Someone says something in a meeting. Something I disagree with. Not wildly, not some great moral crime. Just wrong, and I can see it's wrong. The correction is sitting there fully formed, along with the better way, and I know that if I say nothing now, it'll never get said.

And I say nothing.

That evening, I spend the dog walk working out why. Not angry at them, particularly. Angry at the distance between what I can see and what I can get out of my mouth in the moment it's needed.

If you've felt that, you'll know the shape of it. There's a dread that shows up before certain conversations. There's a quiet rage afterwards. There's a suspicion, underneath the noise of the day, that something isn't working the way it should. You can feel all of that, but when you try to put your finger on what's actually causing it, your hand comes up empty.

That's where I've been for a long time. So I'll tell you what I've found, and you can do what you like with it.

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I. Three words we use, and what they cost

There are three words that get used about this, and I've used all three myself. They're the reason I stayed stuck, so I want to lay them out.

Shy. This was my word for years. Shy sounds like weather. Something that happens to you, like rain, and nobody expects you to do much about the weather.

But I noticed something. Plenty of men who say nothing in a meeting will talk your ear off once they're comfortable in a room. Given the right company you can't shut them up. So whatever's happening, it doesn't travel with them. It shows up in particular rooms, with particular people, and goes quiet again afterwards.

Difficult. This is the word for other people. The manager who won't see sense. The colleague who's blunt for no reason. The client who nods through the whole pitch and then does the opposite. Difficult, rude, slow, doesn't listen.

I'd been using that word for years before it occurred to me that everyone I'd applied it to was using the same word about me, but for opposite reasons. I was the one who took open and speaking at the 'wrong time'. I was the one who never agreed or had something different to say in the room. I was the one who wouldn't let others speak and couldn't let the room go silent for a while. From where they were standing, I was the difficult one, and I'd never had a conversation with any of them that would have told me otherwise.

Confidence. This is the one that cost me the most, so I'll slow down here.

I spent a decade working on my confidence, and I want to be careful about what I mean. I don't think confidence is worthless. I think I was trying to fix the wrong machine and I couldn't see it, because confidence feels like the obvious answer.

Here's what I noticed. Confidence is a feeling, and feelings move around. You can feel like a fraud and still say the right thing at the right moment. You can feel untouchable and still say something clumsy that lands badly on somebody. The feeling and the result didn't line up for me nearly as often as I expected. What I actually needed was something that worked the same way whether I was feeling it or not.

II. What I was actually doing

Right. Let me try to describe the thing, rather than tell you what to do about it.

Every person you meet is running a version of reality they were handed, and handed long before they could argue with it. What counts as polite. What counts as clever. What counts as a proper job. What a man ought to say about his own work. None of it chosen. It was installed in small pieces over years, and by the time you're grown, it runs the whole day for you, quietly, and you'd swear it was simply your personality.

(But thoughts are not neutral. Yes that is for a whole other article. So please subscribe to make sure you don't miss out on that one)

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So when you walk into a room and say something true, and you watch it land wrong, something is happening that most people never get a name for. You're speaking the language you were given. They're speaking theirs. Neither of you can hear the gap.

And there's a pattern in how people take things in. I'd spent years assuming this was about types of person, and it isn't, in my experience. It's about which channel is open. Some people want it short and to the point, and if you give them the background they'll be looking at the door. Some people want the evidence and the sequence, and won't move an inch until they can see how this follows from that. Some need to hear it as a story about a person before it means anything at all. Some can't start until they know exactly where to stand and what happens next.

Most of us carry one of those, all our lives, and use it like a universal key. It works beautifully on the people who share it. On everyone else, the same words arrive as noise, and you get that flat look back, and you take it personally.

Now realise... the cost isn't that you're bad at talking. It's that you've been fluent in one language and speaking it to everybody, and blaming the room for the silence.

I'm not going to hand you the fix for that yet. What I'd like you to hold onto is just this: it's a language, and languages get learned.

III. What it looks like from inside a meeting

I want to show you two versions of the same room.

The first one. Someone senior puts a plan forward. It's poor. The sort that'll eat four months and produce nothing anybody can point to afterwards. I've got the correction ready and I know it's right.

What goes through your head is not fear of being wrong. It's the memory of every other time. They'll think I'm not a team player. I haven't got the evidence in front of me. I'm not quick, they'll ask me one question and I'll go red and lose it.

So you say nothing, and it goes ahead, and two months later it's failing. Looking back, the failure was visible from that chair. You saw it. You held onto it. And now you are the man/woman on the team who agrees with everything, and nobody can remember a single position you've ever held.

That meeting taught you something about silence that can take years to sink in. Staying quiet feels like a neutral act. It's not. It's a decision, made repeatedly, and it has consequences just like any other.

The second version. Same room, same plan, same man in the chair.

What you'd do differently now is smaller than we'd be expect it to be. You don't produce the big clever correction, which is the thing you are always reaching for. You ask a question, and a genuine one.

"What's the outcome we're actually trying to hit by month four?"

It isn't a challenge. It's a question, which means he has to answer it, which means he now has to hold up his own proposal out loud and in his own voice. The plan either holds, in which case it was sounder than I judged it, or he hears the gap himself while he's answering. Either way, You've not had to be clever, and nobody has been opposed. There's just a wrong thing that needed describing, and he described it.

