Improve Your Business Performance by 40%

0:00Real question. Do you want to increase your business performance by 40 %? Better yet? What about increasing the performance of the people around you, like your team, by 40 %? Your customers, your clients, your team, let's even talk about your family. This is a little known secret and it is all about communication. Now, before you turn away from the show, I want to be very clear. If you want better results in just about anything, from your personal relationships to everything in business, the key is clarity and clarity. and consistency in your communication. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where we talk about building a business and growing it beyond your wildest imagination.

0:38I have empowered tens of thousands of business owners to create and sustain their online businesses. And today I am looking forward to sharing with you one of the most important things that can be the greatest lever for your business growth. The reason I'm talking about this today is because two things happened last week that felt like it applied to so many people and perhaps might come a little bit easier to me. I took some time to build a framework around explaining how I increase my communication with clarity to get to understand what is really being asked and then what's keeping somebody stuck.

1:12So the first was reading an MIT research paper that revealed the power of constant communication. And the second thing was a conversation I had with one of my teammates, Lisa. Now, Lisa is a coach on the inside of the Consistent 10K. She asked me how I've been able to hone my ability to get to the root of any question that's being asked and then clearly come up for the next step of action. Okay, so we're gonna break these into two different parts. Let's start with the MIT research first. So researchers at the MIT Human Dynamics Lab spent years studying teams across every industry, tech, healthcare finance, call centers, and what they found should change how you think about your business.

1:51Communication patterns are the greatest predictors of a team's success. and that's more than intelligence, personality, or an individual skill combined. Okay, communication explained about 40 % of the variation in team performance. Now, I found it fascinating, not just in terms of working with the team, but also when I was working with a solopreneur. The more I communicated with my customers, the better my services were. So the customers felt seen and supported, and I felt empowered in that working relationship. So when I first started as a solo entrepreneur, as a photographer, the communication I had with the client before the shoot was a really good indicator of how successful that shoot was going to be.

2:32If I didn't have communication with the client before the shoot, I just felt frazzled. It felt frenetic. And I wasn't quite sure that I would be able to do my best at these shoots. The crazy thing was that it didn't change when my business and my clients began to change. When I became a marketing consultant, working with larger companies and larger teams, everything boiled down to understanding. The clearer I communicated, the more success we would find along the way. Now, this is going to bring me to the back to that question that my team member, Lisa, remember at the beginning of the show, she asked me a question.

3:06Now, as a point of clarity, I have a team of coaches who serve our clients on the inside of one of my programs, the Consistent 10K. Now, the Consistent 10K is a business coaching program where we empower you to build an online business for consistent 10K months. Now, that's the floor and definitely not the ceiling to what an online business can make. So I work closely with our coaches and I work closely in our community. And it's my job to coach our coaches and keep constant communication open for all of us. As I read Lisa's question, I could have simply given her an answer right there in Slack.

3:38But what I decided to do was to host a lunch and learn for my team of coaches and clearly communicate the framework I use to understand what is being asked. That way, my communication just isn't clear. it's exactly what a person needs to hear to take action. So there's clarity, and then there's clarity around taking action. And I wanted to make sure that we're on the same page. Now, I should probably also take a second to publicly thank my husband and my business partner, JD, for being the person who, behind the scenes, makes those lunch and learns come to life. Now, I hate admitting this, but the team low-key calls him the CEO of Vibes because his goal is to make sure the place where people work is impeccable.

4:19And it is a place that makes them feel like, not just a great team member, but also a great human. When we host Lunch and Learns, we have food delivered to everybody's home because we are a virtual team. So how do we do a Lunch and Learn? Everybody gets food at their house. Now, it might not sound like a lot, but JD spends about two or three hours planning and executing to ensure the team gets their meal delivered all at the same time so we can all enjoy lunch as well as create frameworks within the business. And then that will help us systematize our approach. The fact that the team got pizza delivered right on time and piping hot is because the system that JD built.

