The Power of Metaphors: Why Stories Stick When Facts Don’t
You’ve explained the compensation plan four times this month to four different people, complete with the numbers, the payout structure, and the growth curve. Every one of them nodded along and did nothing. Then you told somebody about the time you nearly froze up from fear on top of a zipline platform, and a week later they brought it up on a call and joined your team the same day.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s how the brain is built. As someone trying to build something with your own voice instead of just a slide deck, you already sense that the facts aren’t the problem. The problem is that facts don’t stick, and stories do. Dave Wood built an entire training session around this exact gap at the Classic Costa Rica Intensive, using the group’s own zipline trip earlier that day as the raw material.
Why do people forget your facts but remember your story?
Here’s the blunt version of the lesson: most of what you teach somebody, they will not remember. They might have notes on it. It might sit somewhere in the back of their mind. But the story wrapped around the teaching is what survives, because that’s how most people’s minds work, connecting information to an event rather than storing the information on its own.
Six months after a live event, almost nobody remembers the slide about lead generation. Everybody remembers the moment they stood on a platform they were terrified of and jumped anyway. Attach a message to that moment on purpose, and it becomes something the listener can carry around and use later, without you in the room to explain it again.
This is why the training leaned on personal history instead of theory. A story about meeting a spouse for the first time, a story about a forgettable corporate job, a story about a fight class in a martial arts studio, all of it becomes raw material the moment you attach a point to it. The experience doesn’t have to be significant on its own. It just has to be real, and it has to mean something once you’ve decided what it means.
What actually turns an experience into an automatic reflex?
Underneath the storytelling is a harder mechanic worth understanding on its own: repetition turns an experience into a reflex, and a reflex runs without asking your permission first.
Reference experiences replayed over and over again become reflexes to you in your body. And what’s a reflex? Well, neurologically, what a reflex is, is it’s a reaction by your nervous system that needs no conscious instruction to take action. All right? So, for example, if I go like this, he blinks. Can’t help it.
Fear of heights works the same way. Nobody remembers the original event anymore. What’s left is the automatic reaction, replayed so many times that the memory attached to it disappeared and only the reflex remained.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Costa Rica Intensive, “That’s why you’re afraid of heights. It has nothing to do with the heights, it has to do with the reference experience creating a reflex in your nervous system.”
The training used a martial arts demonstration to make the same point physically: a tense fighter transmits force through his whole body the moment he’s grabbed, while a relaxed one absorbs the same grab without flinching. The tension itself was the trained reflex, not a fact about strength. Years of repeating one pattern had made it automatic, for better or worse.
Once you see it this way, the business implication is direct. Whatever you replay in your mind on a loop is what you’re training your nervous system to do automatically the next time you’re in a similar spot. Nobody chooses their reflexes on purpose. Everybody builds them one repetition at a time, whether they mean to or not.
How do you turn your own reference experience into a phone script?
The training didn’t stop at theory. It demonstrated the mechanic live, using a role play built entirely around the zipline trip the group had just finished that same afternoon. A prospect stalls on the phone, unsure whether this is really the right move for them. Instead of arguing the point, the script hands the prospect a moment instead: standing on a ledge, terrified, looking down at a drop that felt a lot higher than it actually was, and having to decide whether to step off anyway.
The story does the persuading, not the objection handling. By the time the caller finishes describing the fear, the freeze, and the decision to step off anyway, the prospect has already been walked through the exact emotional sequence they’re stuck in themselves: hesitation, a stall, a choice. Nobody has to be told directly that stalling costs them something. They just watched somebody live through the identical moment and come out the other side glad they moved.
That’s the real use of a reference experience in selling. It isn’t decoration sitting on top of a pitch. It is the pitch, restructured so the listener feels the decision instead of being told about it from a distance.
Why does replaying your last rejection wire you to fail again?
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Most people spend far more repetitions on their failures than on their wins, without ever noticing it. Get told no by a prospect, and the mind replays the rejection, not the lesson buried inside it. Watch someone else’s launch outperform yours, and the mind replays the comparison, not the opportunity to ask a real question about what actually worked.
The training used a launch comparison as the live example, a month where one launch on the team pulled in far less than a teammate’s did.
As Dave Wood puts it in the Classic Costa Rica Intensive, describing the more useful response to watching someone else outperform him, “He has a $36,000 launch. I only have a $21,000 launch. I say, Lawrence, I know your list is just half the size of mine. Congratulations on your big launch. Can I ask you a question? What is it that allowed you to sell twice as much with half the list?”
Notice what that question does. It isn’t generous for the sake of being generous. It’s a different reflex being built on purpose, curiosity toward somebody else’s result instead of resentment toward it. Do that consistently and you train yourself to extract a mechanic from every result you see, your own and everyone else’s. Do the opposite consistently, replaying envy and comparison instead, and you train yourself to feel smaller every single time somebody else wins.
The same principle applies to your own wins. Most people can describe their last rejection in detail and can barely remember what they did right the last time a prospect said yes. Reversing that, deliberately replaying the successful call and asking what specifically produced it, is not a feel-good exercise. It’s the same reflex-building mechanism pointed at something useful instead of something corrosive.
What’s covered here is the mechanic underneath the storytelling: how to build a reference experience on purpose, how to use it as a selling tool without sounding like you’re selling, and how to catch yourself training the wrong reflex before it sets in for good. The full lesson goes further into the personality training that follows and several more full length stories built for exactly this purpose. If you’re new to it, the entire course is available for $99 at the Classic Costa Rica Intensive course.
Pick one experience from this week and decide, on purpose, what it means before it decides for you.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
You look, even biblically, right, and we have some Christians in here, you know, and some people who are not Christians as well, right, and that's okay. But even biblically, there's different parts of a church, right, that are all constructed by the different personalities and different people that are good at different things in life. We got analytical folks, and we need them, because without them, we would all kill each other, right? And, yeah, absolutely, the world would be a complete disaster without them. You know, my dad drove me crazy growing up, because he was always analyzing everything all the time.
