Xpand Skills

Now that you understand the concept of a program its all about mastering the elements of leadership that can transmit new thoughts, emotions, skills, and inspiration to Xpand the lives you lead. We do this through different elements of teaching: 

• Online Education
• Manuals and Scripts
• In Person Trainings
• Virtual Trainings
• One-on-Ones
• Live Events
• Virtual Events
• Public Speaking
• Masterminds

I am going to walk you through best practices on each of these, because mastering each of them will help you level up as an influencer. You may not have aspirations to be a public speaker for example, or host events, but I promise holding lots of management positions over the years and coaching you will most likely be asked to participate in most all of these. Whether you are just training a small team of your employees, or you are on a stage of 10,000 people, these tips and tricks are going to quickly give you some tools to implement and shine brighter as an Xpert. 

Teach your people how to learn: 

You would think that the formal education system would take time training kids how to learn, but it doesn’t. Most people graduate never learning the important skill of LEARNING. You may be asking what do you mean by the skill of LEARNING? 

I call it MENTABILISM. 

Metabolism is your body’s ability to take your food intake and convert it into usable energy. Metabolism is your mind’s ability to consume content, process it, and convert it into usable energy. 

A friend of mine, Jim Kwik, author of the book “Limitless” , has spent decades studying the human mind creating learning hacks to improve your ability to retain information. I don’t want to just retain the information, I want to be able to cater the information I consume to my situation, apply it, execute on it, and then teach others to do the same. 

Jim teaches an easy principle to help you retain more: 

MOM

M- Motivation

• Why do you want to do this?  

O – Observation

• Don’t blame old beliefs or patterns that you can’t learn or remember
• Don’t get stuck in old identities

M – Methods

• What are the processes in which you learn best? 
• How do you hit different learning modalities? 

“Inch by Inch it’s a cinch, yard by yard it gets hard” 

To add to this method, my saying was always. “See one, do one, teach one.” This simple framework helps you retain a ton. For example in this book I am giving you a bunch of simple examples for you to no go DO… then once you start executing on these practices you can then teach other leaders to Xpand the lives they lead! I feel my progression really happened when I started teaching my principles. I had to sharpen my trainings and make sure that I fully understood each principle enough to be the teacher. 

Note Taking:

Knowing that I was becoming the coach, the leader, the consultant I started a much more robust form  of note taking that I attribute a lot of my content creation, and retention to. 

About 8 years ago I realized my notes in legal pads, and scratch papers everytime I would go to training kept getting lost. I had 50 different journals and notepads based on the mood. It was a complete chaos. I then subscribed to Evernote.com where I mapped out digital notebooks that had all the topics I was consistently training on, or interested in. In each notebook, I had specific topic notes for each time I was consuming content, and it fell under that category. I could input the notes, quotes, and lessons learned in that specific note. 

Topics included things like: 

• Sales
• Pitching
• Presenting
• Closing
• Objections
• Recruiting
• Finding
• Signing
• Onboarding
• Leadership
• Culture
• Coaching Conversations
• Strategy 

The notebooks started to grow as I became interested in more expansive topics. But this hopefully gives you an idea how to create a skeleton for your note taking skills. Then every time you read a sales book, and they start talking about how to handle objections, you can take a photo or drop a quote in that specific note. 

I have the ability to pull learnings from years ago to compile a last minute training. I don’t have to retain everything, because I know it sits in a safe place to recall the stuff that stood out to me. I then impress those I lead because it looks like I was super prepared and shared great content. 

The reality is I am on a constant journey of compiling amazing content to share, and it isn’t something I turn on the moment I am asked to give a training or speech. It is just always on, and when I need to give a training or speech, its is seamless, and low stress. 

We put a notes section in the app Xpand divided up into 3 sections:

1. Personal Notes

• These are private to where only you can see

1. Public Notes

• Shared with people you want to collaborate with, such as your coach, or team members looking to learn about similar topics and add to a collective learning

1. Course Notes

• Specific to the videos and courses you are watching. When I am watching a course and developing a skill, I want to be able to notate important information that I may want to remember right then and there. This then saves tagged to that video so you know exactly where your learning came from and you don’t have to go back and forth guessing how you learned that nugget. 

My invitation as a coach is to get your people taking all their notes in this centralized space. You want to be able to collaborate on what they are learning, and see that they are actually engaging in content. Ask them about their new breakthroughs with the content. Challenge their comprehension. 

Help them change their old pattern of learning to pass the class and not get in trouble so you are learning for YOU not for me as your coach. The application of this knowledge is power! We told that, but not rewarded with that in public education systems. In the real world you start to learn really quickly. We live in a capitalistic environment and you control your competitive edge and knowledge is often just that. 

Don’t make the content you are assigning something to just “get through,” you want to make it something that is going to create a difference and recommend they watch it multiple times until they really have grasped it. It isn’t a race to completion, it’s a race to mastering the skills taught in the content. 

I find people brag about reading a book a week, or month, but then you ask them about what they have learned, or implemented from the book and they can’t tell you. I would rather read one book 5 times in a row and be able to say I am practicing all the new principles I’ve learned out of the book than say I have read many books over the last few months.