2: VISION

The agents of influence

The few, the remarkable, the vision...and the millions

The empires of the future are empires of the mind.

— Winston Churchill

Creating a vision is essential if you want to flee 9 to 5, get paid a six- to seven-figure income and do what you love. That creation is born here.

Melbourne, Australia, 6 pm — waiting with bated breath. I had my finger hovering over the ‘record' button. I was just minutes away from speaking with a former Oprah producer who was preparing me for my time in New York, and I was ready to absorb every word.

What would she say? How would I need to position myself? What did I need clarity on to really make this work? Most importantly, how would I stand out from all of the other experts who were attending the conference … beyond my Aussie accent that Americans thought was hot! Thanks, Hugh Jackman!

These were just a few of the thoughts racing around my head on a dirt bike, muddying up my clarity. But, before I could take the call, I had to make a few critical decisions … because the real work had just begun.

I knew there were only two ways I could make the most out of this brief encounter:

• I could look past the impossible. I was completely out of my comfort zone. The trip to New York was just one of many steps I'd laid out for myself to help monetise my message. The mere fact that I was being coached by a former Oprah (and Grammy award–winning) producer persuaded me that anything was possible. I had to open myself to a grander vision. A vision that took my breath away, even if it did still seem out of reach at that stage.
• I could create the remarkable. To overcome any hurdles I might encounter on the journey, I had to know precisely what I wanted for myself and for others, and to know intuitively who I was going to ‘become' in taking this giant leap forward. All while allowing myself enough flexibility to grow into it. In essence, I had to create a remarkable vision for myself — to be different, to become an agent of influence, someone with a limitless vision of what life could offer.

Million-dollar personal brands — how their vision makes them wealthy

Flick on the TV, open a newspaper or walk into a bookstore, and you will soon encounter these agents of influence. There's Tony Robbins, Suzie Ormond, Tim Ferriss, Dr Phil, Marie Forleo, Abraham Hicks, Bethenny Frankel, Robert Kiyosaki and thousands of other high-profile personal brands who have made fortunes from the particular vision they hold of themselves. They achieved this level of success by monetising their messages into on- and offline products, consulting services, speaking engagements, webinars, TV appearances, endorsement deals and more.

So why is it, then, that we need your voice?

It's simple. Like their competitors before them, none of these agents has the one thing that you have: your unique perspective, education, experience and vision. Nor do they have your unique personality.

The only thing that businesses and companies can't copy is the essence of who you are. When you bring this essence to the fore, competitors may attempt to copy you, but they never quite can. It's simply not sustainable or authentic.

In my first book, Sleeping Your Way to The Top in Business, I wrote, ‘Personal branding is self-expression amplified to influence and command attention'. The experts you see out there have packaged themselves into marketable products that people flock to, invest in and buy from because they've amplified who they are, rather than hiding it from the world. They themselves are their most marketable asset.

This doesn't mean they are necessarily the best in the world, but their marketing has established how they are perceived. In this book I will teach you how to do the same in the most leveraged and effective way possible, so that within a few short months you can become a first-class expert while finally doing what you love.

Most critically, there is a simple principle that must guide all agents of influence:

Phew! Breathe that in for a minute and really digest it. Your input could transform an entire industry simply by looking at an old problem from a new perspective, taking a fresh approach. You don't have to know all the answers. You just need to know answers to the specific problems you aim to solve — problems that you are most likely already an expert on and solving right now in your day-to-day life. One well-known example of an agent of influence who completely turned her life around is Bethenny Frankel.

Giants levelling the playing field: why now's a perfect time to get started

The great news is that the playing field has been levelled and paved for you, as it was for Bethenny, to begin right now, no matter what your starting point.

You don't need to hire staff, you don't need a physical shop front and you don't need tens of thousands of dollars in your bank account to get started — nor do you need prior knowledge of creating products, marketing or business, for that matter. And you don't need to be an extrovert, as many believe, or to catch a break on a reality TV show.

