008: Charisma Secrets For Success With Manny Wolfe

00:00 Beau Henderson: Welcome to the richest hour on the radio, the one place committed to helping you live a healthy, wealthy, fulfilled life on purpose. Now, this is an area where it doesn’t matter if the thing that makes your life rich. What is your definition? Is it to stay home and help raise the kids? Is it to start that business? Is it to grow that business? Is it to have more fulfilling relationships in your life? That’s up to you but what we can do is give you tools and resources to help you bring that into your life. And that’s what I’m committed to doing with you through the journey. And for our business owners out there, I have a special treat today. We have a friend, rich life friend, and the charisma coach to help you own… You show up with presents and you can own a room. You can own the mic. Whatever it is, it’s my good friend, Manny Wolfe. How are you doing, Manny?

00:58 Manny Wolfe: Man, Beau, I’m so good. I’m so excited to be here. As you know, I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while and it’s great to be out here and verbally in front of your people.

01:13 Beau Henderson: A lot of times on interviews, somebody will kind of leave at the end of the interview with a takeaway or something but I like to flip the script so to speak, and let’s start with 60 seconds, a 60-second version of your mission, because I know that the people we interview on this show they’re mission-based entrepreneurs. There’s a reason behind what they do and why they serve the people they serve. So, if you had 60 seconds and that was all we had for the show to tell what you do and what you’re about, what would that sound like, Manny?

01:44 Manny Wolfe: It would sound like this. I take you where you are. I figure out where that is. And I give you through a very deliberate process, the skills, the mindsets, the tools, and the techniques to make you the most charismatic, likeable, and dynamic version of yourself that you can be.

02:04 Beau Henderson: Beautiful.

02:04 Manny Wolfe: I still got… I got time left over though.

02:06 Beau Henderson: You know what, I say 60 seconds. If you can do it in 30, that’s much more powerful. Awesome. So perfect. So, the most powerful version of what you can be. Now, one of the things I teach when I’m coaching or training financial advisors or I’m working on some things myself, it’s we can have the biggest mission, the most meaningful idea, the most brilliant idea inside of us but if we don’t learn how to effectively communicate that idea so that other people can resonate and get on board with that idea, you don’t really have much.

02:42 Manny Wolfe: I agree with that completely. And additionally, I would say that when we focus on communicating our ideas, we tend to focus on content, which is all to the good. A smaller group of us also focus on sort of the stage craft of it, right? The body language, which is really good. Seldom do any of us focus on the delivery mechanism or style of the words, which is the voice.

03:14 Beau Henderson: Love it. And so that brings up a deeper point. So, it’s not even the “Say the right things to you that I should have said. Hey, I can show you. I can play back the recording.” It’s “Did I effectively achieve the objective I had with my communication with you?”

03:28 Manny Wolfe: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

03:30 Beau Henderson: That’s getting deep, Manny.

03:32 Manny Wolfe: For better or for worse, that’s where I live, where I’ve always lived. And, yeah, it made for some interesting times when I was younger but…

03:42 Beau Henderson: I could imagine. Well, that brings us up to a good point. Whenever I find a strong mission, somebody that has something about them bigger than them that they’re out to do in the world, there’s usually an interesting story behind it. So, I’m sure you have one.

04:00 Manny Wolfe: Well, let’s see what you guys think. Instead of me telling you my story is interesting, I’ll just sort of rip through it ’cause you know like anyone who’s been here for a few years, it’s a long story.

04:11 Beau Henderson: Sure.

04:12 Manny Wolfe: So, starting at the beginning, I was born into a cult.

04:16 Beau Henderson: Wow.

04:17 Manny Wolfe: Now, a new-age cult. And I am in this moment now utterly fascinated by language and communication. When I say that, I don’t mean communication like communications. I mean like communication. It’s been a passion of mine since ironically before I could articulate it. So, I think one of the reasons is because in my upbringing as a child we had this in-group subversion of language. And that’s one of the characteristics. The hallmarks of a cult is they will take language and they will change it so that people who aren’t in the group don’t understand what they’re talking about. I was fascinated by that even as I was negatively affected by it, right?

05:07 Manny Wolfe: We had all these buzz words and slogans and phrases that were ours and ours alone. And then I moved to a Mexican ghetto and I only say that because I’m not Mexican. So, for about four years there from eight to 12, I had to fight every day, but when I wasn’t fighting, again I was just fascinated by the way the cultural sort of language style that they had. It was a subset of the larger Mexican culture. It was like what I was exposed to was basically the gangsters, and they talked in a very different way, in a very specific way. And then after that sort of phase in my life, I had a lot of freedom because we moved out of that super dangerous environment and I never really had any kind of parental guidance and so I was just sort of on my own.