4:54Now we jokingly refer to like these lunch and learns and we call it the pizza matrix. And there are a few times in my life where I see my husband, he gets so stressed when it comes to the pizza matrix. This guy is like, everybody needs piping hot pizza. It's my name on the line. His efforts are well worth the investment because the team feels very special. So let's go back. I want to pause here for a second. We're going to go back to communication, but I'm going to remind you of the question that Lisa had asked at the top of the show, I had said, Lisa had said, how do you know what question to ask and how are you coming up with an answer so quickly that's really addressing what's going on behind the scenes for the client?

5:31So back to this idea of communication and giving you a front row seat to how it looks on the inside of my business, I'm going to be sharing with you the presentation I hosted for the Lunch and Learn. Yes, I'm inviting you into that meeting. And I want to do it for two reasons. Number one, I want to show you my style of communication in action. And then two, I want to give you a communication framework that you can use to improve your communication with your customers, with your team, with your family. Okay, the lunch and learn presentation was broken into two parts. Number one, coaching clarity.

6:04So even if you're not a coach, you're going to see how I use this exact framework when it comes to sales and client success. So no matter what type of business you have, this framework for how to answer questions, well, it's gonna rapidly increase your success. Now, the second part of the conversation is how we are creating clear systems for clear communication with our clients. Yes, we literally teach clients how to communicate in effective ways so we can get them results. Now, we don't assume they know. We know what's best for results, and it's our job to show that to them. And you should do the exact same thing for your customers too.

6:41I'm going to show you how. So let's move on over to that lunch and learn meeting right about now, starting with section one, clarity and communication and learning how to answer questions in the right way. So it was based on your incredible feedback and insights that I was able to get your ideas and thoughts and hopefully create a conversation that has coalescing factors. And one main thing that I saw from a lot of your ideas, insights, and questions was clarity. And I'm going to break this down in two ways. Part one is going to be clarity in our coaching. And part two is clarity in our systems.

7:22But it might not be what you expect. Because what I want to really start off and start off with our coaching clarity, it's that's what we hear. And our coaching system is what we say. So what we hear and what we say. Cool. So when it comes to coaching clarity, in my experience, a question is never just a question. There's always something else hidden just below the surface. So what I've also realized in my experience is that the best leaders, the best coaches, and the best salespeople get very clear using one tool, curiosity. curiosity. You are all of these things. You are a leader, you are a coach, and you are a salesperson.

8:14Now, you're probably thinking, wait, no, Jasmine, I am not in sales. I am a coach. But I specifically mentioned sales on this coaching call because, excuse me, not coaching call, coaches call, is that there's two people in any conversation. There's two salespeople in any conversation. If my husband and I would like to go to dinner and I want to go to one place and he wants to go to another, we're both selling our idea on why that restaurant is better. When Luna comes to me and asks, do I have to do my homework? She's a salesperson advocating for her, I don't want to do homeworkness. And I am a salesperson to sell her into the vision of why homework's really great.

8:54and we can all know and experience with our clients, do I have to follow this method? You are a salesperson as to why the work is going to get the result. And guess what? They are a salesperson oftentimes trying to sell their comfort, their ease, and their place of stasis. So this leads us to a question where I find myself many times whenever I'm reading the conversations in Slack and when we do coaching on the inside of the group, it's, have you ever worked with a client and wondered, despite your best effort, why are you not understanding me? Like, I can't say this any other way. You might find yourself questioning, I actually don't know how to say it differently.

9:40Like, I've said it as best I could. Now, I have come to realize and know that this is a sign that we're not addressing the real question. If you're giving an answer and they're still like, but, but, but, and you're like, I don't know how to say that any differently. I just gave you the answer. It's not your fault, but it's your job as a coach to discover what their question really is. Now, I call that the underlying question. You will see me do it in coaching every single week. They'll ask the question and I'm like, okay, let's get to the underlying question. So the client will ask a question and we must dig, aka I am talking about we have to excavate.