I've had no formal training in any of these areas, and for a guy who grew up on a cattle and cropping farm in country South Australia, who started with zero budget but went on to build an online following of more than 35 000, I know what's possible. More importantly, through painstaking testing and measuring over ten years I know how to help you reach your goals, and to figure out what works and what doesn't, and where you should invest your time and energy in getting started in the lucrative expert industry.

The six fundamental principles of lifestyle design

Everything you can imagine is real.

— Pablo Picasso

As an agent of influence in training, or even as a pro who is seeking to hit the next rung of success, you're creating a vision. Every day. With every thought.

This vision must create dramatic tension between where you are and where you want to be in order for it to be propelled into existence. To do this we begin by answering several key questions in the categories of see,do,create,experience,inspire and share, which are the six fundamental principles of lifestyle design. Agents of influence begin their journey by designing their ultimate life; the business is then designed to fit around this. So let's begin.

1. See

What do you see yourself doing and/or having in six to 12 months? If you could do or have anything you wanted within this time period, and you knew that anything was possible, what would it be? Using the templates on the following pages, get clear on what your future lifestyle looks like. This is the vision that will compel you to make profound changes in your life that you never thought were possible.

Neale Donald Walsch writes, ‘Life begins at the end of your comfort zone'. Get uncomfortable in this exercise and move beyond your existing comfort level. Each expansion of your comfort zone brings about an expansion of you — your lifestyle, your wealth and, most importantly, your potential.

You'll look back and realise that it was the accumulation of small steps over time that was really what you needed all along. For example, I used to watch many reality TV shows on Arena and picture myself in one. I didn't know how. I just knew what I wanted. Six short months later I received a phone call inviting me to make a cameo appearance. How it happens for you is not important. What is important is that you have the vision to see further than you see right now.

2. Do

What do you see yourself doing on a weekly basis? There's nothing more frustrating than seeing someone who doesn't understand what they're capable of, given time. I came face to face with this myself recently. Landing an advisory role with the talented New Zealand fashion designer Annah Stretton, I soon realised I was selling myself short. This phenomenal woman will fly from Auckland to China to source fabrics and tour the factories, then to Brisbane to speak at various women's events, then on to Melbourne to look at possible stores, meet with me and attend a show, then back to Auckland — all within the space of a week. She'll be back at work the next day as if she'd popped down the street to grab a cup of coffee.

Imagine what you could do if your thinking was limitless? Imagine what you could do if you had all the money, time and energy in the world? How would you be spending your weeks? What would you be doing? Where would you be travelling? What would you be working on? We all have the same allocation of time each day; it's how we decide to use it that's crucial.

3. Create

What kind of lifestyle would you like to create? Lifestyle creation is an art and, like an artist, you must choose the palette you wish to paint with. With an abundance of colours and contrasting experiences to choose from, for many it can become an overwhelming experience. Set your fears and worries aside. Worry detracts from your experience of today and creates a vacuum that attracts more of the same. It wastes energy and time that could be better spent on creating a lifestyle that enriches your life daily.

Let go of your inhibitions, judgements, fears and worries and begin to paint. What kind of lifestyle do you yearn for? Perhaps one that includes financial abundance, freedom to travel to exotic countries, time to give back to charities, greater connection with your family. How would you spend your time? Create it freely.

4. Experience

What would you like to experience on a monthly basis? Experience is the gift of life. After all, what are we really living for other than to experience a rich variety of interactions and events over the course of our time on this planet? To enrich this experience we must be strong-willed and clear on what these experiences are to be. Go to your local travel agent and grab as many brochures as you can. Jump online and look at what you'd love to experience more of, whether travelling, adventure, shopping, education, love, connection or self-expansion. Now's not the time to hold back.