I'm like, gosh, stop planning stuff, you know. Even when he comes on a vacation, he's got what he's doing every hour of the day in a planner. I was like, put that planner away on the damned vacation. We're in Hawaii, you know. And he'd get up in the morning at 6 a.m.
He'd be like, all right, guys, at 6 o'clock we're going to Waimea Bay, and then at 10 o'clock we're going to Sunset Beach, and then at, you know, 3 o'clock, and he had something for every hour of the day. And then he'd get stressed that we weren't doing the things that he had planned to do, if we wanted to do something else, we were being slow, that we weren't following the plan, but we were on vacation, right? So it's enough to drive, like, a fun person like Chris crazy, who just likes to party, right? But the reality is that everybody fills different roles in life. And understanding what you're going to be good at and also what you suck at is really valuable, because you could just say, I suck at that.
I don't want to do it, right? Or you could just say, I don't want to do that, right? Does that make sense? Hopefully Fred's doing okay. I kind of feel bad.
We should have got some of that in an aleve form or something, like that, because we have some at the house, you know what I mean? Yeah, we'll deal. It'll be all right.
Huh? I've got one here. You got an aleve? Yeah. Hey, can you run over and just offer that to Fred?
He's got an aleve. You get that for him? Right? So we're going to do a couple things here. I'm going to talk about metaphors, reference experiences, how to use storytelling in your business to recruit people, right?
And then we're going to do a little personalities training. I don't want to beat that dead dog to death, because there's — we can talk about that for three [hours]. You know what I mean? But one of the things that everybody is going to get from here, one of the reasons I wanted to do the zipline tour, is because one of the best things I can give you as a gift from this weekend is some kind of a powerful reference experience to take home, because here's what's going to happen. Most of what I talk about, right, you're not going to remember, right?
The details of it, you may have notes on it, it'll kind of be in your unconscious mind. Some of you will remember it, right? Most of us will not, right? But what you will remember is you'll remember the metaphors, and then those will be in your mind, and they'll come used to you with the resources that you have available to you in your life.
And that's the way most people's minds work, is by connecting stories and events that happen in their life to teachings and trainings. That's how people remember training. For example, how many of you have heard me use that story of the first time I used that zipline in selling stuff, several times? You've heard it, because you've watched every one of my videos, right? You can use a story of anything that happens to you in your life to illustrate an example, and by using a story to illustrate an example, not only is the example more powerful in its ability to communicate a message with people, but also, in addition to that, right, people remember the story and nothing else, right?
When you guys leave six months from now, who here is going to remember you went on a zipline tour and jumped off of a crazy tree even though you were scared of it, right? You'll remember that for the rest of your life. You can't forget it. Now, if that story is then embedded into a meaning with a message, it becomes something ultra-powerful that you can remember. You can use it in all of your selling.
Anybody ever listen to Hitler's speeches? Anybody ever hear or read any of Hitler's stuff, or listen to him speak? You listen to him speak? I swear you could hear him saying the most treacherous, horrible stuff that a person could say and get caught into it, right? Now, that's a bad example of using good principles to lead people in a direction that hurts others, right?
But still, why did he? How in the world did a guy with dark hair and dark eyes convince an entire country to go to war against the world, fighting for a message that blond-haired, blue-eyed guys and girls and everybody are the superior race of beings? How in the world could that even possibly happen? Isn't that worth asking, you know?
Or somebody like, you know, Charles Manson? How in the world did he have such a grip on people? Now, that's an example of a negative grip, but that grip, that negative grip, is a negative example of the same thing, the same phenomenon, as positive examples of history, through great religious leaders, great teachers, that have had the most lasting impact on the world, right? So all that stuff is useful to understand and know. So, for example, you can use that reference experience of yours as a metaphor to sell, all right?
Let me tell you guys a great metaphor that I put in one of my sales presentations that's almost just evil, it's so good, right? But I had this experience, and I think I talked about it to a couple people the other day, of the real time when I met my wife, right? Anybody here heard that story, at least a little bit of it? I don't remember if I taught the whole thing, but the real story goes, you know, my wife's sitting there, and she walks into this place, and I literally thought she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life.
You know, I don't know if when you saw her you thought the same thing or, you know, some people are making that up, you know. I wasn't making it up. I was like, oh, my God, there's something about that girl. There was something about her, you know.
So I kept looking at her, you know, and I'm not like the ladies' man, like this guy right here, who invites girls to go on dates and then shows them the plan, right? I'm just not, you know. I didn't, you know, I had two girlfriends a year, and you'd really break up in a week, you know, and I was just like, man, none of these girls are weird enough for me, right? Well, in any case, so my wife walks in, and there's something about that girl.
I keep looking over at her, like three or four times. So she's like sitting, let's pretend she's, you know, my potential wife here, and I didn't even know that, you know. I just thought she was hot at the moment, right? And so I walk up, and I'm going to go talk to her, and then I kind of like — I kind of want to pull one of these numbers, you know, we're in a store.
It's lunchtime, so it's, you know, I'm trying to look natural, and then, you know, I go buy some food, and then I think I bought more food three or four times, and went, you know, sat back down, you know. And, you know, I tell this because I think it's hilarious, because I look like such a wussy when I tell it, but it's true, I mean, I can't lie about it, you know. I was almost wussing out, because she was sitting there with another guy. So then here's what happens, right? I was literally — well, yeah, she was sitting there with another guy, so I didn't know if they were dating or whatever, you know.
