This week Dr. Misner continues his discussion with Dr. Mark Goulston, author of Just Listen.

The topic for this week is how to take listening from being transactional to being transformational. To do this, you need to get them to uncross their arms—literally and figuratively—by getting them to talk about their passion.

One question you can ask is “Imagine you wake up five years from now and life is perfect. What do you see in your career? What are you doing?” That conversation can transport people into a future that they’ve never thought about. It’s amazing how you will bond with that person.

That’s the kind of question that would be perfect for a one-to-one in BNI.

For some great free resources, including questions to ask in order to delegate more effectively, visit JustListentheBook.com.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 128 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast which is brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you? And where are you?

Ivan:
Hi, Priscilla. I’m doing great. This week I’m in Michigan. I’m doing presentations throughout Michigan. I love visiting this region of BNI. It has hundreds of BNI chapters throughout Michigan. BNI has hundreds of chapters and quite a few members. As a matter of fact, you’ll love this, if Michigan were a country for BNI, Michigan would be the third largest country for the BNI program.

Priscilla:
Wow! That’s interesting.

Ivan:
It’s huge. They bleed burgundy here in Michigan. It’s really a pleasure to be here speaking to a lot of the BNI members. And we’ve done something unusual for this podcast. We’ve carried over the speaker that we had, the guest that we had last week into this week. A good friend of mine, Dr. Mark Goulston. Mark is a psychiatrist and business consultant. He’s been an FBI and police hostage negotiator. And we were talking about his book that just came out recently, within the last month, called Just Listen, and the Web site for the book is JustListenTheBook.com. Lots of free resources there for BNI members. I don’t promote a lot of books on the podcasts, but I really loved this book, and Mark is a good friend. We talked last week about some material from the book.

But there is something that I really wanted to talk about, didn’t get a chance to last week, and that was the idea of how you take listening from being transactional to transformational, which is, in a way, a lot of what we try to do in BNI, to try to take the relationships from being transactional to transformational.

And you’ve got a great story for that, Mark. Do you want to share that with us?

Mark:
Absolutely. I was actually giving a talk to a networking organization, not as well run and I don’t think as productive as BNI. And what I did is I had people introduce themselves to each other, and I said, “Pair up with someone that you don’t know, so this will be very good for the one-to-ones that BNI suggests after meetings. And introduce yourself, what do you do, and who do you do it for, maybe when you do it, etc., etc.” And people did that, and I gave them five minutes to do that and made sure that they changed after two-and-a-half minutes.

And then I said, “I’d like you to try something else. I would like you now to each take the same two-and-a-half minutes and talk about the benefits that your service or product provided to a customer or client. So tell a story of something that totally made that person’s life better and you were associated with by offering them your services or product.”

So what happened is the conversation was totally different, much more animated, much more passionate, much less selling. It was really tough getting them to let go of the conversation and come back to my talk. And afterwards, I said, “What did you notice?”

And they said, “Geez, we didn’t feel like we were selling. We felt more spontaneous. We felt more comfortable. We felt closer.”

And I said, “Well, I noticed that, but I noticed something else. And what I noticed is that you all used your hands a lot more. The reason you used your hands is because the passion you felt when you were talking from the value of your service or product instead of trying to sell people, the passion you felt was so strong that the words were not enough to communicate it, and so you started to use your hands to do that.”

So here’s the take-all, because I’m a neuroscientist. When you’re dealing with skeptical clients or customers or maybe other networkers, when they’re feeling skeptical, their arms are crossed in their mind, and if you can get them to actually uncross their arms literally in front of you to communicate with their arms and hands as well as their words, they will uncross their arms and hands in their mind and be open to you. And you can do that by asking something they’re passionate about or something that they’re really scared about. So you can take either route. The key is as you begin to feel this and you feel them uncrossing their arms, you actually feel them opening up to you, the key is to be of service to them, to actually give to get and focus much more on the giving whether you get or not. As opposed to opening them up and then doing a bait-and-switch or maneuvering them, which I think is out of integrity and not in alignment, actually, with the spirit of BNI. But it’s amazing how it transformed the conversation.