The second question that I've started using in similar situations, when the first one hasn't settled it: "What would have to be true for this to be the wrong call?"

I've watched that sentence change a decision in a room. He thought it through in my language for ten seconds and arrived at his own answer about his own plan.

A day like that teaches you what influence actually is. It's helping someone see something clearly enough that they want to move toward it. You didn't win and he didn't lose. He saw it. Which is why it stuck, and why he came back.

IV. The part that won't be fixed by Tuesday

I don't want to leave you with the impression that any of this arrives quickly.

I got good at this late, and the road there was longer and more humiliating than I'd have chosen. Everyone called me a natural for twenty years. Joby's just got it. I didn't know what "it" was. I could do the thing, but I couldn't explain it, couldn't teach it, and couldn't take it into a room that didn't resemble the one where I'd learned it.

There was nothing perfect about it either. That's how I lost three months in a phone shop, reciting processors and megapixels at people, until my manager took me aside.

Twenty years of that, and then a stretch where I applied for twelve jobs I was more than good enough for and heard nothing back from any of them. Turned down for a chat job at an online casino for being overqualified. That was a Tuesday, with two kids at home.

So I'll be honest with you about the timeline. Learning to speak to people this way doesn't make the phone ring by Friday. But the phone ringing was never the thing I lacked. What I lacked was knowing how to be understood when a door did open, in a way that still felt like me. That's the part that changes, and it changes slowly, and it's worth the years.

V. What I'd want you to sit with

I'm not going to tell you how to solve this, partly because I don't think it can be handed over, and partly because I don't know your rooms.

But I'll leave you with two things I now pay attention to.

The first is noticing how someone is speaking, rather than only what they're saying. In your next difficult conversation, try tracking the manner instead of the content. Are they clipped and quick, wanting the point? Are they laying out the chain, proving it as they go? Are they telling you about a person? Are they asking what happens next? You don't need to do anything about it the first time. Just notice which one they're using, and notice whether it's the one you'd have used.

The second is smaller and harder. There's a true thing you've been carrying around for weeks, a correction or an opinion you've kept in your pocket, and you know exactly which one it is. The next time there's a room where it would do some good, say it. Not cleverly. Not quickly. Just say the true thing and then stop, and let the silence sit there. It'll be uncomfortable and it'll feel longer than it is.

I'll finish with what I've come to believe about men who feel this way, and you can take it or leave it.

What I'd been calling weakness in myself, the flabbiness, the sense of having gone soft somewhere I couldn't point to, wasn't a fault of character. I'd been standing in rooms speaking a dialect nobody had ever taught me, and reading the silence that came back as a verdict on who I was. That's a gap in a skill. A skill can be worked on. A personality, you're mostly stuck with.

The relief in that, for me, was that the room was never against me and the silence was never my personality.

You already know something is wrong. I think you've known for a while, and I think you're closer to the cause than you realise, because the feeling you've been carrying is an accurate report of something real. I don't know what your rooms are, or which conversation you've been avoiding. But if any of this has landed, and you'd like to talk it through, my door's open.

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Not dramatically, but quietly.

It could be the garden you stopped watering. The inbox that you stopped clearing. The relationship that you stopped tending to. Maybe it’s the CRM you opened once after six months and it was just an address book now. No notes, no last contact date. No... well... nothing.

You didn’t make a wrong decision. That’s the thing, you didn’t make a decision at all.

And nature, well, as it does, it just took its course.

I watched this happen in real time.

It was an insurance company, of all things. (sorry in advance). I was working for a student based advertising company. Business would work with us to create a multi-touch marketing campaign across campuses in the UK.

A team leader had left this company to rot. No one was paying attention to it anymore. No one was nurturing it. Relationships had drifted. Systems had gone quiet. The whole thing was slipping toward chaos, fast.

It wasn’t because anyone in particular had done anything malicious. It was because nobody had done anything at all.

Entropy. It was entropy. Pure, observable, predictable entropy.

When I went back to it after the team leader left and the account was given to me, I didn’t have any sort of grand strategy. But I did have a presence. I showed up. I paid attention. I asked questions. I nurtured what was there.

Then slowly, out of the chaos, order began to emerge. New opportunities appeared.

The key is that I never tried to control the outcome. The opportunities came because I showed up and tended the soil.

Here’s the thing.

Entropy is not a metaphor. Entropy is physics. A law. The second law of thermodynamics. Leave something alone, and it will decay. A relationship, a system, a garden, a company. Without attention or nurturing, things move towards chaos.

By design, not by any moral failing, you have something built into the fabric of reality.

However, as humans, especially in western society, we act like we don’t believe it. We assume things will stay the same. We assume the relationship will hold. We assume that CRM will sort itself out. We assume the donor will remember us.

Absolute rubbish.

Nature doesn’t do neutral. It only does decay.

The design is clear: what you don’t nurture, you lose. Every. Single. Time.

The Dark Mirror: Three Lopsided Views of Influence

Most of the persuasion advice I hear doesn’t account for any of this. It falls into one of three camps. And all three are wrong.

Camp one: Control Everything. “Master the close.” “Use the right script.” “Apply the pressure point.” “If you didn’t get the result, you didn’t do it right.”

This is the American guru register. The countdown timer. The “DM me NOW.”