So she's sitting there with this dude, but I think she's the most gorgeous girl I've ever seen, and it's Utah, so, you know, Utah's got a little bit of a different dating culture anyway, because of the Mormons, you know what I mean? People just go on dates very casually without having sex with lots of people, you know. It's a very different dating culture than other places that are in the modern world. So I'm, you know, walking around, and I'm almost — and I literally, I got my stuff, and I'm about to walk out the door, and then I say, fuck it. And I turn over, and I say, look, excuse me, I know you're probably having dinner with this guy.
I don't know. I don't know if you two are dating. And she said, oh, no, we're not. And I was like, oh, thank God, I feel like such an idiot. And I said, I think you're the most gorgeous girl I've ever seen in my entire life, and I would feel like a frickin' moron all day if I didn't walk up and tell you that.
That's what I actually said. And so what she did, you know, was she looks up and she says, well, no, I'm not on a date with him. And I said, well, if that's not true, maybe I can get your phone number to go out sometime. She actually gave me her phone number, believe it or not. What's going on?
Right. So in any case, right, so here's the thing. I literally — now, who would have known I would have married that girl? I bragged about it all day to my buddies. You know, I went back to work.
I said, I just got the phone number of the hottest girl I ever met in my entire life. Check this out, you know. I'm bragging about it, you know, like any man would. You know, I was like, check, I think she's the hottest. I actually — she actually gave me her phone number.
I thought she was going to frickin' hit me with a knife or something, you know. Who knows? You know, I'm terrified, you know, scared, you know. But in any case, right, now, what if I'd gone like this and walked out the door? How would my life have been?
How would my life be different? Right? I might have missed out on the best four years of my life. Right? What if right now you're at that moment where you can have that breakthrough, because you're just a little uncomfortable, you turn away from what you know you're supposed to do, and because of that you miss out on the best years of your life.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to just take action? Little tip: don't buy a button below the video. Whoo! See what I'm saying?
Right? Oh, my God. You know, people don't even know they're being sold. Isn't that evil, Dave? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That one's just hideously evil. But in any case, you're like, whoa, I didn't even know you were selling. It's a true story. No, I just put this into my Perpetual Funnel sales video, the new one, into the affiliate code. This is the second one I'm building.
All of you are automatically affiliates to that stuff, by the way. That's a true story. Yeah, yeah. No, no, the true story. Right?
But in any case, so most people, you know, stuff happens to you all day long that you can use when you're telling, selling. But what you want to tell people is the facts and the data, right? When you put the facts and the data and stuff like that, people get hypnotized by it. You notice when I'm telling that story, everybody's like — you know what I mean? The energy changes.
People are like this. You use it for anything. Right? Another example. Let's use Angela's.
I'm going to pretend I'm Angela. Earlier I was up — no, I was kidding. I just love making fun. You're great.
You've got great energy, you know? And so, you know, she's talking to somebody on the phone. And the person's, you know, let's say she wants to be on the phone. Some people love the phone, right? Just because I don't like the phone, guys, doesn't mean you might not like it.
Some of you guys might just — that might be your primary modality. I don't think really anybody here it is, but maybe it is. I love it when it's the right people. You know, it's the right people. He loves it.
He loves the phone. Right? So what if — let's say Chris Rush lives on the phone, because I'll use him as an example, because you don't want to be on the phone at all. You know, you want to just be, you know, doing fun stuff and making a bunch of money. Right?
So, and Chris wants to connect. He loves connecting with people. Right? That's why I have him working with a lot of my prospects. Right?
Because he loves to do it. He loves to do it. Right? So let's say he's on the phone and he's connecting with somebody. Right?
And the person says, you know, I don't know if I should, I just don't know if this is the best thing for me to do. Right? And let's say he had Angela's same experience where he was freaking terrified. Well, why wouldn't it be the best thing to do? Well, I'm just not totally sure.
Can I share something with you? Yeah. Just a couple weeks ago, I actually went down, had the privilege to go to this conference with Dave Wood down in Costa Rica. And we went ziplining. You ever done that before?
No. What's it all about? Well, what we do is, you know, there's little cords that go through the trees in the mountains, and you kind of hook a little repelling harness in, and you go through. At the end of the zipline tour, there's this thing called the Tarzan Swing, where they've got this cable that's like 200 feet long. And I'm not kidding, you stand on a ledge and freaking — you're looking down, it's like 30, 40 feet down.
You're looking over the edge in here. And I'm very — heights, right, totally scared. Scared crapless.
My face turns white. I'm not kidding. I get near heights, my eyes are bloodshot. You know? And I start seeing white spots.
And the world starts getting all wavy and stuff. I mean, it's stupid, but I am. I've got to be honest. Right? Because I'm not perfect.
Right? Does that make sense? Right? So I'm standing there on this thing, and there's literally a 200 foot rope. There's like a 30 foot drop.
I've seen other people do it. And I knew it was safe. I knew that if I did it and faced my fear, I knew that if I did that, that I would have — that I would just feel completely different and have a big breakthrough for myself. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. If I turn around and I walked away from that, I knew I'd feel horrible, not just for the rest of the day, but I'd be missing out for the next six months on something that I knew I should have done. Right? So I was up there. And I'm not kidding you.
I am not kidding you. Dave Wood had to come and pat me on the back and say, you can do it, and push me up the stairs, because I could not get my legs to move up the stairs. Because I was looking down over this ledge and I was terrified. And it's okay to be terrified about decisions you're making in life. So I'm sitting there.
I'm trying to walk up the stairs, and Dave was like, you can do it, you can do it. Pushing me up the stairs. And I get up there and I almost peed my pants. Not kidding.
Right? I was terrified. But I looked over. I analyzed forever. I was about to freak out.
And you know what I did? What? I took a leap of faith. I took a leap of faith. I stepped off the ledge.
I stepped off the ledge. Right? And you know what happened? I felt more free than I've ever felt in my entire life. Because sometimes, even though you might not know for sure, that's when you need to decide, and you need to learn to do that.
