“Well, because I want to be healthy.”
“Why?”
“Because I have three kids, and I want to keep up with them.”
“Why?”
“Because by 5:00 p.m., I’m completely out of energy, and I just want to lie down.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want people to think I’m a bad mom.”
(Notice that the first few reasons are almost always tied to status.)
“Why?”
“Because I want my kids to know that I love them.”
“Why?”
“Because I never knew whether my mom loved me…”
BOOM!
(Notice that this one is tied to love.)
Or if someone wants to make money, ask, “Why?”
“So I can get a bigger house, and my wife can quit her job.”
“Why?”
“So that I can provide a better life for my family.”
“Why?”
“Because my kids are in daycare, and I really think they should be home with their mom.”
“Why?”
“Because my definition of a successful family is having my wife stay home with my kids.”
“Why is that important?”
“Because my mom was home when I got home from school, and I want that for my kids, too.”
“Why?”
“Because people may think I’m a bad father if I can’t provide this way for them.”
(Notice status reason here.)
“Why?”
“Because I want my kids to love me and look up to me.”
There it is again!
The internal struggle is not that they want to make money, it’s that they want their kids and spouse to love them. They want love, security, status.
As you’re telling the story, touch upon the external, because that’s what they’re willing to acknowledge. But then share your internal struggles, too. Those people who are dealing with the same internal struggles will have instant rapport with you, and you’ll be speaking to them at a subconscious level. They’ll be thinking about feelings they’ve never really shared in the past, but know are true.
When you get to the end of the story, typically you’ve solved the external struggles and accomplished what the hero has set out to do. But for your story to be really impactful, the hero needs to have done more than just accomplish their goal. They need to have become someone different in the process.
In fact, sometimes it’s even more powerful if the hero does not reach their initial goal. Lightning McQueen didn’t win the Piston Cup. Rocky Balboa lost to Apollo Creed (in Part 1), but that is why we love those characters so much. Even though they failed at their external goals, both of them won their internal struggles, the journey of transformation.
Michael Hauge said that the internal journey is all about the death of our identity, and the rebirth of our essence. Our internal struggles are about us holding onto these things that we’re attached to such as love, our status, our identity. If you took away all those things, what is left would be your essence. Realizing that your kids love you no matter what, and that others don’t really care about your status that much—that is the essence of happiness.
So while we want our hero to achieve his goal, it’s more important that he becomes someone different along the way. There has been a death of his internal struggles and a rebirth of something more.
The Wall
“What was the wall or problem you hit within your current opportunity that started you on this new journey?”
The backstory builds rapport with the character, then takes the listener to the moment of frustration that causes our hero to start on their journey. That wall is the frustration you felt because of the current opportunity you have been using to try to accomplish your desires. This old opportunity is not working and is the reason you (as well as your listeners) are willing to go on a journey to try something new.
This is what drives the emotion for the listener and sets up the correct circumstances for them to experience the epiphany. Something happened on your journey that has kept you from your desire. The wall is often a point of frustration, fear, or hopelessness. So be sure to spend time here describing how you felt. This will help to get them into the same state you were in when you had your big epiphany.
The Epiphany
“What was the epiphany you experienced and new opportunity you discovered?”
So far, the hero has been introduced, we know what the ultimate desire is, and we also know the wall their current opportunity has created that is keeping them from their goal. This is the point where something happens that shows them the path they need to follow. It could be a person who helps them understand something. It might be an idea they had while reading, or it could be a breakthrough they discovered while trying to overcome conflict. Something happened that gave them the epiphany, which changed their perception of reality.
Now that you’ve had this epiphany about what you needed to do, what was the new opportunity it led you to? The epiphany is the thought or the idea, and the new opportunity is the vehicle you’ve decided to step into to accomplish that goal.
The Plan
“What was the plan you created to achieve your desire?”
Now that you’ve had the epiphany, and you’ve learned about the new opportunity, now we talk about the plan you’ve created to see if this new opportunity will lead you to what you desire the most. What is the plan, and then what are the steps you took to get to your goals?
Inside this plan, you are inevitably going to run into conflict, which is where we start to get the emotion from the story. Remember, it isn’t the desire of the character that causes the emotion; it comes from the conflict they experience while they are trying to reach that goal.
The Conflict
“What conflict did you experience along the way?”
After the hero develops a plan, they move forward on it until something happens, they start to run into conflict. We call this the POINT OF NO RETURN because before this point, they could have easily just walked away from the plan and things would have been okay. Here something happens where they must either decide to go back to their old life, or burn the boats and keep moving forward.