06:00 Manny Wolfe: And I would literally with my friends, roam the streets of the town I lived in. Now, every different neighborhood, I noticed had slightly different kind of communication cues. I’d go with the… I’d literally go hang out with the black kids and I was fascinated by the way they spoke, right? And then I’d hang out with the white kids and it would be a totally different thing. And then I sort of had an affinity for language and so when I would be around my friends’ parents, I learned… I figured out that you gotta talk a very different way around them. And so I think those are the seeds that started this kind of life long passion. As I got older, I started to realize how important communication is. It wasn’t just sort of a fascination anymore, it was like, “Wow, so many of us do this so poorly.” So many of us are not expressing ourselves in a… I kind of see the pain in people sometimes when they can’t feel heard. They can’t feel understood. And a huge part of that is the communication piece, right?

07:09 Manny Wolfe: I mean, now, I would also add here as an important side note that learning to listen which is not to plug what I do, but part of what I do is, I teach people how to listen. Learning to listen is a huge part too. But what I was more oriented more when I was younger, was like I could see people not being able to sort of connect with each other through verbal communication. And so I kinda… That was setting another one of the seeds for what would become my mission which is to teach you how to do that the best way you possibly can.

07:45 Beau Henderson: Well, that’s fascinating Manny, ’cause that’s experiential body language, charisma, speech, communication training that you are not gonna get in the three week course.

08:00 Manny Wolfe: Yeah. [chuckle]

08:00 Beau Henderson: That’s kind of a life long stay. That’s fascinating that from a young age, you were aware and paying attention to those things.

08:07 Manny Wolfe: I was. In the same way that some kids just have a life long kind of fascination with science, or dinosaurs, or race cars, it was no different for me except that I couldn’t find people who related to me. [chuckle] I couldn’t find other kids who were like, “Yeah, I know what you mean. When we talk, we don’t really say… ” that never happens. But yeah, it just was… I don’t think I could have changed it if I wanted to.

08:32 Beau Henderson: Well, it’s perfect… It might not have been the path at the time that you would have chosen, certain parts of that, but it gave you a skill set that is favorable to your mission now. And somehow I find that fascinating when that happens. But well, share with our listeners what is… So you help somebody with these things. What does that client look like and how do you help him?

08:57 Manny Wolfe: So if we were to sort of pick out of a crowd my ideal client, my ideal client is somebody who recognizes that there is always room for improvement. The life long learner. That there is possibly a gap between where they are and where they would like to be. My ideal client recognizes that a tremendous amount of pain and problems can come from an inability to effectively not only relay our own ideas but to understand other people’s ideas. So that’s kind of the ideal client. They are probably using their voice professionally now, or wish to in the near future. Now, that’s not to say that somebody couldn’t benefit from this just in their personal life. But again, ideal client.

09:53 Beau Henderson: Well, okay, good. So this idea… So somebody is out there, and let’s give away, I hate to put you on the spot and you can tell me no. But let’s give away some of your juice a little bit. So what might be two or three things somebody says, “You know what? I know if I could communicate better, if I could maybe command a room better, my business, my life, my relationships would improve.” You got a couple of tips that you would actually give our listeners to go practice today?

10:24 Manny Wolfe: I do. I do have a couple of tips. And to be able to command a room, is a physical thing. And it’s also very much a tonal issue. There is a thing called the dominant tone in our voices. And if you take 50 people and put them in a room arbitrarily, within seconds of hearing each other speak, we would all subconsciously decide on who the alpha in the room is. The reason that’s important is because, we automatically ascribe certain characteristics and give certain leeway to the alpha. We expect different things of them. Any one of us can connect with that dominant tone with a little bit of training. Now, I can’t do it here obviously in 10 seconds, but… So one hack for the dominant tone, is to take where you speak now and just lower the tone of your voice just from here to here. Just a slight lowering in pitch. And so whatever you start from, it’s like in music, you bring the whole thing down a step or down a key. So that’s a big one for command…

11:44 Beau Henderson: Is that where I say, “Okay.”

[laughter]

11:48 Beau Henderson: Sorry.

11:49 Manny Wolfe: Yeah. Except that if you’re running out of air…

11:51 Beau Henderson: Couldn’t resist.