And that's one of the things that you're going to learn when you buy the Perpetual Funnel System. Are you ready to take action? Are you just going to keep sitting on the ledge and waiting? Are you going to turn away and regret it? See what I'm saying?
Yeah. Folks, stories and metaphors — they happen more easily than facts and data. Right?
And they happen all through life. Wasn't that badass? Yeah. Yeah. You use it.
We recorded it. Well, we did record it. Right? And so, you know, you take these examples — everything in life can be used as a metaphor. Every experience.
It doesn't even have to be a significant experience. Right? It could be kind of a story that you'd, you know, forget. Right? Like, what's another example?
Well, you can use stories that are kind of funny and ridiculous. Like, let me tell you guys a story about, you know, my Dilbert job. Right? Anybody here had a Dilbert job? He's actually told me I'm like Dilbert, dude.
Said something like that one time. I was laughing for like an hour, because I had a Dilbert job. Right? I was a licensed insurance agent for all 50 states with USAA, sitting in a call center in this chair that was like this $900 ergonomic chair that could perfectly conform to the back of my body.
Had all these, you know, all these — you know — had my health care and everything. I wasn't making much money, but I mean, I was a college dropout, so they gave me the low-end pay, and I was making some commission. And then we got a new CEO. Right?
And this job was just — I mean, I wasn't entitled to that much. You know? I want you to put this in perspective here. How many meetings do you go to a week that just have no purpose at all? It's endless, right?
And so we got this new CEO, and he decides that the reason we're not more productive than we've ever been in our entire lives, and we're not squeezing every last ounce of productivity out of us — productivity, productivity, that doesn't make any sense — so what he decides to do is we need to meet several times a day, right? So here's the fascinating thing.
Now this guy who's never sold a thing in his life assigns that salespeople need to meet several times a day. So now we're forced into these meetings, but the fascinating thing is we're just supposed to talk about something, and our bosses don't know what to talk about in the meetings, right? So we're meeting like three times a day. You ever been in a meeting that's just the most boring meeting you've ever been in your life? So I'm sitting there in these meetings, right?
True story. And the first meeting of the week was the meeting to discuss the meeting schedule, right? And so they're talking about, go to this meeting, then go to that meeting, then go to that meeting. And I was sitting next to the most giant lady I'd ever seen in my life. She had a literal problem.
She would eat candy all day with her fingers, like all day, you know what I mean? It was like she was sitting there all day, and she looked like this crazy monster, and I wouldn't have minded if she didn't do this all day. And she had her fingers constantly covered with potato chips. I'm not kidding. On one side. On the side behind me, I had another guy that was the most square-face, boring guy.
He had his chin out to here. It was like a perfectly square face. And he was just like this all day, talking exactly, reading scripts on the phone. And nobody was a good conversationalist. So I'm going to all these meetings.
I was like, after a while I said, what is the point of these gosh dang meetings? They say, Dave, we gotta stick with the meeting schedule. So in any case, what I do is I like to make comics while I'm talking to people on the phone and send them to my buddies, right? Because they have the Microsoft Paint program, and I'm good at drawing, just kind of artistic naturally. So I used to make these little comic strip things while I'm working and selling insurance.
And I did good selling insurance, because I would talk to people forever about their families, because it was so boring I wanted to die. I don't know if you've ever felt like that before. So I make this comic strip where the CEO — I can't remember his name — but I draw him as a dinosaur, right, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. And he's growling like this and his tongue's out and his eyes are all big, right, and he's chasing all these little people wearing suits.
And he says, you need to go to more meetings, right? And everybody's running away from him. And I sent it to like five people. And here's what happened — I shut down the email servers for USAA, right?
Because the thing got sent to like eight zillion people, right? And so they pull me into this little office, right, and he got it. They pulled me in this little office, right, and they say, Dave, we want to know why you did this, right?
And my two bosses are trying not to laugh. They're trying their hardest. Because they had sent the message on. And you knew it, right? They're trying not to laugh.
They're like, I don't think that's funny at all. And I said, why did I do it? And I said, well, it's funny, right? And my boss was like this. And one guy who was actually the corporate guy, you know, I don't think it's funny, you know?
And my boss was like, I don't think it's funny either, David. You know, like that. And you know what I knew right then? I didn't think it was funny. I was like, this is bullshit.
I am not doing this shit for 40 years. You know, so I decided to get in this little home business deal, you know? And what's better? I mean, being in a meeting, in a little office, talking about the meeting schedule for the week, or coming down to Costa Rica, spending three days with a bunch of cool people who all have ADD just a little bit, who all hate the government? I mean, it's way cooler in every other way, you know?
So I mean, in any case, any story that can happen in your life, right, can be useful, can be used as something useful to embed things, to where people are constantly thinking about the stories. You guys will remember that story and think, you know, be laughing about it, probably, if you thought it was funny, for a month, right? You'll be sitting at work resisting the urge as much as you can to shut down the email servers with a little comic book cartoon. So what happened with that job, they said, David, here's the deal: you keep being late.
You keep interrupting the thing. You keep shutting down the servers. So you've got to quit or we're going to fire you. And I was like, gosh dang it, I've got to find a new job. You know?
I had a lot of jobs. Well, I can't be on time to stuff. I mean, today, you know, I mean, gosh dang it, you know. No, no, that was a different job. That was a different job.
But in any case, guys, do you see what I'm saying? So here's what I want to encourage everybody to do that I learned from my mom. I think it's a really good idea. And Tony Robbins talks about it. Start taking like a journal of stuff, right?
Now I don't have the patience to actually write a journal. Like these guys probably will say, journal, take journal, all right, they'll write three and a half pages every night. I don't know. Right?
But my mom actually journaled every day of her entire life, every significant thing that happens today. Now I go crazy reading the thing because she's, you know, because some people communicate differently. My mom's just like that. She wants to tell you everything. She's like, oh, read this.
