Chapter One

1. Start with Your Seventh Level Statement

The Seventh Level is the pinnacle of engagement, and it’s the goal that the Seventh Level Engagement Framework propels you toward. To be clear, the Seventh Level Engagement Framework is a tool to measure your success in connecting with others. Your Seventh Level Statement reflects your own values and beliefs.

Before you can walk through this framework and reach the Seventh Level with someone else, you have to determine your own Seventh Level Statement. You have to establish what the holy grail of engagement looks like for you. You need to know who you are and what you stand for. What are your core values and mission? What do you believe in? What do you want to communicate to the world? That is your Seventh Level Statement. Start by writing your statement. Once you know what you stand for, use it as the lens to communicate with your customers and employees from Level One through the Seventh Level.

Identifying your values is a mandatory first step before you can meaningfully connect with your audience. Only when you know your own narrative can you work toward getting others to engage with you at the highest level.

So start by asking yourself the following questions:

• Who are you?
• What do you stand for?
• What do you believe in?
• Why do you do what you do?

I’m a pop culture junkie, so let’s look at some examples from some of my favorite fictional characters. All of these characters have strong personal values and beliefs that they use as a compass in connecting meaningfully with others, which builds a loyal following to make a significant impact. (And isn’t that what we all want?)

We all love Star Wars, right? (Or at least, I do.) One of Luke Skywalker’s core beliefs was that there was good in the world despite the darkness. This shaped him and was the lens through which he made the decisions he made on his journey.

For you younger readers, maybe you’re a bigger Harry Potter fan. Harry deeply believed he should protect both his own magical community and the nonmagic world from forces of evil at all costs. That was his Seventh Level.

And for you comic book fans, T’Challa (aka Black Panther) valued community and family connection.

Each of these characters felt their sense of purpose pulsing through them, but each needed guidance to understand how to access it. Their sense of purpose stemmed from their Seventh Level Statement.

Each of them also had a guide—Yoda, Dumbledore, and Okoye (Danai Gurira), respectively—to help them on their personal journey. After you’ve identified your Seventh Level, let this framework be your guide, teaching you to connect with others, and leverage your inner purpose—the thing that makes you, you.

Each of the characters mentioned also had a loyal following of people that supported them in accomplishing their goals. You, too, are probably looking for loyal friends and followers to help you build your business.

Sticking with pop culture, don’t be like Julia Roberts’s character in Runaway Bride. She was a chameleon with each romantic interest, and every time a date asked her how she liked her eggs cooked, she gave a different answer! She finally established her personal Seventh Level at the end of the movie with the help of her guide (Richard Gere) and realized that she could love herself and also be in a relationship. When you go through the framework without knowing your own personal Seventh Level, you end up changing yourself all of the time for your customers and employees, which means you’ll wind up having poached eggs one day, scrambled the next, and over easy the day after that—and you’ll never perfect any one recipe.

Avoid the “Uncle SnapTime” Trap

When you don’t know your own Seventh Level, you end up trying to be something you’re not. It’s like that uncle at the barbecue who is trying to be cool while talking to the younger kids and says, “Hey, are you on SnapTime?” They look at him like, umm, do you mean Snapchat or FaceTime? He thinks he’s being cool; they think he’s inauthentic. Unfortunately, I’m aging out as well. Not that long ago as a teacher, I was trying to connect to my millennial and Gen Z students. Rather than trying to step outside of my comfort zone and pretend I was like them in terms of the music they listened to or the movies they watched, I asked them what they loved to read, since I genuinely do love to read just about anything. I ended up reading the Twilight series (before any of my adult friends even knew what Twilight was) so I could keep my finger on the pulse of their pop culture in a way that felt authentic to me. As a teacher, learning and reading were aligned with connecting with them. If I had tried to listen to the same music or watch the same TV shows they did, or DM them on Instagram, they would have sent me the eye-roll emoji, thinking I was a loser or a tryhard. Instead, I used my Seventh Level Statement—to inspire and educate. I was inspired by what they were learning, reading, and excited by, and found a way to connect with them as a person and a reader.

Marketing today focuses on authenticity, but—like engagement—few marketers know what that really means. It’s not about trying to be like another generation. For example, an older, fast food restaurant, with a demographic of baby boomers decides to use teen slang on its Twitter account as a failed attempt to “talk like millennials” ends up looking tone-deaf and out of touch. This is not being aligned with your personal Seventh Level Statement and not communicating that statement so that others understand what you believe in. Big brands always tell me how they are trying to connect with millennials and Gen Z, and generations who are not even born yet. I always like to note that besides these trendy new generations, there are groups that need to continue to be acknowledged (like Baby Boomers and Gen X) that I have coined as the millennial-minded. Because while we have all become obsessed with millennials as a demographic, millennials as a whole have impacted other generations in a psychographic way. When a big brand does not know why they are trying to connect with a specific demographic and they make snap decisions to keep up with the trends without acknowledging their own Seventh Level Statement, their attempts to connect fail. They don’t know who they are, and so they focus on the markets they’re trying to reach instead of communicating their own beliefs and values to different markets. Millennials, Gen Z, and millennial-minded customers see through the brands’ misaligned attempts at authenticity and roll their eyes.

You should know what you believe in first, then connect with the people who resonate with that stated belief. When you’re driven by your Seventh Level Statement and can communicate it clearly, you reach multiple audiences through an authentic lens, eventually connecting with them at the Seventh Level. That lens allows you to think about the next generation without abandoning existing customers.

Have you seen the movie The Intern? In the film, Robert de Niro is a bored, retired executive who takes a job at a startup run by Anne Hathaway. He comes to work in a suit and tie and carries a leather briefcase as he did for his entire career. He’s curious about his young coworkers but doesn’t try to be like them. He offers advice from another generation and solves both some personal and business situations during the film, saving the day when Anne Hathaway comes into her own as the CEO she’s meant to be.

My dad—who LOVES that film—is in his sixties and is helping me build my company. He doesn’t try to be a millennial. He just is who he is. He’s had to change the way that he communicates (Level Two: Unsystematic Engagement—more on that later) with us because he’s old school, Wall Street, and we’re all millennials and Gen Zers. He’s had to soften up a bit with his delivery of what he believes in, but he hasn’t pretended to be something that he’s not. His wisdom and insight offer more value to me than if he tried to be like everyone else who works for the company. I wanted to work with him because he is different. His Seventh Level Statement is always adding value to the work he produces, and this is what he does for me at CatalystCreativ. His Seventh Level aligned with my Seventh Level in the fact that he wants to add value to helping to build CatalystCreativ via the intention to inspire and educate others. We want to put out work that adds value, has integrity, is quality, and teaches people about how to better their business.

Once you identify what you stand for, you can then go through the framework knowing how to leverage who you are to connect with others. If you don’t first identify your Seventh Level Statement, you keep changing yourself to reflect what everyone else thinks you are, and that’s not sustainable.

As a company, identifying your core beliefs and values is instrumental in ensuring your organization meets its employee, sales, marketing, and relationship goals. This most often appears as a mission statement but can also...