Last updated on January 18th, 2018 at 09:53 am
Paloma Lev began her entrepreneurial career at the age of 19, and is now the founder of The Badass Communicators Club, a vibrant, bustling online community of over 1,500 entrepreneurs from around the world.
For the past six years she has served as a business coach and strategist to hundreds of clients. She guides them on how to pitch and negotiate successfully.
Creator of the online course The Sell Yourself Kit: Badass Confidence in a Box, she is also the author of thirty e-books, including Cold To Captivated: The Rapport Report.
Describe what you do for clients?
Paloma: I’m tired of seeing people who are remarkably talented underselling themselves. When you have a sense of security within yourself, it shows. Within three to five seconds, someone knows if they like you, trust you, respect you – and if they do, they are willing to expand the relationships to all kinds of opportunities or potential collaborations. We often think that it has to do with other people’s judgments of us; it really has to do with our judgment of ourselves. Other people simply mirror that.
So, the results I get for my clients is to help them reach a point of core confidence.
What do you do to help them with this?
Paloma: When we identify the areas that are painful, the blockages, the reasons that people are holding themselves back, the reason people doubt themselves, or start a sentence with, ‘This might be stupid but…’ or ‘I’m not sure but…’ when they really have incredible things to give.
What tends to be the biggest hurdle for clients?
Paloma: Believing that other people are better than them – classic imposter syndrome. The funny thing is, our society is designed that you bow down to everyone but yourself. The authority of celebrity culture, the authority of a university, the authority of your employer. No one says to you, ‘Hey, you are an authority too.’
I help clients find their own authority, and realize that it’s anyone’s game.
People think the world’s already designed the racetrack, and we are just the horses running around their racetrack. You should be able to design your own racetrack – be it through entrepreneurial endeavors or simply negotiation on your own behalf. It comes down to believing that what you want and feel matters, and start from a place of unapologetic bad-assery.
What is The Badass Communicators Club?
Paloma: We are the most fun group on Facebook. We are crazy entrepreneurs who support each other in our unapologetic risk taking. We are cheering each other on. We are talking about confidence, pitching, sales, copywriting negotiation, and the underlying premise is that confident communication is accessible to anyone.
What is the Sell Yourself Kit: Bad Ass Confidence in a Box?
Paloma: It’s like eight courses jammed into one. It goes through confidence, pitch, copy, rapport building, negotiation, copyrighting. Marketing is like a language. Once you are very well versed in the language of marketing, you can really sell snow to an Eskimo.
You don’t have to be the strongest, smartest, richest person, to have the most connections, but if you know how to persuade, then you can have and do anything.
I am the daughter of a dude who grew up poor in Romania. His mom was the ultimate in resourcefulness. They had a quota of one chicken a week. Make it work. When you grow up with a parent who has know that kind of struggle, and known that kind of suffering, you realize the only resources that are real and profound and meaningful are your internal resources. The stuff around you can fall away. But the equity you build in yourself is everlasting.
Tony Robbins is famous for saying, “It’s not your resources; it’s your resourcefulness.” That’s what it breaks down to.
How do you use collaboration as a marketing tool?
Paloma: I was thinking that all of these online group leaders are, independently, working on attracting new group members. The old way of thinking is competition; the new way of thinking is collaboration. Millennials know this.
Instead of us hoarding group members and having inner scarcity, like we can’t share, I thought it’s like Halloween, when everyone has those bags of different candies together, the ultimate win/win/win.
So, I pitched some fellow group leaders, and I proposed we do a panel talk, a collaborative e-book, and we share the email addresses of everyone who wants the e-book. The main stipulation is that they had to join all of our groups. We were promoting one another in a fun way, and our first topic was “Why collaboration beats competition.”
This collaboration got us 8,000 views and 80,000 impressions. It was trending.
It can be a little bit nerve wracking dividing a pie. But know that this pie that the internet and the democratization of technology affords us is infinite. You get the abundance that we are surrounded by.
So, for all the people hoarding their 200 views because they want to be the star of the show, if you shine the light on other people, you guys can win together.
What did your mom Tsufit – a widely-respected business coach – teach you?
Paloma: Her whole underlying thing is “please don’t be boring.” I’ve said it to my clients before, “I dare you to be interesting.”
I would write cereal companies when I was a kid. I gave them my marketing ideas, and I would always get free coupons from these cereal companies.
My mom said, “Those were hilarious. What if we did something on that?” I was the fourth of my four sisters to win the school-wide speech competition that year.
So, it really started to click with me that in these moments of decision, when you decide if you are going to take the brave move or the fearful move, you decide who you’ll become. I became the kind of person who started making the brave moves. Courageous people are not people who don’t feel fear, they are just people who say, “Fear is not my guiding principle. I’m not going to make my decisions based on that.”
So, from that, I became a person who actively sought out risks. I posed naked for an art class. I gave a lecture to a university class. I met the person to the right of me and left of me in every single university class.
I did all of these things that didn’t feel comfortable, but when you do scary things and take risks, your comfort zone explodes, and you feel comfortable in all different scenarios.
She basically offered me the same opportunity that I offer to my clients. You can make the brave choice or the fearful choice, but if you want to make the brave choice, I’ll support you.
