[Pankaj Raval] (0:04 – 1:13)
Hi everyone, we are back with Letters of Intent and today we are lucky to have a guest who I’ve had a chance to chat with a little bit about what he does. But you guys are in for a real treat today because we have Michael Leibowitz here with us today. And Michael is an expert on messaging, okay?

And if anyone who has a business should be listening closely to this podcast because messaging will really make or break your business. We are very lucky today to have Michael with us because he’s going to share some really unique insights on what it means to have good messaging, what bad messaging looks like, and how you can optimize your messaging. Michael is an expert in neuroscience and linguistics and has a storied career, has done many, many interesting and wonderful things that we’ll get into.

But we’ll also be talking a lot about messaging and even maybe talking a little bit about our messaging today at Carbon Law Group and how that can be improved. So I have consented to be his guinea pig. I’m a little bit concerned, but I’m excited to see what I learned.

So Michael, without further ado, thank you so much for joining us today.

[Michael Liebowitz] (1:13 – 1:18)
Pankaj, I am so happy to be here with you and what a wonderful introduction. Thank you so much.

[Pankaj Raval] (1:20 – 1:32)
My pleasure, my pleasure. So let’s kick it off, Michael. So tell us a little bit about what you do.

What is messaging? You don’t meet a lot of people who focus just on messaging for businesses, but what made you focus on this and why is it so important?

[Michael Liebowitz] (1:34 – 4:05)
I love language. I don’t know why I love language. I can actually, I won’t go into the long story, but I can trace it back to the first grade to tell you the truth.

In particular, what I like about it the most is how people use language to understand each other. That’s my main focus, is how do we communicate for understanding each other on a deeper level? So when I encountered behavioral neuroscience, which is an amalgam of so many other techniques, there’s psychology in there.

I’ve studied psychology, a lot of study in neuro-linguistic programming, and a bunch of other three-letter modalities that no one else has ever heard of, so I won’t bother with some random alphabet soup for anybody. But I got deeply interested in these modalities from the standpoint of understanding how people understand themselves, their world, and how to communicate with each other. And these are all therapeutic techniques, right?

To do a piece of therapy with someone, which I can do, and I often do throughout the year on a pro bono level. But I didn’t want to sit in someone’s bad day all day, right? I want to sit in someone’s joy and what makes them light up.

And that’s when I realized, oh my gosh, there’s all these amazing people starting, building, growing their business. And this is part two of the formula. I am a huge fan of entrepreneurship, right?

I think I’ve been on a W-2 working for someone else exactly three years of my life. So I’m a huge fan of entrepreneurship, and the two are a perfect blend together where I get to apply my understanding of neuroscience and behavior and communication and work with people who are creating an amazing business to support themselves, the people who work for them, their families, and just bringing something amazing to the world. And we create their unique market position, how to frame their business that’s different from everyone else, but also so resonant for the kind of person they want to attract into their world and just express the value they offer rather than the thing they offer so that they can get those yeses so much more quickly and just enjoy a business filled with amazing clients.

[Pankaj Raval] (4:06 – 4:54)
I love that. I love that. I mean, I think this is great.

Kismet, I think, brought us together today because I think we think alike in many, many ways. And it’s really reassuring to hear that your passion for entrepreneurship, because that’s really also what this podcast is about, and business and entrepreneurship, even though as a lawyer, I see we look at it from a little different angle. But it’s funny when you said that you want to be part of the joy of people.

I’m like, wow, lawyers are often part of the other side when people are running into problems. But as a transactional lawyer, we get to experience more of the joy. And it’s also how you show up for your clients, too.

And I think that’s a big part of it. So it kind of begs the question, what are people doing wrong with messaging right now? What’s the problem with messaging?

[Michael Liebowitz] (4:55 – 8:58)
Yeah. So you and I both know this. We met through networking, and we’re in networking groups.

And whenever you’re in a networking group, here’s what you hear all the time. Hi, my name is. This is what I do.

Maybe they say some of the benefits of it, right? But you typically talk about the thing we do, how we do it, and what are those benefits, probably more likely the features, things like that. This is all good and useful information.

But when it comes to what is wrong with it, is messaging, here’s the thing. All of it talks to the wrong part of the brain, OK? There’s another part of the brain in operation.

I call them the human brain and the critter brain. All the information I just told you, that’s human brain level stuff. And I’ll just skip to the highlights.

