From Podcast to Millions: How Art of Charm Exploded Revenue with Jordan Harbinger

Co-founder at The Art of Charm, Inc – Jordan Harbinger

Jordan started a podcast way before it was the trendy thing to do. His podcast Art of Charm created a great platform for his business model – selling the Art of Charm Academy. Listen to Jordan’s story and learn what he thinks the most important thing is to grow a hugely successful company.

Go to JordanHarbinger.com and TheArtofCharm.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download
?
Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today on the show we have Jordan Harbinger of TheArtOfCharm.com. I'm really excited to have him on the show. We have 122 mutual Facebook friends and yet I didn't actually know him beforehand. Thanks so much for coming on, Jordan.

Jordan: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. It's funny because we're doing video and your mic is down there and mine is right here.

Jaime: People want to see my face.

Jordan: Nobody needs to see my face. It's like that picture of the guy where the apple is blocking his face.

Jaime: I think you should leave it there.

Jordan: I will. I don't know what you mean by that.

Jaime: Everyone listening to the audio is like "What is he doing right now?" You'll have to go to the website, EVentualMillionaire.com, and check it out.

Jordan: That was funny enough to drag people to your website. Let me rethink that marketing.

Jaime: I love this, Jordan. Why don't you tell everybody what The Art of Charm is so that everybody has an idea of what you do?

Jordan: Sure, so The Art of Charm teaches social skills but not like which fork you use or even remedial or advanced social skills. It's essentially emotional intelligence. We take emotional intelligence, which is something that's hard to measure/quantify, and we teach it in a systematic way that anybody can learn and master. Our clients include everybody from entrepreneurs who have realized that people buy you, which is a topic that I talk about a lot - they don't buy your product and service and we can maybe get into that - but also we have a lot of engineers and people like that who work at XYZ, a massive company where people use their stuff every single day, but they don't really know how to interact with either coworkers, family members - believe it or not - or women. Whatever it is, we can help them with that. Last but not least one of our interesting client segments is military intelligence and special forces and they come in because this stuff saves their lives when they have to either be a leader in an extreme situation, keep their cool in a very tough situation, generate rapport and trust, get someone to like them, trust them, get information and things like that, so that's what we specialize in training. Our live training programs are in Los Angeles and people come in from all over the world and learn from us there and then, of course, we have online stuff that's essentially only dating focused because if you want to learn some dating stuff you'll sign up for a website but if you want to learn some legitimately life changing stuff it's like going to college, you have to go somewhere, so people do that with The Art of Charm.

Jaime: I assumed it was more dating focused and stuff like that but as soon as you get to your website it's way more than just how to pick up chicks.

Jordan: It's really not about just dating stuff. that was fun and that's how we started and we market that way a little bit, especially online, because here's the thing - your audience may be the exception to this but if I tell a bunch of people, especially guys, "Hey, we're going to teach you how to network, make better first impressions, generate trust, rapport and connection," they're like "Yeah, whatever. I think my dad needs that - he's old," and then we're like "But wait - people buy you," and they say "But my product is so cool people will just want it and I'm going to be an eventual millionaire." But it's not really true so we have to buy the broccoli - that's what we call it. To get a little kid to eat broccoli you can't say "Excuse me - this is good for you. If you eat a lot of it you will gain nutrients to become big, strong, smart, clever and be successful in life." They'll just go "No, I'm going to throw this across the room." So what you do is you take cheese whizz, you put it in the microwave, you stew it up, you dump it all over the broccoli and the kid throws it in his face and eventually, when he's older, he goes "Oh, that stuff was good for me," and you go "Yeah, you're welcome." That's what the dating element of The Art of Charm is - it gets them to the door, it gets people going "This is really interesting. I applied all of this stuff and it changed the way I interacted with people. It got me XYZ results. Now that I've handled the women problem in my life, where I'm feeling lonely and can't generate positive relationships or don't have a strong connection to my life," they see the bigger picture and their mind expands to it - because when you're trying to solve one smaller problem that is really a pain point you don't bother looking at the bigger picture. You might say to an entrepreneur "You need to think about your five year plan" and they say "Dude, I can't even pay my rent this month. I'm not writing a business plan. I'm going to go out and figure out how to sell anything, even if it's a kidney, because my kids need to eat." They're not thinking "I need to strategically leverage blah, blah, blah." If you talk to a beginning entrepreneur about that they're just going to tune out because they don't care, they're just trying to make a buck and you get why. It's the same thing with people's dating skills and relationships - you have to solve the immediate problem first and then you can get to the bigger picture. Just telling people about the bigger picture is only going to get 1% of your audience to become your customer because everybody else is going to go "I don't need this right now. I don't get it, I don't need it, I don't want it."