11:53 Manny Wolfe: [chuckle] Then you might have gone too far. [laughter]

11:57 Beau Henderson: Okay. Tips for…

11:58 Manny Wolfe: So a quick physical tip for commanding a room. Now, this is so funny because to me it’s so obvious and it’s so easy and yet nobody does it, and when somebody does do it we just notice them. We act as though we have a light in our chest, right about where our heart is, okay? And when our chest is gently up and our shoulders are back and relaxed, that light goes on. When our shoulders are slumped forward, the light goes off. The reason I say it like that is because I teach Keep Your Light On, okay?

12:33 Manny Wolfe: And chin sort of parallel to the floor, never high. Never higher than parallel to the floor, looks arrogant. And you can have it down just a little but down too far looks antisocial. So chin parallel to the floor, soft eyes, soft, relaxed face muscles. Now automatically when you have those things in place you’re gonna move differently.

13:02 Beau Henderson: Right.

13:03 Manny Wolfe: You’re gonna begin to move like a person with confidence. We all look for cues from other people to tell us who they are. So if you look like you’re moving with confidence, you have confidence because other people assume that you have it. If it’s a fascinating thing and it seems a little too easy, but it works time and time again. It works every time.

13:30 Beau Henderson: That’s a good point is we have probably milliseconds when somebody sees us for them to decide who we are, so why in the world do we not use tools very intentionally to help them tell the story to themselves of who we are? I think most people just passively approach that, but there are… I’ve seen your training in other people’s things, I think we can intentionally actually help influence and making sure… It’s almost like, “Hey, somebody is gonna make up something about me anyway, let me make sure they’ve got the right information.”

14:04 Manny Wolfe: It’s not almost like that, Beau. It’s exactly like that.

14:07 Beau Henderson: Nice.

14:08 Manny Wolfe: We are all hardwired with what are called heuristics. They’re just cognitive shortcuts and we need those because the sort of trotted out, tired old example is 4,000 years ago, when we’re walking through the grasslands or whatever, me and my buddy, we both see something out of the corner of our eye. The one that flinches, because he has the strong heuristic to do so, may make it back to camp and the other one may not. So these heuristics are there for a reason. Now, we have built up a very kind of sophisticated insulated society where the likelihood of getting ambushed by a mountain lion is very low now. But we don’t shed those heuristics that quickly and so we’re constantly doing these sort of cognitive shortcuts to assess our environment and the people in our environment.

15:01 Manny Wolfe: Now immediately when we see someone on a very deep level, the first questions are, “Is this person capable of moving mountains? Is this person capable of doing great things for me?” That may sound kinda selfish but that is something that we ask ourselves on a subconscious level. And the second question is, “Are they willing?” There’s a level of self-interest that has to be present. And so kind of shifting from the commanding a room physically into the charisma piece which obviously is huge for that. The person who looks like they can and are willing to is going to be perceived by us as highly charismatic.

15:48 Beau Henderson: Got it. Nice. You brought up a good point. Some things, it might not sound like the way to be but what it is is the reality of what we are as humans and working with it, the hardwiring, and then the things may be on the other layers of our brain or the softwiring that we actually can influence knowing that hardwiring is just… That’s gonna happen.

16:13 Manny Wolfe: Yeah, exactly. So the question is if we know that we’re all drawing conclusions about each other and we’re all… We’re making snap judgments no matter how much we wanna be a person who doesn’t and it’s not a bad thing.

16:28 Beau Henderson: Right.

16:29 Manny Wolfe: Right? We couldn’t possibly spend our lives sort of consciously processing and analyzing every little piece of data. So knowing that, if you’re a person who wants a certain outcome in a social situation, why wouldn’t you adopt these ways of controlling that first impression?

16:51 Beau Henderson: Right, absolutely.

16:52 Manny Wolfe: Yeah, exactly.

16:54 Beau Henderson: And I think a key here too is control the first impression to give people the right idea of who you are, and, of course, where the context turns negative if you’re trying to control to be something you’re not or perceived as something you’re not. So again it’s almost like money, Manny. These tools, they’re not good or bad. They’re powerful. The context is given by what we humans do with them.

17:19 Manny Wolfe: Perfect. And that’s exactly right, Beau. That’s perfect. So I know that a lot of us have this idea, “Well, I don’t wanna be manipulative. Well, I don’t wanna be false. And I’m worth… ” Believe me, I get that. And I don’t wanna be manipulative or false either, but I do know that I would rather have you perceive me as the person I really am which is, quite frankly, I’m pretty competent, I’m pretty capable. I’m pretty friendly, I’m pretty outgoing, I have a deep, deep love and concern for the well-being of other people. And so if there is a way I can better project that, then I wanna do that.