We use all that information to justify a decision. What we don’t do is we hardly give our audience the information to make a decision in the first place. And that’s all critter brain level stuff.

And here’s what the critter brain wants to hear. And it’s really counterintuitive. All it wants to hear is what is your belief.

That’s it. It doesn’t want to know how you do the thing. It doesn’t want to know how good you are at it.

Doesn’t want to know how experienced you are in it. Doesn’t even care about the benefits of it. It just wants to know what do you believe is true about your thing.

It doesn’t have to be a belief that the heavens open up like, wow, what a revelation. No, I’ve literally had clients or a client specifically where their core belief in this business is it’s fun to show off, right? We created our entire messaging strategy around that core belief.

In this case, they sold cooking gadgets and the messaging that came out of that is would you like to be the star of the dinner party, right? We create dinner party stars, right? This attention and this I get to be the center of attention type stuff.

Worked out great. 10% growth from then on when they were stagnant. That is the main thing this part of the brain wants to know.

What do I believe? And this is what’s missing from almost everyone’s communication from the solopreneur all the way up to Fortune 500, Fortune 100. The difference with those people at the high end is they got a lot of money just to hammer you with the other stuff till it finally sticks, right?

So what I do with my people and the joy I like to sit in with them is most of my job at the beginning is to elicit what is the belief system you are using that is underpinning your entire business. And when we reveal it, oh my God, the smiles and the that’s it. This is what I’ve been trying to say to everybody and I just didn’t know how.

It’s just a belief. It’s just a belief. From my estimation, there’s no science behind this.

There might be. I haven’t found it and I haven’t done research on it. But just observationally, 80 to 90% of all human communication is literally just two people hurling beliefs at each other.

They are literally how we understand and organize our world. So when it comes to messaging, that’s the thing that makes us feel a connection. It also makes us feel trust.

We’ve all heard that the know, like, and trust you trust. I do a workshop every month and in that I show the neurology of trust. And at the core of it is belief systems.

And we just want to know, do we share the same belief? And if so, oh my God, I feel so you’re so awesome. Wow.

You’re the of all the options. There’s something about Pankaj I really like, right? I’m going to work with you.

And it’s all belief based. But hardly anyone knows to do that. Because it’s kind of scary territory for a lot of people.

Gosh, what if they really see me? Or that doesn’t seem like information people need to know. Like, no, it’s the first thing they need to know.

Interesting.

[Pankaj Raval] (8:58 – 9:21)
I wonder, you know, I’ve read books by like, I don’t know, Robert Cialdini influence persuasion. Yeah. Is that kind of what you’re talking about when you’re talking about messaging?

Is that what messaging needs to get to like the social proof? Is that how people are making decisions? Or is there something beyond that that people need to address when they’re thinking about messaging?

[Michael Liebowitz] (9:22 – 10:21)
It is part of it. So when I look at Cialdini’s work in persuasion, those are very good elements of communication. But they skip the foundation.

Most of this stuff, Cialdini’s work, there’s another person out there by the name of Donald Miller, who has written some very good books about storytelling called Story Brand, which is a great framework for communication. But what they skip, I call them step one or step two. They’re skipping step one, right?

Or they’re skipping the part before you get to their stuff, which is where I go. It is like, okay, what’s the foundational belief in your business? It’s the keystone for everything else.

Once you have that clearly identified and articulated, all the stuff from Cialdini starts to make sense and you know exactly what to do in those spaces, right?

[Pankaj Raval] (10:22 – 10:23)
What’s your foundational belief?

[Michael Liebowitz] (10:25 – 10:39)
My foundational, well, I have many, but one of them is people do not buy your thing. What we buy is what your thing means to us. Meaning is everything.

And when you find the meaning, you find the message.

[Pankaj Raval] (10:39 – 10:42)
When you find the meaning, you find the message. I love that.

[Michael Liebowitz] (10:42 – 11:35)
Yeah, absolutely. Every business, God, I have so many beliefs around this. Every business is a reflection of the business owner, of the person who runs the business.

They are literally aspects of self. My job is to help you find what those aspects are, turn them into really good messaging. And lo and behold, when you put that in the world, guess what happens?

People are very clear on who you are, what you represent to them and what meaning you hold in their world. And the right people go, oh, hell yeah, that’s who I want to be with. And the wrong people, their brain just turns it off.

They won’t even come into your world. So if you’re experiencing a situation where I’m attracting the wrong people or I’m just getting really difficult clients, this is why. Interesting.