And regarding transformation versus transactional, transactional conversations are eye to eye, toe to toe, and what you have is commodity versus commodity, and people will try and cheap date you and will decide things on price. When you can ask people questions that cause them to break the conversation and look up to the ceiling because they want to think more about what you’ve asked them, when they come down with their eyes to look at you again, you’re not in a transaction anymore; it’s been transformed into a relationship, because you have added relating to the conversation.

Ivan:
I think that’s really powerful. A lot of what we try to teach is that when you come to a BNI meeting and you’re telling people what you do, you’re not trying to close a sale; you’re trying to train a referral team, you’re trying to teach them about what you do. And that, to me, is not transactional. We talk about transactional networking to be a sort of coin operated networking, where you put the coin in and you expect results right now.

But transformational networking is really about going deep and building that relationship. Wouldn’t you agree?

Mark:
Absolutely. And I think building on that, I think a good thing to also get from people that go with passion, but find out what their core of excellence is, because when I discover what people’s core of excellence is, I feel it behooves me to go out to people, and the way I’ll make a referral is I’ll say, “Have you ever met someone who is so excellent in their service or product when you experience it that you just had to tell others?”

And everyone says yes.

I said, “Well, I need to tell you about someone I just met, what they do, and what they did for me so that you can experience it on your own.”

And I think when people can pause and talk about their core of excellence, what you’ll see happen is instead of being a sales mode, you’ll see confidence, you’ll see them actually re-experience their competence so they’ll feel much better. It will be a wonderful conversation, and then you can actually follow it up in that way I just suggested.

Ivan:
You know, in BNI, when we do the one-to-ones, and what you’re suggesting here would be something great to try out on the one-to-ones to see how they’re responding to what you have to say. We do what we call the GAINS Exchange, where people share their Goals, their Accomplishments, their Interests, their Networks, and their Skills, as a way of getting them to open up about – a little bit of personal information about themselves rather than transactional, “Hey, here’s how you can give me a referral.” And we find that going a little bit deeper and sharing with each other a little bit more about each other that it creates connections for people to build upon.

Have you seen that with your networking efforts?

Mark:
Not as much as what you do. You deserve – you especially, Ivan; you’ve created an amazing organization that’s really about productivity and results, but it’s also about building a community. You have a caring community, but one of the things they want to share is help each other be successful.

One of the questions I’ll ask people, by the way, to deepen the value is – sometimes people who are in transactional professions just see themselves going and improving their business by just doing more and bigger deals. If you ask someone this question, “I would like you to imagine that in five years from now and you wake up, it’s a Monday morning, and life is perfect. What do you see in your career? What are you doing?”

And what’s fascinating is a lot of time, people will, instead of breaking from the future they’re living into now, which they may not be that keen about other than making more money, that kind of conversation will transport them into a future that they’ve never thought about, like “Well, you know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see myself doing this, which is very different than what I’m doing now.” And then if you help them work backwards. “Well, what would be the steps between now and then to make that future a reality?”

Talk about transforming a conversation from transactional, it’s amazing how you will bond with that person.

Ivan:
Great example. And these kinds of questions, I think, are perfect for the one-to-ones, and I urge members listening to this podcast to try out some of the things that Mark’s been talking about here.

And, Mark, you’ve got a Web site, JustListenTheBook.com, that has a ton of free resources. Do you want to give my members a couple of the examples of the free resources they can get from your Web site?

