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But if you want to increase your success every day, every week, every year, you want to just continually improve and increase your success and make yourself more valuable. And get yourself to the point where you could be dropped out of a plane with a suit of clothes in any city and immediately start making money; they go like this.

1. Your language. Unfortunately, we’re seeing that more and more people are illiterate and we’re just not paying attention to how important it is to learn your language. And our language being the English language, the one we’re using right now, is a very subtle language and it’s a very powerful language. And the more you learn your language, the better you become at using it to persuade and connect with people. So you’ve got to learn your language. And I think it’s important to study the history of your language, study entomology , where words come from.

When you hear a word you don’t know, I write words down if I hear something I don’t know or a word I’d like to learn or something new is coming up, and then I go and learn about it, and study it, and see where it came from and try to incorporate it into my vocabulary. And that’s not so that you can have a huge vocabulary that makes you sound important, it’s just so that you can think better and connect with other people better. Second thing is communication. Now language is part of communication, but there’s a much bigger piece of communication than language, which is the non-verbal communication that happens between people.

2. Most persuasion, most bonding, most connection happens on channels other than the words. So you’ve heard the old estimates that over 90% of your communication is your voice tone and your body language. Communication is so important. And what’s amazing is most people are just unconscious. They’re not paying any attention to it. They’re not learning how to communicate with and connect with other people better. So learn about body language, learn about non-verbal communication, learn about how to connect with people and build rapport.

3. The third thing is marketing. Marketing is everything from advertising to writing compelling sales letters to doing PR and all this other stuff that we talked about, but you want to study and learn marketing because marketing is really the art of selling long distance. Sending a letter to someone’s house instead of sending yourself. And what you learn when you learn marketing, and I recommend that people start with direct response marketing, you learn that you need to communicate your entire message. And you learn that the person who is hearing the message doesn’t know you. They don’t care about you; they are busy doing their own thing, and you only get one shot; and you need to communicate your entire message, you need to tell your whole story. And the better you get at communicating the whole story, telling your story, telling how you did something, how you came about it, how you learned all Lessons of all the benefits, all the stuff you’ve discovered. The process of putting this information or this product or this service together, and more people become interested. The more they buy in with their hearts and the more they want to become part of the dream and become part of you, in a way. So marketing, he’s got to learn marketing.

4. The four thing is sales. And this is the one where everyone goes, I don’t want to me a salesperson. One of the things that we do in our business is we take experts and we teach them how to package their information up into products, like eBooks and other information products, and sell them. Well, when I start talking to these experts, almost universally, they say things like: I’ve got all the content, I just need to find someone who can market and sell it for me. And when I say to them, well you know what would probably be good for you is to actually learn some marketing and sales, they say, I don’t want to learn — I’m not a salesman. They kind of look down at sales people like it’s some lower form of human business scum or something like that. You imagine you have to put on a funk suit and like a windbreak like a car salesman or a similar product , and we never want to do that. The best selling methods are consultative selling where you don’t sit down and try to talk someone into buying. You sit down and you say, let me ask you some questions.

Let me learn about you and find out what all your problems are, and let me see if what I have is even going to fit. Then, once you’ve found out where they are, what their problems are, what all the challenges they facing are and what they’d like to accomplish, then you sell solutions. Then, fixing their problems, you sell them getting what they want, not you thing.

And the best of the best of the best sales people are the ones that walk in and sit down and ask a bunch questions and then say, my product can’t help you, let me refer you to someone who can, because those are people that win the trust when they say, this is the thing that will solve your problem to prospects . That’s the thing they need, because they are trustworthy.

So, learning consultative selling and really learning how to sell like a professional is very important.

5. Then the final thing is public speaking. That’s the one where people really cringe, because public speaking triggers a fear inside of humans that is literally worse than death. We wear public speaking worse than death on average. I’ve asked myself why that is for years, and I don’t know if this is the reason, but this is what I’ve come up with: They’ve discovered that rejection by another human being triggers a part of the brain, it triggers a pain center that’s the same pain center that physical pain triggers.

Rejection by a person actually hurts the way physical pain hurts, like getting cut by a knife or poked by a pin. We can all kind of identify with that. At a gut level, you can go, aww yeah! Yeah, wow, that does kind of feel that way. So, what does public speaking represent? The idea of potentially getting in front of a hundred or a thousand people who will all reject you. So, imagine having hundreds of knives stabbed into your body. It’s like sticking a cattle prod into the pain center of the brain.

So, I think that like evolutionarily speaking, if you get rejected by the group, you could die. There’s some part of us that knows that we got to hang with the group or else we’re going to be out on our own, and who knows what’s going to get us out in the wild. So, we don’t want to be rejected.

So, when it comes to public speaking, all of our fears come up. We have to face like our deaths, like that moment of destiny in life — gasp — can I do it? The good news is you can learn it. You can learn it for nothing, or for very little by finding a local networking group or a toastmasters group and getting up once a week and going there and sitting around a table with some people and standing up and doing your little three minute talk, and then doing it again and doing it again.

The first time you do it, you’ll be nervous. The third you do it, you’ll be nervous. The 10th time you do it, you’ll go, hey wait a minute, and then you’ll start reading a little book about doing better public speaking and presentations and you’ll start incorporating it and you’ll get a little coaching, and then maybe you’ll volunteer to speak at a local group. You’ll put up some fliers and do some free seminars.

I’ve done all of these exact things and you’ll invite a bunch of business people together and say, I’m going to do a networking group and I’m going to have 10 people over, and we’re just going to have some little hors d’oeuvres. I’m going to go to Subway and buy $25 worth of sandwiches and I’m going to do a 15-minute presentation and teach you something I’ve learned about business. Whatever you have to do, develop and enhance and increase your public speaking skills.

If you can learn those five skills and then develop them a little bit more over time, they will set you free. They’ll make you so you will always have something to do, you’ll always be in demand. You’ll always be able to create value, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you are an expert and that you’re very successful, and they’re things you develop continually over time.