فصل 05

5

STATE MANAGEMENT

BEFORE THINGS AT STRATTON HAD spiraled out of control, the boardroom had been a truly remarkable place. It was an egalitarian society in the purest sense of the phrase, a meritocracy where you were judged solely on your performance, not by the weight of your diploma or your family connections. Once you entered the boardroom, it no longer mattered who you were, where you came from, or what mistakes you’d made in the past. All of that could be left behind.

In essence, the Straight Line System served as the Great Equalizer, allowing even the most disempowered men and women to completely reinvent themselves and start their lives anew.

To give you an idea of just how massive an impact the Straight Line System had on these kids, I would only be slightly exaggerating if I said that more than half of them showed up at my door with only a borderline ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. Then, sixty days later, I’d see the same kid and—bam!—that kid would be completely transformed.

No matter how many times I witnessed it, this radical transformation was never lost on me. Everything from how they walked to how they talked to how they dressed to how they shook hands to the way they made eye contact; you could literally feel the confidence oozing off them.

Now, for those of you who are currently saying to yourself: “I don’t see what the big deal is. I mean, if you paid me fifty thousand dollars a month when I was in my twenties, I would’ve changed anything you wanted me to. I’d have walked differently, I’d have talked differently, I’d have dressed differently, and I’d even have washed behind my ears if that’s what it took! I mean, who wouldn’t, right?”

If you were thinking anything along those lines, I can’t say that I really fault you. After all, your argument is both intelligent and well thought out, and shows a very solid grasp on human nature. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact you’re completely barking up the wrong tree!

You see, the Stratton training program was six months long, so at the time I witnessed their transformation, none of the kids had started making any money yet. They were all still trainees, which meant they were still flat broke!

So what was it then? What caused this transformation?

In truth, there was more than one thing behind it, but at the heart of the transformation was a powerful visualization technique that I taught the Strattonites called future pacing.

In short, future pacing entails running an imaginary movie through your mind where you get to see yourself in the future having already achieved a certain outcome. The result is that you get to experience the positive feelings associated with a future achievement right now, as opposed to having to wait until a few years from now, when you actually achieve it.

During my daily sales meetings, I always made it a point to remind the trainees of the importance of future pacing their own success, and I also made them run the positive movie right there in their seats, allowing them to see themselves in the future already being rich and living the Life. And, of course, in the same way that I told the first twelve Strattonites to “act as if,” I kept repeating that message to the boardroom again and again and again.

I would say, “Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and you will become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence, and people will have confidence in you. Act as if you have all the answers, and the answers will come to you.”

In other words, I told them that they should not only think like wealthy people but to also carry themselves that way, because it leads to the right state of mind.

As previously mentioned, the technical term for this is state management.

In essence, when you’re managing your emotional state, you’re temporarily blocking out any troubling thoughts or emotions that might normally make you feel negative—thereby allowing yourself to maintain a positive state of mind.

What makes state management so important in achieving success is that your current emotional state determines whether or not you’ll be able to access your internal resources at that moment to achieve your outcome.

When you’re in an empowered state—like “certainty,” for instance—then you’re able to access your internal resources, which then sets you up for massive success. Conversely, when you’re in a disempowered state, you’re blocked from accessing your internal resources, and you’ve set yourself up for massive failure.

It’s very similar to how a valve works.

An empowered state is the equivalent of the valve to your internal resources being fully open, allowing you to access them at will, while a disempowered state is the equivalent of the valve being closed, blocking you from accessing your resources, no matter how badly you might need them. Let me give you an example:

Imagine that you have some of the best sales skills in the world. You’re an expert at every aspect of the Straight Line System—from taking immediate control of the sale to running world-class looping patterns and closing the deal.

But let’s say you walk through your prospect’s door in a state of absolute uncertainty, then how good of a salesperson can you be at that moment?

Not very good, right?

You see, at that particular moment, you’re blocked from accessing your internal resources—in this case, your sales skills—so no matter how great of a salesperson you could be, you’re simply unable to access that greatness.