Mark:
Well, there’s a list of things called Two Questions that are exclusive to the site, and I think in a prior podcast, we talked about two questions to gain people’s respect and have them treat you better. One of the other two questions is how to delegate more effectively, and I need to give credit to a friend of mine, Stan Barkey, who is a senior executive at State Farm for many years, and he said whenever you’re delegating something, the first question is to tell people what you want them to do; but then instead of saying, “Do you understand?” you said, “What do you understand that I’ve asked you to do, and why it’s important for us to do that?” When you do that, they feel, actually, more than a function.

But the second question, which he feels is the best question he’s ever asked in his career, is, you said, “In the event that, for any reason, you’re not able to do what you just agreed to, how do you want me to react to you? If what I care most about is just getting the work done, I have no interest in being punitive, and all that kind of stuff, but going forward, what shall I do?”

And that’s what I talk about a lot in the book, Just Listen; if you can talk about the future that nobody has messed up yet, it’s amazing how open people are, whereas if you talk about something that’s already happened, even in the best of conversations, you’re going to get people that are defensive, justifying their position. And so I thought that was amazing advice when you’re delegating to someone. And then you repeat it back to them, “So what you’ve said is, if you don’t follow through, what you’d like me to do is to never tell you about it in front of other people, but just take you into the office and be firm with you and tell you it needs to be done by today, etc.” Then you repeat it back to them and you wait for them to get what I call the confirmatory yes. And when they say yes, then you have your way of dealing with them instead of fuming about them when they drop the ball.

Ivan:
Well, Mark, great content. Your book called Just Listen, our members can go there, to JustListenTheBook.com. I highly recommend this book and free resources at the Web site. Dr. Mark Goulston, thank you so much for being on two of my podcasts. You’re the first guest back to back like that, I think, so thank you so much.

Mark:
Thank you, Ivan.

Ivan:
Back to you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Okay. Thank you both. That was great.

I’d like to remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.

It’s not the anchor that holds a ship in place during a storm, but the length of chain connecting it. The captain watches the first mate to see where he needs to lay the chain to counter the winds.

This is a metaphor for BNI. How many links are there in your chain of relationships? Can you extend your chain in times when the economic winds are blowing against you? Have a one-on-one meeting with everyone in your chapter at least once a year.

Your BNI director is like the first mate on the ship, watching to see which way the wind blows and signaling which adjustments need to be made for the welfare of the group.

What are you doing to lengthen and strengthen your chain? Leave your comments here.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 122 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast which is brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. Where are you and how are you?

Ivan:
I am doing great, Priscilla. This week I am in New Hampshire and Maine visiting BNI groups and doing presentations. There are some great groups up here, and I am really pleased to be here.

Priscilla:
Great. Well, what do you have to share with us?

Ivan:
Today I have a topic that I have written a little bit about; it is called “The Strength of the Anchor.” This summer my family took a several-day small ship tour of the Great Barrier Reef. The first night we noticed the anchor being used to secure the ship in the middle of the Coral Sea was really small compared to the size of the ship. It was a pretty decent sized ship, and the anchor was pretty small.

The second night we were anchored off of Hope Island in the Great Barrier Reef, and some really strong winds came up and our captain started the engines, and he backed the ship up, letting out more length of chain to the anchor. I am really curious, maybe a little bit concerned, so I asked him, “How is it possible that such a small anchor will hold the ship in place when the wind is blowing against it so strongly?”

And he said, “It is the chain that is holding the ship, not the anchor.”

After the anchor is lowered, the captain looks to the first mate, who signals from the prow which direction the chain is laying on the bottom of the sea. The captain then maneuvers into the right position and lets out the necessary amount of chain to hold the ship in a particular place and at particular time. This night, with the winds growing stronger, he recognized that he needed to let out more chain, and I began to see how this dynamic was really relevant to BNI.

Our anchor is the system, the process of doing business the BNI way. But it is not the system or the process that has the strength at all, or not completely. Clearly, it is a powerful process. It is the length of the chain holding the chapter, or the ship in the metaphor, in place that makes it all come together.