5. Inspire

What is inspiring you to make this change in your life or those of others? To be successful in life, we must understand the why. Why did you decide to make the change now and, critically, what inspired you to make the change? Did you have your own New York moment when you just knew that enough was enough? Did you help someone solve a problem and just know you had to share the solution with the rest of the world?

6. Share

Sharing your story and message is the secret to creating a lifestyle business that can generate long-term profits. What is the story or message you would like to share with the world? Did you experience crippling pain that turned you to yoga, so that now you'd like to teach others via DVDs and books? Did you help a business grow by six or seven figures by implementing your strategies, and you'd love to create an online course that better leverages your time and increases your income? Did you have a life-changing experience that you'd like to share via an audio program that sells on autopilot? Your story is what will connect you to your audience and them to you. It's what sets you apart from everyone else in your industry. What is your story?

The Lifestyle Design Blueprint

The 15-minute Lifestyle Design Blueprint is a tool that will help you refine and reinvigorate your life by working on the six fundamental principles I've just outlined.

Find yourself a quiet space in which you can let your imagination run wild. Now is not the time to hold back. Don't worry just yet about how your vision can be brought to fruition — we'll get to that later. Get excited and let go; most importantly, whenever you find yourself getting stuck, simply ask yourself, ‘If I could be, do or have anything, what else do I want for my life and for those of others?'.

To help you get started, table 2.1 shows a sample blueprint.

Table 2.1: the Lifestyle Design Blueprint (example)

Visit www.benangel.com.au/flee9-5 for a printable copy of this template.

Now it's your turn. Use table 2.2 to complete the template for yourself. Jump into this task with abandon and, whatever you do, don't edit your own life. You only get one shot at it — live it well and create it freely.

Table 2.2: the Lifestyle Design Blueprint (your turn)

Extracting the essence and bottling the passion: the key to your happiness

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

These questions are designed to extract the essence of your passion, the most potent resource you have as a human being. When we connect with this passion, 9 to 5 no longer factors in. You could work 24/7 and be happier than Kim Kardashian with a brand-new sponsorship deal. It's got zero to do with the hours you work and everything to do with whether or not you are doing what you love.

By homing in on your passions now, you uncover the fundamentals for creating a profitable business and fulfilling lifestyle.

I want you to really think about the answers you just entered in the Lifestyle Design Blueprint. Picture them, smell them, feel them and hear them and, most importantly, experience them. Create an online dream board using Evernote by copying and pasting images of how you see your life to come. Sync it to your phone and look at it every night before you go to bed. Make this part of your daily ritual because, as we know, all successful individuals follow daily rituals that support their development.

Your answers to these simple yet powerful questions will underpin everything you do now and in the future, and will fast become the driving force that compels you to keep going when times get tough, when you lose flow, when you get frustrated, when expectations aren't met and you're greeted with brick wall after brick wall and filled with self-doubt. You will draw your inspiration and motivation from these answers, which will shape not only your world but eventually the world we live in.

Which brings us to a critical question.

What kind of agent are you?

Potential career paths were lost on me as a kid. I had no idea what I wanted to do, how to find out or where to get started. I just knew that I valued experience and contribution over a title I could hang on the wall. I tried everything, including writing music, management, investing in a personal development company, training as a travel agent, running a speed-dating business. (Did it help get me dates? No!) You name it, I tried it. I did everything I possibly could to fit myself into a confined box, not realising that there were options available to me based on my skillset at the time — I just didn't know how to package and market them successfully.

This experience helped me devise an easy formula that you can use to instantly uncover your talents, find your strengths and secure your future. My EKP Solution (see table 2.3, overleaf) breaks down into three easy steps that you can use to identify your current expertise and knowledge (or what you would like to discover), and how to transform that expertise and knowledge into marketable products.

This tool can be used by anyone in any industry, no matter what their area of expertise or specialty. Take a personal trainer, for example, who like many of us trades time for money. Here's an illustration of how such a professional might reimagine their business to increase sales, reduce the need for those 5 am wake-up calls, and create greater flexibility that allows for travel and growth.