The same thing goes with your personal life.

Let’s say you’re a parent.

Now, obviously, you love your kids to death, and you pride yourself on being an amazing parent. In fact, you’ve even read a few books on parenting, to give you strategy and insight, so you really know what you’re doing. But let’s say you come home after a really tough day at work, and you walk in the door in a state of anger and impatience—two very disempowering states—then how good of a parent can you be at that moment?

Again, not very good.

Your anger and impatience have blocked you from accessing your resources for parenting. So, despite the fact that you still love your kids just as much as usual, and despite the fact that you still possess all those wonderful skills for being an amazing parent, at that particular moment you’re blocked from accessing them.

Here’s the bottom line:

As a salesperson—or as any success-oriented person—you must learn how to start triggering the key empowered states; otherwise, you set yourself up for a lifetime of pain. There are no two ways about it.

However, one point I want to clarify here is that what I am not saying is that you need to, or for that matter should even want to, live in empowered states all the time. That’s completely nuts!

Just think that through for a second:

I mean, what do you call someone who walks around all day long with their chest puffed out, in a state of absolute certainty?

You call him an asshole, right? We hate those people!

And you don’t want to be one!

I don’t want to belabor the point, but this is a far bigger problem in the self-development world than you’d think, especially with people who attend seminars that focus solely on inner-game skills. The problem that arises is that when you teach those skills without the context of a real-world application, the attendees almost invariably get the wrong message.

The key distinction here is that once you’ve learned the technique for triggering an empowered state (I’m going to teach you the most powerful one in the world in a moment), you only want to use it at certain key moments, when it matters most, like before you enter a sales encounter, or try to close a business deal, or enter into a negotiation, or even if it’s just an important decision you need to make in your personal life.

In fact, in the latter case, you definitely want to make sure that you’re in an empowered state, because human beings, as a species, make their worst personal decisions when they’re in a disempowered state (and their best decisions when they’re in an empowered state).

In terms of achieving success in sales, there are four key states that you need to learn how to trigger at will within state management. We call them the four Cs:

Certainty, clarity, confidence, and courage.

These are your linchpin states for achieving wealth and success. If you don’t learn how to trigger them, then you’re playing Russian roulette with your future—essentially hoping that you’ll be in the right state when you enter a sales encounter, versus knowing you will be because you have a surefire strategy to do it. The name of that strategy is olfactory anchoring.

I created olfactory anchoring almost a decade ago, in response to my personal need to instantly trigger an empowered state under what were becoming increasingly odd circumstances.

As the story goes, when I was on my first global speaking tour, I began to find myself in situations where it was crucial for me to be in an empowered state despite the fact that the surrounding environment was often working heavily against me.

For example, I was constantly getting cornered into doing last-second TV interviews, talk shows, radio shows, newspaper interviews, sponsor requests, and photo opportunities, all of which required that I look my best, act my best, and, in fact, be my best at all times. No matter how tired, jet-lagged, or completely burned out I was from being on a multiyear speaking tour, I was expected to perform, plain and simple.

In addition, on those very same days, I would also have to get up on stage and give anywhere from a two- to a ten-hour talk to as many as twelve thousand people who had paid good money to see me, so the moment I hit that stage, I had to take my state from zero to 100 mph in a matter of seconds.

That was the reality I was facing.

At the time, I had just started using a state management technique called NLP anchoring, which was part of a group of techniques and strategies that make up a body of knowledge known as neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, for short.

Operating on the fringe of mainstream psychology, NLP’s basic premise is that the human brain functions similarly to a computer and hence can be programmed as such to make near instant changes to certain key behavioral patterns. The only sticking point, however, is that before you can make any changes, you need to know two important things first:

How to write code for the human brain

What type of software to embed the code in

It sounds complicated, I know, but in reality it’s the exact opposite. Let me explain, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

According to NLP, the software of the brain is language, and the way you write code is by creating language patterns, which consist of a group of words—as brief as a short sentence or as long as a few paragraphs—that have been structured in accordance with a series of basic yet extremely powerful linguistic principles that can be used to reprogram virtually any person’s brain, including your own, in a number of very profound ways.