And it's like four pages from the time she woke up brushing her teeth to going through the day cleaning the house, and then finally at the end is the part she wanted you to read. I was like, I'm sweating, you know? But here's what — just a good question to ask yourself, okay? What stories happen to me, right?
And what meaning can they be assigned? What meaning can they have? What can I use this story for? What point can be illustrated with this, right? And I'll tell you something.
If you guys look at the most influential people in every government through history, in every religion through history, good or evil, right, regardless of ethics or morality, they all use metaphors and stories. They use metaphors and stories to illustrate everything. Obama does it all the time, right? George Bush did it. George Bush did it like a master, too, and made himself look dumb while he was doing it.
You know, on purpose. Yeah. And a lot of great communicators do that. Bill Clinton — freaking genius Jedi ninja at it, right?
And you don't have to agree or disagree with any form of politics to realize — why do a lot of people listen to this guy I think is a moron, right? Well, because he's conservative. Right? And he's communicating in an effective, compelling way, right? Or how come that guy who seems to know what he's talking about, nobody listens to him?
Because he knows what he's talking about maybe a little too much, and he's not communicating the message effectively in a way that can influence most people. And remember, most people are impacted more by metaphors, allegories, stories, than they are by things. And also what you can do is look for in your life — and this is very important if you want continued success, and I learned this actually from Tony Robbins, if you guys are wondering where this information comes from — look for reference experiences that are powerful. Reference experiences that are powerful, right. And what's a reference experience?
It's an experience that you continue to reference through your life. You need to go to the bathroom? Well, go. Oh, I thought you said, I need to pee. Because you went like this.
Yeah. Right. Pen. Here. Here you go.
Oh, you got a notebook. I got a notebook. I just lost my pen. Here. Use this.
All right. So, reference experiences. Now, here's how we use reference experiences, and this is very important to your happiness generally. All right. Here.
Stand up here real quick. Stand up real quick. I gave a demonstration through this. Reference experiences replayed over and over again become reflexes to you in your body. And what's a reflex?
Well, neurologically, what a reflex is, is it's a reaction by your nervous system that needs no conscious instruction to take action. All right? So, for example, if I go like this, he blinks. Can't help it. Right?
He can't help but blink. A doctor kicks you in the knee, and what do you do? You see that? His legs move, because he thought I was going to kick him in the knee or something. Right?
You cannot help enacting reflexes. They're automatic. And a lot of our reflexes are stupid. For example, here's a reflex. Right?
Locking up at that ledge. What happened — I'm going to just tell you what happened, and I don't know what happened specifically. Sometime in your life, sometime in your life, sometime in your life, you had some sort of experience, right, and I'm going to tell you what happened, I don't even know what it is, that was negative associated with heights.
You replayed it in your mind every time you got next to heights, and it doesn't — you did it for a long time, you don't remember the experience anymore, right, and now the reaction happens automatically without replaying the experience, right? That's why you're afraid of heights. It has nothing to do with the heights, it has to do with the reference experience creating a reflex in your nervous system. It happens to people all the time. It's Pavlov's dog syndrome, right?
You ring a bell before a dog eats, and you keep doing it, then the ringing of the bell will cause the dog to automatically start drooling like they're already eating, yeah, already drooling. So let's look at something, though, what happens, here. So who in here has taken martial arts, anybody? You've taken martial arts, you've done it? He's a karate master, look at him.
And you've taken martial arts a little? You haven't? Anybody else taken sports? Okay. Let's say you have a little bit, right, a little bit.
So let's say he puts his defense up, his guard up, right, and let's say he's tense because he thinks that to hit harder you must be tense. A lot of people think that, right? They think that tense equals more power. Who in here would automatically think that if you were just, you know, your mind was processing it? Tense equals power, right?
Muscle equals power, you're flexing your muscles when you're tense, therefore tension equals more power, right? When he flexes his arm, his whole body flexes because he's tense, right? If I jerk on his arm, you see his whole body, it reflects through his entire body, right? Now a lot of people, right, what happens is, if they're attacked on a street corner, right, what do they do? I'm gonna block, right?
You know, like, and that's what people do. You ever seen a fight break out, nasty, right, and somebody's just like this, trying to protect themselves, their whole body goes tense. Right? What happens when you get in a car crash when you're tense?
You get whiplash, break bones, right? You get all sorts of problems. What happens to drunk drivers when they get in car crashes? Barely ever die, don't they? It's always the people in the other car, right?
So let's take this for example. Let's say his arm is totally relaxed and I come and I attack his arm, right? It doesn't even affect his face at all, right? Now, that wouldn't be — that wouldn't be natural to most people. Right?
The difference is the difference in reflexes, right? So when I give you an example here, you can just go ahead and sit down here. And what happened is, I used to take Kung Fu, right, and I learned a lot of these principles that guide a lot of the way I train from Kung Fu, actually, because for me it's a powerful reference experience. But they used to do a thing where they would literally force us to have zero tension in our body whatsoever whenever we were doing training, right?
Zero. And if we had tension, they'd like slap our arm and stuff. And you couldn't even feel the tension sometimes. There was supposed to be no tension whatsoever, right. So, but then they'd do a thing where every time you kind of went through and learned some new skills, they'd make you go through this fight class.
And it was horrible. It sucked, because what they'd do is they'd dress up a huge guy, like, or like a stocky guy like Ola, you know, or Lawrence, right, who are stocky and just got a lot — you too, you know, people like you. And they'd put that police body armor on them, right, covering their knees and their legs and their crotch and their chest and their neck and their face.
And big boxing gloves. And they'd just come swinging at you, right? And you had to not — in Kung Fu, here, actually, here, just stand up again. See, and this — I'm not saying this is right, I'm just giving you an example of this concept, right, because it'll help illustrate the point.