Interesting. Yeah.

[Pankaj Raval] (11:35 – 12:13)
I love that. So I think about, obviously, my life and my business. And I’m always wondering, I sometimes struggle with messaging because I’m interested in doing a lot of things.

I help a lot of clients with business issues. We provide general counsel to business. But I realized for a long time that I wasn’t really getting as much traction because I was a business attorney.

But once I said, oh, I’m a startup attorney or a trademark attorney or whatever it might be that we focus on, how important is the niche in what you do versus explaining what you’re passionate about or what you care about?

[Michael Liebowitz] (12:13 – 13:42)
So what you’re passionate about, what you care about is really useful. When we start talking about what we’re passionate about, a lot of interesting information is attached to that. But it may not be effective information.

Because one of my values is communication for understanding is fantastic. But let’s face it, we are in a business context. And the ultimate goal is client acquisition.

It’s not messaging like, wow, that sounds great. Yeah, fantastic. But let’s make sure it’s effective.

Effective for what? Effective for attracting clients, for getting a yes a lot faster. Right.

So when you start going into passion and such like that, there’s a place for it. There’s definitely a place for it. It’s later on down the messaging hierarchy, though.

However, within all that passion are clues to belief systems. So it’s got a lot of extra information there that doesn’t need to be there. But they’re a great place to start to find the core message.

I see that one that one message. You’ll see some of my messaging out there. It’s on the banner on my LinkedIn.

You know, every business has that one powerful message that just makes their people say, yes, I hope you find it. But there’s that one. It’s that there’s that one thing, right?

[Pankaj Raval] (13:42 – 13:58)
That’s great. Now, actually, maybe we can pick pull up your LinkedIn. I’d love to see kind of how your it might be good for visuals, you know, yeah, how your LinkedIn is.

Let’s see. Yeah. So I see it’s I love it.

Like messaging. Badass. I love that.

Okay.

[Michael Liebowitz] (14:00 – 14:12)
Yeah. You know, that’s the result. I changed that fairly recently.

Yeah. Messaging, badass, leveraging all that stuff. And yeah, I have to end there.

Yes. Fine. I’ll write a book one day.

I mean, it’s actually in the process.

[Pankaj Raval] (14:13 – 14:15)
Okay. Okay. Okay.

Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (14:16 – 14:16)
Exciting.

[Pankaj Raval] (14:16 – 14:24)
That’s exciting. So, yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot to share. I mean, this seems like a very captivating subject to write about.

So that’s great to hear.

[Michael Liebowitz] (14:25 – 15:26)
Yeah, and right away, look at the about section. The first sentence language is where the rubber meets the road. You can have the most finely tuned marketing strategy and exquisite sales process, but none of it will matter if what you’re saying in those moments doesn’t inspire your audience to want you.

Right. And that’s where a lot of people get hung up. When they think about the territory I’m in messaging, they think marketing, they think sales.

And that’s great. Everything I’m talking about is foundational to both of those. What I do is I play well with marketing.

I play well with sales because my outputs are their inputs. So, yeah, but a lot of times people focus on structure, like processes and formulas, and that’s fine. But all that is meant to come down to one moment, a conversation, whether online or in person with someone.

What are you going to say? And is it going to be effective?

[Pankaj Raval] (15:27 – 15:34)
So how do you close a deal, right? So is that it? Like, what can you say to help close the deal when people are coming to you or is it more than that?

[Michael Liebowitz] (15:35 – 16:12)
Okay. So now we’re talking about sales. To close a deal.

Okay. Here’s how sales is generally taught. And this is not new.

This is everyone’s going to like, yeah, duh. Okay. First is rapport building.

Then there’s information gathering. This is where you’re supposed to spend all your time. You’re asking that potential client questions and find what they want to solve and such like that.

Then we want to talk about how we can solve their problem, our solution. And then ideally, there’s an ask. And I know there’s a lot of psychology around people like, I’m afraid to ask, right?

Like, you should ask.

[Pankaj Raval] (16:12 – 16:14)
Would you like to work with me? Okay. Always ask.

[Michael Liebowitz] (16:15 – 20:57)
So here’s the deal. Between information gathering and I can solve your problem, here’s my solution. There’s a missing step that most people miss.

And it’s the most crucial step to the sale. And I’m going to go back to the beginning. I call it the belief transition.