18:04 Beau Henderson: Well, when it comes to behaviour hacks, if that’s a fun way to put it.

18:08 Manny Wolfe: Yeah, that’s fair.

18:09 Beau Henderson: And things like that, are fascinating to me. And I believe it will be fascinating to a lot of people that listen to this and they are on that pursuit of what we talked about the thing of the show. They want to have create the most favorable conditions to live this life that lights them up. Their definition of a rich life. So if somebody out there listening to this Manny, and they are saying, “Hey, I wanna talk to this guy a little more. This stuff sounds fascinating.” What would you like them to do, to maybe reach out and ask you a question?

18:38 Manny Wolfe: I would like you to get a hold of me at Manny, M-A-N-N-Y @thesteepside.com. That’s Manny, my first name, my nick name, @thesteepside.com. And if that’s for some reason something you don’t wanna do but you wanna reach me, you can find me on Facebook at The SteepSide, or you can go to my website the steepside.com.

19:06 Beau Henderson: And if you found anything I’ve ever done or said effective and powerful. It’s because Manny helped me. Now, if I said something that you didn’t really resonate with, that was something that I just brought into it from my own. So…

[laughter]

19:19 Beau Henderson: So that’s your plug there buddy.

19:21 Manny Wolfe: Perfect I love it.

19:22 Beau Henderson: So we get the business, we get the power that, I wanna know more about you Manny. A concept that I like to shift into, is this idea of life school. It’s been an important component on the RichLife show since day one going on seven years now. This idea that if we look at life, just like we would a college… No, say you go to high school, we gotta pass certain courses to graduate and go to the next level of courses. We got to pass high school to go to college et cetera. So there is a curriculum. And then within those curriculums you could be an accountant, a landscape, I mean, anything. There are different curriculums for each person. So I believe and what’s been valuable for me is this idea, we all have a curriculum in life.

20:06 Manny Wolfe: Yeah.

20:07 Beau Henderson: And some of the components of that that make a lot of sense to me, are that in life school there is no mistakes, there is only valuable lessons.

20:17 Manny Wolfe: Agreed.

20:18 Beau Henderson: Second component, are lessons gonna be repeated until it’s learned?

20:23 Manny Wolfe: This is not like college. There are all chances in the world.

20:26 Beau Henderson: And this is the good one. The third component is, are lessons gonna be painful each time it’s repeated? So with that context of what life school is to RichLifers listening, and that… Has there ever been something in life that maybe at the time seem like a really, maybe even unbearable or a hard lesson or something you really didn’t want that turned out to be curriculum you ultimately needed?

20:53 Manny Wolfe: So many man and I’ll… Yeah, so I’ve got a ton of them. And I think the one that has been the most visceral, the most teeth on bone difficult but has given me the most pay off, is the extremely volatile relationship between myself and my son’s mother. I won’t go too far into it because that… I mean, there is just so much stuff there. I will say this to you. When my son was four months old, his mother had broken up with me with no explanation. And I still to this day don’t know why it happened really. Four months after that, my son’s not a year old yet, she comes to me and she says, “I’m getting married and I’m moving out of State and I’m gonna take our son with me.”

22:02 Manny Wolfe: And at that point, I just looked her in the eye and I said, “You must not have any idea who I really am. If you think that I would let anyone take my child from me, you must not know me at all.” That was the sort of the spark of about eight years, maybe nine years of just incredibly difficult refusal to work with me even for the interest of our son. Just adamantly stubborn and keeping information hidden and just this whole sort of campaign where at some point through this, I… Now, I’m a big student of Taoism, I’m a big student of Zen Buddhism, and I’m a student of what’s valuable and all deep and abiding spiritual and religious practices. So at some point, I realized I’ve got to completely let go of this fight. So I’ve told you the challenge and now I’m gonna give you a little bit of the pay off.

23:09 Beau Henderson: Got it.

23:11 Manny Wolfe: I said, “I’ve got to let of this fight. I’ve got to be prepared to do whatever I have to do but every interaction, I just have to focus on what’s best for my son’s well being. And I am convinced that that is to have me in his life consistently and regularly.” Fast forward to today, I’m the only person in her life that she’ll take advice from. My son lives with me full time and we are so close, he and I and it was so touch and go where I could have completely lost him. And that is just the most abbreviated version of that story but I couldn’t agree with you more, that lessons will keep showing up until you learn them, and that life, the way I choose to put it is the universe, but it doesn’t matter what words you put on it, will turn up the intensity every time. I couldn’t agree with you more, Beau. That is so spot on, man.