I’ve seen this version up close. I’ve got the scars. The business owner con-man who knew exactly which buttons of mine to push. (for another day) The reverend who threatened hell on me then passed the collection box. It was the same pattern, just in a different costume. Both of them believed the outcome was theirs to command.

Camp two: Neglect Everything. “Just be yourself. The business will come.” “Don’t worry about the systems. Don’t worry about the follow-up. It’ll sort itself out.”

People who believe this don’t have a CRM. Or, well, they do, but they haven’t opened it in six months. And when they finally do, they just see names. Addresses. Maybe a phone number from 2023. But there isn’t a prospect there anymore. There isn’t an opportunity or relationship. They just have a graveyard. And you’re lying to yourself saying “I’m sure I spoke to them last month.”

You didn’t mate, you didn’t and you know it.

Camp three: The End Justifies The Means. “Anything that gets the result is fair game. Manipulation, pressure, fake scarcity.”

The feature reciting salesperson the customer can’t wait to escape. They interrupt as soon as you start talking about a problem and start reciting those features about random products they have to sell. The system that tells you to shut up and comply. This is the camp that makes people flinch at the word “SELL.” Because they’ve only ever seen it done wrong.

Here is what all of those three camps share. None of them account for any design in the world.

Camp one ignores entropy by pretending you can force the outcome.

Camp two ignores entropy by pretending it doesn’t exist.

Camp three ignores the mystery of growth entirely, because it just doesn’t care how the seed grows as long as you get the harvest.

They’re all lopsided. The lopsided views of influence warps everything.

The Farmer Who Sows and Does Not Know How

There is a strange little parable most people get wrong, or skip. It’s in Mark’s gospel, chapter 4. Jesus is talking to a crowd, and he tells this story:

“The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.”

“HE KNOWS NOT HOW”

I just want to pause there.

He does not know how. Not “he’s got a rough idea.” Not “he’s 80% sure.” Not “he’s read a few books on agriculture and he’s fairly confident.” He knows not how. The mechanism that turns a seed into a plant is hidden from him. Completely.

And... yet... somehow that isn’t the problem.

Somehow, that is the design.

You know how when you’ve done everything you can and it still isn’t working?

You’ve asked the right questions. You’ve built the relationship. You’ve been consistent. You’ve shown up.

Yet still, nothing.

The donor doesn’t give. The client doesn’t sign. Heck, even for you trainers out there, the team member doesn’t engage!

You wonder if it’s you. If you’re doing something wrong. If there is a secret you are missing.

Well. Yes, sometimes, if you haven’t watered correctly.

But most of the time, there isn’t.

See, the mechanism of growth is hidden from you, the same way it’s hidden from the farmer. You can plant the seed. You can tend and water it. You can protect it from frost. But you cannot “make” it grow. The transformation is beyond your control, written in the DNA of the seed.

And that’s not a weakness in your approach. It’s design.

The control merchants don’t want you to know this. Because if you can’t control the outcome, they can’t sell you the script.

They can’t sell you the pressure point. They can’t sell you the guarantee. The whole industry is built on the lie that the result is yours to command.

It isn’t. Sorry bud.

And the farmer knew it two thousand years ago.

The farmer sows, and does not know how. Neither do you. And that’s the best news you’ll hear all week.

What This Changes About Influence.

“Alright Joby, so if entropy is real, and growth is mysterious, what does that do to how we think about influence... you saying don’t try?”

You’ve been told influence is about control. The close. The script. The outcome. But if the design of the world is entropy, plus mysterious growth, can you see how the whole framework collapses from that point?

Ethical influence cannot be about control.

It HAS to be about nurturing.

Here’s what you can control: the soil.

The presence. The consistency. The quality of your attention. Whether you show up with something real to offer. Whether you remember who someone is and what they care about. Whether you follow up, not because you’re chasing a close, but because you’re tending a relationship.

If you take one thing away from this... let it be this next sentence.

The nurture step is the whole thing.

The opposite of this is that pitch that lands and then you pray they’ll say yes. The CRM that is just an address book. The relationship that gets attention only when you want to ask for money.

psst. I’ve got news for you. That’s not stewardship. You are mining. People can tell the difference.

Remember, you are not responsible for the growth. You are responsible for the soil.

The farmer doesn’t stare at the ground demanding it to sprout. He sows and he sleeps. He wakes up and he does it again.

The consistent tending to the soil, and adapting based on the weather, is the most disciplined form of influence there is.

Sadly, it took me far too long to realise it.

The Humility at the Centre.

Here’s the humility at the centre of it all. And I really mean this.

If you believe you control the outcome, you’ll manipulate. You’ll pressure. You’ll push. Because if the result is on you, then anything that gets the result is justified.

I’ve seen this up close. It was me, for a long time. It was some of my worst managers ever.

I’ve even been on the receiving end of it.

There was an advertising con-man. There was a reverend with a legalistic manner and then a collection box. Both were the same pattern in a different costume.

If you believe nothing matters, you’ll neglect. You’ll drift. You’ll let relationships go cold because you stopped believing your presence made a difference. The CRM slowly decays from neglect. The prospect will fall through the cracks. And you’ll tell yourself it’s fine.

It’s not fine.

Entropy is real and it’s working against you every single day.