All you need to do is tell them what you believe. And I’ll give you an example in a sec. But the reason why that’s effective is everything that comes after that, which is to say your solution, your expertise, and even the ask are now framed in the context of that belief.

So here’s the example. And I use this example in my monthly workshop. So I had a client, this goes back several years.

They do data analytics. Fine. Their marketplace, they chose a really narrow and deep vertical.

Mutual insurance companies. Fantastic. Guess what?

Mutual insurance companies have no idea what data analytics is or what it can do for them. Okay. Challenge your sale.

So what they were saying before was a bunch of, well, if you come to the workshop, you’ll see it. And I usually say to people, raise your hand when you start falling asleep. And usually by the second sentence, people are raising their hand because there’s a word salad.

Here’s the core belief of this company. The mutual insurance industry is changing and the change is accelerating. Right.

It’s all about change and the acceleration of change. Now, the outcome of that, and that’s the thing that we haven’t talked about, because there’s two parts to an effective message, belief and outcome. The outcome of that is we give you a plan to survive and thrive based on facts, not intuition.

Now, here we’ve reframed data analytics in that last several words. It’s about facts, not intuition. That’s how we want them to understand what data analytics is.

That’s accessible no matter where you’re from. Okay. So let’s go back to that belief.

We know our belief system is about change and change is accelerating. That means in the investigation phase of that sales process, this is what I coach them on. We know you need to be asking, among other questions, your standard ones.

Hey, so tell me about the kind of changes you’re seeing in the last five years. How have those changes affected you? Have you thought about adapting to that change?

What’s going on? So we’re priming the conversation to be about change. Then when we got all the information we need, we can go to the belief transition, which is simply just a statement of the belief.

And it’s like, you say your thank yous for all that stuff. You say, okay, so here’s how we see it. We see the mutual industry changing really fast.

The big players are coming in. They’re changing the conversation and the change seems to be accelerating. And then we can ask, is that what we’re seeing?

It sounds like you’re seeing that too, right? And they say, yes. That is the first most important yes you’re gonna get.

They are now on your map of reality. They have now accepted your context of what we’re really talking about. We’re not talking about data analytics anymore.

We’re talking about change in the industry. And now when we talk about our solution, we can tie how every step of that solution has the purpose of helping identify the change and adapting to the change. So our first step is this, and this is important because, and related to change.

Now the ask at the end isn’t, do you want some data analytics? Gee, I don’t know. The ask at the end is, would you like our help adapting to this change and thriving in the future?

It’s a different question. It’s a different ask, right? It’s a different value proposition.

So by changing this language, I was so pleased when I got an email from the CEO six months after we finished our work together, because they had, they were a new business. They didn’t have a track record. It’s a six figure investment over three years.

And there’s no ROI until year one and a half, right? You can’t sell that to an audience that doesn’t know really what you do. So they were at just a handful of clients, I think two or three, maybe they were in week five of trying to get number three.

And I got an email six months later, they’ve been working for like 10 months beforehand. He said, I just wanted to say, thank you. We are now celebrating client number 10.

It’s a 5X increase of landed clients in six months. Wow. Just from changing the language and the messaging to be belief-based, add in some outcomes and some structure about how to include them in the conversation.

Interesting.

[Pankaj Raval] (20:57 – 21:38)
Interesting. Yeah. That is fascinating.

That is fascinating. Yeah. In business, I always tell my team, when we were talking to clients too, that when they even go to a lawyer, they don’t go to us to get a long contract and pay thousands of dollars just for a long contract.

It’s for that feeling, right? They’re not buying what I’m giving them, but it’s that protection, that feeling, that understanding. So, I mean, yeah, maybe you can talk about in the context of professional services, or even as a lawyer, like what are lawyers doing wrong in terms of messaging?

I’d love to hear like your thoughts there.

[Michael Liebowitz] (21:40 – 22:01)
You’re relying on your data, years of experience. I’m an expert, you know, wins and losses. If you’re a litigator, right?

If you’re transactional, it’s hard to have data on transaction. How many contracts are successful? It’s like, well, the goal is to not test that.

[Pankaj Raval] (22:03 – 22:06)
Exactly, exactly. Right? Exactly, exactly.

Right?

[Michael Liebowitz] (22:08 – 25:21)
You only go to the contract when someone messed up. It’s like, well, you don’t have to go there. I’ll give you an example.

And yeah, I have had a client that is a contract attorney, transactional. And this is what’s great about this. When you tap into beliefs as your differentiating factor, rather than a feature or a benefit of your business.

