The Death of Dr. Wayne Dyer: time to celebrate his success secrets

Dr. Wayne Dyer passed away in Hawaii on Sunday August 30th. He was an amazing success guru, a worldwide lecturer and TV personality. He was the #1 best-selling author of such life changing books as Your Erroneous Zones, Pulling Your Own Strings, The Sky's the Limit and Change Your Thoughts and Change Your Life.

In the first chapter of his first book Your Erroneous Zones Dr. Dyer confronts the reader with soul searching questions: “With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, ‘Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?’ ‘Should I live my life as others want me to?'"

He boldly introduced the concept of the No-Limit Person one can become. He proposed to cut through the tangle of negative emotions, habits and obligations that block our capacity for high performance. His mindset was selfless, ego-less and filled with love.

I had the privilege of interviewing this wonderful guru 33 years ago for Selling Power magazine (https://sellingpower.com). To celebrate his life and honor his message, I’d like to share our word-for-word conversation (over 3,000 words) where he reveals his inner blueprint for success, serenity and wisdom. It is a privileged journey into the mindset of a true inner winner.

SP: Do you consider yourself a good salesman?

DR. DYER: I do. I have been called one of the top salesmen in the publishing field. People say I am a terrific book salesman. However, I have never made a conscious effort to sell anything in my life, and yet, I know that I am an excellent salesman.

SP: What did you do to become an excellent salesman?

DR. DYER: I achieve inner serenity. I don't believe in pushing my products on anyone else. I think I am a good salesman because when I'm on the air, I just sell myself. I talk common sense. I talk from a perspective of being someone that other people would want to hear and know more about. And as a result - and that's even done unconsciously - people then want to go out and buy my books to know more about what I do.

SP: You say it's done unconsciously. What subconscious message do you communicate?

DR. DYER: You simply sell yourself. You believe in who you are and what you do. I believe in the concept of modeling. You have to model whatever it is you're asking somebody else to become.

SP: So, in selling, the first product you have to be concerned with is yourself?

DR. DYER: Right. In my latest book, Gifts from Eykis, I use a quote from Thoreau describing what I mean: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his own dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." If you're a person who really, truly believes in yourself and the possibility of reaching your dreams, then that will come through and other people will want more of you.

SP: You seem to describe charisma.

DR. DYER: Yes, I think of it as an enthusiasm for life. It is a genuine excitement of who you are and what you are doing. Translated into selling, it means that you communicate to other people that you really care about them as people, rather than as buyers of your product.

SP: Could you tell us about your first major sale and how you have applied this technique?

DR. DYER: I think my biggest sale was my book, Your Erroneous Zones. When I met with the publisher's editorial vice-president to talk about the sale of my manuscript, I realized that he had just experience a personal setback in his life. He was upset about it. I stayed in his office for four hours and we discussed the book all afternoon. We talked about a problem that we both had faced in our lives. I talked to him from a perspective of a caring person. I suspended all my desire to get my book published. I was just doing what seemed to make sense to me at that moment, trusting my inner instincts. The next day he called and told me they were going to publish my book.

SP: It appears that your ability to suspend your preoccupation with selling your book was the key to the sale.

DR. DYER: Yes, human love, the ability to reach out to a person, is the greatest sales technique in the world.

SP: In your opinion, what are the key characteristics of an effective salesperson?

DR. DYER: I think first and foremost of someone who has positive self-values, self-worth, self-esteem. That is at the very top. When you don't have that, then all of the other things don't make any difference. In addition, you should have the ability to communicate a feeling of enthusiasm, a feeling of excitement about who you are and what you're selling, being a model, and being flexible and having a sense of humor.

SP: What are the keys to improving your relationship with a customer or prospect?

DR. DYER: It all boils down to what they need and what I can provide. It means shifting your concern from problems to solutions. Solution oriented thinking comes from caring and loving. You have to see things through the eyes of the other person. You should be so involved in helping another human being that your own needs became unimportant.

SP: How about the problem customer. What do you feel are the most significant barriers?

DR. DYER: I honestly believe they are all within ourselves. To me, there are no barriers, only challenges.

SP: Have you ever counseling salespeople on an individual basis?

DR. DYER: I've done a lot of that.

SP: What do you feel are the most common obstacles that salespeople seem to put in their own way?

DR. DYER: The biggest one is the fear of failure. Equating their performance on the job with who they are as a person.

SP: What do you mean by that?