This is where you take the step of faith out into the dark, only to find that there’s a light just a little further ahead. Most people are so scared of executing on an idea—an “aha”, an epiphany—that they never move forward.
In spite of all the reasons you may have said no in the past, this time it’s different. This is when the desire shifts from a SHOULD to a MUST. You move from “I should lose weight.” to “I MUST lose weight.” Or “I should start a business.” to “I MUST!”
This will sound like a battle cry to your prospects because they, too, have been “should-ing” for too long. It’s time to finally make the change once and for all. They will see you as someone who successfully took a stand and shifted from SHOULD to MUST. And you will inspire them to do the same. Describe for them the moment you made the shift, including how it felt inside.
In all good stories, after the hero has moved past the point of no return, things start to fall apart. They discover the journey isn’t as easy as they had assumed in the beginning. If they had known all the pain they’d have to go through, they might never have started the journey at all.
Describe the major setback and conflict you experienced that made you feel like all was lost. But then…there was a glimmer of light, one last way you could accomplish your goal. You alter your plan and go for one last final push.
The Achievement
“What was your end result?”
After your final push, something happens. Either you achieve your external desires, or you don’t. Share the aftermath of what happened so people can see the results that you got from the new opportunity.
The Transformation
“What was the transformation you experienced?”
Here you tal
k about who you became through this process. This is the resolution of your internal struggles, and is the death of the hero’s identity and the rebirth of your new belief systems.
As you will see in the next secret, the goal of all good stories is to break old belief patterns and rebuild them with new ones. When you create your stories this way, you are helping people to break free from their old belief systems and create a new future. That is the goal of a good Epiphany Bridge story.
THE EPIPHANY BRIDGE QUESTIONS
That’s the script for writing an Epiphany Bridge story. We’ve covered a lot here, so you could understand the power behind each section of the Epiphany Bridge story. But remember that stories are simple by nature. You can make stories more complex by going deeper into the settings, emotions, other characters, etc. But at their core, they follow a very simple progression.
YOUR ORIGIN EPIPHANY BRIDGE STORY
As I’m sure you can tell so far, each chapter builds on itself, and each secret gives you the next piece you need in the puzzle. So I wanted to step back and talk about a few things, so you can see where your first Epiphany Bridge story fits.
In Secret #5, we talked about the Big Domino, the One Thing you must get them to believe to join your new opportunity.
Here is the Big Domino statement I created for ClickFunnels:
If I can make people believe that funnels are the key to online business success and are only attainable through ClickFunnels, then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.
Now obviously I believe that is true, but why? What was the epiphany I had that made that belief become truth for me? That story, the one that made you believe in your domino statement, is what I call the “origin story”.
So what I want you to do for this chapter is think about your origin story and then answer the Epiphany Bridge questions. This is the story you will be using often in the sales process, so it’s important to take some time and make sure you create it correctly.
As an example, I’ll tell you my funnel origin story that I affectionately call the Potato Gun Story.
1. What is your backstory that gives us a vested interest in your journey? I was a broke college student athlete trying to make money online. I learned that people were making money selling information products online, so I created a DVD teaching people how to make potato guns and started to sell it. I was using the extra money I made from our potato gun sales to keep wrestling so I wouldn’t have to drop out of school.
2. What is it you want to accomplish? I wanted to be able to support my wife so she wouldn’t have to work and we could eventually start our family.
a. What is the external struggle you are dealing with? The external struggle was that I was only making a few dollars a day, and many days I actually lost money, so I wasn’t able to make enough money to support her, let alone a new baby.
b. What is the internal struggle you are dealing with? The internal struggle was that my wife was supporting me. I was supposed to be the man in the relationship, but my wife was working two jobs while I was going to school, wrestling, and living out my dreams. I felt like a failure as a husband.
3. What was the wall or problem you hit within your current opportunity that started this new journey? The problem was that Google had changed their algorithms and increased their ad costs. Suddenly my little potato gun website was no longer making any money, so I had to turn it off, which literally killed my only source of income.
4. What was the epiphany you experienced and new opportunity you discovered? I met a friend who told me about how he was adding upsells to his products. By doing that, he was able to make more money from every customer who came in, and therefore all his websites started working again in spite of Google’s increased costs. I learned that normal websites weren’t enough anymore to make money online, you needed an actual sales funnel. So I found someone who was selling potato gun kits, and I partnered with them and started selling them as an upsell. After I added a potato gun kit as an upsell for the DVD, I started making money again. I was spending about $10 a day in ads and making $50 or $60 back. That’s when I realized that the secret to making money online was creating sales funnels.
