Vanessa Van Edwards

Welcome.

Thank you, Vanessa, for having me.

I'm glad to be here.

So I have a confession that I have not told you yet.

I am an imposter, which is laughable, right? Like, isn't that, that is exactly what imposter syndrome is or imposter phenomenon.

No, absolutely.

And I can't tell you how many times, Vanessa, I have found myself in that exact same situation where I will be speaking somewhere and then I will find myself thinking, wow, like, should I even be doing this? Like, why am I here? Like, there's so many other people much more qualified to speak than me.

I have felt the exact same thing.

Welcome Cal.

Hi, Vanessa.

Thanks for having me on.

So I was, we've known about each other.

So we made a list of our finishable projects and we scheduled in sprints.

So, for example, working on a new facial expression software and that requires a lot of back and forth.

What was happening was is every day it was, hey, do you have those photos? Hey, have you edited those photos? Hey, do those photos get edited and also added to the videos? Hey, Vanessa, have you finished the curriculum? I mean, these chains of 15 different emails.

And so I realized we have to set aside two days where we're all in the same room and we're all actually working on this at the same time so that you can just turn to the person and ask.

Hello, hello, YouTube friends.

I am so excited to welcome today Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, which we're going to hear about later in the interview, author of Lost and Founder.

I got an early copy.

I already have mine all marked up.

What we can't overlook is They were dishonest with this, or whatever it is, or the reverse.

We can say, hey, look, we recognize that they fudged the truth a little bit with this client, and that's okay, but they committed to a deadline, and then they missed it, and that is not okay in our organization.

You can decide which of those things you personally, especially as a founder, right? A founder, CEO, you should come up with those things in your core foundational team or very early team.

And then that should be extended across the company.

I'm like, oh, what are we gonna do for all that time?

Vanessa, I worked with an executive team of a huge software company recently, and they had no wonderers.

Out of nine people, nobody had wonder.

In fact, wonder was in most of their working frustration, so they hated it like you did.

I'm like, eh, the image is a little blurry.

It's fine, someone will fix it.

You know what I love, Vanessa? The language, people use the letters as verbs.

Like, so here's something we always say in our office.

okay and that

is that we we think that having one identity and being consistent with that identity is the secret to success right there is no one authentic you vanessa there's the vanessa that's interviewing me right now and you want to be the best interview that you can be there's also vanessa who's the teacher requires some different skills, right? There's Vanessa, the mom, there's Vanessa, the friend, the quirky, funny one that we sit around and we have some wine or Pinot with or whatever.

And those are all parts of you.

And in fact, in the world of psychology, single self theory was the most common theory where they postulated for a long time that the people who had one single identity and acted through that identity had the lowest rates of mental health disorders, anxiety and stress disorders, and depression.

So when you, the great power of an alter ego is it helps you disassociate.

Hmm.

Disassociate from the story of who Vanessa is, what she can be.

But now all of a sudden Halsey can go and do that.

So were you surprised about any of these inaugural addresses? Were you intrigued when you saw some of this data? Was there a surprising one for you?

Well, a little secret between you and I, Vanessa, and everybody that's watching this is George W. Bush's chief media advisor is on our advisory board.

So it's a wonderful communicator named Mark McKinnon.

What he taught me in that when I was a low intern and was lucky enough to work for him, he taught me two things.

Amazing book.

Amazing book.

And one of the big things in the book is we have to say, you know, your name is Vanessa.

My name is Noah.

Am I right? In this video, I'm going to give you 15 easy, powerful LinkedIn strategies you can do right now to supercharge your profile.

My name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I am the bestselling author of Captivate.

My goal is to give you easy behavior hacks to level up your career, life, and success.

It's estimated that one in three professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.

Most voicemails sound like this when they're really, really high in vocal warmth.

Hi, this is Vanessa.

Leave me a message and I'll call you back.

Well, the listener is going to wonder, really, are you going to call me back? Because it sounds like you're asking.

We don't do anything typical at the Science People Lab.

My name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I'm lead investigator at our Human Behavior Research Lab.

Today I want to teach you one of my favorite hacks all about atypical productivity with something that I like to call alphabet work.

Here's how it works.