What Is Your Magic Question?
Bart Baggett is perhaps best known as the world’s number one forensic handwriting expert. He’s been featured on CNN, Good Morning America, The Today Show and literally over 1,600 radio and television shows. During his media rise, Bart started an advertising agency for authors and experts and spoke to sold out audiences around the world in Australia, Taiwan, India and on the US. His book is called The Magic Question and it went to number one with over 100 positive reviews in just three days.
I always like to ask people like you who have accomplished so much if they could take us back to their own story of origin. When you were a little boy, you became fascinated with handwriting or when you were in college, you figured this out. Nobody just gets born and becomes an expert in anything, let alone the world’s number one at anything. Let’s start there.
There are two stories that come to mind and I’m pretty sure you asked me a question about me at fourteen years old, a dorky little kid and insecure. I was going to summer camp with my dad and he turned to me and he goes, “Grab a piece of paper and write this sentence. I’m going to analyze your handwriting.” I said, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t do that. That’s stupid.” He goes, “I may be stupid but just write for me.” He looked at my writing and he told me things which I didn’t know about myself or didn’t want to admit things like low self-esteem, sensitive to criticism, self-conscious, care too much, well think and he said, “The good news is you can learn this.” I said, “I can’t learn that. That’s Dr. Walker. He’s a doctor.” He said, “No, take this book.”
Within about a week I had memorized 30 or 40 little traits from one of the books and that summer camp changed my life because I finally had empathy for other people. I finally understood why the bully acted the way he did. I understood that the arrogant girl was just insecure. It was amazing. In that summer camp, I ended up holding hands with the prettiest girl in summer camp, which was amazing for I was the dorky kid and I’ve got a trophy for best camper. I ended up being onstage analyzing the handwriting of the camp director and telling people he was disorganized.
In that one week, I went from irrelevant to significant. I had empathy, I was popular, and I had status all connected to this interesting skill called hand writing analysis. Fast forward from that moment, once I learned it, you can learn it in a year to the first time I did some radio interviews when I was in college, eighteen, nineteen. I was like, “They’re going to let me get on the radio?” I have all these emotions, significance with this interesting skill. Then I had to figure out how to make a business out of it. That is the second story is how do you turn the skillset, which is either entertainment, interesting, personal development? I’m like the Tony Robbins with handwriting analysis. That’s the kind of positioning for the first twenty years of my life. Now, I do a lot of other things as you know.
Empathy is such an undervalued or often forgotten skill. It is what makes anybody successful, in my opinion, because if you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes for whatever reason, you understand why the bully is the way he is or why someone’s not jumping to a yes quite yet because they’re afraid to make the wrong decision. It has nothing to do with you or what you’re offering. It gives you so much more patience and also focus.
Knowing you personally, that’s one of your strong skillsets in person is that you are magnetic and you teach other people how to be magnetic by this empathic characteristic that you have in space. I love hearing where it all came from. With handwriting, are there certain characteristics that people can do? Let’s say you are disorganized or you’re shy or whatever your challenge is. If I would cross my T dot my I, that would start impacting my personality. Is there anything that you can share that does help us?
Handwriting is nothing more than micromovements frozen on a piece of paper. Just like your eye movements, body language. All of us can know when a puppy is sad or the puppy is happy because you’re reading the body language. It is very simple and the same thing with human beings around the world. The movements and micro movements of the frown on the forehead. Those are all things we universally accept. The problem is a lot of people that claim to be handwriting experts are not. They’re idiots and there’s a lot of bad books out there. I understand that there’s an inherent skepticism because not everyone is as talented as me and Dr. Walker and that luckily, I learned a good path.
One of the things Dr. Walker told me, which I absolutely thought was the craziest idea I’d ever heard, is that if I cross my T bar higher, meaning at the top of the stem instead of the lower part of the stem in writing my name, I will become more successful. I thought that’s insane but the cost of doing it was nothing. If it doesn’t work, I’ve got to change handwriting but if it does work, what could I be in twenty years? I was fourteen, fifteen years old when he told me this. That conscious decision to raise my self-image brought consciously the awareness of how I was behaving and that helped.
Forensic Handwriting: Affirmations don’t work, and I’m not saying that they’d never worked, but they go up against a core belief.
When I write your name, Bart, if I cross the T, the last letter and your first name, a little bit higher, that’s going to over time impact my self-esteem. Is that what you’re saying?
Yes, it impacts your thought processes, which makes you think, “I can do it.” My belief system switched and then eventually, if your thoughts change, your actions change too. I dramatically recall asking the prettiest girl out in school thinking I could be wealthy, all at fifteen, sixteen years old with no evidence board it. I wasn’t that good of a student. I wasn’t that physical. Teams pick me out last. I didn’t do kick ball.
There was no evidence that said I should be the world’s number one anything or that I could write ten books or I’m going to end up having my own radio show or tv show. There’s no evidence. The belief system changed. Part of it was the handwriting, part of it was just the journey of self-improvement and I’ve taken that message into my books and around the world.
People see this tool as an opportunity for transformation. What sets it apart is they go, “I can understand myself and I can reprogram my unconscious mind,” which is a message that everyone loves. They look at Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyers. It’s a shortcut to reprogram your unconscious mind and then people go, “That makes sense. I’m interested as opposed to some guy at the county fair that analyze your hand.” That’s not what we do, especially in the forensic stuff.
The short answer to that is yes, you can change your writing. It’s not the only methodology to change your belief systems, but it worked for me. It’s also even helped one of our friends, Sam Bata. He had a head-on car collision and he could not speak. I don’t know if you know this story but he basically couldn’t talk. I suggested that he try and write and he basically texted me, “I can’t write. I can’t even talk.” He took a pen and he started writing figure eights, which is the fluidity of thinking trait. You see that in all radio host and speakers, especially the echo ones and he said within 30 days, his ability to speak came back just from handwriting exercises.
Hand writing is a shortcut to change your belief system. Is that accurate?
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John Livesay, aka, The Pitch Whisperer, is a keynote speaker to brands and shares lessons learned from his award-winning sales career at Conde Nast. His keynote talk '"Getting To Yes" shows companies' sales teams how to become irresistible so they are magnetic to their ideal clients. After John speaks, the sales team becomes revenue rockstars who form an emotional connection and a compelling brand story with clients. Listen to his TEDx talk: Be The Lifeguard of your own life which has over 1,000,000 views. He is also the Co-Founder CMO of QuantmRE which helps homeowners get cash for the equity in their home without taking on more debt.
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