Jaime: It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? If you haven't been able to eat yet you're not paying attention to anything else, you're saying "Give me food, please." Did you know that at the time, though? I'd love to hear the beginning story - did you know that you had to feed them broccoli with cheese whizz or were you trying to feed them broccoli?

Jordan: We weren't even trying to do broccoli; we were 100% cheese whizz at that time. Seven or eight years ago when we started the show "just a brief origin story here - I was working at a law firm, I went to law school and I used to be an attorney and I worked on Wall Street and I had an associate position which is essentially a junior level position in a law firm and the guy who hired me was never around and yet he was rumored to make more money than everyone else. People who have listened to my show have heard this a million times so I'll do the short version here.

Jaime: Not everybody has listened to it - keep going!

Jordan: What?! Everybody has heard it!

Jaime: Yes, you're very popular, sorry!

Jordan: I'm kidding, obviously. I love the fact that I get to retell this and people are like "That's so well polished!" He was never around, he was from Brooklyn and he had a tan - that was the first red flag - and he took me for coffee once and he said "Ask me anything you want," because he was supposed to be my mentor, which is Wall Street HR baloney for "I have to check off a box on some form some place that says I mentored someone this summer," so he showed up and was like "You. Coffee. Now," he didn't even know who I was. So we went out for coffee and he said "Ask me some stuff about law," and I said - not caring about the job at the time - "How come you're never in the office and you make more money than everybody else' Especially if it's all about billable hours," because if you're a lawyer you're essentially an hourly wage slave, you just get to mark your own hours and decide which client you're working for and stuff like that. The old joke on Wall Street - and pardon me for the audience who might be offended by this - is that we go to the bath room and take a leak standing next to another lawyer and say "What do you think about the Hannity thing?", "Oh, you know what we should do, blah, blah, blah," and then you wash your hands and you walk back to your desk and you go "That was six minutes. I can bill for that," and we do. If you're thinking about it, doing anything with it, even if you're not 100% focused on the task at hand, maybe a little bit distracted by something else, you bill that, and that's a running joke in law and especially on Wall Street where banks don't care what their legal bill is. But what he told me changed the way that I look at work forever - he told me that he's out generating business for the firm which is more important than what the other partners were doing. I said -I see guys in here on Sunday at 1am when I'm wandering home from the bar and I'll stop in for a diet Coke or something like that," because I can get into my office 24/7 and I'm trying to impress girls or something so I show up on a weekend, like "I'm just going to stop by my skyscraper in New York office." Again, this was eight years ago, have a little bit of mercy on me. But I would stop by and there would be people in there working their butts off and I would be like "Wait a minute. You're a partner - why are you here on Sunday? This is for schleps." I figured I wouldn't see anyone because I didn't want to get called in to work. He said "No, those guys are technically skilled but their only value is billing hours," and I said "Wait a second, so let me get this straight - your value is go play golf, do jiu-jitsu, do cruises, charity events and get investment bankers, or whatever clients, to like and trust you and want to do deals with us by just being cool and their job is to bill as many hours as humanly possible at the highest rate possible?" So the conflict of interest for them is that their time is only valuable to the firm if they're at work, working, and this guy of course could have done the technical aspects too but his time was more valuable screwing around and hanging out and having mimosas at brunch with his wife and the other guy's wife. That's his job. When he left the firm he took that client book with him and we went out of business so I'm thinking "Not only are you un-fireable," because he told me he was compensated as such - not only is there a bonus structure for bringing in business but he was compensated for that and if he wasn't given a raise or a higher percentage he could leave with that book of business and that's exactly what he did, he walked into another firm at the height of the recession, walked in, became a partner and brought his book of business over and everybody else retired early or started somewhere else at a lower rung on the ladder. He had all of the leverage and that changed the way I looked at work completely. I was still thinking about becoming a lawyer but I hate the technical aspect, it's boring, so I thought what I should work on were my people skills, networking skills, relationship skills, getting people to like and trust you, rapport and things like that. That's far more valuable and it's more fun and it plays much more to my strengths as well but also, even if I was really good at all of the other stuff I would still be playing second fiddle, after a decade or two decades of doing this stuff, to someone who went out and mastered the skills that he knew and the skills that we now teach at The Art of Charm versus somebody who just everything about whatever technical legal aspect you're working on - and that was a no-brainer for me. That changed the way I look at every aspect of work in every industry because now that I live in San Francisco I look at all of these tech startups and there will be guys who have just an amazing product - it's polished, it's a pleasure to use, it's fun, it's cool, they have a great outlook, their business plan looks amazing and they've got investors and funding - and then there's another guy or group that has an app that's not quite as polished, they have less investment funds, they don't really have quite the follow through that the other company has but, man, their dev guy is a kickass killer. He can run out and talk to anybody and you just can't wait to get your hands on it and he's got deals coming in with all of these other companies because they think he's cool, he's the front man, the spokesperson for the app, and they're crushing it and the other company doesn't understand why because their app is objectively better. The reason is because they pay a superstar $300,000 a year to go out and sell it. People buy you - they don't buy your product or your service. It's really hard for an app service to sell itself, it's almost impossible. Even in the industries that are critical to our life, like medicine, you see that doctors that have good bedside manner and good people skills are not only making good money but they get sued for malpractice a lot less - even if it's their fault - if people like and trust them, because nobody wants to sue old Dr Dorcy, the sweetest guy ever, even if he did leave his scalpel in your gut - you blame the manufacturer of the scalpel. I'm not making this up - there are studies that show that this is true. People skills are always going to be more important than technical skills. If you have a little of both, you're going to want more people skills than technical skills any day. if you have none of one then of course you're out of whack but, for us, our clients are coming in because they want the people skills that they don't have, they probably already have the technical aspect down.

