Living Your Purpose Using Fascination

As many of my regular readers already know, I’ve been working through the book, “Heart of a Visionary” and I’ve stopped long enough to read the book, Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation by Sally Hogshead.

Sometimes research to improve your skills unexpectedly calls out and you have to stop and engage.

I wrote about the basics of the Fascinate book in my weekly Sunday dream column titled, Are You Being Fascinating Enough? How to be Fascinating.

I was stuck at the marketing part of Heart of a Visionary and I needed to stop, take a breather and examine my online presence and 8 Women Dream site. I researched what makes certain creations popular like, Why It’s Hard Out There For A Lefty or Maru, the cat.

I’ve long been this weird tech geek gal/marketing gal that companies would shove between programmers and their creations, the marketers who sold what they created, and customer service who dealt with their creation. I thought this odd ability was because I was one of those people who works with both sides of my brain at once.

One thing I learned from arguing with programmers (and getting them to create something with the end user in mind – who wasn’t them) was to look at the end-user experience from the end-user’s perspective.  To be successful, you’ve got to step away from your creation and look at your work from another angle.

And you have to be open to it.

I was in the middle of Heart of a Visionary at the point of  exploring marketing and what makes a person, product, videos, online content, or companies alluring.  I began to Google the term “fascination” and stumbled across Sally Hogstead’s book, then her TED speech.

I had to buy the book.  She hooked me with a fascination trigger.  I needed to know more.

I’ve been reading the book on my tablet and this week I decided to take the “Fascination Advantage Test.”

With the book purchase came a short fascination test and what I discovered blew my mind. It’s a test she offers you to see what your fascination triggers are.

What’s a fascination trigger you ask?

From Sally Hogshead’s website:

What does it take to be fascinating? It starts with gaining an understanding of how you blend two of the seven personality triggers in a way that sparks the intense interest of those around you.

Sally developed the 7 Personality Triggers based on over five years of proprietary research on fascination, including the first-ever marketing research study specifically about how people and brands become more fascinating, which was conducted by Kelton Research. Kelton Research is a global public opinion company, leading research with more than thirty of the Fortune 100 corporations, including McDonald’s, Target, and Pepsi. Twice it has been named “fastest-growing market research consultancy” by Inc. magazine.

Knowing your triggers reveals your unique strengths.

The results of my trigger test are behind an Intranet wall so I am not able to share the video about me, my trigger and the test results with you.  I decided to transcribe what the video said below and I invite those of you who know me personally to tell me if she isn’t dead on.

My top 3 fascination triggers are:

1. Passion
2. Mystique
3. Prestige

And to tell you the truth I wasn’t really sure about this until I played the video.

It said,

You are “The Intrigue.”

This means that you connect with people, but you always keep your distance. You know how much of yourself to show and how much to hold back.

Your primary trigger is passion. This means that you are warm and you connect with others. But your secondary trigger is mystique. And the mystique trigger means you work independently, that you think intellectually, and you are able to balance out the warmth and emotion of passion, with a more rational approach.

As The Intrigue you have a nuanced approach to communication. You’re perceptive. You’re able to see what other people are thinking. You are selective in which parts of yourself you show and which parts you want to hold back.

The closest archetype to you is the “subtle touch.”

Here’s what the people around you need to know and where you are going to add the most value: you are sensitive and intuitive to the people around you. You have a warm approach initially, but you also have a strong core. You can access both sides of yourself depending on the situation.

In certain situations you’re going to reach out and bond quickly and in other situations you’re going to hold back. There are going to be certain times in your career when you will want to emphasize the passion trigger, especially when you are first meeting someone or when you are first communicating a particular point in a meeting.

Make sure that you use your emotions to sell through your ideas so that other people can become engaged with them. If you use your mystique trigger too much people might think that you are disinterested.

This is your gift. This is your strength — that you have these two sides of your personality — the ability to reach out and the ability to know when to hold back. And this is how you fascinate.

The pdf report that accompanies the results go deeper:

How I add value:

• You captivate others with your vibrant and attractive style of communication.
• Your approachable and transparent style makes you an “open book.”
• You intuitively understand ideas and feelings of others.

Examples of leaders who use passion:

Jim Carrey, Oprah Winfrey, George Lucas, Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Wolfgang Puck, JK Rowling

How to apply passion at work:

PASSION is one of the most immediately fascinating triggers. With PASSION as your primary trigger, you capture widespread attention through colorful words, ideas, and actions.

You’re naturally curious, and become utterly captivated by certain ideas or topics. Yet, you don’t always let your excitement show. If you’re inspired by someone or something, don’t be afraid to share this excitement— it’s part of what makes your personality fascinating. Your curiosity makes
others curious, too.

Suddenly, I realized that in order to fascinate you need to truly understand who you are and accept yourself (flaws and all) in order to build on what makes you fascinating to others. It’s living life on purpose and playing to your strengths.  Everyone is fascinating at something.  It’s when we drift away from who we are that makes us die a little every day and lose our fascination sparkle.

Then passion dies.

Does 8 Women Dream exude my passion?

Does my passion for what I am doing with these 7 other women (and you)  leap from the pages when you first arrive here?

Am I clear about my passion?

Now these are great questions for me to explore.

Ones I’ll be mulling over as I review how I am delivering my passionate online message living on purpose.

I’d love your thoughts.  More next week.

Catherine

By the way, let me introduce you to Internet sensation, Maru and let you study what over 3 million people find fascinating: