InfluenceOlogy, Charleston, SC (2026)

06/01/2026

Most sales and communication training gets it halfway right.

Knowing your material does build confidence. When you understand what you're saying and why it matters, that certainty shows up in your delivery. So yes…the script has a role.

But if script knowledge is the only thing you're developing, you're missing the bigger lever.

Research on the confidence bias shows that audiences make decisions based on how certain a messenger appears, not how accurate or well-prepared they actually are.

Psychologists studying source credibility found that dynamism, the perceived conviction behind the delivery, consistently outweighs content quality in persuasion outcomes.

Which means two salespeople can say the exact same words and produce completely different results. One owns the room, the other loses it…why?

The main difference is how much they believe what they're saying, and whether that belief is visible.

Obviously, the script/message is important, train it, but if you stop there, you've built knowledge without presence, and presence is what actually moves people.

05/30/2026

After 24 years in the influence, sales and public speaking and training business, I can tell you exactly why most training produces mediocre results.

People come in for a weekend, they learn the skills, they practice the techniques, they leave feeling genuinely capable. And then six weeks later they are back to the old patterns, doing exactly what they were doing before they walked in the room.

The skills they learned were real, but the story inside never changed.

That is the difference between training that produces a temporary performance and training that produces a permanent shift, "transformational training."

You can get someone to execute a technique for a weekend. What you cannot get them to do is sustain that technique past the point where their internal story about who they are starts pushing back. And it always pushes back, because the story is more powerful than any skill you can teach in two days.

The clients I have watched make genuine lasting change are the ones who left with a different understanding of who they are and who they are becoming as a communicator. Not just what they can do, but who they are.

That shift in identity, I like to call "identity expansion," it is what holds the new behavior in place long after the training room is gone and the accountability is gone and the energy of the event has faded.

Obviously, skills and behavioral capability matter, but without the story changing underneath them, they are temporary.

Change the story first and the skills finally have somewhere permanent to land.

05/29/2026

There are two modes every speaker operates in.

Internal is when you're living in your own head. What's my next point? How did that land?
What's coming next? You're present on stage but absent from the room.

External is when the information flows through you. You're reading the room, you're adapting, you're there with people, not just in front of them.

The best speakers aren't the ones who never go internal. They do. We all do.

The best speakers are the ones who spend more time external, and they know how to get back there fast when they drift.

The more external, the bigger the impact!

05/28/2026

I love questions from the audience. Every presentation has a context though. Sometimes you're doing a Q&A with all the time in the world. But sometimes you have a hard stop and you have to finish on time.

And there's always that one person. First question, second question, third question...they keep going.....They're not really curious...what they want is the attention and control of the room. If you're not careful, they get it...

Here's what I do. When I sense that's what's happening, I use this script and everybody walks away feeling good about it. The person gets their questions answered, the rest of the audience doesn't feel discouraged from asking their own, and you stay in control of your presentation.

"𝘐 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘐 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘐'𝘮 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘺, 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯? 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘯𝘦, 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦-𝘰𝘯-𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮."

05/26/2026

Research tracking thousands of conversations, press conferences, and even the Nixon White House tapes found the same pattern consistently: the higher someone's status, the fewer I-words they use. The boss uses fewer than the employee. The president uses fewer than the aide. The most confident person in any room is focused outward, not inward, and their language shows it without them trying.

The problem is that most speakers do the opposite. They talk about their results, their method, their experience, their process, and wonder why the room does not fully trust them. The audience does not feel your authority when you are focused on yourself. They feel your self-focus.

The fix is not to change your words. Researchers coached a presidential candidate to use different pronouns and it made him worse. You cannot patch the output without changing the input. Shift your genuine attention to the person in front of you, and the I-words fall away on their own. What are your presentations actually saying about you right now?

05/25/2026

A man walked into a psychiatrist's office and told the doctor he'd been depressed his entire life. The doctor listened, then walked him over to the window and pointed to a circus tent on the horizon.

"There's a clown performing there tonight who has made more people laugh than anyone I've ever seen. He's cured more sadness than any pill I could prescribe. You should go."

The man looked at the doctor with the saddest eyes in the world and said, "Doctor, I am that clown."

I think about this story often, because it describes something I see constantly in the professionals and leaders I work with.

So many people are performing a version of themselves they think the world wants to see, and somewhere along the way the real person goes quiet. They develop a facade, and they get so good at maintaining it that they eventually forget it's there.

What behavioral science tells us about this works on two levels at once.

The person wearing the facade experiences what researchers call cognitive dissonance, which is the internal friction that builds when your actions and your presentation are out of alignment with who you actually are. That friction costs you energy and slowly erodes your confidence in ways that are genuinely hard to trace back to the source.