DR. DYER: In other words, they are telling themselves, "If I make the sale, I can be happy. If I don't make the sale, I can't be happy." Consequently, with economic conditions bad, interest rates high, money hard to get, they are bound to be depressed.

SP: Do you ever experience the fear of failure when you write a book or appear on national television?

DR. DYER: No. I learned something very important. When I write, I write for myself. When I first starting writing, I submitted 100 articles that were rejected. Anybody in his right mind would have said, "Okay, I'm not a writer; they are rejecting my articles." It never made a bit of difference to me. I didn't judge myself as a failure based on what other people think I should have done. It was just one more opportunity to learn and to prove that I could do something. When I give a speech, I must first please myself. I believe in what I do and I get my satisfaction from completing it.

SP: So, you don't care about whether people will buy?

DR. DYER: It's the work itself; it's what I do that counts. If they buy, it's just a bonus. It's advancing confidently in the direction of your own dream . . .

SP: Do you care about the positive reactions?

DR. DYER: I love to hear positive reactions from people. I like getting good book sales. These are all wonderful things. I want them, but I don't need them. Ironically, you will meet with success in selling if you don't need to make the sale. That's the key. So, if I don't sell one book, I'm okay.

SP: That's a tough act to follow. If a salesperson doesn't make that big sale, he isn't likely to say, "I'm okay."

DR. DYER: It's your choice. You don't need to interpret a lost sale as a rejection of yourself. If you need the sale to prove your self-worth, you will end up trying too hard. You'll be communicating that if you don't get it, you're going to be hurt, you're going to feel bad. So you'll come across as pushy; you'll be tempted to use guilt. All this comes from needing the sale. But you've got the choice to turn this around by conveying to that person, "If I make the sale, that's terrific; if I don't make the sale, that's fine too. I like you and maybe we'll do business some other time."

SP: It sounds as if you don't believe that striving for the #1 spot in your field is a good idea.

DR. DYER: I think that is a very unhealthy, sick kind of concept.

SP: One of the most successful films in the field of sales motivation, entitled "Second Effort," has sold nearly 10,000 copies in the past 10 years. The basic message is Vine Lombardi's famous quote, "Winning is the only thing."

DR. DYER: I disagree vehemently.

SP: Why?

DR. DYER: First of all, you cannot win all the time. Lombardi knew that. He was a great motivator, not because of his emphasis on winning, but because he knew how to appeal to each one of his players on an individual, personal basis. Lombardi himself did not win all the time. He had to drink milk the last 10 years of his life because of his ulcers; he was grossly overweight and died a very premature death. If you have to tell yourself that winning is the only thing, or if you define winning as having to beat somebody, you're going to be a loser. You can't win all the time. Ask Mohammed Ali, who was "the greatest" - sometimes!

SP: So, in selling, could you win more sales by not concentrating on winning?

DR. DYER: When you depend on competition to win, you are putting somebody else in charge of your life. If you give up control over your emotional life, you're bound to suffer. When you're looking over your shoulder at the other guy and then deciding whether or not you are doing well, based on comparing yourself with him then he's in charge of your life. By looking over your shoulder, you'll end up losing; by looking inside, you'll find the key to growth, self-improvement and happiness.

SP: What is it exactly that you should focus on when you look inside yourself?

DR. DYER: In selling, your mental focus has to be on enjoying what you're doing, finding a sense of fulfillment.

SP: In your book, Gifts from Eykis, you write that it is preferable to stop listening to the outside world and to begin consulting your inner voices.

DR. DYER: Right.

SP: Do you mean that most salespeople do not listen to their inner signals?

DR. DYER: Most of us are trained not to trust what we're saying to ourselves.

SP: We are unaware of the importance of self-talk and we're untrained in responding in self-enhancing ways.

DR. DYER: Generally, we train people to trust somebody else.

SP: How do you learn inner listening and inner responding?

DR. DYER: By practice, by doing it. There is no other way.

SP: In your book, you're saying, "Your mind is the captain of the ship called your body." How do you propose that people get captains' license?

The only way to get that license is to begin practicing new things. You don't learn by someone else's telling you.

SP: You make it sound so easy; as if you were saying the access to our subconscious mind is as easy as dialing a toll free number.

DR. DYER: It's easier, because you don't need a telephone.

SP: Let's say you're preparing for an important presentation. Before your big day, you wake up in the middle of the night because you've had a bad dream.