Jaime: It's funny, I have a degree in IT, I'm a huge computer geek and was an engineer, so that's the reason I did really well in what I did, because I can actually talk to people. But we tend to throw that under the rug - "Oh, yeah, you're a good networker, whatever." You're telling us stories that are extremely tangible, making tons of money from this one thing - why do we have to put cheese whizz on the broccoli to do it?

Jordan: That's because people are scared to do it. Here's how it looks - "Hey, man, you need to network more and put yourself out there and sell your business," and they go "Hmm, things I don't like: phone calls, sales pitches, public speaking, awkward social situations. Let's see, that pretty much overlaps 100% with networking, putting yourself out there, selling your product. No, I'm good. I'm going to rationalize why I don't need that or I'm going to hire somebody, eventually, who already do that." Here's the problem - those people cost a lot of money because they can do anything. It's unrealistic, especially if you're an entrepreneur, especially if you're in an engineering field. At the end of the day, especially if you're doing this stuff for dating purposes, you can't rely on anyone else - no one else is going to do this for you. If you're running your own business, no one else is going to do it for you, and if you're in a technical field, people who are doing this are going to sail ahead of you, it doesn't matter if they're hired later. I interviewed a biz dev guy, a big one here in Silicon Valley in San Francisco, and he has doubled his salary every two years and then, as soon as the company can't pay him more, he just quits and goes to another company. I'm like "Holy crap, wait a minute. This is a six figure job when you begin. How much money is this guy making?" He's the highest salaried employee at any company, including the C-level executives, he makes more than them because he brings in their business and he knows it and he's a killer negotiator so he really crushes it. The truth of the matter is that it's an uncomfortable situation for a lot of people, they don't want to admit that they need it and when they finally do admit that they need it they want to rationalize, in any way possible, why they can't do it, shouldn't do it, don't need to do it, so you hear excuses from guys who are looking at The Art of Charm like "It's too far," and I'm like "Dude, you live in Chicago. I've got a guy here from China and another guy here from Australia and you're telling me it's too far - you could theoretically drive here if you wanted to!" "Oh, well it's really expensive." It is. How expensive is failing at your business or losing your house? How expensive is it that you're stuck in the same place for a decade or how expensive is it to hire someone to do this for you at 10 or 100 times the cost of the programs and services that we have here, that teach you this skillset? So there are all of these objections but, at the end of the day, the reason that people don't want to do it is because it's scary to go in and realize that we're going to make you do things that you hate doing until you get good at them and they're fun. We make it fun, but before that you're just envisioning us laughing at you while you stand up on a stage and throw tomatoes at you. I don't know what people have in their head but it is scary - that's the point. We're holding your hand, making sure you get it right and making sure that it's fun but, yes, it can be terrifying but, think about it, at the end of the day, the people who want to go through the program and the tough lessons that we have, they come out of it rarer on the other side of that fence and that makes their value go through the roof, whether or not you're working for yourself or somebody else.