10:23The more complex, the more tightly held to somebody is to their reason or belief, the more we have to dig it out. So how do we dig it out? We get curious. If there is one thing that I know is that clarity and curiosity work hand in hand. The more curious you are, the clearer you become with what it is they actually need to hear. Because there is a 99 % chance that your client is not coming to you with a how question. Like 99 % of the time, like we have trainings for every how question a client has. Now, in case we don't, let us know, we will make one. Our job is to create a training for any sort of how question they might have.

11:11So if they're not coming to us with a how question, although it always is, it's framed as a how, right? But we can point them to a training and then they'll come back and be like, but. So most of our clients get stuck in a question that has nothing to do with our process, but is a reflection of their fear. Their fear of being seen. their fear of failing publicly their fear of being thought of as a fraud the fear of trying and wasting time and the greatest fear is that realizing their best isn't good enough they come to us with a how we answer and then they're like but but and what we have to understand is what are they really asking?

12:02Because the truth of the matter is most people would prefer to stay stuck and safe than not even try and have that fear realized. Most people, literally not just entrepreneurs, not just clients in our program, we're talking about most of the human race would rather stay safe. But oftentimes by staying safe, they can also acknowledge I'm stuck. I'm not where I want to be. And when push comes to shove, many people will choose safe and predictable and stuck than the unknown, even if the unknown has a limitless upside. So if we know that to be true, the vast majority of humans, which we can relate statistically, the vast majority of clients coming in, it's uncertain.

12:53in. So how do we as a leader, as a coach, as a salesperson, what are we selling? We are selling their greatest hopes and their greatest dreams. How do we sell them into taking an action and getting a result they want? Every time they come to you, your job is to lead, coach, and sell them into their greatest hope. How do we do that? By getting curious. So to clearly answer their question, we have to know why they're asking. And this is where the work comes in for us to figure out why are they asking this? Do I have to do market research? Do I have to post on social media? Do I have to send direct messages?

13:37Do I have to send for the sale? Every time somebody asks me a question, I mean, the vast majority of the time, I ask, I'm curious, why do you ask? This just happened a couple days ago. Rosie had asked me a question and I said, can you explain why? I'm curious. I can give an answer, but if I don't know why it's being asked, I won't be able to give the answer that resonates with him deeply. In fact, I share this curiosity framework with our sales team. I am sharing it with my husband and I'm sharing it with my daughter. So what I've discovered is that curiosity reveals their beliefs, not just their question.

14:24Curiosity reveals that what do they believe to be true? Because your answer most likely won't change their belief because they weren't afraid of, they don't think that they were asking a belief question. They were asking a logical question to a deeply held emotion. They're coming to you. I have a logical question. But what they're not telling you is I also have this deeply held belief that I'm not going to reveal to you because it makes me too vulnerable and admits too much of my greatest fears out loud. So what happens is that our logic and our emotion are entirely different energy frequencies.

14:58Like they're on two different pages of two entirely different chapters. So if we don't align with that frequency, I can promise you what's going to happen. Clients are going to shrink. They're going to feel misunderstood. and when they're very afraid, they're going to fight for their beliefs. We've seen this happen. So simply put, you both are on different pages if you're answering a how question with a how answer. What we need to do is answer a question but ask why they're asking it. That's how we get movement and results. So this is how I use curiosity. And it's a framework that I would like to share with you.

15:43And you could try it on for size because I think you're going to see some pretty massive shifts in the rate of results that we receive. Okay, so it's three-step framework. Step one, I'm curious. Why do you ask? What this is proving to me and to the client, energetic alignment. Are we on the same page here? Step two, clarify their question. And by oftentimes, you will see me repeat back the question to a client to indicate, yes, I understood, or give them an opportunity to clarify. And what I'm actually doing is, did I hear what you intended to say? Most of the time, if not all the time, they're saying yes.