But, the design gives you a third way. Work with the grain. Sow. Nurture. Trust the design. The farmer sows and does not know how. He doesn’t need to know how. He just needs to sow, and nurture.

This is the foundation of ethical influence. And it was there, hidden in an ancient farming parable, the whole time.

That’s one law. But there are more. Patterns in the design of how we connect that are hiding in plain sight.

In philosophy, theology and science. In a text that’s been sitting on shelves for two thousand years.

How dare we understand any of this and keep it to ourselves?

This is what I want to explore here. Because, I’ve been doing it as a hobby to help myself grow for a long time.

If you’d like to come with me, I’m going to write more about it here.

"Focus on what you CAN control... stop worrying about things you can't change"

Ugh.... is it just me, or does that always sound like you are being patted on the head and being told to go stay in your lane?

Here’s how I read it:

You're small. You can't change the way things are. Here's a box, stay in it

You know what it's like.

You hear it when your world is on fire, or you can see the match about to be struck. You know you could help change things but you don't have the influence or clout.

And it comes from people who would hand you a self-help book to help with your anxiety, just before they recommend you "journal about it" or "meditate" and let it go.

But you were born a visionary, and you see what others can't... I'm going to show you how to harness it.

"Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion - in a word, whatever is of our own doing."

Stephen Covey’s Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

For so long, I'd always seen it as a way for institutions and societies to remind you that you are small, insignificant, and cannot change the world.

I'd also experienced this many times in roles where I saw problems and recognised solutions others couldn't see, but when I brought them up, I'd been shot down and/or told "It's just the way things work here"

The point, is that the framework that was supposed to reduce anxiety actually created a different anxiety.

Learned Helplessness Dressed Up As Wisdom.

You are told to accept what you cannot control. But the unspoken message, really, is:

Don't try. Don't push. Don't reach. The system is bigger than you.

And the more you internalize that, the more your actual influence shrinks... because you stop attempting things that are at the edge of what's possible.

Covey, in all transparency, DID warn us about this:

Reactive people focus on the Circle of Concern - they obsess over what they can't change, and their Circle of Influence contracts. But the framework was never meant to be a cage.... though it definitely got taught that way.

NOW... There is a way to read this framework that flips it entirely...

Not as a lesson in limits... but as a lesson in leverage.

Ready?

The Circle of Influence is not a cage... it's a compass of your heart.

Yeah yeah, it sounds mushy right?

This is the version I was taught. But not from some self-help book, and definitely not in a corporate training session

I was taught this in a fundraising apprenticeship lesson.

In fundraising, you cannot control whether someone writes a cheque or not. If you try to, you'll go mad, constantly trying to walk a tightrope between morals and manipulation.

You cannot control the economy, their mood, their priorities, or their spouse's opinion. (I've learned through 13 years of marriage I can't control my own wife's mood or opinion, so Lord help me with someone else's...)

BUT.

You CAN control: the quality of your own preparation, the clarity of your story, the depth of your listening, the timing of your follow-up. So those things - done well - will dramatically influence the outcome.

The circle isn't a wall. I needed to get my head around this... instead, it's a map of where your effort has the most leverage.

Using the Circles of Influence framework moves a fundraiser from anxiety and inaction to productivity. Focusing on the Circle of Concern wastes time and energy on things you can't change. When you focus on issues in your Circle of Influence, your actions improve relationships and results. This expands the circle, giving you more influence and control."

Every ounce of energy you spend on what you cannot control is wasted. Every ounce you spend on what you CAN control compounds. The framework is not about accepting less. It's about directing your force into the point of highest impact.

The three domains where the reframe can change everything

Let's now look at some examples of this in action.

In Work

So you can't control whether or not your company WOULD ever promote you. Or whether your industry gets disrupted, or even if your boss COULD like you or not.

BUT... you can control: the skills you build, the reputation you earn, the relationships you invest in, and the quality of the work you do.

Can you see how these are levers? - PULL THEM.

In relationships

You cannot control if someone has the potential to feel positive or negative about you. Whether someone is going to forgive you or not, or whether they stay with you or not.

BUT... you can control: how you show up, how you communicate, whether you apologise without hedging, and whether you do the work to understand them.

Can you see how the influence follows the action?

In the world

You cannot stop the news cycle, or fix the political system, or reverse wars.

BUT... you can control: where you put your money, who you vote for, what you build, what conversations you start, and which local problems you solve.

The people who actually change things do not wait for permission. They find the edge of their circle, and push.

The tension between the boundaries of the circles.

One note here. Before we get into this any deeper.

Did you notice that line just then? - "They find the edge of their circle and push"

You can also align the circle of influence barrier with the comfort zone.

Dan Koe speaks about the two states of progress: Boredom and Anxiety.

When you are in a state of boredom, you are not aware of a problem. Or, at least not one you believe you have the ability to do anything about.

Compare that to being in a state of Anxiety. A little anxiety fuels you to find a solution and is very healthy. Lots of Anxiety happens when you are focused on a huge problem you have no idea how to solve.

Take that and think about it. Then compare it to those domains and the reframes.

I would argue that the pushing of the boundaries of influence is exactly the same state as pushing the boundaries of the comfort zone, where you tread slightly into the realm of that sweet spot of slight anxiety.