Jaime: I love this. I think one of the interesting things is that I see entrepreneurs in general who are just like "Tell us the newest webinar tactic. Tell us the newest Facebook tactic," when, in reality, it's so much more than that. Tell me about how you've grown your business - I know you have co-founders - what did that look like for growing and how did networking play a part or was it all Facebook tactics?

Jordan: I just dumped all of my life savings into AdWords.

Jaime: Sold! Interview over.

Jordan: Exactly. What I did was stumble through a lot of it. I didn't start the whole thing by myself, I still don't run it by myself - it's a company, it's an S corp, there are shareholders. But the guys running this with me - AJ, Jonny, Tory, Justin, Alana, all of those guys on the team - originally AJ and I had a podcast that was on iTunes, I think there 800 shows on iTunes at the time, it was 2006 and nobody knew what podcasts were, and not only could you not listen to them on your iPhone, I don't think, but you had to stream them from iTunes, which no one had. So we were sitting there, talking about things that we were messing up on - dating stories and how to develop certain relationship tactics and things like that, just kind of stumbling through it, and guys would listen - "I've gone to every coach in this industry to figure out how to solve XYZ problem," and this was not only guys who were looking for dating and relationship advice - one of my clients at the time was an African guy who had moved to Denmark and he was like "I don't fit in. I don't have friends. I work here at a college," he was an academic professor or something, "I just cannot figure out how to assimilate. It's not easy and I need help," so I helped him with that via Skype. One of my other clients was a mortgage banker - he had tens of millions of dollars and he was like "All of the women and guys that I have in my social circle, I can't tell if they like me or if they like my money. I don't know who to trust. I need help filtering people in and out of my life," so I helped him with that. Of course there are a lot of guys who are like "I need to meet girls!" so we helped them with that; that part was pretty fun too, but at the end of the day we were really just focusing on helping people with advanced social skills and trust and rapport wherever we could. Eventually guys were like "Listen, I'll give you $10,000 if you let me stay with you for a couple of weeks."

Jaime: Really? Is that really what happened?

Jordan: Yeah, and I was like "Are you kidding?"

Jaime: Are you sure that wasn't a proposition?

Jordan: I had to snuggle with him but it was totally worth it. So we had him come in and we talked about that on the show and somebody else wrote in and was like "Is that an option? I didn't know you guys did that. I don't have $10,000 but I'll stay with you for one week," or whatever, I don't remember the numbers but it was something like that. I said "Sure, you can," but the problem was that I had just started another Wall Street job so I needed to hire a coach temporarily to come up and service these clients and teach the curriculum.

Jaime: You still had a job at the time?

Jordan: I was still a lawyer, yes, for the first year of running The Art of Charm. I was an attorney and AJ was a cancer biologist and he didn't even live in New York at the time. We hadn't moved the business to New York at that time. So I brought in a coach, Johnny, who still works with us, and he was these guys who were now coming in from all over the US and Canada and even some other countries, like we had a guy come in from Slovenia, and they were coming in, staying with us for a while and learning from us live. We finally got a curriculum going and we started to develop that as we found out what our clients really wanted and what was really good for them and the curriculum is now constantly evolving every single day. Now, of course, we're running a lot more boot camps. Back then it was a couple of students a month or a week. Now it's sold out three to four months in advance, eight guys in a classroom, residential programs, we have a place for them to stay, it's an immersive, 60 hour program. It's funny to look at where it was, which was a dude sleeping on my couch, possibly the floor, in 2007, and now we have a real school. It's kind of a miracle that we survived this long. I think a lot of entrepreneurial ventures start that way in the first place.

