Episode 746: The Unnatural Promoter

bnipodcast.com/2022/02/23/episode-746-the-unnatural-promoter/

Ivan Misner

Synopsis
“Unnatural Networker” Charlie Lawson joins Dr. Misner this week to talk about his second
book, The Unnatural Promoter: How anyone can blow their own trumpet without feeling
awkward.

If you hate talking about yourself even when you know you provide a top-notch service
and your customers love you, you might be an unnatural promoter. So how can you
build business?

The secret is simple: get other people to talk about you. If you can build up the great
strong relationships with people around you, they’ll go out and promote you.

If you feel self-conscious about the way you sound on audio or look on video, remember:
you’re the only person who thinks you look or sound wrong. To everyone else, you look
and sound just like you always do.

Visit unnaturalnetworker.com to learn more about Charlie and order the books.

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 The Official BNI Podcast is sponsored by Misner Audio Programs.

Complete Transcript of Episode 746

Priscilla:
Hello everybody and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast. I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m
coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkeley, California. And I’m joined on
the phone today by the Founder and the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.
Hello Ivan, how are you today?

Ivan:
I am doing fantastic and I just did some calculations. You know, at the end of the podcast,
you mention Misner Audio Programs, and I donate all of the proceeds, all of the profits
from that, to the BNI Foundation. And we just donated over $4,000 USD to the BNI
Foundation from the Misner Audio Programs downloaded in the last year.

Priscilla:
Oh, that’s great!

Ivan:
So thank you, everyone. For those of you who are downloading programs from there, I
donate all the profits from it to the BNI Foundation.

And I’m really excited to say I have a guest who’s been on the show once before. His
name is Charlie Lawson. I consider Charlie a friend, and he is the author of The
Unnatural Networker. And you know, most experts talk about networking as though it’s
easy to talk to strangers, and Charlie helps other unnatural networkers, he considers
himself one as well, to gain confidence by putting networking across from the point of
view of someone who’d rather avoid it completely. And that book was released in 2014;
it’s helped a lot of business owners to network effectively. His second book, The
Unnatural Promoter, was released in 2021, and it focuses on helping people that don’t

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like to blow their own trumpet to be their best selves in promoting themselves. Charlie is a
highly regarded keynote speaker. He’s the National Director of BNI in the United Kingdom
and Ireland. And in his spare time, he’s mostly out swimming, biking, and running
triathlons. God bless you, Charlie, good for you. Welcome back to the BNI Podcast,
Charlie.

Charlie:
Thank you for having me. It’s fantastic. I mean, when you just read out the start there,
Episode 746, was it? I knew it was a big number, but I didn’t realize it was quite that high.
It’s amazing. Fantastic. Love it. Good to be on.

Ivan:
Thank you, I appreciate that. I’ve been doing this just about every week. I mean, we’ve
put in classics in between, and we close for at least a week around New Year’s, but I’ve
been doing this since 2007.

Charlie:
Yeah, amazing. Fantastic.

Ivan:
Priscilla, you’ve been with me since what? 2008?

Priscilla:
No, I was with you, well, I’m not sure. It was like somewhere around in the 30s.

Ivan:
Yeah, so it would have been late ’07 or ’08.

Priscilla: Yeah.

Charlie:
I’m still gonna say that’s quite a high number. Priscilla, you might not have done the first
30. But that’s still impressive.

Priscilla:
I know. Consistent. That’s what we both are.

Ivan:
Yes, indeed. So, Charlie, tell me, what is The Unnatural Promoter?

Charlie:
What is an unnatural promoter? Well, I am definitely an unnatural promoter just in the
very same way I’m an unnatural networker. I love the word unnatural. I guess I can say
that. Now, what is an unnatural promoter? Look, you’re great at what you do, you deliver
an amazing product, top notch service, and your clients or customers seem to love what
you do. So why do you feel that you’re not getting the opportunities your rich talents
deserve? Why do other people get all the breaks, even though you know they’re not as
good as you? I don’t know if that statement resonates with anyone, but I know it does.