A Calmer and More Effective Way of Being

Look at those reframes and realise you can choose to be calmer, you can choose to be more effective as an individual in everything you do once you "get it"

You can stop spraying effort across everything you are worried about. Stop living fully in the circle of concern, thinking you are in the circle of control. Those people are not calm or effective.

You have that choice.

Once you do, you stop doomscrolling as if "Staying informed is the same as doing something"

You'll stop arguing with strangers about things neither of you can change.

Instead, you'll identify the three things you can actually move, and move them. Every day.

The result is not just less anxiety, but you'll find it's more output, more impact and a reputation for being the person who actually gets shit done, while everyone else is still complaining and putting blame on external things that they can't control.

Elephant in the room

So... cool, but the question is not whether this reframe makes sense. It obviously does. The question is:

How do you actually apply it when the world feels loud and the pull towards the Circle of Concern is constant?

Well here is the method I was taught - and how I've taught others - so you can start using it today.

The Core Tool - A Two Column Split

The reframe above is useless without the tools. Here is one I was given.

Draw a line down the middle of a page.

Label the left column "What is MINE". Label the right column "What is NOT MINE"

That is it. That is the entire operating system.

This is not a philosophy. See it as a sorting mechanism, from your head to the paper. It forces you to name, line by line, what you are actually carrying - and - what you are carrying that was never yours.

The 5 Steps from "Worry" to "Action"

So here is how you actually run it.

I want you to pick just one thing, JUST ONE, that keeps you up at night. Maybe it's a stuck deal. A silent and ghosted prospect. Maybe it's a relationship that feels frozen.

One action could be:

Instead of sending a pushy follow-up (trying to control the situation), send a highly targeted resource solving a pain point they mentioned on your last call (focusing on your control to add value)

Why it works

See... If you are still thinking "this is stupid and too simple"... stop and read.

There is a reason this exercise lands differently, when done properly, than just reading a tweet that says "focus on what you can control"

The act of striking through the right column is not simply organisational. It is emotional. It is something like a ritual of surrender. Does that make sense?

You are looking at a list of things you have been carrying - some of them for a long time - and you are physically crossing them out.

You are admitting, in that ink, that you were never the one holding onto them.

And the wave of relief that is going to follow is not just

"I feel better"

...it is a cognitive bandwidth returning to your system. The energy that was bound up in those worries is now free. You can think again. YOU CAN ACT AGAIN.

This is why the framework was never meant to be a cage in the first place. It was meant to help you release unnecessary energy. Like a release valve.

The circles were never a problem. How people use them is.

This works beyond sales

The audit exercise above was built for stuck deals, conversations that feel out of your control. But it scales to every domain of the 3 earlier in this article.

A STUCK CAREER DECISION

• Left column - update your portfolio, have three honest conversations, research the salary range.

• Right column - whether the hiring manager likes your vibe, whether the internal candidate has an edge, whether the budget gets approved

A STRAINED RELATIONSHIP

• Left column - How you are going to show up, whether you listen without defending, whether you apologise without hedging

• Right column - whether they forgive you, whether they let you back in, whether they do the work that's needed too

A CREATIVE BLOCK

• Left column - write one bad page, ship something small, show it to one person.

• Right column - whether it goes viral, whether critics are kind, whether the algorithm picks it up.

Understand, the audit is a universal sorting mechanism. The categories can change, but the mechanics and emotional value of letting go, THEN ACTION, do not.

Your First Audit

You do not need to read this twice.

Inaction is your enemy here. Call it out and do this... if it's as simple as you thought earlier, it won't take you long, and done correctly, will change the way you see yourself.

You don't need to journal about it for a week before you try it. Screw your self-help bullshit.

Pick one thing that is currently tangled in your chest. A conversation you are avoiding. A decision you cannot make. A person whose silence is maybe eating at you.

(I know that feeling working in Business Development...)

Take a piece of paper. Draw a line. Sort the worries. Strike through the column that was never yours.

Then take the one action in the left column.

Today.

The people who do this once are calmer. I've seen it.

The people who do it as a practice are unstoppable.

Not because they have more control than anyone else, but because they have stopped wasting their force on what they cannot move.

Turn up to the room knowing who you are, and stop wearing a mask.

The Farmer

In the Gospel of Mark. Mark 4. A farmer prepares the soil, sows the seed, sleeps, and rises day after day. The seed sprouts and grows - doesn't know how it does. The farmer does not stand over the soil screaming at the seed to grow. He doesn't pull the blade of grass to stretch it and make it grow taller. The growing was never HIS job.

If you're a manager trying to train young staff who look at you like you're speaking a different language, this is for you.

If you're a solo practitioner who does brilliant work but dreads the money conversation, this is for you.

And if you've ever flinched at the word "sell" because every version of it you've seen felt wrong, pushy, scripted, or outright manipulative, this is for you.

I know that flinch. I've had it. I've also been on the other side of it, used against me by someone I trusted. That's why this publication exists.

My name's Joby. I've spent 20 years selling across five industries. Suits. Warhammer. Mobile phones. B2B digital advertising. Charity fundraising. And now I'm building CRM infrastructure for a charity that supports families.

Twenty years of being called a "natural" at sales without understanding what "it" actually was. That understanding came late, and it came the hard way.

This is the map I needed then. I'm building it in public.

I.

The first answer is never the real answer. It's always three whys deep.