And his map of reality, it was all about the details, right? That a contract is all about that one little detail. And that’s where his focus of attention.

But in talking with him, and when I’m eliciting all these beliefs, I just noticed this frame kept coming up. Detail this or other words around detail. So we mapped his language all around this one frame of telling the audience a version of, and I forget off the top of my head, what was the actual language we use?

I just remember the direction of it, which is what I’ll give you now, which is, and when it comes to this, the details matter. It’s just all about details. Fine.

This is specific language. What it’s doing, it’s a lighthouse, it’s a beacon, I should say. You know, like, or like that, the light at the front of your house that attracts all the bugs, like it’s meant to attract them, right?

It’s meant, this is meant to attract a kind of person who is also all about the details because they’re going to resonate with that frame, right? Is there, it’s a subtle hint at, if you’re the kind of person, and here I’m getting into belonging traits. If you’re the kind of person who is all about details and you are that sort of fastidious kind of micro detail person, boy, do you belong over here.

And anyone who is not like that, who isn’t that detail person, who may be a great business owner, maybe they operate more on feels, right? It’s like, how are we getting along? They’re more relationship-based.

They may see this and go, ooh, maybe not the person for me, or that language may just like fly right by them because it doesn’t trigger the parts of their brain that signal, that’s my person. So this guy’s now attracting, and of course there’s other parts to the messaging strategy, but it’s all designed to attract the kind of entrepreneur and business owner or whatever thing where someone’s like, yeah, it is about the details. That’s the first most important yes, right?

Yeah, and I’m sure there’s a way to message a different type of transactional attorney because there’s a way I can see someone who’s like, oh, contracts are a way to facilitate relationship and make sure the relationship, like they’re using this language, right? This is their belief system. We wouldn’t use the word detail at all.

We’d amplify about relationship and people who are all about relationship will go like, oh, this person gets me. Meanwhile, all the detail people are like, not detail enough, pass, right?

[Pankaj Raval] (25:21 – 25:22)
Interesting, interesting.

[Michael Liebowitz] (25:23 – 26:00)
And there’s enough for everybody. So there’s two people who do the exact same thing, have had the exact same training. Heck, they might’ve even been in the same class in law school, right?

Graduate at the same level, the whole thing had the exact same, everything, all the detail, I’m sorry, all the metrics are the exact same, but they’re attracting their ideal clients, they’re attracting great businesses in competition, so to speak with each other. But because their language is specifically tuned to attract a different kind of person, they are having thriving businesses, they’re differentiated while doing the exact same thing.

[Pankaj Raval] (26:01 – 26:08)
Fascinating. So it sounds like also you need to be really clear as a business owner about who you wanna attract first.

[Michael Liebowitz] (26:08 – 27:32)
Actually second, and here’s where I differ from almost every other marketing point of view. It’s like I’m standing alone, shouting in the wilderness with this one. Marketing will tell you to, you gotta talk to your audience, you gotta understand your audience, you gotta understand your audience, go talk to your audience.

And yes, that’s true. However, the neurology tells us, there’s again, a missing step. And from my point of view, and here’s another belief, because a belief is anything you can add the words, I believe that, and if it makes sense, what comes afterwards, it’s a belief.

So here’s another one of mine. Before you can understand your audience, you have to first understand yourself. And that’s the key.

You gotta understand yourself, your belief system, your perception of what you do. And by doing that, you can now start to understand, let’s filter the now, let’s use that to go find the audience just to validate there’s enough of them that will resonate with that. And there’s almost always are, unless your belief system is like, that’s really out there.

How do I understand myself? Okay, I’m gonna give everyone the main question. This is the first question I always ask in my engagements with people, and I freely give it away.

So here it is, Pankaj. So you’re a transactional attorney, right? How do you describe your business now?

You’re telling me like, Hey, Pankaj, nice to meet you. What do you do? You say, what?

Well, I’m a business lawyer.

[Pankaj Raval] (27:33 – 27:47)
Our tagline is counsel for deal makers and risk takers. So we are working with small to medium sized businesses, helping them with everything from contract negotiation to mergers acquisitions, and also protecting their intellectual property.

[Michael Liebowitz] (27:48 – 28:27)
Okay, you’re doing something very good there. But it’s only in the space of, we are counsel for deal makers and risk takers. Those are called belonging traits, and they’re very powerful, and you’re using them very well.