16:26Then the third step, and this is where the gangsters dwell, is you present them with an if-then statement. And that is what reveals what's going on below the surface. Three steps till we get to the root of the issue. So let's give an example. My six-year-old daughter. Question, do I have to take a bath? Now we work with the underlying question framework. Step one, I'm curious. Why are you asking, baby girl? She'll likely reply, I just don't have enough toys in my bath. Not enough toys in my bath. Step two, I reflect what she had said. Oh, I get that. Having a lot of toys makes you enjoy your bath and have fun, right?

17:10To which she replies, yes, mama, that's right. Then I move to step three, the if-then statement. If I added more toys, then would you take a bath? I want more toys, but I don't want to be left alone in the bathtub. Bingo. She doesn't want to be left alone, but what she's asking is a how question up top. And then the reason, the noise on the in-between is it's the toys. It's got to be the toys. If I present the toys as the solution, what is revealed? No, that's actually not it. So if we were to use this in a client-style framework, let's apply this same framework. Question, do I have to post on social media every day?

17:56Now we get into the underlying question framework. Now, I know that I'm using the world's most basic example, okay, basic, but this is just the explanation of the framework applied. Step one, I'm curious, why do you ask? I want to pause here for a second. The temptation would be to answer a how question or a must-eye question with a how answer. Do I need to post on social media? The quick answer is yeah. But we're not addressing whatsoever the deeply held belief about posting on social media is. So let's go back into the framework. Step one, I'm curious, why do you ask? Response, I don't have time.

18:37Step two, reflect. Not having enough time is hard. How much time do you have for your business each day? I don't know, an hour. But it's just that social media, it takes me so long. Step three, if then. If you want to grow your business to consistent 10K months, then can I show you how to easily create posts and templates in less time than that? Oh, well, it's just that creating it makes me have to be online and that makes me uncomfortable. Okay, we're not dealing with I don't have time because you told me you had time. So if you had time and I gave you a solution within that time frame, will you do it?

19:22Oh, well, well, actually. So what does it really reveal? Is we are not dealing with bath time questions. We're not dealing with social media questions. Because if we simply answer, yes, you need to take a bath. Yes, you need to post on social media. We completely miss the real reason that is keeping people stuck. They know how to do it because we have given them a training. Every time, I would say the vast majority of the time that somebody is coming to us, curiosity is the thing that will get them the result. So this is part one of our coaching clarity. What are we actually hearing? So a question is never just a question.

20:10Our goal is to uncover what actually is going on. What is the underlying question? And so we do this by being curious. Why? Because the underlying questions are fear-driven. If we can address the fear and ground them and shift their perspective about their fear, then the how takes care of itself. So how do we approach every question with curiosity? The underlying question framework in review, step one, to ask, I'm curious. Why do you ask? Step two, reflect the question to ensure you heard them correctly. And step three, the if then. If you got what you're advocating for, then would you be able to do the how that we have outlined?

20:59I hope that first part was helpful in learning my framework for getting curious to truly hear what people are saying, even like below the surface, so we can answer their questions in a way that gets them results. Now let's move on to part two, clarity in our communication with our clients. Essentially, what and how we say for them to get results. So here we are for our systems clarity. Now, the first part is what we hear and the second part is what we say. So our goal as coaches is every time we've coached, our focus is on one thing, results. Now, I understand that what we receive and intercept from clients could be they're worried, they're stressed, they're overwhelmed.

21:41Totally fine. But what is our focus? Results. Because our reality, any business owner's reality, is that clients aren't paying for work to do, but they're willing to work to get results. So the farther we get from getting them results, the least inclined they are to do the work. So I'm gonna make this like a very clear example. I invested in high ticket fitness and nutrition program at the beginning of the year. I know my coach did not want me necessarily signing up to deal with my, I don't know, like yo-yo eating, binge eating, my body dysmorphia. She does not do that. Her goal is to get me a result.

