The comic book chick

Archive for November, 2011

Someone calls you up and is interested in your offer. So, they start asking questions. And more questions. And more questions.

Suddenly, you’ve been on the phone for over an hour. And, when you hang up, they still didn’t sign up for your offer.

You spent enough time on the phone, and answered enough questions that if they were a client, you would’ve sent an invoice.

When is it okay to say “I charge for that” and turn the meter on?

Why so many questions? And why do you spend so much time on the phone with them?

Questions aren’t always what they appear to be. In many instances, the answer to the question asked isn’t what they are -really- looking for.

“Are you my mommy?”

In a children’s book “Are you my mommy?” a small bird becomes separated from her mother, and goes searching from animal to animal. She asks a dog, a pig, a horse, “Are you my mommy?”

The little bird was feeling lost and needing help. As a little chick, she asked directly: “Are you my mommy? Is this home?”

As adults, we’ve learned that the world is sometimes a scary place, and it doesn’t feel safe to be vulnerable. So we don’t ask, “Is it safe here?” Instead, the questions tend to come out, “What are all the components to this class? What are all the ingredients in this product?”

Until that person gets their real question answered, they are going to keep asking. And asking. And asking.

Wouldn’t you?

The real question they are asking is…

They are asking if you are going to care for, support, and guide them. Can they rely on you? Is what you’re offering really going to work? An hour’s worth of questions basically trying to find out if there is enough safety, connection and trust here for them to say, “Yes.”

So, how do you answer their questions that will help them become a client, without spending an hour, being rude, or treating them like a child (which they aren’t)?

Keys to Turning on the Meter

* What questions do people ask you repeatedly?

If you’ve had a number of these conversations, you’ve probably heard certain questions over and over again. Brainstorm those questions, write up the answers, and put them on a web page, pdf, or some other document you can email them.

Because the people who are calling you aren’t children, they do need some information. Write it up and give it to them.

* Close the book and take charge.

I’m guessing you may approach a conversation with a prospect using an ‘open book’ approach. You become an open book, and you invite them to ask any questions they may have.

Except that you are the expert. If you were to ask a brain surgeon about brain surgery, and you needed an operation, what kind of questions would you ask? “Uh… does it hurt?” That’s right, you don’t know what the most important questions are, so you’ll just keep throwing darts in the dark, hoping that your need for connection, safety and trust will be met.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be nervous if a brain surgeon invited me to just ask her questions, before she had assessed me or asked me any questions of her own. Questions designed to help the surgeon know what’s really going on and how best to procede. And also questions designed to set me at ease, as the patient.

Your work may not be brain surgery, but the questions you ask communicate: “I’m confident. I know what’s going on. I’m going to take care of you. We will get you help.”

* What do you recommend?

After 15 or 20 minutes of questioning a prospect, I’m guessing you’ll know as much as you need to know in order to make a recommendation: “I can help you, and I believe that ten sessions will probably get you the results you want, or at least help you make a LOT of progress in that direction.”

Of course, it is polite to let them ask you questions. But, after questioning them, and having a clear picture of how to work with them, it will be much easier to say: “The question you are asking is an excellent one. Here is a piece of the answer: X-Y-Z. And, I’m wondering what you think of my recommendation.”

* Advanced tip: Web forms.

You can take a handful of your preliminary questions that you would ask almost anyone, and put them into a form on a webpage that they can fill out. The same page that has the answers to frequently asked questions.

If someone is willing to fill out your form, it’s more probable that they are serious in their inquiry. And, you will have a place to start having an informed conversation with them.

Spa party games sound like trivia or card games based on favorite Chick-Lit books or movies. They can be or they can also be based on nutrition, diet or exercise guessing games. Really anything that brings a round of light amusement to the gang waiting for their facial or turn in the mud is great fun for this party meant to relieve stress.

Mud Body painting:

This Spa party game themed idea is a great way to have a little fun with your mud or clay masks at the spa party. You can make this game competitive by giving an award at the end of the session for the most artistic body art. Spread out a large floor cloth to keep the mud from getting everywhere and you’ll also need plenty of mud, brushes and some water.

Guests at the Spa party games will get in groups of three and paint on each other’s bodies. They can paint anywhere on the body, but the back makes the largest canvas.

Caloric Count:

Try guessing games like guessing the caloric content of certain fruits, vegetables or other foods at your Spa party games. Set a nice example of different foods on display with a numbering system. Leave paper and pencils for guests to write their guesses on and then drop them into a box with a slot on top. Later on open the box and see whose guesses were the closest. You can give the food examples as prizes to the guests who were closest in their guesses.

Spa parties for the after work crowd center around the home Jacuzzi, lap-pool, sauna or other relaxing home spa equipment. This can be a summer evening party with all the decorations of a back yard pool party or can be a winter warm up in the basement spa. The basic decorating theme for this party can incorporate all of the traditional elements of other similar seasonal parties. Hot chocolate by the fireplace served in sturdy ceramic cups for winter or fresh lemonade served in spa party paper party cups for summer. Either season is the time for fresh salad and fruits served on paper spa party plates.

A man named Franklin P. Jones once said something along the lines of: “You are what you eat”. When I was playing my guitar the other night, I thought of something quite remarkable: “You are what you listen to”.

Just like how devouring too many potato chips can make you fat, the music you listen to determines what kind of a guitar player you become.

The ability to listen is very underrated amongst the guitar community. Most guitarists spend all their time learning licks, guitar solos and perfecting your guitar chops. No one, however, talks about listening with as much enthusiasm. You may hear a guitar student spending hours getting that sweep-picked arpeggio right, but you never really find guitarists say they spend hours of their day simply listening.

