How people are moved hasn't changed. And the more digital, virtual, and artificial life gets, the more we crave the one thing that has always moved us: real human connection.
That's what I teach. Here's how I got here.
Twenty-some years ago,a few years into practice as an internal medicine physician in Baltimore, colleagues started calling me for a consult that doesn't exist in any hospital directory. The patient who wouldn't take the medication. The family that had stopped trusting the team. The room nobody could get to move. "Can you go talk to him?" Somewhere along the way they gave it a name: the patient whisperer.
The problem was... I couldn't tell you how I did it. It worked, and I had no system for it, no structure, nothing I could hand to a resident and say "do this." Medicine had trained me in everything except the part I was apparently best at.
So I went looking for the people who could explain it. That meant doing something physicians are not known to do. I cold-called a semi-well-known marketer and said, "I'm not a weirdo, but I have a weird question. Can I come learn from you?"
He said yes. So did the next expert. And the next... Over the subsequent two decades I apprenticed with people who move people for a living... who work in disciplines that never show up in a medical curriculum: direct-response copywriters, Ericksonian and conversational hypnotherapists, magicians, caricature artists, facial profilers, game designers, negotiators, comedians. I learned it the way I learned medicine, at the side of practitioners, watching what actually worked.
What I found surprised me. The same handful of things move a patient, a board, a customer, a teenager, and a neighbor.
I also found something that bothered me. The people doing the most good in the world (clinicians, teachers, nonprofit leaders, public servants) were usually the least trained in moving people. Meanwhile, the training was flowing freely to people selling things.
Somewhere in those years of watching practitioners, the patterns started to organize themselves. What a hypnotherapist did with a nervous client and what a copywriter did with a skeptical reader turned out to be the same move, dressed differently. So did the magician's misdirection and the game designer's first level. I started writing it down.
That's where the Core Influence Framework™ (States, Frames, Patterns, Contexts) came from, and the 7 Simple Rules of Influence that make it usable on a Tuesday afternoon. TING, the deep-listening practice I teach alongside them, came the same way, handed to me by a hypnosis teacher early on and refined every year since. None of it was designed in a conference room. It emerged from the study of who was already doing it.
Along the way I also founded and directed the Influence Center at MedStar Health, a first-of-its-kind center inside a major health system, teaching physicians, nurses, and leaders across ten hospitals how to move people... for better conversations, better care, and behavior change that lasts. It was proof, at scale, that the people doing good in the world could learn this, and that they were hungry for it.
Today I run Influence Everywhere, LLC. My mission is simple: help people who do good in the world get better at influencing for good.
That looks like keynotes and workshops for organizations that need their people to move people. One-on-one coaching for leaders whose next level depends on connection more than credentials. Books and card decks that put the frameworks in your hands. Consulting to health systems and mission-driven organizations, including communication strategy for high-stakes cases. And courses and group coaching for people who want to practice, not just learn.
I'm a husband and a father of six, and my faith is the foundation everything else sits on. I live outside Baltimore, coach healthcare leaders across the country, and spend my mornings publishing, reaching out, writing, editing, and reading. I still use doorknobs as a reminder to manage my state before I walk into a room.
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