Now, the real question is, and if you want, okay, this is kind of like doing therapy on yourself for your audience. You can ask yourself this question. It’s hard to answer it on your own.

Just saying, but go for it. What’s important to you? Pankaj, not your audience, not the people you serve.

What’s important to you about this work that you’re doing? And if you want, you can add in, especially for deal makers and risk takers.

[Pankaj Raval] (28:28 – 28:37)
What’s important for me? To provide my clients with a valuable service.

[Michael Liebowitz] (28:37 – 28:38)
Stop right there. Stop right there.

[Pankaj Raval] (28:38 – 28:39)
Okay, that’s for them.

[Michael Liebowitz] (28:39 – 29:10)
The second you start saying to provide them, you’re talking about them. What’s important to you? I want to preface this with something.

We are all in the business we’re in, especially as entrepreneurs, because of our belief system. There’s a reason why you’re not an airline pilot. You’re not a firefighter.

There’s a reason why you’re not every other gazillion possibilities for making a living in the world. There’s a reason why you have decided this is the path for me, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. What’s important to you about the work that you are doing?

[Pankaj Raval] (29:11 – 29:21)
To uplift entrepreneurs and business owners and help them achieve their dreams, their goals of growing a business.

[Michael Liebowitz] (29:21 – 30:17)
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere, especially that word uplift. Now, this is where you want to engage with someone like me, because I know how to find the keywords. The keyword there was uplift.

I want everyone to notice how well uplift and deal makers and risk takers go together. But when we just had deal makers and risk takers, that was just, this is the kind of person you are. But now we have context.

We have uplift. Ooh, boy, do I want to explore more than that. I want to take up the whole time of this podcast and do that.

But I just want to show the audience, like it’s the language. So, okay, you exist in a space of, we don’t have the language for it. We don’t have the framing of it yet, but we have directional.

And this is only one of your beliefs. You have many, right? Right, right.

Tell me more about uplift. What’s important to you? Actually, I’m more curious about this.

Tell me more about uplift. What do you mean by that?

[Pankaj Raval] (30:17 – 30:40)
To support, to encourage, to kind of catalyze, in some ways, entrepreneurs, to help them, I guess, overcome potential risks and challenges and just the unknown in starting a business, helping clarify that for them to starting and growing their business.

[Michael Liebowitz] (30:41 – 31:29)
So much going on there. Let me break it down, okay? You started with support, which is useful, but I don’t think should be in your language.

Maybe later on in the road. Because here’s why. Here’s the, oh, language, all communication is mind control.

Okay? Don’t think of an elephant. What did you just do?

Okay, so we have this word uplift. Notice the directionality of it. It’s upward, right?

There’s move. It’s active for number one, because it’s got movement. And we have a direction of movement in that language.

Then you said support. Notice support is static. It sits there.

It’s a floor. It’s down. That’s why we don’t want to use support.

[Pankaj Raval] (31:30 – 31:33)
Yeah, it’s a chair. Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (31:33 – 33:11)
There’s a reason why you went to support. And I’d get curious, like, what did you mean by support? Because I’ll bet you who your version of support has that uplift component to it.

But you don’t, but maybe not. Because then you said other things later on down the road that. It’s a catalyzer.

I forget the exact words you used, but I remember what I thought about them. And the intent behind that language you used was something like this. And here we start to have the first draft of your message.

That in your work in transactional work. I forget what. I don’t know.

I’m not a lawyer. I know what you call your transactional attorney. Contracts and things like that, right?

In your work, it’s our job. And here comes the belief, or it’s related to the belief. You are about removing the roadblocks and obstacles on their way up.

Now, you make sure nothing derails them. You make sure nothing stops them in their tracks. Right?

Because the direction is up. Right. For these dealmakers and risk takers, you’re the one who removes all the stuff that could have stopped the up.

Right? Right. This is not language we use in public, but we have directionality to it.

Right? Right. And that’s where the word support comes in.

Because support in some cases is, let’s use it like the stock market, right? Support is the thing, the floor. It’s like, you can’t go further down than this.

[Pankaj Raval] (33:11 – 33:12)
Right.

[Michael Liebowitz] (33:12 – 33:36)
Right? So at various times, you’re providing a stable foundation that protects them where they are. So they don’t go down.

Now, let’s bring it back to that sales conversation we were talking about. When we have the language, now the ask isn’t, hey, do you want us to help you with some contracts? The ask is, would you like to work with us to maintain that upward direction and prevent the downward stuff?