Jaime: Definitely. Can you tell me what the catalyst was? Was it the podcast? What helped you grow as fast as you did?

Jordan: It was the show. At the time only these really tech dudes were listening to podcasts, it was not mainstream at all. You had to know enough to even find that these existed. People were streaming them from the website when they found us and they were like "I don't know how this works!" We had a player there and MP3 downloads and even then I think most people probably didn't have MP3 players so people would sit there, next to their computer, listening to streaming audio.

Jaime: We're old, Jordan. We're old. That's what it is.

Jordan: I know! So then people were like 'I wrote an article, and it's probably lurking somewhere on the web, about how you can take an MP3 and play it on speakers in your house." Now of course we have Android and iPhone and you can just stream it or download it that way. Everyone knows how to listen to a podcast. If you're listening to this now you can find us on iTunes and download it to your iPhone or Android, stream it, whatever you want to do. That's, of course, helped our audience tremendously but back then it was all of those guys finding us but the serendipitous part was that guys who were technical enough to find our podcast and listen to it were usually the type of guys that had IT jobs and they were like "Man, I need this bad. I work for a company and I'm just sitting there, coding away, and I need help with this stuff." Now, of course, it's so mainstream that we get guys from all walks of life but back then we just happened to choose a medium that just nailed our demographic. We couldn't have asked for a better advertising medium, even though we weren't advertising or selling anything on purpose.

Jaime: That's impressive.

Jordan: It was luck, really it was. At first it started because me and AJ were going out every night trying networking skills and dating stuff and mixing them together - so we were meeting real estate owners and hospital donors and people who worked at the university when we were both going to grad school in Michigan. At the same time, AJ was really good with women and I wanted to know how that worked. I was teaching him all of the networking stuff that I had started to learn and master because of what my law mentor had told me and so guys started following us around and they were like "Listen, I'll buy you guys drinks all night or I'll buy you dinner if you explain to me what you guys are doing, because I hear you talking about body language and reading people and I see you do stuff and I don't really fully get it. I want to figure this out." And then it was "You guys need to write a book," because at many points we had six or eight guys following us around, but not the kind that you necessarily wanted because a lot of them were guys who were recently going through a divorce - not that those guys were undesirable but they were like "You need to teach me this!" and it was kind of needy, not like we were there to have fun. Some guys wanted to meet girls and some guys were really lonely because they were getting a divorce and some guys were trying to compete with us, which we didn't need or want. They were like "You need to write a book. You need to write a book," and I was like "Dude, I'm studying for the bar exam. I'm not writing a book," and AJ's like "Man, I'm a cancer biologist. I'm cloning stem cells. I'm not writing a book." Then we found out about podcasting, we bought some microphones from Guitar Center and realized we could talk about it, not write anything, put it on the internet and people will download it. Then, when people ask us "How do I know this'" we can just show them this URL and they can just go there and get it and we don't have to repeat ourselves. So we planned to record maybe 20 episodes of the show, now we're episode 307, I think, not including all of the bonus ones that we recorded that are not numbered. We thought no one's going to listen to this so it doesn't really matter, we can just talk freely, and that's what made the show popular. We weren?t like "Hey, everybody! Welcome to The Art of Charm!" it was "Oh, man, I made this really big mistake in my relationship. What do you think?", "You're an idiot. You should have done this and that.", "I'm having trouble getting a job - what should I do?" We would read letters from people and solve their problems. It just started with us talking because we were too lazy to blog and it just expanded.

Jaime: That's why I did it! That's why most podcasters do it - we're too lazy to write so we have to do something else.

Jordan: I know.

Jaime: That's awesome. So now that we've talked about all of the networking and getting girls we need some tactics, at least one, so that when people walk away they're like "Okay, Jordan told me something that I can put into practice right now to make me cooler to everybody else."

