in a previous video we discussed dr. robert cialdini's six principles of
influence now one of those key principles is the principle of scarcity
in this video we're going to show you how to use the principle of scarcity to
help raise the value of your personal brand and increase your credibility by
doing this you'll be much more able to exercise influence and ethically
persuade others now the principle of scarcity states that the more scarce of
resources the more it will be highly valued it's effectively the same as the
law of supply and demand in economics except that refers to the available good
supply versus the price for our purposes you are the resource so we're going to
be making you more valuable so to increase the your value of your personal
brand you're going to have to do a few things we're gonna describe them in
depth in this video but one thing is you have to have ethics that are beyond
reproach in this matter when you make a suggestion or a recommendation
people are going to trust you they're gonna believe you and they're going to
be very likely to listen so the three ways we're going to show you how to use
these scarcity is one specialization to leverage your differences and three
integrity the first thing we're going to discuss is to raise your value by
specializing something now this should be something that's very important to
your company and ideally is something fairly complicated and even better it
should be something that very few people understand now study this learn this
master this and when you think you know it learn it some more I'll give you a
personal example and then we'll talk about how to do this personally about 20
years ago I became an expert on IP multicast realistically speaking I was
one of a handful of people in the entire world that could truly understand that
implement IP multicast now what I did is I wrote a paper on introduction to
multicast no but I did that was different than most people is I wrote it
in human terms something that regular engineers could understand something
that managers can understand and something that executives can understand
because there were three versions of my paper and I made sure it was very
comprehensive I made sure it had good graphics and I made sure it was better
than anything else that I could find out there now it's pretty interesting
because I get calls still today nearly two decades later people in some of the
largest tech companies in the entire world are actually using that paper
whether they're in technical support whether they're in architecture it's
being used everywhere and why because it was so easy to understand and I took the
time to really learn it before I wrote it and when you understand something
better you can write it or speak it in a much crisper manner
in fact I often believe that when you go to a lecture and you don't understand
anything by the end of the lecture the lecturer didn't understand it well
enough to put into the terms that were understandable I want you to write a
document and make it absolutely wonderful make it that anyone can
understand ideally three versions of the document executive document a management
document and an engineering document if appropriate now now what I want you to
do is I want you to share this document with absolutely everybody you can find
because I want you to spread your knowledge and I want you to be known as
an individual that spreads your knowledge then share your expertise if
someone gets stuck help them let them know that you're there and you're
available to help so share share and share some more now the next step is to
really find a way to teach it so ask your manager if you can teach it to the
engineers in your region and I promise you they're going to say us because your
manager wants his team to be better than the rest the better his team is the
better he does so he or she will love you for being willing to teach into your
team and when your team starts to understand it I want you to ask your
manager if he or she would let you spread it to the entire operation or the
entire organization or a much larger audience and I want you to be so
prepared for this I want you to deliver such a stellar presentation that the
entire company knows that you're the expert this is really going to help you
in your career and this can increase your scarcity more than you can possibly
imagine so the next thing that's going to happen
after doing this and after teaching others you're going to get calls from
absolutely everyone and it's going to be so fast you won't believe it
and when you get these calls assuming you're legitimately busy and they'll
typically be calls from a manager across your organization requesting your time
and what I want you to do is very simple I want you to tell them that you would
absolutely love to help them you're extremely busy right now but please make
a request to your manager and if your manager is willing to share you you
would love to a system because you want to do anything you can to help the
organization's succeed and to help them succeed you've done a few very important
things you've let the monitor that called you know you're in demand so it
increases your value just by being scarce the second thing you've done is
you've made it clear to the manager that called you that you value your manager
and his use of your time so the person that called you will say wow this is a
person of honor and expertise on integrity and they value their manager
well this is a really good person I really love this person on my team
now you've also let your manager know by getting the request from the other
manager how in demand you are which increases your scarcity and raises your
value and you've shown ethics to your management team by just being respectful
of their needs of your time so what have you done you've raised your value
dramatically across the organization people know who you are and when you
make a recommendation and people know they can trust you they will listen to
you it'll be so easy for you to exercise influence and ethically persuade others
because people will know not only do you have the capability but you have their
best interest at heart the next recommendation I'm going to make is to
leverage your differences to become a more scarce resource and here's what I
mean by that as individuals we all have varying backgrounds we all have
different hobbies dition different passion projects different education
xand that's a wonderful thing and we can use that to our advantage in fact this
can be such a strong advantage it could actually take you from normal status to
expert status in which case you're going to be much more of a scarce resource so
I'll give you a couple of examples and I'll give you a personal example on how
it benefited me perhaps your yogi or a martial artist
and you've learned how to be calm in tense situations I want you to think
about that no matter how good an organization tries
they're gonna have conflicts and they're gonna have challenging situations now if
you actually have an area of expertise and the ability to actually de-escalate
challenging situations well then you should be the go-to person for