[Pankaj Raval] (33:37 – 33:37)
I love it.

[Michael Liebowitz] (33:37 – 33:38)
Right?

[Pankaj Raval] (33:38 – 33:39)
Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (33:40 – 33:41)
It’s about a contract.

[Pankaj Raval] (33:41 – 33:43)
Yeah. It’s about solving an issue.

[Michael Liebowitz] (33:44 – 33:47)
But the lawyering, the contracts, this is just how you do that.

[Pankaj Raval] (33:48 – 33:48)
Right.

[Michael Liebowitz] (33:48 – 34:13)
But that’s not, you’ll learn in my workshop, the other thing that the brain wants to know, and this is actually human brain communication. There’s two core things that our brain wants to know. You already know about the belief.

The thing that a human brain wants to know is, what’s the main outcome I get? And outcomes are interesting. There’s a famous saying in marketing, people don’t want a quarter inch drill.

What they want is a quarter inch hole. Right?

[Pankaj Raval] (34:14 – 34:17)
What does that mean? What is that? It’s a metaphor.

[Michael Liebowitz] (34:17 – 34:40)
And I’ll give it to you right there. The drill in your case is the contract. That’s the thing you’re buying, a tangible thing.

But what they want in your case, the hole is, I want the purpose of this contract is to make sure up happens and not down. I see. Right?

That’s what they really want. So be clear about that. Meanwhile, your competition is selling contracts.

[Pankaj Raval] (34:41 – 34:41)
Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (34:41 – 34:43)
I can get those from any of you.

[Pankaj Raval] (34:43 – 34:43)
Right.

[Michael Liebowitz] (34:44 – 34:51)
You live in a big metropolitan area. There’s probably several hundred of you in just this within driving distance. Right?

[Pankaj Raval] (34:51 – 34:53)
Right. Right. Exactly.

[Michael Liebowitz] (34:54 – 35:15)
And notice how this differentiates you. You’re not differentiating in a process like, hey, we have the X, Y, Z process or the pick of something else. There’s a plumber in our neighborhood says, we’re the punctual plumber.

That’s not differentiation. Seeing that any other plumber can say, yeah, we’re going to be on time to differentiation lost. Right.

[Pankaj Raval] (35:15 – 35:16)
Okay.

[Michael Liebowitz] (35:16 – 35:23)
This is differentiation into a belief system that is an invitation to people who think like you to go. Oh, you’re my guy.

[Pankaj Raval] (35:25 – 35:26)
Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (35:27 – 35:58)
Yeah. Now, imagine you were working with a bunch of risk takers and deal makers who are also all about the up. Right.

That uplift rather than like, hey, I need you to protect me against this person. They’re like, they’re defensive. Yeah.

My guess is you’re going to be, you’d rather fit, sit in that, the joy of that energy of people like, let’s go, let’s go build something amazing more than you want to sit in the energy of someone going, hey, protect me from this. Protect me from that.

[Pankaj Raval] (35:59 – 36:01)
Right. Right. Yeah.

[Michael Liebowitz] (36:01 – 36:02)
Right.

[Pankaj Raval] (36:03 – 36:19)
Yeah. That’s so fascinating. You know, I’m, I’m so intrigued by language too, you know, as lawyers too, we, we, we operate in the world of language.

You know, how we are written, how we write, how we speak is, is, is so important to neolinguistics. It’s fascinating.

[Michael Liebowitz] (36:19 – 36:22)
There’s a whole word for your version, legalese.

[Pankaj Raval] (36:23 – 37:00)
Legalese, right. Yeah, exactly. Something he’s trying to avoid, but, but yeah, there is a whole way of speaking.

And it’s interesting because every, every business, right. Every industry has its own legalese, has its own way of speaking, communicating acronyms that are used or overused, you know? So corporate, we see, we hear corporate speak all the time.

So it’s interesting, you know, just even a way of identifying, right. We talk about identity and connecting with identity with, with, with messaging, because you know, when you express that belief, it sounds like that’s what you’re connecting with, you know, who, who are you and who am I and who are you and how do we, do we, do we speak the same language? Are we on the same page?

[Michael Liebowitz] (37:01 – 38:08)
Identities are just beliefs that start with the words I am. That’s what they, they are literally beliefs. And that’s why beliefs matter.

They are a window into identity and all we want to do. And now we’re getting into the deep neuroscience. All we want to do is know that you are like me and here’s where it gets really fun.