But something is also happening on the other side of that conversation. Research on nonverbal behavior shows that when your words and your genuine emotions aren't aligned, the incongruence leaks through in ways your audience picks up without ever being able to explain. They can't always name what's off, but they feel the distance, and trust doesn't build the way it should.

When the person you are on the inside matches the person showing up in the room, people experience something they can't quite articulate, but they know they trust you. I always tell my clients that congruence is the ultimate tool of influence, and I've seen it proven right on every stage I've ever stood on.

The most powerful thing you can do as a communicator is let the real you come through, because that's the only version of you that can move people.

05/24/2026

We are less than 2 weeks out from our next Influencing From The Front program and I'm already fired up.

The people who show up to our training are the ones who already get it. They know that ethical influence is the name of the game and they just want to do better.

They know that if they want to grow a business, change a narrative, or make a real impact, it runs through their message.

These people are change-makers and leaders, the real influencers who are willing to put themselves out there and lead companies, industries, and movements.

Those are the people we attract and spending three days in a room full of them in Atlanta on June 5th is going to be something special.

If that sounds like you, link in the comments.

05/24/2026

The fastest way to become more persuasive costs you nothing

Most communicators try to get better by saying more or finding a sharper phrase, and that instinct points them in exactly the wrong direction.

The single fastest way to increase the persuasiveness of a message is learning how to stop talking.

I know that feels counterintuitive, and that discomfort is the whole problem. Most people avoid the pause because silence feels dangerous from the inside.

When the room goes quiet, what you're experiencing is a social threat response, the brain's threat-detection system firing because it can't tell if that silence means you've lost them. Your body floods you with cortisol and urges you to fill the void.

And while that's happening inside you, the listener's brain is quietly encoding what you just said and deciding how much weight it deserves.

Key point here: the pause isn't a gap in your message, it's the moment your message actually lands.

I teach this with an acronym I call PAUSE.

P is for Power, because silence is a dominance signal, and while your nervous system reads the quiet as danger, your audience's nervous system is reading it as authority.

A is for Attention. When sound stops the brain sharpens, and the pause functions like a spotlight that tells the listener this is the thing worth holding onto.

U is for Understanding. The brain processes within a finite capacity, and if your next idea arrives before the last one is encoded, the first one gets crowded out.

S is for Synchrony. Uri Hasson's research at Princeton shows that a listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's, and that the stronger that coupling, the better the understanding. When you slow down and pause, you give that synchronization room to deepen, which means you're not just controlling your tempo, you're locking your nervous system to theirs.

E is for Emphasis. You can't bold your spoken words, so whatever precedes a silence automatically becomes the most important statement in the room.

Three seconds of silence after your most important idea will do more for your persuasiveness than anything else you could add.

05/23/2026

Researchers studied 476 political speeches and tracked every moment an audience clapped.

What they found had nothing to do with charisma. Seven rhetorical patterns triggered nearly 70% of all applause. Speakers who used them got applause 71% of the time. Speakers who didn't got 29%. The only variable was how they structured their words.
Here are the seven:

Contrast: put two opposing ideas side by side: "other trainers teach you what to say, we teach you what to do Monday morning."

List: three-part lists signal a finish line: "we're going to cover referrals, retention, and reactivation."

Puzzle then solution: open with a problem, then answer it: "why do some speakers lose a room in the first five minutes? They skip the setup."

Headline then punchline: signal before you deliver. "let me tell you what actually separates great speakers from everyone else…they build the response in before they walk on stage."

Position taking: describe a situation, then land your stance. "most people think charisma is something you're born with, I've never believed that."

Combination: layer two devices together. the effect compounds.

Pursuit: when the room doesn't respond, go back for it. "I’ll say that again because it matters."

I hope you enjoyed this, Roberto

05/22/2026

Most people think the reason they're not performing at the level they want is because they need more skills or more motivation, so they go looking for better techniques, more training, stronger accountability systems. But here's what the research actually shows: the ceiling on your performance is more impacted by your identity than your skills.

Albert Bandura spent decades studying why people with equal ability produce wildly unequal results, and what he found was that your belief in your own capability predicts your performance more reliably than your actual competence does. The moment your identity says "I'm not someone who does that," the skill you just learned quietly goes unused.

Robert Cialdini's work on consistency explains why that pattern is so stubborn. Once your brain has formed a self-image, it will bend your behavior back toward that image almost automatically, not because you're weak or undisciplined, but because the brain is wired to keep you consistent with who it already believes you are.

If you've ever taken a course, worked with a coach, and still found yourself back at the same level six months later, the question worth sitting with isn't what else do I need to learn. It's whether you've expanded your identity the same way you've expanded your skills.

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