Announcer: This is Push Button Influence, where the world's leading influencers candidly share their exact strategies for maximizing reach, accelerating growth and generating massive exposure, all by leveraging the power of new media. You can become the next Larry King, Oprah or Howard Stern. All you need to do is broadcast your brilliance. Push Button Influence teaches you how. Here are your hosts, Alex Mandossian and Steve Olsher.

Steve: All right. All right, all right, all right. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to another addition here of Push Button Influence. I am Steve Olsher, along with my co-host extraordinaire Alex Mandossian. Today we are joined by the extraordinary James Schramko, who is, well, you're down under, man. But I guess internet land here, as we're locked on Blab as we are darn near every Wednesday at 4 PM specific, it doesn't really matter where you are. That's the beauty of the internet. You said it was the morning there, so it's actually the next day, so it's Thursday and it's like, what is it, 10 AM there?

James: Exactly.

Steve: 10 AM. All right, there we go.

James: If you want any stock tips or horse race results, let me know.

Steve: I always wondered about that. All right, so just to kind of familiarize you, sir, with how we do this show here, we always start out with a word. Alex and I both have a word. Alex, why don't you share what your word is for today?

Alex: Okay, our guest today, although this is my first physical meeting, which we acknowledge prior to coming on live, I've known his work for quite some time. He's familiar with the work I've done and he never really talks about this, he just does it. Many teachers talk about this word, but the really, really good ones, the ones where you don't see the moving parts and the wheels kind of moving in the foreground ... It's always in the background. This word always comes up and without it, you can't make sales, you can't get opt-ins, you can't move the needle. That's the word "persuasion". When you're really good at it, you don't talk about it. You just do it. It flows and melts right out of you. James, you're good at it with the spoken word, you're good at it with the visual word, and you're good at it with the written word. Let's take a step back and just look at the moving parts. Why is persuasion such an important part of your business, even if you don't talk about it outright like an influencer would, let's say, in sales training?

James: So I answer this?

Alex: Yes.

James: I think because we are a pile of choices, as my friend Seth Ellsworth says. We're basically a pile of the choices that we've made for ourselves and that other people have made on our behalf. If you accept that point of view, then we need to be good at persuasion. Probably the most important person that we could ever persuade is ourself because there's a lot of inner gain, a lot of self-talk. That's what gets us over obstacles and helps us develop and learn and grow. Of course we need to be armed against the persuasion of others who want to influence our life, whether that's our parents when they bring us up ... Either knowingly or unknowingly they influence and persuade our choices. Of course people around us, whether it's customers, team members, family members, they're all going to have an impact on our life.

I think it's a really good thing to understand and research and study and I think using persuasion on yourself is one of the secret things. I'm a huge advocate of mindset and I've done a lot of research around that because until you get that bit, not much else will follow. Your outside world will be a reflection of your inside world. Whatever's up here will manifest. You take someone who's constantly focusing on how little money they have and how desperate things are, they tend to perpetuate that situation. Conversely, if someone is very aware of the tools they can use to influence their own thinking, then they can actually move forward in a better way.

Alex: What I'm hearing you say is all persuasion that's effective is first self-persuasion and then, as a starting point, it becomes easier to persuade others, to paraphrase? Is that close?

James: I think it's the most important level of persuasion is to be able to persuade yourself. Good salespeople tend to be able to do that. They could justify just about anything. We have to use our force for good, not become consumers so to speak. I think self-awareness would be very closely associated with that. To be able to persuade, you not only have to know yourself but then the next level is to able to step outside yourself and to walk in someone else's shoes. I think if I look back into my career where I was heavily involved in sales and persuasion and influence for a job, then the results I was able to get was when I was really able to walk in someone else's shoes and to understand their situation and to not just understand their problems, but to help them solve them properly. That fits with my whole definition of selling.

Persuasion might have a negative connotation, especially if you think about cults or associated things, like religions and wars and stuff, but I think from a positive point of view, if you could persuade someone, if you're educated them, you might be able to show them a way that they can't see themselves and help them move towards a result. A great example of that would be the instant influence framework they use in hospitals to help people receive treatments that they need when they're not in the resourceful state to accept that without some persuasion.

Steve: Nice, nice. Awesome. All right, so James, I'm not trying to date you here in terms of how long you've been in the game, but you've been online, like I have, like Alex has, for enough time to have seen folks do