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For me, I don’t find it easy to talk about myself; I don’t I find it easy to shout about myself.
And that comes in both a business and a personal context, honestly. You know,
sometimes you just don’t feel very confident about going out there and shouting about
yourself. So I’ll give you an example from the personal context. You know, we all have
WhatsApp on our phones and constant conversations going on. Sometimes I feel a bit
nervous about putting something out with a group of friends. So people that I know the
relationship is strong. I know they’re not going to be judging me a lot, if you like, or
wondering what I’m talking about. I still find it quite hard sometimes to put that message
out there. So yeah, there’s a lot of people out there in a big wide world who are unnatural
networkers, maybe find it a little bit daunting going into a networking scenario, or a
networking event and going and mingling. But there’s also people who just don’t really
feel comfortable shouting about themselves at all.

Ivan:
So what’s the best way for an unnatural promoter to generate business for themselves?

Charlie:
That’s a great question. I mean, honestly, the best way to do it, I think you probably would
recognize the answer, is to have a group of people around you, a group of people that
you’ve got good relationships with, and they, once they have a good relationship with you,
will want to help you want to shout about, want to help you move forward. So yeah,
networking, generating great relationships, building those relationships to the point where
you want to help each other, you can trust each other, and then getting people, other
people, to go out there and effectively do your promotion for you. It’s much easier that
way, you don’t have to shout about yourself quite so much. I mean, you still got to
educate them, you still got to make sure they know what you’re what you’re after, and
how to shout about you, effectively. But once you’ve educated them, they’ll go off and do
it. Think about, you know, your best friend, you’ll help them if they’re in need, wouldn’t
you?

Ivan:
Yeah, of course.

Charlie:
If you can build up the great strong relationships with people around you, they’ll go out
and promote you. In a nutshell, that’s what’s in the book, honestly. I mean, there’s a lot
more to it than that, clearly, you’ve got to have lots of strategies and techniques to make
that happen. But summing it up in a single concept – get your people around you, build a
relationship with them, and they’ll go and promote you for you.

Ivan:
Third party endorsement has always been the most powerful way to promote yourself. I
mean, even in advertising; some of the best commercials really are somebody else who’s
actually used a product or service talking about the product or service in the
advertisement.

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Charlie:
Exactly. Yeah.

Ivan:
And so if it works in advertising, which, by the way, I’m not opposed to. Many people think
I’m opposed to advertising, I’m not. I just think that referral marketing is another form of
advertising, and you need to plan it, like you plan your other forms of advertising. And that
third party testimonial is really, really powerful.

Charlie:
Yeah, I think that’s the key, you know, to go from just being, I’m not going to be able to go
network with someone straightaway, get to know him a bit, and they’ll suddenly go and
promote my business to the hilt and just make sure everyone knows about me – it’s not
going to work like that. What you’ve got to do is take a strategy to it, make sure you’re
building a network or building a relationship with the right people, get the right people in
vaguely similar professions, your contact sphere around you, all the good things that we
know make it work. But yeah, if you don’t feel comfortable chatting about yourself, get
other people to do for you. That’s the basic principle of what an unnatural promoter
should do.

Ivan:
Yeah, you know, in my first book, my first major book, World’s Best Known Marketing
Secret, I talk about the fact that people are more likely to talk about you when they’re
upset with you, than they are happy with your services. And so what you need to do is
mobilize those people who are in fact happy with your services and train them then to talk
about you and how to talk about you effectively. And when you do that, that’s when you
get those third-party testimonials.

Charlie:
It’s such a great, great point. And so many people don’t do it, you know. They’ve got a
happy client, they’ve got someone who’s very satisfied with their services, and they don’t
go and use that and leverage that all the time. Yeah, absolutely. If you can get those
people shouting about you, that’s what to do.

Ivan:
Yep. So give us a specific tip from the book on why people don’t like to promote
themselves.

Charlie:
Yeah, there’s lots of different ways in which we can get into that. The one I was going to
focus on is actually moving away slightly from networking, I mean, good networking
practices, good self promotion practice, in many ways. But the one I’ll focus on is slightly
different; I’m going to talk about video. Because so many people, well, you look at any
social media feed, and you’ll see videos all over the place, you know, it’s everywhere at
the moment. It always will be. It’s such a powerful way of getting things across, you know,
if you think of words going to a picture, that’s a huge step up, when they go from picture
to a video, there’s so much content that can be shared in that.

