Sally Hogshead is a Catalyst, known for her out-of-the-box thinking and energizing personality. On the other hand, she isn’t the most detail-oriented person. She told me that knowing her strengths as well as her pitfalls helped liberate her from the pull of negative self-talk so she could be more productive and focused.
Helping people to grow their awareness of who they are when they are at their best is Sally’s driving mission. In fact, she created the Fascination Advantage Assessment so others could discover their own natural advantages of persuasion and gain a better understanding of how the world sees them.*
Sally is a branding expert, bestselling author of the FASCINATE: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, and natural Asset-Based Thinker. In part two of this inspiring Lead Positive profile, Sally talks about the impact her kids had on her perception of herself and her assets and a recent “a-ha” moment.
Note: This is part two of Sally's Lead Positive profile. Go here for part one, in which she explains how “becoming more of who you are” spurred her career to new heights.
*SPECIAL OFFER! Sally has generously offered readers of this blog access to the Fascination Advantage Assessment for free (value of $37)! Go to HowToFascinate.com/YOU and enter the private access code KCRAMER.
Who has had the biggest influence on you?
My kids. I was very career-focused in advertising. I never thought of myself as somebody who was extremely maternal—but then I had a baby. My entire life completely changed. I gained a new understanding of how to communicate with people because kids mirror back whoever you’re being with them in that moment.
Kids tell you how the world sees you right there in real time. They’re not masking anything. What I saw was that the best parts of me, the parts that could build a relationship with them and get the best response from them, showed up when I could be my archetype, the catalyst; when I could be playful and outgoing, social, emerging, out-of-the-box creative and artistic. Those were the modes of communication that allowed me to create the best bonds with them.
Well, what if I could infuse the greatest moments I have with my children into my career?
What if I could be the catalyst with clients? What if I could attract exactly the kind of customers, clients, and team members who want me to be that every day? What if there’s complete congruency between who I am at work and who I am at home? Wouldn’t that feel so much better and be so much more effortless?
That’s really how I got the epiphany of finding out who we are in our optimal states—when we’re communicating and other people are getting exactly what they need and they’re reinforcing that they’re seeing us in your optimal state. What if we could be that all the time? Wouldn’t that feel amazing?
What have you ever said to yourself that may have held you back, and how did you silence that voice?
We all have plenty of ways in which we tell ourselves things that get in the way. For me, that was thinking that I had to be great at everything. When we feel as though we failed, or we feel as though we’re underwhelming or underperforming, it’s incredibly discouraging.
The reality is that there are going to be areas in which you do not have an advantage. In fact, if you have a disadvantage you’re probably wrong for that situation. But if you don’t realize that before you go into the situation, then you have a value judgment about how you should have behaved or what you should have said, or the result you should have achieved.
Imagine if you could go into a situation, a job interview or a project, and you already know how you are most likely to be seen by others, positively or negatively.
That would help you to manage your own expectations and focus your energy on the areas in which you’re going to have the best possible outcome.
I’ll give you an example in my own business. My company is named How to Fascinate and we teach people how to be fascinating and be compelling and engaging in their communication. I had a big “a-ha” recently.
I would go into a company and we would do this amazing training and there would be this incredible happiness bubble that happens afterwards where the client was thrilled, the employees felt great, and my team was high-fiving. But then, we would get to the phase where we had to do the expense report and suddenly, the e-mails were going back and forth about the missing six-dollar receipt from the airport.
Now, I’m not good at details. I don’t want to have to keep receipts. It’s not my best use to focus on where the hotdog receipt is. And so I made a decision that we were going to stop doing expense reports altogether. We were never going to be successful when we focused our precious exposure in front of our clients on expense reports. Now everything is a flat fee. It’s all negotiated upfront so we don’t talk about receipts anymore.
The same symbolically is true for all of us. Find those areas where you can add the most value and then subtract everything else.
My advantage is in initiating things, not in implementing things. When any kind of implementation has to happen, I’m not going to make myself feel bad that I’m not good at it. I’m going to be proactive about finding a team member who can help me, or setting aside a little extra time to make sure that I can really dig in and focus on it. But it’s not going to be a value judgment anymore because I already know it’s not a place where I have an advantage.
There’s something very freeing about knowing your potential pitfalls. All of us have certain areas where we’re naturally suited to be intensely valuable and other areas that are not going to be the way that we’re going to contribute. Once you know that, then it ceases to be a surprise. It’s more like a relief.
Which great leader, dead or alive, would you like to have dinner with and why?
I’d love to have dinner with Carl Jung. I’m not a psychologist and I haven’t done graduate studies on his work, but I am totally fascinated by the concepts that he developed—introversion, extraversion, archetypes, the collective unconscious. I would love to talk to him about how he would apply those in a modern context, for example to Twitter and Facebook. How would you bring those concepts into a world where we’re so much more interconnected and we’re so much more social? I’d love to be able to have him take the Fascination Advantage assessment and see what his results would be.
Over the course of her ad career, Sally Hogshead was one of the most awarded advertising copywriters, winning almost every major international advertising award. Her internationally acclaimed book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, has been translated into over 12 languages. Her newest book, How the World Sees You is already a New York Times best seller as well as a Wall Street Journal best seller. Follow Sally on Twitter @sallyhogshead.
Dr. Kathy Cramer has written seven best-selling books including Change The Way You See Everything, which started the ABT Global Movement. Her latest book, Lead Positive shows leaders how to increase their effectiveness through her revolutionary yet refreshing simple mindset management process, Asset-Based Thinking. Download her Speaker Kit here.
To read more of Kathy’s thought leadership, visit drkathycramer.com/blog and drkathycramer.com/press. Follow Kathy on Twitter at @drkathycramer.
