This interview with Sally Hogshead was first published on storyboardmagazine.com.
World-class branding expert and best-selling author Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself. She identified seven forms of communication, detailed 
in her book, FASCINATE: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, to help people identify the personality traits that are most valuable to others. Her newest book, How the World Sees You, is already a New York Times bestseller.
Q. What is your interest in fascination?
Fascination is a force that can rule our thinking and our emotions. Your personality has certain fascinating qualities. When you begin to understand what makes you fascinating to other people, it becomes easy to see why people want to hire you, promote you, connect with you, buy from you and even fall in love with you. When you fascinate someone, you become more worthy of attention.
Here’s why this matters for creative professionals: In a distracted world, it’s no longer enough to just have the best idea. You have to earn attention for your ideas.
Q. How does a Fascination assessment help creative professionals?
You already know how you see the world. But how does the world see you?
By applying the principles of copy writing and branding, I found a way to give you the perfect words to describe yourself, to understand how your personality is most likely to impress and influence a potential customer.
Once you know what makes you valuable to others, you’re more authentic, confident and more likely to make a positive impression.
Q. Why do we need an assessment built on branding rather than psychology?
What makes you different from every other creative professional? What qualities make you intensely valuable to your clients? Psychology can’t show you how to stand out in the market, but branding can. After decades working with the top brands and agencies in the world, I was able to see how millions of people respond to certain types of messages and not others.
Ask yourself: Why do you listen to certain people and not others? Why do some brands fascinate you? A decade ago, I began researching the answers. I discovered that there is a hidden system behind why we become intensely focused.
That’s when I made a key break-through. “Fascination” is not the same as interest. It’s a neurological state of intense focus, one that creates an irresistible feeling of engagement. It’s almost the same as falling in love.
By 2009, I’d isolated seven different types of communication that each trigger a specific type of fascination response in the brain: Power, Passion, Mystique, Prestige, Alert, Innovation and Trust.
Think of these seven modes of communication like a set of tools, or a set of golf clubs. Each one has a different purpose and each creates a different result. When you’re mesmerized by an advertisement or political speech, your brain is responding to one of these seven forms of fascination.
Read more of The Advantage of Fascination – Interview with Sally Hogshead from storyboardmagazine.com.
Sally Hogshead is an international Hall of Fame Speaker and New York Times best-selling author of HOW THE WORLD SEES YOU , a complete guide on how to defeat the threat of competition and add value to every communication. She is also the author of FASCINATE: “Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. Sally’s books are founded on a scientifically-based system of influence, based on the brain’s hardwired patterns, and she has taught over 200,000 people how to use their natural strengths to become more persuasive.