Table 2.3: the EKP Solution(example)

As you can see from the sample above, we focus on three core areas in a simple way to extract and define both your knowledge and how it could be turned into information products that could be sold online.

Now it's your turn to apply this template to your area of expertise. The key is to be as specific as possible when it comes to how your knowledge can be applied. If you're looking to enter an entirely new industry, under ‘expertise' simply list the skills you are most passionate about learning and developing. This will form the starting point for your ‘Quick Start Guide'.

If you're already in the game and doing what you love, but you'd like to make it more profitable, by completing this exercise you'll uncover other products that could be added to your marketing mix to increase your income with little effort.

Now complete the template below in table 2.4.

Table 2.4: the EKP Solution (your turn)

Finding velocity: three archetypes for becoming a successful agent of influence

‘Hello?'

‘Hello, is this Ben?' asked Danette, the former Oprah producer. ‘Are you ready to get started?'

‘Absolutely', I replied.

‘Then let's begin. It's time for you to take the next big step.'

Does earning a great income and having flexibility in your life sound good to you? Let's make it even better by speeding up the process of helping you find your position in the marketplace by taking a look at the three archetypes for becoming a successful agent of influence.

Following on from the exercises you have just completed, these archetypes are the ultimate differentiators to set you apart from everyone else in your industry. They are designed to get you thinking about how you could be positioned in the marketplace to gain greater traction, sooner.

Polarising

There is nothing more powerful in marketing and life than using your ability to polarise your audience by being unapologetic about who you are. Polarising is the art of creating ‘friends and foes' — people who love you and others who absolutely hate you. For many people this idea is frightening. The most important thing to realise is that any expert who enters a new marketplace must create what I call ‘industry disturbance'. When your opinions differ from others' in your field you suddenly create fans who will follow your every move and buy from you time after time. Your detractors serve only to amplify your message, and in many cases become the catalyst by which you reach your tipping point for success in your industry. So don't just identify your expertise and knowledge; identify what makes you, through your opinions and personality, different from others in your industry.

Mission

Anyone with a story and a message to share makes it their mission to get people to give a damn about it. In my brief interaction with Danette, the most remarkable takeaway for me was that there is power in simplicity when pitching for a mass audience. It sounds easy, but it's not. It's in the process of subtraction and not addition that we command influence and authority and become formidable communicators. In stripping back who we are, we allow others to strip back who they are. This creates a connection that instantly separates you from the wannabes, allowing your story and message to shine through.

Fail fast, fail early, fail often

Perfectionism is the number one enemy of state. As Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed'. Failure is one of the greatest gifts we could ever be given. By failing fast, failing early and failing often, you'll quickly speed up your rate of success and create brand-new stories and experiences that can also be packaged into marketable products.

Lifestyle, vision, expertise and knowledge are key cornerstone concepts. By defining yours you will position yourself for success and create a blueprint for getting anything you want. It is through this clarity that new doors will open and new opportunities flood through. You have just taken the handbrake off your life.

Mid-air jitters

‘Thank God!' I thought to myself. I was finally on my way. I'd made it through LAX security. Those guys are scary. I now had to race across the Los Angeles airport in search of my connecting flight. My comfort zone was about to be obliterated and reshaped in a way I'd never experienced.

And something magical was about to happen. In the midst of all the chaos I didn't realise I'd finally cracked the code to the agent of influence's bank account and that within four weeks it would add five figures to my bottom line. And I was about to come face to face with Hurricane Sandy.

Tips and resources.

Successful agents of influence have a powerful vision of themselves and have packaged themselves into marketable products.

Sharing your story and message is the secret to creating a lifestyle business that can generate long-term profits.

By homing in on your passions and vision now, you uncover the fundamentals for creating a profitable business and fulfilling lifestyle.

Visit www.benangel.com.au/flee9-5 for printable copies of the Lifesyle Design Blueprint and EKP Solution templates.

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