Let me hold up a mirror before I tell you anything about myself.

You know that feeling when you need to persuade someone and your stomach drops? The pitch you rehearsed in the car. The funding ask you've been avoiding for three weeks. The conversation with a staff member where you need them to care about something they don't yet see. The DM you didn't send because it felt like you were becoming one of them.

Every version of influence you've seen smells like the same thing. The countdown timer. The fake scarcity. The "DM me NOW to 10x your..." The script that sounds like a script. The boss who smiled while extracting what he needed. The reverend who threatened hell and then passed the collection box.

You know it's manipulation. You can smell it. And you've decided, quietly, that if that's what selling is, you'd rather not. You'd rather be bad at it. You'd rather avoid it. You'd rather hope the work speaks for itself.

Here's the cost of that. The people who need your help don't get it. The charity that needs funding doesn't get it. The young person who needs a manager who gives a damn doesn't get one. The family who'd benefit from your service never finds you.

Because you never asked.

The alternative to manipulation isn't silence. It's clarity. And that's what this publication is about.

II.

The medium changes. The mechanics don't.

I was 17. Working in Burton's on Wolverhampton High Street. Suits. Formal wear. My first sales job.

A bloke came in. Started browsing. I could have done what I was told to do: recite fabric counts, seasonal collections, the features of the suit. That's what the training said. Tell them about the product. List the specs.

Instead, I noticed a tattoo on his arm. A rugby club badge. I asked him about the match last weekend. Honestly, just because I knew spewing features wouldn't work, not because I thought the following would.

We talked about rugby for five minutes. Then he bought eight suits. Not one. Eight.

I didn't sell him anything. I noticed him. I asked about something that mattered to him. And because I'd done that, he trusted me when I said, "You'll want these eight for the team." He wanted to be seen. I saw him.

Fifteen years later, I was working for a company in digital advertising. B2B digital advertising. The owner told me I'd come onto a new project. Told me I'd earn affiliate income every month. Told me I'd become rich. For two years, he kept me on a string. "You're the best. I need you on the other part still." The promise never came.

When the company folded, he rang me. Called me a horrible person. Called me manipulative. Then tried to blackmail me. Wouldn't give me the redundancy money I was owed unless I apologised for something I hadn't done. He wanted me to say sorry three or four times, in writing for something I didn't do, to get the money that was mine.

Same skill. One helped a bloke buy eight suits. The other was used to keep a man on a string and then gaslight him when he asked questions.

The difference between influence and manipulation isn't the technique. It's the transparency. It's whether you're hiding what you're doing.

The bloke in Burton's knew I was selling him suits. I wasn't pretending otherwise. I was just treating him like a person first. The owner at the advertising company was hiding the truth about the data, the company, the promises. He used the same mechanics. Discovery. Relationship. Tailored offer. But the intent was extraction.

I know the difference because I've been on both ends. I've been the bloke who noticed the tattoo. And I've been the bloke on the living room floor at three in the morning, by himself, completely broken, saying "I give it all to you" to someone he couldn't see, and feeling golden hands on his shoulders and hearing "Shh. It's going to be okay." That was the lowest point of my life. And it was the moment I understood that the same skill I'd spent 20 years practising had been used against me by someone I trusted.

That's why I don't teach ethical influence as a theory. I teach it because I've seen the alternative, up close, pointed at me.

III.

Sales is noticing people, not pitching products.

Here's what I've learned across suits, Warhammer, mobile phones, advertising, and charity fundraising. The same pattern works. Every time. The product changes. The conversation doesn't.

At Games Workshop, I was trained on something they called the 10 commandments. Not rules. A conversation that hit every point of what the store offered. Every word earned its place:

Acknowledge. Approach. Ask questions. Listen. Intro activity. Engage in productive discussion. Advise on what they need, sell what they want. Invite back. Run spontaneous activity with a product link. Tell about content. Challenge to progress. Ask for the sale.

That's a full discovery call and a full sales call in a retail store. Unheard of. Most retail "training" is "smile and point at the till." This was a philosophy operationalised into daily practice. Weekly testing. Know every word by heart because every word is there for a specific reason.

They had question frameworks too. TED. Tell, Explain, Describe. "Tell me about what you're looking for. Explain how you'd use it. Describe what you've tried before." Deep-diving questions that opened people up. The right question framework does the selling for you. You don't pitch. You ask. They tell you what they need. You help them see it.

The real need is never the first answer. A dad comes into the store with his son. Says he wants his Son to explore if the hobby would be good for them. That's the first answer. It's the surface.

Why? "It might be something we could do together."

Why? "It'd be nice to hang out with him on a weekend"

Why? "Because I don't get to see in the week, and he is growing up so fast"

There it is. The real driver. He doesn't want plastic goblins. He wants time with his son. The hobby is the medium. The time is the need.

The how flows from the why. Paint together. Play together. Join a group. Come to events. You're not selling a product. You're building a bridge between a father and his son.

That's what selling is. Helping someone see something so clearly they want to move toward it themselves.

I used the same pattern selling phone contracts at 3UK. The same pattern selling multi-year advertising deals at the advertising company (when the product was real). The same pattern securing £294k in annual charity partnerships at Young Epilepsy. The same pattern taking Next Foundation's giving from £1k to £15k through two years of stewardship.

