being a super poor English teacher to being a more successful English teacher and having a better career was by developing my enthusiasm and my energy that was the first thing I focused on I focused on that tremendously not only with public speaking but in my teaching.

Eventually I was almost kind of crazy as a teacher, but when I was teaching in schools and I would jump and shout and do all these story lessons. I just focused on being more and more and more energetic because it was already something I did well, and that made me quite different as a teacher and eventually led to greater and greater success. Your great strength or area of impact might not be energy it might not be enthusiasm it might be something else. Maybe you’re extremely logical and rational. Maybe you’re great with numbers whatever it is you’ve got to find it and focus on that.

Finally, in your personal life, what are the things in your personal life that you’re most passionate about, that you’re most skilled at and seem to have a natural ability for? All of these things because what happens is that when you do this your going with your own nature instead of fighting against it. That’s kind of the trick of it all, is that when you focus too much on your weaknesses and obsess about what you’re not good at and then you’re constantly trying to work on making your weaknesses better. You’re kind of fighting against nature, so it’s like trying to row a boat up against the river going up stream. Some work on your weaknesses can be beneficial, but if you focus on that too much it’s like you’re constantly fighting, fighting, fighting against your own nature.

For example, if I had fought against my enthusiasm and energy. If I was always trying to focus on using the exact, perfect way of phrasing things and to come across as constantly very authoritative and strong. If I worked on that all the time I would of probable improved as a public speaker, but never have gotten as good as I got by focusing on my strengths. The same is true for you. The other thing about this is that when you focus on your area of impact or areas of impact you gain confidence faster. This is probably the best benefit of all. When you obsess about your weaknesses too much your confidence goes down, because you’re constantly telling yourself oh I’m not good at this, I’m no good at this. I’m not that good. When will I ever be good enough? That has a deep psychological affect on you. It can erode your confidence not only in that one area, but in many areas of life.

On the other hand when you focused on the areas that you’re most passionate about, that you’re already fairly good at you seem to have a natural inclination for, than your confidence grows quit quickly and growing confidence can spill over into many areas of your life. This is one of the reasons why, by focusing on areas of influence, on your strengths, that you can actually gain more success in all parts of your life.

Finally, once you identify these areas of influence, the areas that you can be really good at and you start developing that skill and you develop that by practicing and practicing and focusing on that strength that area of passion and making it even better, even better, even better constantly training and working in this area. Find mentors, find teachers, find role models in this area of influence that you’re strong at already and make it even better. Develop yourself to a very high level of excellence in that area or areas.

As you develop that, the final step to really gain influence is to go public because it’s one thing to be very strong at something to be very good at it, but it’s quite another thing then to influence other people with that. To do that you must go public you must publicly show this excellence. You must publicly share it and that’s how you influence other people. How do you do that? Well, a very simple first step blog. Blog about it.

This is how Effortless English started, it started as a blog. I was just an English teacher trying different techniques, new techniques in my classes and I started a blog. All I did was every few days I would write a little article, a little post about what I tried in my class that day and what worked and what didn’t work. I talked about my ideas about English teaching. I talked about the frustrations of my students and the successes of my students and just by sharing my ideas, my experiences I began to attract readers.

I thought I was writing for teachers it turned out that it was mostly students reading my blog and so that helped me identify another area of influence, who my audience really was. As that developed and as I communicated with my audience, my influence grew and grew and grew. Another step which I took and which you should take is to speak about your topic about your area of influence.

You could develop a YouTube channel. You could develop a podcast whatever, but just talk about your topic. Public speaking is a great way to do this. One of the reasons public speaking is so important is that it magnifies your influence. If you talk to one person in a conversation you’re influencing one person. If you talk to an audience of 100 people it’s a much bigger impact, you’re now influencing 100 people instead of just one. Of course the same is true with video or something like that with media. The reason these things are powerful is that it expands and multiplies your influence.

And then finally, develop leadership within your area, where you specifically give advice, where you specifically lead people to excellence, you help other people develop this area as well. If public speaking is your thing than teach people to speak better. Show them how to speak better. Become a leader in the area of public speaking. If fitness is your thing than again blog about fitness, speak about fitness and eventually coach people and help them become more fit.

This is the key to greater influence and success in your career and your life. Don’t get so worried about what you’re not good at, focus on what your great at and make it even better, and then share it with other people. Very simple. We’ll talk about some specific techniques in the commentary about how you can do this more affectivity.

See you then Bye- bye.