If you take a look at your chapter, members that are listening to this podcast, think about the links or relationships you have formed with the individual members in your group. How many links does your chain have? Do you have strong relationships with all the other members in the chapter, or are you closely linked with some but disconnected and detached from others in your group, for whatever reason? How do you go about letting out more chains during times when the economic winds have strengthened against our business?

I submit that it is time to get serious about developing strong relationships with each and every member in your chapter, even the ones you don’t think you have contact with that might run a business that is not exactly symbiotic with yours.

We talk about forming power teams with those businesses which are closely related to yours, but what you do about those members whose businesses are totally out of sync with yours or members who seem to be unable to provide quality referrals to you? Have you done one-to-ones with those members? Spending time to do the one-to-ones with each and every member of your chapter helps you to develop a longer and stronger chain. Each person in your chapter is one of the links that lengthens and strengthens that chain. The wisdom of laying down a longer chain to strengthen the ability of the anchor to hold strong is critical for the success of your chapter.

Another aspect of this anchoring process is watching the first mate. I thought that was really interesting. Your BNI director is trained and qualified to signal your chapter of the direction the chain is lying as the dynamic in your chapter changes. This is really important. The first mate signals where the change is going for the captain, and without him, the captain would really, really struggle. That is your BNI director; they can signal the direction of your chapter and help you if you take their advice.

The chapter president is basically the captain of the chapter, the ship in this metaphor. He or she watches the director for guidance and what adjustments to make to ensure the chapter is pointed in the right direction. At one point in the anchoring process, you see the first mate literally, literally dove into the water…

Priscilla:
Wow.

Ivan:
…to loosen the chain where it had become hooked on some coral formation. Your director cares about your chapter. As we travel around the world meeting with BNI directors and conducting trainings and conferences, we’re both gratified to see the heart of our BNI directors and our presidents and leadership team people and chapter members. And we encourage chapter members to keep their eyes, particularly the chapter president to keep their eyes on the director as he or she signals which adjustments need to be made so that the system works well for the BNI group.

I love this metaphor, and I wanted to share it with BNI members today.

Priscilla:
It is interesting, especially the idea that the chain, rather than the anchor, being the most important part, which is just counter intuitive.

Ivan:
I had no idea, no idea at all. I guess when winds really pick up is when they need to lay more chain down, because when I was on the ship the first night, there was not much wind, and it was no big deal. As the winds really kicked in, they laid more chain down, and they said that is what really helped to grip the bottom. I am listening to that and thinking about BNI, and I put these two things together. I talked about it with my wife, Beth, who helped me to create this visualization. I think it is very relevant to BNI, and I would love education coordinators to share it at BNI meetings.

Priscilla:
I just want to make one more comment in terms of the actual group. If you have been in a group for a while, as I have, and you develop a certain number of relationships with people and then you don’t renew them by doing one-on-ones in a fresh way, or more often than you would have thought to do them, I think you put yourself at a disadvantage.

Ivan:
Definitely. I think you should probably do a one-to-one with those people, certainly all new people, and all of the people that you want to maintain a strong relationship with, no less than once a year. Most people say, “Well, it’s not that much.” But you have a chapter of 30 members, that can be a lot of one-to-ones. And I am saying that is a minimum not a maximum; that is a minimum. You have to meet with those people if you want to create those relationships, if you want to maintain those relationships with them.

Priscilla:
Yeah.

Ivan:
No less than once a year for one-to-ones.

Priscilla:
Do you think a party counts?!

Ivan:
No, I don’t think that is a good one-to-one! But that is a good way of staying in touch with people, absolutely.

Priscilla:
Okay, great. Well, do you have anything else you would like to share?

Ivan:
No, that is everything today, and I would love for those of you who listened to this podcast to leave a message, leave a note what you think. Particularly if you take this back to your chapter, I would love to hear what your chapter thought.

Thanks, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Great. Thank you, Dr. Misner.

Well I just want remind the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you’ll join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.