Suits. Warhammer. Phones. Advertising. Charity. Five industries. One pattern. The medium changes. The mechanics don't.

IV.

You can't control someone's decision. The circle of influence is the only space that matters.

This is the insight that reframed 20 years of instinct. It came during my fundraising apprenticeship. Level 3. Distinction. First time someone gave me language for what I'd been doing without naming it.

You can't control whether someone says yes. You can't control their budget, their mood, their boss, their timeline. What you can control is the space around their decision. The questions you ask. The information you give. The way you help them see the gap between where they are and where they could be.

That's the circle of influence. Everything outside it is wasted energy.

I learned this the hard way. At 3UK, I spent three months failing. Couldn't sell a thing. Blamed the time off. Blamed the product. Actually, I'd stopped doing what worked. I was selling features. Processors, megapixels, video graphics drivers. Reciting specs at people who didn't care.

The manager pulled me aside. "Joby, you're overthinking things. You're selling features not benefits again. You're not even figuring that out."

I went back to the 10 commandments. Acknowledge. Approach. Ask questions. Listen. Within weeks, I was top of the store out of seven or eight staff. Built a new framework using 3UK's language and values. Took the store's NPS from 66 to 94 in six months. The insurance attach rate was 9 to 10% store average. Mine was 25%. Because I listened, learned about the customer, then helped them see the value based on their actual situation. Not a script. Not a pitch. Discovery, then recommendation.

Same pattern. Different product. Different industry. The mechanics didn't change.

Then I tried to teach other staff. Failed. Because I was telling them what to do instead of looking at the beliefs behind the behaviours. You can't change someone's behaviour by telling them to change their behaviour. You have to work on the belief underneath.

At a secondhand tech store, training young staff who didn't give a crap. Trying to teach skills to people who didn't have a purpose. It's like throwing something at a brick wall. Nothing sticks.

You have to find their belief system first. Help them believe in themselves. Help them see a future where they could achieve something. If you can get them to see a possibility, an action, and how to get from A to Z, and how what you're offering is the bridge, then they'll work for it.

I had to sell them on the idea they had a problem before I could teach them the skill to fix it. They weren't even problem-aware. School had told them what was possible and what wasn't. I had to walk them through every rung of awareness, problem-unaware to problem-aware to solution-aware, without telling them directly. I was teaching them how to sell by teaching them how to sell. The medium was the message.

Influence operates at the belief level, not the behaviour level. Always. Whether you're selling a phone, teaching a skill, or building a donor relationship.

V.

Systems beat willpower. Conversation infrastructure beats charm.

So what is this publication?

Three branches. One thesis.

Branch 1: The Mechanics of Ethical Influence. How persuasion actually works. The discovery frameworks. The conversation patterns. The awareness ladder. The three-whys. The TED questions. Why the first answer is never the real answer. How to ask questions that open people up instead of closing them down. This branch takes the flinch out of the word "sell" by showing you what selling actually is: noticing people.

Branch 2: Systems for Influence at Scale. What happens when you're not in the room. The CRM as relationship infrastructure, not data entry. Stewardship that moves someone from stranger to advocate. Segmentation that serves people. Automations that remember so you don't have to. Why 84% of one-off donors haven't given in two years, and what to do about it. This branch is for anyone who's been told their infrastructure is "not a priority" and can see exactly what it's costing.

Branch 3: The Person Behind the Pattern. Who this work is for and why it matters. The system that crushes individuality. The school that punished questions. The safe path that was someone else's ceiling. The moment at the bottom. The golden hands. This is where the foundation lives. Not always stated. Always present.

Three branches. One belief: influence can be ethical, effective, and repeatable. You don't need a personality transplant. You need a framework.

VI.

You sell best from who you are. Anything else is a costume, and costumes itch.

Here's what this publication believes. Each one earned, not borrowed.

Selling helps people. The people who need your help can't find you if you never ask.

The real need is always three whys deep. The first answer is the surface. The third answer is what you're actually selling.

The most ethical form of influence is the follow-up. Anyone can close once. Stewardship is influence over time.

Confidence is quiet. You don't need to be loud to be effective. You need to be clear.

The same pattern works across every industry and every medium. Suits. Warhammer. Phones. Advertising. Charity. The medium changes. The mechanics don't.

Systems beat willpower. Structure creates freedom. A system is what lets one person do the work of three.

Here's what this publication refuses to be.

Manipulation disguised as persuasion. Countdown timers. Fake scarcity. "DM me NOW." Hustle culture. Six-figure promises. Empty motivation without a how. Corporate jargon. If it belongs on a management consultancy slide, it doesn't belong here.

And the guru register. No exploiting, no hacking, no pressure points. That's not influence. That's extraction with better marketing.

VII.

Confidence is quiet.

When I left Games Workshop, customers brought me cards. Not many retail stores where that happens. People you served for years, showing up with handwritten notes because they'd miss you.

"All you did was sell them toy goblins." That's what someone said to me once. Objectively true. I sold plastic space marines and paint sets.

But it wasn't toy goblins. It was the time with their son. The community they found. The belonging. The bloke who noticed the tattoo instead of reciting specs. The one who asked three whys deep and found the real need every time.

They weren't missing a salesperson. They were missing the person who noticed what they actually needed.