One of those ways forms the basis of NLP anchoring.

The basic premise of NLP anchoring is that human beings have the ability to choose how they feel at a particular moment in time, as opposed to it being chosen for them by what’s going on in their surrounding environment or their personal life.

In other words, we can be proactive when it comes to choosing our emotional state, as opposed to reactive, which is what most human beings have been conditioned to think is our only choice.

A vast majority of human beings believe that their current emotional state is a result of outside forces that are being exerted on them. For example, if positive things are happening to you, then you’ll end up falling into a positive emotional state; and if negative things are happening to you, then you’ll end up in a negative emotional state.

Now, obviously, the proactive nature of NLP’s state philosophy is attractive to anyone in sales, and for that matter anyone who wants to live a more empowered life. To that end, NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements, both of which are under a person’s conscious control. The first of these two elements is:

What you choose to focus on.

In essence, at any particular moment, you have the ability to choose the precise direction of your focus; and based on that choice, you’ll fall into a state that’s congruent with what you’ve chosen to focus on.

For example, if you spend the next few minutes focusing on everything that’s great in your life—a recent business success, being in a loving relationship, the health of your children, a recent goal you achieved, a family getaway—then you’ll quickly pop into a positive, empowered state that reflects all those wonderful things.

Conversely, if you spend the same amount of time focusing on everything that’s wrong in your life—a recent business failure, a divorce, a sick child, a recent goal you failed to achieve—then you’ll quickly fall into a disempowered state that reflects all those crappy things. It’s as simple as that.

The second of these two elements is:

Your current physiology.

Comprised of the sum of all the possible ways that you can move and hold your body—your posture, your facial expressions, how you move your appendages, your rate of breathing, your overall level of motion—physiology of human beings as it relates to each emotional state is nearly identical across all cultures.

In other words, human beings, as a species, will all adapt virtually the same physiology when they’re in a happy, positive emotional state. Put another way, people who were born and raised in Papua New Guinea don’t smile when they’re depressed or frown when they’re happy any more than Eskimos do, or people who were raised in Portugal do.

For example, if I pointed to a closed door and said to you: “Behind that door is a very happy woman! For a prize of ten thousand dollars, I want you to tell me which of each pair of these physical traits best describes her: Is she smiling or is she frowning? Is her head held high or is her head slumped over? Is she breathing fully and deeply, or is her breathing slow and shallow? Are her shoulders pulled back, or are they rolled slightly forward? Is she standing up straight, or is she slightly hunched over? Are her eyes opened wide or are they slightly narrowed?” (And, of course, the same questions would apply if it were a depressed woman.)

Now, just so you know, I’ve asked both of those versions to live audiences all over the world—the US, the UK, Australia, South Africa, China, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, Canada, Iceland, Germany, and pretty much anywhere else you can think of—and no matter where I’ve been in the world, the entire audience always answers these questions in the same exact way.

In other words, we know what a depressed person looks like and we know what a happy person looks like; and we also know what an angry person looks like and what a loving person looks like too; and we all know what an impatient person looks like and we know what a calm person looks like. It’s all very logical.

Now, let me ask you another state management question, albeit from a slightly different angle. Let’s say you were in a depressed state right now, and I offered you $50,000 to act happy for the next sixty seconds. Could you do it?

Yes, of course you could!

It would be as simple as consciously making certain obvious changes to your physiology, ones that you had used countless times in your life, since you were a little boy or girl.

However, what if I offered you $100,000—no, make that $1 million—and asked you to make the same changes to your physiology as last time, albeit with one important difference: this time, I need you to maintain a happy physiology for the next eighteen hours straight. Could you do it?

No way.