22:28She's gonna have to deal with the other things that come with it, but she keeps me on the main thing, which is the main thing. okay, and it is okay that you're feeling frustrated or that you plateaued or that nothing is ever good enough. Okay, got it. But we want to get you a result, which is healthy from the inside out and strength. Are we on the same page? Yes. Let's get back to work. So we focus on results. People don't really want to do the work, but if we continue to keep them tethered to the result, they're going to be more willing to do the work. Now, our method is that you, our coaches, are a client's unfair advantage and the catalyst to getting the results.

23:11You are their unfair advantage. How many of our clients have tried something in the past and they didn't get a result? 8 % of people, 8 % will complete a course that they've invested in. The average time in a membership is about 2.4 months. So what happens is they said, I've tried something and they're worried and preoccupied about whether or not this is going to work and you are their unfair advantage. So because you are their unfair advantage, their expectation is different than anything they've done before. So their expectation is our new way of coaching. Now, we begin this conversation, our new way of coaching, as early as the sales call.

23:59If somebody says, I've gone through coaching before and X, Y, or Z, or I've never had a coach and I have this expectation of what a coach should be, we're very clear and letting them know. So y 'all are very familiar and clear already as it is. When they come into onboarding, our lovely head of client success is showing them this methodology that is very familiar to you, but I'm going to repeat it so it becomes very true. The old way of coaching is that a coach would meet with a client like once a week. But then what happens is that you, sometimes these new clients, these people that are coming in, they're going to be delaying or pushing off results until they speak with their coach.

24:36But our way of coaching that gets results. Now, please understand the words we're using on the screen is a psychological thumbprint of what they're to expect. I started off by saying our goal is a result. We are measured by the result that we give to a client. So what are we saying on the front end when they come in? Our way of coaching that actually gets what? The thing they want. Results. So we say the new way of coaching, it has to be consistent and quick. We have daily or sometimes multiple times daily a video response that is personalized to your business and your questions. No delays, no pushing off, no excuses.

25:16You get quick support to keep moving. This is their expectation. expectation number two for our clients coming in the old way of coaching is after oh you know a weekly coaching call you're high energy but then it quickly disappears because you're like oh i gotta get back to work and now i'm stuck because wait what was that one thing and now you have to wait another days before you get to chat personally with your coach which is what you're going to think you want or you need but our way of coaching that actually gets results well you and your coach remain calm, confident, and focused as you work through the problem.

25:51We value work and facts and support, not just momentum to get results. Pause here. Please understand that the words that we have selected are, I'll hear again, a psychological thumbprint of how we're priming them to come into the program. What are we telling them their experience will be? Calm, confident, and focused. We're telling them at the beginning how energetically they will arrive to us. Now, lastly, the old way of coaching was that on that coaching call, a coach is going to explain what to do. You're going to feel confident. You're going to feel ready. But then you hit a point where there's like a step or there's a detail that's missing.

26:30And so you might get stuck or frustrated. And that is what slows the process. We don't want to slow the process. We want you getting results quickly. So our way of coaching that gets results is because your coach records all of your personalized feedback and your personalized video, you're going to walk through their insights, advice, and your next steps so you can rewatch it and never be stuck. This is what we're telling them. This is their expectation. So our job is to help them stick to the plan to get the thing they want, results. How? How are we doing this? Well, this is time for us to go in and massage our focus here.

27:12Because in my experience, what has been revealed a thousand times over, a thousand times over when I am being sold to, when I am selling, when I see a conversation, is the person who uses the most words is the least confident. Our clients are not paying us for long videos because they find it valuable. They're paying us to collapse time and tell them what to do. So the shorter amount of time and the least amount of words that we tell them to the result, the better off we're going to be. So every time you coach, I want your focus to be on two things. And please, if you decided to take this as a mantra for every single video, rock it out.