That's the test. Not revenue. Not conversion rate. The cards.

I'm still in the day job. Building CRM infrastructure for a charity. Building this publication at night. I haven't built a full-time business from this brand yet. I'm not pretending to be finished. I'm not coaching from a position I haven't earned. I'm building in public, one post at a time.

This is the map I needed 20 years ago. The mechanics of ethical influence, from live conversation to CRM infrastructure, grounded in 20 years of doing it and one moment that changed everything.

If that sounds like the conversation you've been needing, there's a subscribe button somewhere on this page. No countdown timer. No fake scarcity. Just posts, one at a time, from someone who's been through worse and came out the other side with the map.

The medium changes. The mechanics don't.

Not because you're desperate. Because that's when you finally had a spare ten minutes, and if you don't reply now you'll forget, and if you forget you'll lose them, and if you lose them that's another month where the calendar has gaps you can't explain.

You didn't train for this bit.

You trained for years to hold a room, to read a body, to know exactly what to say when someone's frightened and needs steadying. Nobody trained you to price that. Nobody trained you to turn "I'm interested" into a booking without it feeling like you're begging someone to spend money on you.

So you've built a workaround. A quiet, exhausting, completely normal-feeling workaround. You reply late because that's when there's time. You keep your prices where they are because you don't know what would happen if you moved them. You take whatever comes in, because saying no to money feels like a luxury you can't afford, even when the client isn't right for you.

If that's your week, you're not doing anything wrong. You've just never had a reason to notice it's a pattern.

The bit nobody names

Here's what's actually going on underneath all of that.

You've got a real skill. People pay you for it. That part works. What doesn't exist is the structure underneath the skill: a clear sense of what you sell and what it costs, a path that carries someone from "I heard about you" to "I've booked," and a version of the money conversation that doesn't make your stomach drop.

Most people call this "the business side" and leave it there, vague and slightly shameful, like it's a personality flaw they haven't got round to fixing. It isn't. It's a missing structure. Three specific things, usually: clear offers, a working lead path, and a sales conversation you're not dreading.

That's it. Not marketing. Not "hustle." Not some deeper character problem where you're "just not a business person." A stranger should be able to hear what you do and what it costs in one sentence. When someone says they're interested, there should be an obvious next step, the same one every time, not something you improvise under pressure. And the money conversation should feel roughly as natural as the work itself, because it's part of the same relationship, not a separate, awkward transaction bolted onto the end of it.

Most solo practitioners have none of that written down anywhere. It lives in their head, changes depending on their mood, and gets reinvented from scratch every single time someone asks "so, what do you charge?"

What it actually costs you

Here's the part that's easy to miss, because none of this shows up as one dramatic loss. It shows up as a hundred small ones.

It's the client you underquoted because you froze and named a number that felt "safe" rather than right, and now you're doing an hour of extra work for less than you meant to charge. It's the enquiry that went cold because you replied three days late, not because you're disorganised, but because there was no set path for what happens next, so it sat in a mental pile marked "deal with later." It's the month where the diary is rammed followed by the month where it's empty, and you've told yourself that's just how self-employment goes, when actually it's what happens when there's no consistent way people find you and move toward booking.

None of it is a crisis. That's exactly why it's dangerous. A crisis gets fixed. A slow leak gets tolerated, month after month, until you've quietly built a business that pays you less than the skill inside it is worth, and you've stopped noticing because it's just how things are.

The shift that actually matters

Here's the reframe worth sitting with: none of this means you're bad at business. It means nobody ever built you one.

You built a skill. You didn't build a backbone. Those are different jobs, and almost nobody teaches the second one to people training in a caring profession. You learn how to hold space for someone in labour, or how to work a knot out of a shoulder, or how to sit with someone through grief. Nobody sits you down afterwards and says, right, now here's how you price that, here's how you turn a stranger into a client, here's what to say when the number comes up.

So you improvise. And improvising a business, month after month, is exhausting in a very specific way. It's not the tiredness of doing hard work you love. It's the tiredness of doing the same hard admin decision badly, over and over, because you've never had the chance to just decide it properly once.

That's the whole shift. Stop treating this as a gap in your character and start treating it as a gap in your structure. One of those you fix by trying harder. The other you fix by building the thing that was missing.

What changes once it's there

Picture the same week, with the structure underneath it.

An enquiry comes in and you already know what you're going to say, because there's a path, not an improvisation. Your price is a number you settled once, properly, not a guess you make fresh every time someone asks. Someone raises the money conversation and it doesn't wrongfoot you, because it's not separate from the rest of what you do, it's just the next honest sentence in a conversation you're already having.

None of that requires you to become a different kind of person. You don't have to get louder, or salesier, or start posting things that make you cringe. You just stop carrying, in your head, every single week, work that should have been done once, properly, and then left alone.

That's the actual transformation. Not more clients overnight. Less weight.

The one thing worth doing this week

Not a plan. Not an audit. One question.

Next time someone asks what you do and what it costs, notice how you answer it. Notice if it comes out clean and settled, or if it wobbles, or gets longer than it needs to be, or ends with "but I can be flexible" when you didn't mean to say that.

That wobble, if it's there, isn't a personality trait. It's a sign the structure underneath is missing a piece. Which is fixable. Properly, once, and then you never have to think about it again.

More on that soon.

- Joby