Jordan: Well one of the things that people always ask about is how to make a great first impression and that's a good step towards having people buy you and one of the drills I can give that works in an audio-only format is the common mistake that people are making - they go "Alright, my first impression, it's when you open your mouth, the first thing that you say, the way you look, maybe you smile at people, etc." The problem is that people don't realize when their first impression is made and it's actually made much sooner than people think - it's actually made when you become a blip on someone else's radar. To put it into a fun dating context - because, again, hide the broccoli, right? - guys will walk into a place where there are girls of any sort, any variety, and they'll be like "Okay, we're here to meet girls!" They've got this agenda. They're hanging out, pretending to watch the basketball game and they have a couple of drinks and they're like "Alright, I'm kind of getting there," and the girls are like "I see these guys looking at us," and you can vouch for this because it's happened to you, "I see these guys looking at us - what's going to happen? Why aren't they talking to us? Are they going to talk to us?" and then the guy has another couple of drinks and he does this buzz by and he's ordering next to you, kind of looking at you but not saying anything and it's weird. Then he goes back to his friends and, finally, one of your friends goes to the bathroom or you go the bathroom and he walks up and he's like "Hey, what are you drinking?" and you're like "Uh, no," because you've already decided that this guy is not a winner in your book, you've over it. He had 25 minutes to figure out how this was going to happen and instead he waited forever and came up with something pretty mundane and you're like "Dude, liquid courage is doing all the talking. I'm not interesting," and he's going "Man, girls are hard. Why are they so mean?" The truth is that he thought his first impression was walking up there with the cool guy walk, "What's up, ladies?" Meanwhile, your first impression was "Who's this drunk guy who keeps standing in the corner, staring at me?" How close am I right now?

Jaime: So close!

Jordan: The truth is that he doesn't realize that his first impression was made right when he became a blip on your radar. This works in the context of business as well. I go to these events where I'm speaking and there are always these people coming up to talk to us, which is great, but there are also people who sort of hover, following you around for a little bit, and you're thinking "When is this person going to pounce on me and talk to me?" and it's always at an awkward time, like you're coming out of the bathroom and someone's like "So I had this question for you," and it's like "No!" and you're looking around to try to figure out how someone can save you. For women it's literally that - you're looking around, thinking "Am I in danger right now? I don't know what's going to happen." So for anything in a business or dating related context you need to make sure that your first impression is kick butt right out of the gate. When you walk into a room, that is when your first impression is really made. It won't happen any sooner than that. So what we want to make sure is that our non-verbal communication is on point because it's not when you open your mouth - most people's first impression is made before that, so it's all about non-verbal. If we walk through a doorway and we have that set up nicely we are, by and large, good. So how do you ingrain that as a habit? How do you get a good first impression when you walk into any room? The drill that I will give you is every time you walk through a doorway for the next, let's say, two weeks, and I mean even in your own house, anybody else's place of business, anything, straighten up, chest up, smile on your face. Not ridiculously - you don't need to be doing the Superman or the Batman or whatever, but you're standing up straight and you've got that confident body language, you've got a smile on your face - and the reason you do this in your own house is because we're trying to ingrain this as a habit. Here's what we don't want - we don't want you to go 'Okay, I need to use this at the network event that I'm going to," and then you're going "Chest up, chin out, oh crap, I haven't heard anything anybody's said.' Then you kind of have to micromanage all of your non-verbal communication. That looks weird, it doesn't work, it takes you out of the moment, etc. If we internalize this as a habit then we can start to take things even further. So, again, chest up, shoulders back, chin up, smile on your face every time you walk through a doorway. Once that becomes a habit you never have to think "What's my first impression like?" and when you start to go into stressful situations that affect you on non-verbal communication levels, on a physiological level, you're not going to have to worry about it because your default is chest up, shoulders back, chin up, smile on your face, and even if you're a little bit nervous at the time, at least that's your default, instead of being as small as possible and hunched over, because that's what your body does when it's under stress and it does not look confident, it does not look good, and people buy you, remember, so if you don't have that non-verbal communication set up nicely they're not going to want to buy you. They're not going to go "He or she must be feeling a little bit insecure because this is a socially awkward environment and probably this person has a little bit of social anxiety because they work in a non-office environment." They're just going to go "This person is weird and I don't know why but I don't really care. I'm just going to move on to somebody else." They don't give you the benefit of the doubt because even if they're exactly the same way all they're doing is examining their own feelings and reacting to the feelings you're giving them - so if you're giving them open body language, confident body language, positive body language, they're going "Oh, this guy's cool. I like this person. I feel good around this person." That's the kind of person you want to be if you want people to buy you. Another extension on this that we can take is that once you get good at the body language aspect you can get even better at eye contact and that's where a lot of people are dropping the ball as well. I would say, once and only once you get the body language stuff handled, notice the eye color of every person you talk to in the next couple of weeks. So instead of "Make good eye contact," where you get a death stare and it's really weird and it doesn't work, it scares people, it's a little rapey in a lot of ways.

