InfluenceOlogy
After 24 years in the influence, sales and public speaking and training business, I can tell you exactly why most training produces mediocre results.
People come in for a weekend, they learn the skills, they practice the techniques, they leave feeling genuinely capable. And then six weeks later they are back to the old patterns, doing exactly what they were doing before they walked in the room.
The skills they learned were real, but the story inside never changed.
That is the difference between training that produces a temporary performance and training that produces a permanent shift, "transformational training."
You can get someone to execute a technique for a weekend. What you cannot get them to do is sustain that technique past the point where their internal story about who they are starts pushing back. And it always pushes back, because the story is more powerful than any skill you can teach in two days.
The clients I have watched make genuine lasting change are the ones who left with a different understanding of who they are and who they are becoming as a communicator. Not just what they can do, but who they are.
That shift in identity, I like to call "identity expansion," it is what holds the new behavior in place long after the training room is gone and the accountability is gone and the energy of the event has faded.
Obviously, skills and behavioral capability matter, but without the story changing underneath them, they are temporary.
Change the story first and the skills finally have somewhere permanent to land.
05/25/2026
A man walked into a psychiatrist's office and told the doctor he'd been depressed his entire life. The doctor listened, then walked him over to the window and pointed to a circus tent on the horizon.
"There's a clown performing there tonight who has made more people laugh than anyone I've ever seen. He's cured more sadness than any pill I could prescribe. You should go."
The man looked at the doctor with the saddest eyes in the world and said, "Doctor, I am that clown."
I think about this story often, because it describes something I see constantly in the professionals and leaders I work with.
So many people are performing a version of themselves they think the world wants to see, and somewhere along the way the real person goes quiet. They develop a facade, and they get so good at maintaining it that they eventually forget it's there.
What behavioral science tells us about this works on two levels at once.
The person wearing the facade experiences what researchers call cognitive dissonance, which is the internal friction that builds when your actions and your presentation are out of alignment with who you actually are. That friction costs you energy and slowly erodes your confidence in ways that are genuinely hard to trace back to the source.
But something is also happening on the other side of that conversation. Research on nonverbal behavior shows that when your words and your genuine emotions aren't aligned, the incongruence leaks through in ways your audience picks up without ever being able to explain. They can't always name what's off, but they feel the distance, and trust doesn't build the way it should.
When the person you are on the inside matches the person showing up in the room, people experience something they can't quite articulate, but they know they trust you. I always tell my clients that congruence is the ultimate tool of influence, and I've seen it proven right on every stage I've ever stood on.
The most powerful thing you can do as a communicator is let the real you come through, because that's the only version of you that can move people.
Most people think the reason they're not performing at the level they want is because they need more skills or more motivation, so they go looking for better techniques, more training, stronger accountability systems. But here's what the research actually shows: the ceiling on your performance is more impacted by your identity than your skills.
Albert Bandura spent decades studying why people with equal ability produce wildly unequal results, and what he found was that your belief in your own capability predicts your performance more reliably than your actual competence does. The moment your identity says "I'm not someone who does that," the skill you just learned quietly goes unused.
Robert Cialdini's work on consistency explains why that pattern is so stubborn. Once your brain has formed a self-image, it will bend your behavior back toward that image almost automatically, not because you're weak or undisciplined, but because the brain is wired to keep you consistent with who it already believes you are.
If you've ever taken a course, worked with a coach, and still found yourself back at the same level six months later, the question worth sitting with isn't what else do I need to learn. It's whether you've expanded your identity the same way you've expanded your skills.
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