And by listening – I’m don’t just mean listening to the same old guitar players, bands and songs you’ve always been listening to. That’s unlikely going to make you improve as a guitarist. The kind of listening I’m talking about has a lot more meaning than that. It’s what I call – the art of listening. I feel that there are 4 rules when it comes to listening that will make a huge difference to your guitar playing.

Rule #1 – Be A Time Traveller

Rule number one is to be what I call a musical time traveller or a musical historian. Often times, a lot of beginner guitarists simply listen to what’s currently popular, or the so-called classic heavy metal / rock songs that everybody seems to know. This, I feel, simply fails to go beyond the surface of being a good listener.

The following statements which I am about to say may offend a lot of guitarists and you should first of all understand that it is only my personal opinion. It saddens me these days that people think that the guitar revolves around the likes of Hendrix, Slash and Eric Clapton and so forth i.e. that the development of guitar playing has stalled since the times of these greats. Whilst these guitarists have certainly contributed a great lot to the guitar playing universe, they are by no means the only ones to have done so.

The reality is, the guitar universe has moved light years beyond since the days of Jimi Hendrix. What was considered breathtaking and original guitar playing then now seems rather boring. What annoys me is that we have more gifted musicians and guitarists than ever before but these guys simple fail to be acknowledged by the majority of people. By gifted, I don’t just mean good guitar chops – I mean guitarists who also have great composition skills too.

Likewise, you can also make the error of listening to just the new stuff and miss out on some old goodies. Shredders – if you think Paul Gilbert is the god of shred, jazz guitarists such as John McLaughlin and Pat Martino have been leaving audiences jaw-dropped decades before with their awesome picking speeds. You think Eric Clapton was the best blues guitarist? Check out his influences. Guitarists such as Buddy Guy and Albert King helped lay the foundations of modern blues playing and should deserve a good deal of attention as well.

In fact something which I highly recommend you to do is to do a biography search on your favourite guitarists and find out who their influences are. If these musicians were able to influence and form the playing style of your favourite guitar players then surely, they must be worth at least a listen.

Rule #2 – Explore Different Genres of Music

There is a lot of self-labelling that goes on in our society, guitarists included unfortunately. You hear a lot of guitar players branding themselves as being purely shred or metal. They have little interest in the other musical genres and dismiss these genres without having given them a chance. Likewise, classical or acoustic guitarists, can sometimes be very stubborn when it comes to venturing into the electric guitar.

Some will argue that it’s a musician’s choice to play whatever music they want – I would agree and even encourage this. After all, there’s only so much music we can play. It is impossible for someone to simultaneously become a great blues guitarist, a great classical guitarist and a great metal guitarist. However, by not checking out and hearing some of these other musical genres, you would miss out on things you could have learnt.

For example, a heavy metal guitar player could learn a lot of licks and phrasing ideas from blues guitarists. Similarly, the fingerpicking technique of classical or flamenco could also be utilized by jazz guitarists. You may not necessary want to embrace these other genres with all your heart, but at least you’ve heard the music.

And who knows – it might even change you as a guitar player. When I was in my high school days, all I ever wanted to play was shred. I was obsessed with playing at the speed of light and would spend hours a day trying to get my sweep picking right. At the same time, I was open to learning new musical theories and wasn’t scared of exploring other genres of music. After a chance encounter with a Pat Martino live recording, I changed my guitar playing focus. Today, jazz is my main genre of music. Ten years ago, my friends would have laughed at me if I said I was going to be a jazzer.

Rule #3 – Explore Other Instruments

One bad habit a lot of guitarists make is to listen only to guitar music. Whilst this is rather intuitive, it is a real shame because we can learn a great amount from other musicians. One thing which I’ve noticed amongst great guitar players is the diversity of their musical tastes. For example, jazz fusion guitarists such as Brett Garsed and Scott Henderson frequently cite horn players as their influences. After adopting this approach, I too feel that listening to other musicians has hugely improved my guitar playing.

Guitar players tend to be stuck in a rut of playing a lot of guitar-sounding licks during improvisation, where bends, hammer-on’s, pull-off’s and bends are overused and abused. Listening to non-guitarists could help us to break out of these habits and inspire us to come up with some new ideas. For example, I regularly listen to pianists such as Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea to get me thinking out of the box and come up with new inspiring guitar licks.

Rule #4 – Be An Active Listener

Most of us have heard of the term active listening – but does it mean when applied to a guitar/musician context? For me, active listening simply means to learn as we hear, to take in the good ideas of the music we hear and to see if we can adapt some of these ideas to our guitar playing. It’s not simply appreciating the music – it’s harnessing the music that we listen to.

Readers of my blog will know that I believe in the one-lick-a-day principle. The idea behind it is to learn one and only one new lick a day, spending the entire day internalizing the lick so that it can integrated into your guitar improvisations. The biggest source of these new licks isn’t from a website, tab sheet or book – it’s the music that I listen to. My approach is – when I hear a lick that I like (which doesn’t necessarily have to be from a guitarist), I make a note of it and transcribe it later. This transcription also helps you to develop a good ear – one of the vital tools for good guitar improvisation (i.e. playing what you hear in your head).

So I recommend that you too become an active listener. When you hear a song that you like, understand why you like it and see if there’s anything there that you can use in your own guitar compositions or guitar improvisations. This can be done for just about any aspect of music – phrasing ideas, a certain guitar tone, guitar chord progression or lick. You will be surprised at the things you learn when you adopt this active listening approach.