5. What was the plan you created to achieve your desire? My plan was to start creating sales funnels in other markets that had better potential to make money than the potato gun market. I started creating funnels and selling products in the weight loss market. But we didn’t stop there. We then created and started selling supplements to people who suffered from diabetic neuropathy. After that, we created funnels in the couponing, dating, and parenting markets, and others.
6. What conflict did you experience along the way? Each new funnel we created took between 6 to 8 weeks to create, on average. We had a team of 8 full-time people including designers, programmers, and copywriters just to get one funnel live. We had to glue together about 13 different products just to create one funnel. On average, our costs to get one funnel live were about $30,000, and then only about 1 out of 10 would actually recoup that money. It took a lot of time and money to find another winning funnel.
7. What was the end result you achieved? We ended up getting so frustrated that we decided to create a platform that would make it really easy for us to create sales funnels. The project nickname when we started was “ClickFunnels”. We thought if we could build something that would make it possible to build in 1 day what used to take us 6 to 8 weeks, we’d be really happy. After 8 months of programming and every penny I had ever made, we created ClickFunnels. I can now build in an hour—by myself, without any tech people—what used to take me and my team of 8 guys 6–8 weeks, and these funnels run faster and converted way higher. We then started to let other entrepreneurs use ClickFunnels. Within just 2 years, over 30,000 people use ClickFunnels to power their entire businesses. In fact, in 2016, we had 71 people who made over a million dollars with a single funnel.
8. What was the transformation you experienced? After creating ClickFunnels, I was not only able to let my wife become a full-time mom, I’ve also been able to spend a lot less time working, because we can create things so quickly. I’m now able to be with my kids, and never miss any of the highlights of their lives.
Now that you’ve read my potato gun epiphany origin story, I want you to re-read my Big Domino statement and see if that story gives you the “aha” you need to be able to believe this statement:
If I can make people believe that funnels are the key to online business success and are only attainable through ClickFunnels, then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.
If I did this right, then you should believe that you need a funnel to be successful online, and that the only way to build one is by using ClickFunnels. If you believe that, then your resistance to buying becomes almost zero.
Now that you understand story structure and you’ve created your first Epiphany Bridge story, in the next section we are going to dig deeper into the false beliefs people have about your new opportunity, and then look at the stories we need to create to break those false belief patterns.
SECRET #9
FALSE BELIEF PATTERNS
We all create belief systems that support our decisions. We’ve been doing it pretty much from the day we were born. Those belief systems form the foundations for our lives. We create these beliefs to keep us safe and to safeguard our status. And while they’ve been developed to protect us, oftentimes they’re also the things that keep us from progressing in our lives.
When I’m trying to sell someone on my new opportunity, almost instantly their subconscious mind will start thinking about all the reasons it isn’t possible, or why it won’t work for them. The bad news is that these beliefs can be really strong.
Let me show you how these beliefs are created. It all starts with an experience. It could be positive or negative, but immediately after they have that experience, their mind quickly creates a story about what that experience
meant. Our brain then takes that story we created and it becomes a belief. It’s pretty simple, yet that process has happened tens of thousands of times in your life and has created the person you are today.
It’s interesting that two people can have the exact same experience, but because of the story they created, it affected their beliefs about it. So you have to understand that when you speak to people about your new opportunity, they will bring thousands of preconceived beliefs with them that you have to combat if you are going to make the sale.
The good news is that when you know what those false belief patterns are, and you understand the experiences and the stories that your prospects have created in their minds, you can actually use Epiphany Bridge stories to replace their old stories—break their false beliefs—and create new ones.
Here is a fun exercise to demonstrate how this works.
Step #1 What “false chains of belief” might your potential customer have about your new opportunity? For example, if you’re in network marketing or multi-level marketing (MLM), a false chain of belief might be something like:
“If I joined a network marketing / MLM program, I could lose my friends.”
Or if your opportunity is about weight loss:
“If I try to lose weight, I’m going to be miserable.”
If you’re not able to think of false beliefs that your potential prospects might have, think about the false beliefs that you had before your big epiphany.
Step #2 Now that you have the false belief, the next step is to figure out what experience they had in their lives that caused the false beliefs. What is the most likely experience your prospect had that caused this belief?
Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Finding Your Message, Building a Tribe, and Changing the World Page 11