Jaime: I was going to say creepy but that's good too!

Jordan: "Is this guy a little serial killer-y?" I don't mean to make light of that but it really does signal danger in people, especially females, so it's not something that you want to do as a habit to over compensate for looking at the floor or looking somewhere else. If you notice their eye color then you don't have to worry about making the death stare, too much eye contact, and you don't have to worry about too little because if you notice their eye color and go "Hmm, okay, blue, or green," then you can do whatever you want and their first impression is "He made good eye contact." They're not necessarily thinking "He didn't make any eye contact." Also the anxiety that comes from making eye contact will dissipate after a little while. If you notice the eye color it forces you to look people in the eye without thinking "Okay, eye contact, eye contact, eye contact." You look in there and you go "Oh, blue," and it's calming and it's not so hard to keep looking at that person because you've sort of got through it already. Now we've got our body language and our eye contact largely squared away. That's a good first impression or at least we're on our way. I would say work on those for the next couple of weeks and if you want to learn more this is what we talk about on The Art of Charm.

Jaime: I think it's awesome. It's like Pavlov's dog. I was super geeky too and the funny thing is that now I notice that if anyone has a camera I perk up. It's like Pavlov's dog - Jaime has her "I'm on video" face. It's automatic and I don't even notice it anymore - people joke with me about it. I can't help it; it's so ingrained. But before I was like "Please don't do that. I don't want that on me." So you think two weeks is enough to start doing that?

Jordan: No, but once you do it for two weeks it will start to become a little bit of a habit and then you'll continually work on it. It's something that's going to take a long time because here's the thing - the first two weeks you're going to look like somebody shoved something where the sun don't shine and after that you're going to be able to do it in a calm, loose, natural way. By the way, did you see, when you were giving the example of the camera on you, how small you got? That's what people do and they don't see it. They do that either physiologically or emotionally, which might be a can of worms, but they do that when they're in uncomfortable social situations and what that says is "Huh, that person doesn't want to be interacted with. That person is not confident. That person doesn't want to interact with me, they don't like me," it doesn't matter but it's not good for you if you're trying to sell yourself, sell your business or date. That's not a good reaction to have to social anxiety pressure in any kind of situation in which you feel uncomfortable or not completely on point. Any situation in which you're going to learn or grow or be able to sell your business or sell yourself is going to have that pressure so you need to be able to manage it or you will not succeed.

Jaime: Definitely. It's uncomfortable so people don't want to go after it but that's why you have to go after it so that you can get better at it.

Jordan: And people who try to think of ways to avoid it are the people who have mediocre levels of achievement. Everybody that you know who's really successful is really good at this stuff.

Jaime: That's a really good point. When you think about the people who I know who are really successful, they are really good communicators and really good at this stuff in general.

Jordan: Look at Pat Flynn - he doesn't go "Hey, everybody?" He doesn't do that, right?

Jaime: He used to.

Jordan: He probably did.

Jaime: He's totally worked on it.

Jordan: I'm sure he has. Watch videos of Steve Jobs from ten years ago up until the most recent ones and it's completely different - and it's not because he gets so much attention as the CEO of Apple. No, he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a charisma coach, well, multiple charisma coaches, some of whom I know, and they worked on him a ton. It's the same with any executive. Here's the thing - you become an executive in part because you have some of those skills down or because you started the company but you become a great executive and a great leader because you work on those skills and it's a virtuous cycle and if you're ignoring one aspect of that you're just going to end up mediocre or losing out to somebody who is working on it.

