“Leadership is an action, not a position.”
Hey Sunday Brewers!
Inside this edition of the Sunday Brew:
✅ The 4 highly-coveted skills that set 30-50% of FAs apart
✅ A research experiment that gets 35% of strangers to respond
✅ The #1 thing holding you back from consistent $25k+ months?
The First Sip
A first-grade teacher in Connecticut has redefined what it means to go the extra mile to help her students.
Rewind to 2019 when Jenna Riccio heard her student, Nate, needed emergency surgery to stop an infection.
The surgery saved his life, but required the amputation of both legs below the knees, his left arm, and two and a half fingers on his right hand.
Jenna immediately drove to the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to visit him.
“He was there by himself with no family. I wanted to cheer him up and have someone he knew there with him,” she recalls.
While at the hospital, Jenna found out that Nate had recently been removed from his family’s home and was living in foster care.
The foster care family lived more than an hour away from his school.
It wasn’t an ideal situation, and Jenna knew it.
So she turned to Nate’s social worker and asked if she could foster him.
That kick-started a whirlwind of events that ultimately led to Nate living with Jenna and her then-boyfriend, Tim Riccio.
“When you’re waking up with a kid in the middle of the night and helping him get dressed in the morning and giving him baths and doing all the stuff that parents do, it was only a couple months, and we were ‘mom and dad’,” Tim said.
Two years later, Nate served as the ring bearer at Tim and Jenna’s wedding.
Then in February 2022, he became a big brother.
And in November of last year, Nate was legally adopted.
“Every night I go to sleep thinking, ‘I’m very lucky,’ “ Nate says.
1 Caffeinated Neurohack
How many introverts do we have out here in Shift Nation?
It’s estimated that somewhere between 30% to 50% of the population is introverted…so I’m guessing quite a few of you.
But despite nearly half of all people falling into this category, introverts are still very misunderstood.
And according to new research, they have four highly-coveted skills that set them apart from others:
- Introverts think more. They have more gray matter (the outer layer of the brain that processes and releases new information into the brain).
- Introverts have better focus. They’re usually able to sustain intense focus and are better poised to put in the hours needed to master a skill.
- Introverts are often “gifted” in a specific area. While extroverts may be skilled in a variety of areas, introverts often exhibit unique gifts in very specific areas of their lives.
- Introverts do the right thing. Introverts tend to be less swayed by external pressure and are more driven by their inner moral compass.
If you’re an introvert, don’t be afraid to lean into some of these strengths.
If you’re an extrovert, keep these in mind when it comes to hiring team members or interacting with more introverted peers.
The more you understand how to get the most out of people, the more successful you’ll be in your career.
P.S. Next week, we’ll take a look at some of the unique strengths of extroverts.
☕ TL;DR: Introverts have 4 highly-coveted skills that set them apart from others
Marketing Psychology Quick Hit
In 1974, Phillip Kunz and his family received hundreds of holiday cards.
Some days, it was one or two.
Then they came by the dozen.
The typical note read something like:
|
Dear Phil, Joyce, and family, We received your greeting and were happy to hear from you! Hope you have a great holiday season and new year. Love, Charles, Pam, and the children |
The cards all looked different, but the messages were very similar (all wishing Phil and his family well).
Some cards even shared their own personal family news and life updates.
Many included smiling family pictures.
Pretty normal, right?
Well, except for one small detail…
Phil didn’t know any of them.
He was a sociologist at BYU and decided to run a social experiment that holiday season.
He wanted to see what would happen if he sent holiday greeting cards to total strangers.
So he grabbed directories from nearby towns and picked out 600 names at random.
He sent a card with a greeting and family photo to each person.
Then Phil waited…
All it took was five days and the responses trickled in (slow at first, but eventually 12 or 15 per day).
“I was really surprised by how many responses there were,” he says. “And I was surprised by the number of letters that were written, some of them three, four pages long.”
Who would write a four-page letter with a life update to a total stranger?
And why did more than 210 out of 600 people (35%) send a card back?
According to psychologists, it comes down to the rule of reciprocation.
This rule, which is ingrained in us as children, says you shouldn’t ever take something without giving in return.
It’s an innate compulsion that we feel as human beings.
According to psychologist Robert Cialdini, “There’s not a single human culture that fails to train its members in this rule.”
And here’s the neat thing: It works in the world of marketing.
When you GIVE to people, they feel a compulsion to return the favor.
This is one of the reasons lead magnets as an email list building tool.
And it’s why 39% of clients are much likelier to make referrals if directly incentivized.
Let your brain chew on this for a few minutes and see if you can come up with some new marketing ideas for this month…
☕ TL;DR: Want better marketing results? Try “giving” before “taking”
What’s New in SHIFT Nation?
Every FA should be able to consistently hit $25K per month in today’s marketplace.
If you’re not there yet, comment on the post above with the #1 thing holding you back.
We’ll gather the responses and pump out some more powerful content to help you reach your goals 💪
Weekly Industry Catch-Up
🔹 Mortgage activity ⬆️. With interest rates dropping for the fifth straight week, mortgage refinance demand jolts up 18%. Still, mortgage applications are 37% lower than they were one year ago.
🔹 Alpha-bust. Investors are going crazy for AI technology, which is leading to big movements in the market. And while Google thought its AI chatbot announcement would be a Wall St. boom, it ended up being a big bust (with Alphabet shares falling 7% on the day of the announcement).
🔹 Got spare change? More than 100 million people are expected to tune into today’s Super Bowl between the Eagles and Chiefs. Many watch for the game, but millions tune in for the commercials. Today’s going rate? $7 million for a 30-second spot. (And that’s just for the air time.)
Keep learning,
Jeremiah D. Desmarais
CEO, Advisorist
#1 in ROI-Driven Training for Advisors