In Kung Fu, what happens is, see, most martial arts, you know, they play that dancing game, they back up, they go forward, they back up, they go forward, they dance around, they're trying to dodge things. You're punching, you're dodging the punches. Well, in Kung Fu they fight this close all the time. And they never back up. However, they only shift their weight.
So if Chris comes at me, right, I just go like this, right, I'll just hit him in the face, right? That's what you're supposed to do in Kung Fu. Now, that is really easy to do if you're relaxed with fists coming at you. And what you learn is, if you're this close to somebody, and fists are coming at you, they literally can't hit you. It doesn't matter which direction their arms are flying, you're just relaxing, you're just hitting them in the face.
And they're going crazy and they can't do anything about it. And the first experience I had with this — I was used to going up in karate. And we were tense like crazy, key eyeing. I had a second-degree black belt, and don't attack me because I'm out of practice big time.
But you know, we'd be like doing all these crazy things. And we were tense. And so I was this tense, big guy. You know, I used to weigh about 195 pounds, I used to lift weights, you know, if you believe that or not. And I was pretty ripped at the end of high school, right?
He knew me, right? I used to lift weights a couple hours a day and just hit things, because I loved this martial arts stuff. So I go down to Utah. And I meet this guy. Try to find an example of somebody as — he was like your size, okay?
He was like her size, right? And his arms were thin, and he was just a laid-back guy. And I went to take, you know, because I needed to keep training, but I wanted to take a different martial art. So I went to take this Kung Fu. And I was looking at this guy, and I was like, you've got to be kidding me, I can't learn from this guy.
And I remember, he just said, attack me. And I said, well, what do you want me to do? Because I'm used to karate, where they say, well, go ahead, throw a punch, let me show you what to do. Right? And he said, I don't care.
Right? And it was like my hands were behind a waterfall that I couldn't see behind, and fists were just flying at my face. Right? And I couldn't stop him.
Right? And I couldn't feel his arms because he was so relaxed. He was like a waterfall. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my entire — you met the guy. Right?
He could hit you on any part of your body and hurt any other part of your body, because he had such good control of the way his force was moving. It was unbelievable. I mean, it looked almost like magic until you understood it. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. He goes like this, and he had this amazing ability to communicate energy, and he was tiny. Right? And I was like, that is the scariest fricking thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Right?
Well, what's the point of that story? What's the point of that story? Right? As illustrated in network marketing. Well, here's what happens.
Here's what happens in your mind as you're going along, is all through your life you're forming, as you move along, right, some of your experiences unconsciously — some of them serve you, some of them do not. So this one might serve you, some may not. Right?
And a reference experience is no different than practicing a good or a bad kind of move in any kind of sport. Right? If you practice dribbling incorrectly, you're not going to get any better at basketball. Right? If you practice hitting with tension, right, it might really not make your hits any harder.
Boxers aren't tense. Right? If a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu guy was really tense, do you think that he'd be able to break the arm of somebody that weighed 400 pounds more than him? Probably not. Right?
So what people do is they tend to replay what's most impactful and emotional to them. Right? For example, if you ever got attacked in a dark alley, right, and you kept replaying that, it wouldn't be long before you would unconsciously be afraid of dark alleys. That's a bad example.
What's another example? You keep replaying your failures over and over and over again, and your lack, again and again and again. You do that. You just stop. Because I can hear it when you're talking.
Right? And you've seen that now, don't you? Right? And a lot of us do it. Right?
We have a failure. We talk to a prospect. He doesn't want to get in Amway. Right? And we keep remembering.
We say, that frickin' idiot, I'm going to get him back and drive my Ferrari next to his house. But you're not thinking about the Ferrari. You're thinking about this guy rejecting you. You can't stop thinking about being rejected. You think about your sales aren't as good as Dave Wood's sales.
And that's what you're thinking about. You're comparing yourself to somebody who's better than you. It's creating negativity emotionally in you. You're saying, man, I can't recruit like this guy. Man, Mike Dillard, I'm jealous.
You know? You're looking at your page and you're saying, man, this page just is not getting enough conversions. Right? And if you keep replaying that stuff, guess what happens? Well, just like my example last night where the No Excuses Summit —
I'm going to describe turn by turn, right, how to get — here's my breakout room, this is how to get there. What you're doing is you're describing to your mind over and over again, here's how to fail. Here's how to fail. Here's how to fail.
This is the suckiest way to live. I hate this. It sucks. My life sucks. I'm not making any money.
I need to get making money. I'm not making any money. My bank account's empty. Right? And that can be fixed.
And I promise you, if you're not having good success and you've been working at this for a while, you are doing that. You are doing it. Right? And one of the things that'll happen, like even with Lawrence, you know, you've been making good money, but you want to get out of that job, you know, you might have a tendency to just replay again and again in your mind, man, this check just is not big enough to get me out of my job. It's not stable enough yet, right?
But what you should be replaying in your mind instead is, what was the last thing that happened? What was the last thing that happened that created the most success for me? When was the last sale and how did that happen? How did I get that sale? Right?
So you have a successful prospecting experience, and what you should do is say, that was such a good prospecting experience, and the next day you recall that and you replay it and you say, what did I do yesterday? I have such a positive prospecting experience, what did I do to create that? Right? You write a great article that gets a bunch of leads, and you look at the article and you say, what is it about this article that got more leads than the previous article that didn't get as many leads?
Is it the traffic? Is it the way that I wrote it? Is it the call to action at the end? Right? You have an experience where you get in a fight and win.
And you say, well, I'm going to do this. And you say, I sure kicked his butt. Right? Seriously. You have an experience where you fall in love, right?
And what would be more useful, for example, in a relationship to replay? Let's give some examples, okay? Because this happens all the time to people in relationships, all right? Let's say you fall in love. You're totally in love, right?