de-escalating challenging situations in your technology area of expertise and
people will love you for it or maybe you spent time in the military
and you're working for a large tech company and they have different
verticals it might make sense for you to spend more of your time selling to the
military than say selling to education education is a wonderful place but it's
very hard to find engineers that actually truly understand the needs of
the military environment so by specializing as a former military person
of designing systems for the military not only do you have the technical
expertise but you've got the industrial expertise and you're much more credible
instantly or perhaps you studied psychology undergraduate which I see a
lot of people especially working in the tech space maybe you even have a
master's degree in that but you're still working in tech and maybe the knowledge
that you have about psychology and understanding of anxiety could be used
to actually help you sell and what I mean by that is now we're not talking
about basically playing mind tricks with people I want to be very clear about
that before I go into death what we're talking about is if you know a lot about
a psychology and you understand anxiety you can understand the anxiety and fears
that a chief information officer would have is something were to happen to the
network you could use those psychology experiences along with your network
engineering expertise to recommend a high security high availability network
that will work and have 99.99% of the time uptime and you can describe that in
a matter that's going to decrease the anxiety of the CIO and make him or her
be able to sleep through the night and have lower fears because everything is
going to work and I'll give you a personal example now my background is a
bit odd for the tech industry though I've worked in the tech industry for
someone for over two decades I started by paying my way through
university as a paramedic which I love then I became an ER nurse which I didn't
love and then I became a nurse practitioner and after I became a nurse
practitioner I just had to go to tech because tech
my love Tech was my passion but I still had seven years of education taking care
of people plus several years of being a paramedic taking care of six people so I
know a lot about how to be good in a crisis but I also know a lot about the
healthcare industry now I was a CCA and I was working as a CCIE
on designing networks and troubleshooting networks for a great
many years and then I thought about it how could I possibly use that nurse
practitioner and medical background in addition to my network experience and
expertise and that's when I moved into a healthcare vertical now it was really
interesting because I moved into a healthcare vertical and I designed an
architecture called the medical grade network which really was a high
availability high security network designed specifically for the needs of
healthcare and I wrote three versions of a document presented it everywhere and
one was designed for executives one was designed for management one was designed
for engineers now being an expert on healthcare and being an expert on
networking when I would meet with a healthcare organization I was instantly
credible look there were many engineers that were equally as good as me but none
of them could walk into a hospital and say to the chief nursing officer or the
chief medical officer I know how your organization runs I know your
organization needs and I can build a network or design a network or help your
engineers design a network that's going to meet the workflow requirements of
your healthcare team so we can use technology as an advantage as opposed to
a distraction just that industry knowledge that I had took my career and
I saw rapid career escalation and progression in my career because in a
way like specialization but not necessarily I leveraged my differences I
leveraged my background in emergency medicine in the ER medicine and as a
nurse practitioner to be able to consult with health care organizations and
insurance companies and different governments across the world on how we
can use technology to make the network flow better to improve the operational
efficiency of their organizations so leverage your differences our
differences can make us great if you're enjoying this video please comment soft
skills for technology professionals in the comment section below now the next
way I'd like you to separate yourself is a very scarce resource and
increase the value of your personal stock is to always be honorable now I
would like you to think about this for a second how many truly honorable people
do you know people that will always be there for you people that will not place
their needs ahead of yours to get ahead people that you know that will always do
the right thing someone that you can truly trust see what I mean it's a very
scarce resource so just by you doing the right thing and
always sticking to do the right thing people are gonna know you as someone
they can always trust which will so fast raise the value of your personal stock
and it will keep your career going on on and on over a long period of time I
truly believe that honor integrity ethics and expertise are the key to
actually having a long term highly successful career because what will
happen is and it's not going to be necessarily instant but over time your
sphere of influence will just grow and you're always going to be in demand
especially in the most high-profile projects because people know you're not
going to mess up and people know that if you need help you're going to get it and
people know that if there's a problem you're not going to blame someone else
you're going to do what's right so people will listen to you and they will
trust you when they have to because you're an expert you're such a scarce
resource that they're lucky to work with your value is sky-high
and they don't have to worry about you doing the wrong thing so you'll
automatically be placed in a manner that's gonna really help your career so
I like to say don't be a generic commodity and what I mean by that is
when we talk about the law of supply and demand commodities for which there's a
lot of like coffee for example I love coffee aren't worth that much per pound
and compare that to say diamonds or gold or platinum there's not a large supply
so their value is sky-high so I want you to generate real demand for your
services I want you to raise your personal stock and I want your brand to
be very valuable so please use the tips that we discussed in this video to
increase the scarcity of you as a resource and increase your value did you
meetings can be an excellent opportunity to enhance your career please download
our free guide to using meetings to accelerate your career the link to this
guide is in the description below if you like this video please like and comment
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you think would benefit to additional help with soft skills for technology
professionals thank you so much for watching and I look forward to seeing
you in the next video