Jaime: I think that's what's so important though - that it is learning. It's not as though I'm an introvert and I can't do this at all. I used to be super introverted but it is definitely a learnable skill and that is, of course, why you teach it, because you can make changes in people's lives. We have to start wrapping up so I have to ask you the last question - what is one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Jordan: You just blindsided me with that. You definitely didn't warn me about that at all.

Jaime: It had better be good because I warned you.

Jordan: No problem. Well, aside from the drills that I just gave you to work on, and that's a step in the right direction, breaking down things into micro habits is a kind of cool, learnable way to go about mastering new skills. I would say look at something that you're not doing - for example, in the drills that I just gave, with the body language and the eye contact, think about it like this - maybe you're trying to get into shape and you want to go and run and you're like "Every morning I wake up and I'm like "Screw this," I don't want to go run. This sucks." You don't have to go run - break it down into micro habits, and it can be anything - it can be anything - but for running, as an example, instead of getting up in the morning and going and running, do this - get up in the morning and set your micro habits, break it down - every morning get up, put on your track pants and your running socks and then you can go back to bed if you want. Seriously, you can. Most people will probably end up going running if they do that but a lot of people will just go "Cool. I can just go back to bed and not feel bad." So you'll get back into bed and the next day or the next week, whatever you do, however you do it, you'll get up and you'll put on your running pants, you'll put on your running socks, you go outside and you put on your running shoes - then you can go back to bed. Some people will go back to bed because it's cold and they live in Michigan. Other people will actually go running because they're already up. If you break it down into micro habits your success rate is going to be much higher than if you just keep trying to browbeat yourself into getting up and going running every morning. That's not a good way to get yourself spurred to action. For some people it is, for most of us it's not. So look at anything that's holding you back right now - it could be something in business but it can be something that can be habitually corrected, like maybe you're an e-mail addict or maybe you're avoiding your e-mail because you have tons and you don't know what to do with it all. Maybe you have to do your big tasks first, maybe you're guilty of doing tiny little things throughout the day - whatever it is, break it down into a micro habit that gets you an inch closer to that every single day and then plan that out for the next week or two, depending on how big the micro habit display is, and just do it every single day. because you're going inch by inch now, instead of mile by mile, and it will get you closer to what you want to do. So think of at least one thing, aside, of course, from the body language and eye contact stuff that I just talked about, and break it down into those micro habits and you will create a successful habit for yourself in the next few weeks. Then just do that with every single thing in your life.

Jaime: Every single thing in your life!

Jordan: Do it with everything else but start with one. That's the micro habit - break the first thing down into micro habits - do it with everything else. But seriously, if you can break everything that you're having trouble with down into those tiny pieces and create action steps for each one, in a year you won't recognize yourself.

Jaime: So people just listened to that - what percentage of people actually do? Whoever's listening right now, I need to kick them in the butt because if you don't do this then you don't really want success or to change your habits. If you're paying attention and you're like "That was really good advice. I should probably do something with that," and then don't do anything right now, that's your own fault.

Jordan: Of course.

Jaime: Thank you so much, Jordan.

Jordan: My pleasure.

Jaime: Where can we find more about you and your podcast and all of that fun stuff?

Jordan: Since you're already listening/watching a podcast, if you're listening in iTunes or Stitcher or whatever, just search for The Art of Charm and you'll see us right there. Sometimes we are on the front page of iTunes if you're lucky with the time but search for us or you can go to TheArtOfCharmPodcast.com and check it out. it's all free - there are hundreds of hours of tools and things like that, just like we talked about today, and action steps - I'm all about the practical and we're all about the practical and if you are interested in the training you should call or e-mail me - jordan@theartofcharm.com and the phone number is right at the top of the website.

Jaime: Nice. You have an academy and a whole bunch of stuff on your site too, so people should definitely check that out also. Thank you so much for coming on, Jordan. It's so nice to actually meet you after 122 mutual friends - they must be right! Thanks so much for coming on today. I appreciate it.

Jordan: My pleasure.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Art of Charm, Business Growth, business model, business revenue, Business Scaling, business success, Jordan Harbinger, millionaire interview, podcast, podcasting

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Millionaire Interviews

---