And then what happens is you notice after, you know, you're not having sex four times a day anymore after a few months or whatever. It's down to one, you know? And then all of a sudden you're like, gosh, that girl, she's just freaking, you know, keeps scratching her arm like this all the time. That's driving me crazy.
What's wrong with your arm? You know? And you just keep replaying that in your mind, you know? Or man, when you say that thing it just sounds stupid. You keep saying that, right?
She did this thing with her face. You know, Dave Sharpe does this thing with his face. He won't stop doing this thing with his face. Dave Sharpe, stop doing that thing with your face, you know? Drives me crazy, right?
And people do this in relationships all the time, don't they? I've been guilty. Have you been guilty of that in the past? Right? So what happens after a while of replaying all this negative stuff is all of a sudden that magical feeling of being in love disappears.
And what happens is now all of a sudden the look of your face causes irritation. Does that make sense? So what would that do to a relationship if you kept doing that? So this is like a constant vigilance in your life that you go up and down with, and you're never perfect, and that's okay, to be imperfect, because your imperfection is your beauty, right? It's a constant up and down and floating relationship in life.
Where you're saying, where am I the most powerful? What are my giftings? What am I good at, right? Where did I have success at? What have I succeeded at?
You know, I'm not making a million dollars a year yet, right? So I could look at that and I could say, well, gosh dang it, you know, I got negative this much from a million in my bank account, that sucks, right? Or, you know what I could do, I could say, you know what, freaking heck, I've done over a million dollars in sales last year. That's pretty cool. How did I do that?
What caused me to create that success, you know? I could look at the van experience and I could say, that was such a negative time, and remember the time the cops woke me up, or I could remember the times when we got to go to a different beach every single day for a whole year. Every day we're at a new beach, every day, new beaches, new beauty, going on hikes every day, seeing nature, getting to eat good food, meeting the strangest people you ever met in your life, most interesting people I've ever met in my life, sometimes the coolest weird homeless people walking around quoting the Bible at night and have teeth missing, you know, I got to see things that nobody ever sees, right? Do you see the difference in that, right?
And the emotion behind doing that will totally shift the way you think about yourself, all right? So that's why I took you on the zipline tour today. Does that make sense? So you have a powerful reference, right? And so you understand the concept of reference experiences and how to use metaphors and how to use stories, because it's more useful helping you live a story than it is by just explaining it.
Does that make sense? But now that you see this, look for it. When somebody's speaking, here's what I want you to do. It's more useful to me, depends on where you're at in your business. For example, most of the time it's more useful to listen to how somebody is selling a course than actually buy the course and go through it.
To me it's more useful to listen to how they're selling that, right? Like the Mark Hoverson launch. I still haven't looked through the product. I did buy it. Hopefully I'll go through it, or I wasted money.
But in any case, I wanted to buy it because I was telling people to buy it. I don't want to tell people to buy something I'm not going to buy, right? So I watched through that launch, you know, and I said, why is this thing attracting so much attention? What did Mark Hoverson do to get so much attention in this launch?
And watching the actual sales process, for me, will probably be a lot more useful than the actual course, right? Seeing just that one thing where you leave the page and you hit cancel to stay on the page, and it asks you what you didn't like about it. And no matter what selection, he's got a new sales video overcoming the objection and asking you to buy. Brilliant, brilliant, right? Or what about Jonathan Budd?
He just sold an event. He got 1,000 tickets sold to Unstoppable Entrepreneur. And what was that event about, for those of us who didn't go? Do you even know? He sold an event to 1,000 people and nobody knew what they were going to.
Nobody knew what they were going to, right? See what I mean? Nobody knew, right? How did he sell 1,000, if nobody knew?
How did he do that? Well, to me, attending the $3,000 deal is one thing, but seeing him sell it in that replay video he put up? Priceless. Does that make good sense? Because here's what you're going to notice.
If you look for things like this, metaphor stories, and you say, what is selling? Because here's the thing. You can go through some sales training that'll explain structure, right. It'll explain all this stuff. It'll explain the structure of presentations.
I could explain to you guys the structure of a good presentation. I can do that if you guys would like, right? Structure. Okay, I got the structure, right? But you don't know whether that's actually what's happening when somebody's selling or not.
You don't know until you actually watch a presentation that has sold a lot and ask, why is that? Why is that? Right? And the only way you'd really know the difference is what, Dave? Split testing.
Right? Trying the thing. Is it this in the presentation that made it sell a lot, or is it that? Let's test this. Nope.
What's that? Ha, we got it. So I don't need to have crazy hair to make this work. I just need to tell the stories. Right?
Does that make sense to you? Powerful references. Other people's powerful references. Right? Sometimes we have a tendency to all get jealous.
Anybody here ever got jealous of another person's success? No. I do it. And it's so stupid. You know what I mean?
It's like, you know, that's not your success anyway. Right? You know what I'm saying? It's not. It's another person's.
So why am I coveting it? What's the point? Is it making me happier? No. Is it helping me succeed more?
No. Probably helping me succeed less. Right? Yet we continue to do it. What would be a better way to look at the same exact thing?
I don't know. I don't know. It's just a thing. What is it about what this person is doing that's making them be so blessed with such great success? What are they doing to create that?
And how could I do that for myself? And do I want it? Am I willing to do what they're doing or not? Maybe the answer is no. Right?
I'm not willing to do everything. I don't care how big — if my organization would have ten times the people if I did two calls all day, don't care, right? I don't want to tell my people to do it either, because I don't like doing it. I'll send them to other people. I'll send them to Ray, because Ray likes it and other people who like calls like Ray, right? And I'm like, call him. You know, Dave, will you call me and help me with everything in my business? No. Well, then I might not join with you. Okay, call Ray. Seriously. Because — and then I'll explain it, I'll say, because in my team I don't want just people to make money, I want people to make money and have a life at the same time. What do you want? Why? Well, I just want money. Well, then probably not the right team, right? Because I'm going to do things that won't make any sense to you whatsoever. No sense, right? And Lawrence is really good now about deciding what he doesn't want to do, right, because he went through pounding the phone three hours, and I had it — feel emotionally it was sad, wasn't it? Did it make you much more money? A little. Oh, it's okay, it's okay, dude.