24:15 Beau Henderson: Well, it will either teach us or it’ll kill us trying, probably, and that’s a way to put it.

24:19 Manny Wolfe: Yeah, and it’s sort of indifferent. You either, and that’s sort of a metaphor that’s in my own coaching, is like you either grow or you break.

24:30 Beau Henderson: Right.

24:31 Manny Wolfe: And it’s not because I say so. It’s just the indifferent nature of how circumstances play out.

24:40 Beau Henderson: Well, that’s a powerful lesson, Manny. Sometimes, we just, even when it’s the things you would think are natural to hang on to the tightest, sometimes you’ve just gotta pick your spots and let go to maybe let it come back, or let it do what needs to happen, or give it some space. So, great, great, great life school lesson. Now, as we kind of wind down, I knew we’d have fun and we’d just talk and talk, but let’s do a little bit of a more of a lightning speed here and go through some of these, I think will be fun. Success with life and money.

25:11 Manny Wolfe: All right.

25:11 Beau Henderson: Consistent theme through the rich life message, everything we’ve done. Best money advice you’ve ever received and from who?

25:20 Manny Wolfe: Best money advice I’ve ever received is stop thinking of money as such a complicated thing, okay?

[chuckle]

25:32 Manny Wolfe: That was the best advice and it was from a therapist I had in my late 30s.

25:37 Beau Henderson: No, that’s beautiful. I like it because so much of what I’ve seen over the years in a lot of these conversations, ’cause we’ll ask the question a lot, we give money this power it simply doesn’t have.

25:49 Manny Wolfe: Yeah.

25:50 Beau Henderson: Like we talked about earlier. The power is what we give it, that’s the context we bring to it.

25:54 Manny Wolfe: That’s right.

25:54 Beau Henderson: Is money good or bad? If I use millions of dollars to help some kids eradicate a disease, it’s probably pretty good. But if I take that same money and go and ship drugs into middle schools, that money’s probably pretty bad. I mean, I don’t…

[chuckle]

26:08 Manny Wolfe: That’s right.

26:09 Beau Henderson: It’s the context we give it. It’s really if we’re good or bad.

26:13 Manny Wolfe: Yeah. I would say it this way, is money good or bad? Yes.

26:17 Beau Henderson: Exactly, exactly. Yes and no. Okay.

26:20 Manny Wolfe: Yeah.

26:20 Beau Henderson: Best advice for just overall success in life?

26:24 Manny Wolfe: Best advice I have got for overall success in life, get back up one more time than you fall.

26:31 Beau Henderson: I like it. Keep showing up. Who was that from?

26:32 Manny Wolfe: Yeah. Keep showing up, that’s right. Yeah, God, I’ve heard that expressed in different ways so many places, I don’t even know where I heard it from. But here’s one thing that we can count on with those sort of cliches. They became cliches because they’re so packed with relevance.

26:52 Beau Henderson: Right.

26:52 Manny Wolfe: Yeah.

26:53 Beau Henderson: They were utilized. Okay, last piece, and I’m gonna let you run. Again, this topic, and it’s been fascinating, the human behavior, that’s something that comes up on the show a lot because it’s a fascination of mind, how to command the room, how to more effectively communicate your mission, your message. Those are all things Manny can help with. If you have questions for him, go to manny@thesteepside.com, that’s manny@thesteepside.com, and let’s go out with this, Manny. No boundaries, no constraints, no issues at all in this world right now that we’re imagining, what is your definition of a rich life look like?

27:38 Manny Wolfe: My definition of a rich life is simply the broadest reach, helping the most people I can, being completely dedicated to service using the things that I’m the best at and through that process generating complete abundance for me and everyone involved.

28:02 Beau Henderson: Sounds rich to me my friend, and thank you for sharing some content and some tips with us today. That made us all a little richer, too. Again, the things that Manny shared, like many of our guests, they help you with working on your business, your relationships, your health, whatever that thing is, that healthy, wealthy fulfilled life on purpose that we talk about. For more on the show today with Manny, go to the richlifeshow.com where you’ll find tips, tools, even some of those hacks we talked about to help you on the journey. I’ll be there with you and I’ll see you next week right here on the RichLife Show.