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And a lot of people don’t like seeing themselves on video. And there’s actually a bit of
science behind it. And I was fascinated to look into it. There were studies done where
people looked at pictures of themselves, and then a picture of themselves inverted. So
just the other way, flips 90 degrees, but just the other way around. And without knowing
that they were in this, this was just a controlled experiment, people will look at those
pictures and say, you know, I like one of them more than the other, but I can’t really tell
why. And the thing is, when you look at yourself on video, what you’re actually seeing is
how the world sees you. So if you are talking just face to face, obviously in the same
room, you know, you can, you’ll just see that person differently from how I see myself.
Why? Because we only ever see ourselves in the mirror. And a mirror by the way it works,
it inverts you.
So in that study, people were tending to like the pictures of themselves [that] were
inverted, but preferred the pictures of other people where they were seeing the true
picture. But they couldn’t figure out why, it’s too subtle a difference. It’s just the face isn’t
exactly, doesn’t flip exactly the same each way. And it was just a subtle difference. So
when it comes to a video, so many people say like, I hate the way I look on video, I look
like such an idiot when I see myself on video. Or they’ll say, I don’t like the sound of my
voice, it’s a similar principle there. When you hear your voice on a video, you’ll hear it
coming straight from the speaker of your phone, or the device or whatever it is you’re
listening to. When you hear your own voice in your head, there’s a more scientific way of
expressing this, but effectively, your voice goes through your head, through bits of brain
and bone and whatever else, and ends up in your ear. So it’s distorted.

Ivan:
I totally agree with that. I have so many people who tell me they listen to the podcast, and
I have such a calming voice. And I’m like, no, no, I listen to my voice. It’s not that calming.
Interesting how we perceive our voices different than other people.

Charlie:
Exactly. And you know, if you weren’t listening to this video, I’m sorry, this podcast is
audio recording, I’m hearing your voice and you sound exactly like Ivan, that I’ve always
known and love.

Ivan: (chuckling)

Charlie:
You’re hearing me and I sound exactly like I do, and you sound like you. But to each
other, it’s different. So yeah, with that little flicker of you know, the challenge on both
seeing ourselves because of that inverted issue, and the way our sound comes, so many
people don’t want to do it. Now, I can’t tell you, I can’t try and solve that, click my fingers,
and suddenly you’re going to look like…

Ivan:
Yeah, so how do we use that information?

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Charlie:
Well, that’s the thing. I think you have to just sort of realize that it is only yourself that
thinks that. It really, genuinely is only yourself thinks that because it is personal. No one
else is hearing me in the same way because they’re hearing my voice come from my
mouth and go to their ears. And no one else is seeing that, you know, everyone else is
just seeing the normal version of me that they always see. So yeah, I can’t flip a magic
wand and suddenly, it’s all sold. But in your mind, we’ve just got to tell ourselves that as
an unnatural promoter wanting to get out a video, is a great tool to use, you’ve got to use
it. But you’ve just got to tell yourself, it really, genuinely is only you that’s thinking that.

Ivan:
All right. Well, we’re out of time. Is there any last thought before we wrap up?

Charlie:
No, look, I think the main thing about being an unnatural promoter is get a good network
around you. If my two books were fiction, they’re not, but if they were fiction, it would
almost be that “The Unnatural Promoter” is the prequel to “The Unnatural Networker.” So
what “The Unnatural Promoter” says is look, don’t feel comfortable going out and
promoting yourself? – get out there and network. Then go and check out “The Unnatural
Networker”, that will tell you how to do it. So that’s how the two fit together. But you know,
if I can be of any help to anyone with their unnatural networking or promoting tendencies,
I’d love to do so.

Ivan:
Well, that’s great information, Charlie. And thanks so much for being back on
BNIpodcast.com. For anyone who’s interested in Charlie’s books, “The Unnatural
Promoter” or “The Unnatural Networker”, you can go to www.unnaturalnetworker.com for
information on the book. And I think, Charlie, the books are both available on Amazon.
Yeah?

Charlie:
Correct, they are. Yeah.

Ivan:
Fantastic. Well, thanks for being on again, Charlie. I appreciate you.

Charlie:
Thank you for having me.

Ivan:
Over to you, Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Okay, perfect. Thank you both for the great information. This podcast is sponsored by
www.misneraudioprograms.com. These audio programs will provide you with the tools
and the inspiration to powerfully enhance your BNI experience and help you boost your
business. So check out the great material available to you at

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www.misneraudioprograms.com and use the promo code IVAN50 for 50% off all of the
audio programs [this code is good for a limited time], and all of the proceeds are going to
the BNI Foundation.

So thank you so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we look forward to having
you join us again next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast

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