The reason why that’s important is it’s safety patterning. It sounds almost like some tribal, from our tribal origins, you know, growing up or something. Further back than that, we’re talking about, we’re talking about mammalian neurology, not even human yet.

Right. Although our brains are built like Microsoft builds operating systems, everything’s backward compatible. So, you know, all the stuff that happened, you know, when, from hundreds of thousands of years ago before homo sapiens sort of are identified on the branches of the light tree of life, this stuff was, was already in place and we’re just, we’re just still operating it and everything else that makes us cognitively human was built on top of it, but it’s still there and we got to work with it.

[Pankaj Raval] (38:10 – 38:17)
That’s great. So you talked about your monthly meeting. How do people sign up?

How do people find, find out more about that and attend?

[Michael Liebowitz] (38:17 – 39:11)
Yeah, there’s several avenues and you can put in the show notes, either go to my website, mindmagnetizer.com and all the CTAs there are clicked, click to register. There’s also some free eBooks there that you can find. One of them, the Neurology of Yes.

If you don’t want to join the workshop, the Neurology of Yes eBook is a highly condensed version of the same lessons you’re going to learn. Now, in the workshop, though, I work on the message of everyone in the room, much like you and I just did a little bit, a little bit more in detail too. So if you want to have that sort of result, like, yeah, I don’t just want to read about how messaging works.

I want to have a good message, come to the workshop. So you can register from the website. That’s going to be the easiest one.

You can also read a little bit about my philosophy of all this stuff. There’s an about section. You can read a little bit about me too, if you want to.

[Pankaj Raval] (39:12 – 39:12)
Okay.

[Michael Liebowitz] (39:13 – 39:28)
The website is designed to be a learning experience and that’s deliberate because belonging trait, I want to attract people who love to learn new things. That’s one of my belonging traits. So I deliver a learning experience so that those people go, heck, this is awesome.

[Pankaj Raval] (39:28 – 39:42)
That’s why we get along. I think, yeah. I think I love learning and I love learning about new ways to communicate and improve, you know, business and messaging and life.

Yeah. If people want to find out, get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?

[Michael Liebowitz] (39:43 – 40:55)
I’m more and more on LinkedIn, although I’m not posting a lot. That’s going to be changing soon, but I’m there paying attention a lot more. But honestly, feel free to…

Oh, actually on the website, on the upper right-hand side of the menu at the top is a button you can click. I forget what it says specifically, but you can just schedule time with me. You can do a 15 minute really quick, or you can schedule a 30 minute chat with me.

And oh my gosh, I have people like, who am I talking with right now? It’s like this person. I don’t know that person, but we’re going to have fun getting to know them, right?

And it’s totally not a sales pitch either. It’s totally not. It’s mostly just like, hey, what’s going on in your world?

Maybe I can add some insight and help you find a direction. If you want to work together, that’s fine. But that’s not my purpose with those calls.

My purpose is to educate and to illuminate and to help you out in one way or another. Do I get clients from that? Absolutely.

There’s some people like, I definitely need your help. Great. Let’s talk about it.

But this is not a sales pitch. You’ll never hear me ask, hey, here’s my thing. Do you want to work together?

Will never happen.

[Pankaj Raval] (40:56 – 40:58)
All right. Wonderful.

[Michael Liebowitz] (40:58 – 41:10)
I set it up so that you find it. I deliver a lot of value. And then the people who work with me always say, so what’s it like working with you?

Michael, tell me. That’s my opening. You’ll never hear me pitch though.

[Pankaj Raval] (41:11 – 42:02)
I love it. I love it. Well, Michael, this has been extremely illuminating.

Loved hearing about ways to improve messaging. I think there’s so much more, obviously, we could talk about in neuroscience and linguistics. So this is hopefully the first of many conversations that we will have about this.

And listeners, if you’re looking to get in touch, you guys know how to get a hold of Michael now. He’s also on LinkedIn, on his website. And we will post all that information in the show notes.

We hope you guys found this information, this podcast informative today. And if you guys have any comments, questions, please leave comments or message us. And we always are willing to hear feedback and ways to improve our messaging.

So until next time, thank you again for listening to Letters of Intent. I’m Pankaj Raval, founder of Carbon Law Group. And thank you, Michael, for joining us today.

[Michael Liebowitz] (42:02 – 42:04)
Thank you so much, Pankaj. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[Pankaj Raval] (42:05 – 42:05)
Thank you.