No matter how hard you tried, you simply couldn’t pull it off.

It’s impossible.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with you being weak or strong or anything of the sort. It’s simply the way human beings are built, as a species.

You see, while it’s true that we can, in fact, make ourselves feel any way we want at any given moment, that moment is fleeting—giving us a window of opportunity that’s anywhere from five minutes to maybe an hour at most. After that, you’ll slowly start to settle back to whatever state you were in before.

Now, if any of this stuff still seems foreign to you, here’s a quick exercise that will really clear things up. Ready?

Okay, I want you to think back to all the times in your life when someone asked you to manage your state, and you actually did, but you called it something else at the time.

For instance:

How many times has someone said to you: “Keep your chin up!” or “Put on a brave face!” or “Look alert!” or “Keep cool!” or “Smile and act polite!” or “Don’t lose your temper!”

See my point?

The reality is that we’ve all tried to manage our state at various times in our life, and sometimes we were successful and sometimes not. The goal of anchoring is to eliminate the “not.”

So, with that, let’s get specific.

NLP’s first leap of logic was based on the idea that human beings could proactively manage their emotional state with near 100 percent success by directing their focus and their physiology in a specific way.

The second leap of logic was to combine this concept with classic Pavlovian conditioning, as in: Pavlov’s dogs.

Remember Pavlov’s dogs?

As the story goes, sometime around the turn of the last century, a little-known Russian scientist named Ivan Pavlov conducted an experiment involving a starving dog (very common, at the time), a juicy piece of meat (almost impossible to find, at the time), and an extremely loud bell (very common, one would think, although who really knows).

Either way, the experiment’s protocol was simple:

Present the starving dog with the juicy piece of meat, while simultaneously ringing a bell. This he did.

Not surprisingly, the dog instantly began to salivate at the sight of the meat, while the sound of the bell was merely coincidental to him, at least at first. However, what Pavlov quickly noticed was that as he kept repeating this process over and over again, it didn’t take long until the dog would start to salivate just from the sound of the bell. The sight of the meat was no longer necessary.

The reason for this, Pavlov concluded, was that each time he repeated the experiment, the dog’s brain would develop a stronger link between the sound of the bell and the sight of the meat, until, finally, the link had grown so strong that the mere act of ringing the bell would be powerful enough to trigger salivation.

In NLP, the ringing sound of the bell is referred to as an anchor, the act of ringing the bell is referred to as firing off an anchor, and the process by which two formally unrelated items become linked together in this way is referred to as setting an anchor.

The most common state that salespeople will try to set an anchor for is a state of absolute certainty, and the most common anchor they’ll choose to try to link it to is a combination of shouting the word “yes” and simultaneously clapping their hands.

Now, if you’re thinking that screaming the word “yes” while executing a single clap of your hands doesn’t seem quite as intense as tempting a starving dog with a piece of juicy beef (while ringing a bell that’s loud enough to wake the dead), then you’re in the same boat that I was: feeling frustrated, skeptical, but still hopeful for an answer.

Yet, on the flip side, I knew that the science behind NLP’s approach was sound, and that the payoff for cracking the code would be incalculable—not so much to me, but to the tens of millions of people who would be attending my live events over the next few years.

You see, unlike most people, I was blessed with a natural ability to manage my state at an extremely high level, so anchoring was really more of a luxury to me than a necessity.

Unfortunately, though, for every oddball out there like me, there are ten million normal folks whose natural abilities in this area lie on the opposite end of the spectrum. In consequence, I continued to experiment with a number of different strategies that could be combined with basic NLP anchoring in order to ratchet up its effectiveness. It took just a bit over a month, until I finally struck gold.

In the summer of 2009, I gave birth to a wildly effective state management technique that I proudly named olfactory anchoring. She was born weighing just over an ounce, and was just under two inches long. She was on the thin side, for sure, but perfectly symmetrical nonetheless. However, out of all her defining features, there was one in particular that stood out above the rest:

She stunk!