Here, Chris, you want to take the dog outside, out back or something, he's from Nigeria where dogs have diseases, right? Yeah, so does it. But does that make sense to you guys? The questions you ask, right, out loud and also internally, determine what you're going to focus on, all right? And what you focus on is going to determine what image and path you're playing towards your desired output, which is what — your goals, or your dreams, your desires, why you're at this weekend, while you're at this conference, while you're here, while you're listening to this information — what it is that you really want. And also not just what you want, but what do you specifically dislike, and then don't replay the things you dislike all the time, because you'll create them, you know. So for me, I wanted to recruit two people a day, that was all that mattered in the beginning. So what did I do at any cost to personal balance? I got to recruiting two a day, right? Not anything evil, not anything bad, but just my life got out of whack for a while, like your wife did. I was on the phone all day, disconnected with my wife a little bit, right, because that's all I was doing. So I took a look at this and I said, can I make this money without doing it, and do I care about the money or do I care about the desired outcome? What I care about is not just money, because who gives a crap, the whole money system will probably collapse anyway, I don't give a shit, right? What I care about is several things, right, relationships, the network, the real prosperity, because what is money anyways? And this is a fascinating discussion, and then we're going to get into some tactics, and hopefully you guys are getting some marketing and sales value out of this concept, right? But what is money really? And that's a question to ask, because — this is just not a good tripod, I'll say that, but good job on the try, because this was made by a cab driver. You believe he put this together, a cab driver did this, and pretty good, you gotta give him a hand. He loves — see, they go the extra mile here, you know I'm saying, who does this anywhere else in the world, that's crazy. He's like, oh, you need a tripod, you don't have one, here, let me make one, I'll go buy supplies, you know. I'm totally not used to people being that cool. But in any case, what money is, is simply in our society a way to transfer resources. What you really want is you want the resources, right? What resources? The ability to go wherever you want to, access to the plane, right, access to good food, right, access to really nice — not just shelter, but somewhere where you feel good, right? There's resources. What you really want is you want the resources. If you think about money all the time, it doesn't translate very well in your brain, for most people, because people are not digitory like that, where they just see numbers. Most people connect better with the real resources, right, which is what — time with your daughter, right, beach time. You know, you want to get on a plane, so you just get up, buy a first-class ticket and go to Fiji, right? You travel to French Polynesia, because — yeah, it's not a problem. But if all you think about is money, what happens? Even when you have money, which is really only there for resources, you get very nervous parting with it for the resources. So even when you have money, you feel unhappy, because — it's okay to part with money, it's just a transference of ability to get what you want, right? And it's a flawed one, to hell, in our society today, that's got problems. So you don't want to get attached to this, you want to fall in love with what you want, what you want to create, your ability to attain this. It may actually sometimes not just take money, it may take a combination of money, right, and time, to be able to give you access to the resources that you truly desire. So what resources do you want, and to achieve those resources, what do you have available to you as tools right now that you can access? That's a really good question to ask. And what do you not have yet is another great question to ask. What tools do you have — you're using that ability that transfers, that language, right, to say, what do I have, is skills. And then, what do I not have yet? And when you ask the question like that, it is not negative to your mind. You got to be very careful with the questions you ask your mind. Because if you say, what do I suck at? Well, you know, I walked into a bar last week, man, I'm not a good dancer, number one.
Number two, my voice sounds a little girly at times. Number three, right? That's not a good question. But when you say, what do I not have yet? Well, I'm not fantastic at dancing yet, right?
I'm not excellent at fluent Spanish yet, right? I don't have a million dollars in my bank account yet. That type of language now, you cannot say without seeing the desired result in your mind. And if you're going to ask yourself a question that results in something you don't have yet, why not point yourself towards the resources you desire, rather than pointing yourself towards the pain you're experiencing right now that you don't want to continue to experience? Does that make sense?
This is very important. Because a lot of people will get something that happens to them, and unconsciously they'll chase away their desired result through jealousy, through coveting somebody else's success, right? All that stuff causes pain, right? For example, let's say Lawrence does a product launch, and I did one last month. Mine only did $20,000 in sales, but Lawrence does $36,000 in sales.
And I say, that fucker, he's selling more than me, right? Right? And I'm all mad, right? And all of a sudden, out of jealousy and spite, I say, I'm going to crush this guy. And is that not a way a lot of people respond to other people's success?
Is that useful? Right? No. Because what you're saying, in saying that when you're coveting somebody else's success, what are you telling yourself? There's not enough for both of us.
There's not enough. Let's say — I'm going to do this. Let's say the opposite. Let's say the opposite, right? He has a $36,000 launch.
I only have a $21,000 launch. I say, Lawrence, I know your list is just half the size of mine. Congratulations on your big launch. Can I ask you a question? What is it that allowed you to sell twice as much with half the list?
Right? Congratulations. I really appreciate you succeeding. Because there's more than enough for both of us. Right?
Right? Somebody else's success says there's not enough for you. So it's not useful. Right? What is useful?
Congratulations. You've done great. You know? Appreciate what you're doing. Right?
Not envy. Not all this stuff. It's negative stuff, guys. Right? Here's another thing Tony Robbins says.
Right? Now, I don't really pay tithe to a church. Right? It's not my thing. Because I, you know, I grew up being forced to do it.
So I'm a little rebellious against it. But, like, giving money to people, people that are doing service for me. Overtipping. If I remember —
Which is mostly all the time. I give like 50 and 70% tips and stuff, all the time. Now. All the time.
Right? Because I used to work in the service and restaurant business in one of my many jobs. I got fired from.
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