DR. DYER: You're the one who dreamed it; you take responsibility for your dreams. You can train yourself to dream or not to dream anything you want. We have all kinds of evidence to substantiate that. It's hard work to really get in tune with dreams, but I did that for one year. I recorded all my dreams. I forced myself to wake up every single night for a year just to find out what I was dreaming.

SP: So you're saying that you can use your mind more efficiently by learning how to listen to its messages.

DR. DYER: When you set your mind to doing something, you can do anything. It can alter your heart rate; it can rid you of diseases. There is a will in everyone that is very difficult to describe. I see it when I run a marathon. I just ran a marathon yesterday - 26.2 miles. Since October 6, 1977, I have not missed one day of running a minimum of 8 miles. Not one single day. There is a will in everyone that doesn't come from anything that is inherited, or any electro-chemical processes. It comes from the choices we make in our lives. Everything in life is a choice. I don't think it is a chemical imbalance that creates the way we think. I think it is the other way around; that is, our thinking indeed can create chemical imbalances. That's precisely what an ulcer is.

SP: One of Zig Ziglar's concepts is "Garbage in - garbage out." You're saying that even if there is garbage around you, if you think happy thoughts, you could get chocolate cake out the other side?

DR. DYER: It may not necessarily be chocolate cake, but it's still a miracle; it's still something to appreciate. I've learned this from being around handicapped people, from having friends who are blind or deaf. People with handicaps often say, "I treat my handicap as a gift." It's not a curse, it's an opportunity. Look at some of the accounts from POWs. A POW is put in the worst conditions in the world and the thing that saves him is his mind. His crucial choice is to think in a self-enhancing rather than a self-defeating manner.

 SP: I've heard comments from sales managers saying your books and tapes all sound very good. They like the promise of becoming self-actualized, but when they try to translate your ideas into everyday reality, they say it's easier said than done.

DR. DYER: We all keep falling down. And, I do too. I fall down all the time, but I never said that no-limit people don't fall down. It's what you do when you fall down that makes you a no-limit person.

SP: Could you give us an example of how you've fallen down and picked yourself up?

DR. DYER: You're talking to one of the biggest failures who ever lived. When Erroneous Zones came out and they told me there was no advertising budget, I said, "Well then I'll have to go out and do it myself." When they said that they couldn't distribute the book, I said, "I'll buy some; I'll take them with me." To me, that an opportunity rather than an obstacle. If they don't have the money, then I'll have to take out a loan and do it myself. There was never a time when I said, "I guess I'll just have to give up on this." Successful people don't just land where they are on a parachute. You've got to climb up there; you've got to go through all the hurdles and look for the opportunities.

SP: Let's assume that in spite of your efforts, your book didn't sell. You lost all your money. Would you have succeeded in thinking happy thoughts?

DR. DYER: Sure. No question. When I got down to writing it, I never thought I'd make a nickel on it. I had been writing for five years and never made any money.

SP: Why did you write it?

DR. DYER: I wrote it for me. I felt that I had something to say that hadn't been said.

SP: Aren't you in a way talking like someone who has $2 million in his bank account and says making money is easy?

DR. DYER: I was saying the same thing when I was working as a bag boy at a supermarket in Detroit, when I was shining shoes, or driving a cab. I always had money. I grew up in an orphanage and I know about things like hunger from experience. I've never had an allowance. I've never had anybody give me a nickel in my life. Still, people think I'm talking from the perspective of a rich guy. I've been alive 42 years and I have been rich only a few of those. I always had more than one job, because I didn't care for unemployment benefits or blaming the economy. I knew I had to go out and get a job. Not only did I get one, I had one in the morning, one in the afternoon and another at night, plus going to school on top of it.

SP: What's your definition of success?

DR. DYER: Living your life the way you choose to, without interfering with anybody else's right to do the same.

SP: In your book, The Sky's the Limit; you've made the promise of becoming a no-limit person. What about delivery?

DR. DYER: I deliver for myself and that's all I can take responsibility for. I am an example of somebody who has come out of a family where nobody went to college. We were as poor as you can get. My parents got divorced when I was one year old; my stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. I'm saying that you don't have to use your childhood as an excuse for not growing. It is never too late to have a happy childhood. I've a sign on my mirror that says, "Maybe we can change the world if we start with ourselves." Someone who read one of my books sent it to me. I look at it every day and I say, "Just take responsibility for yourself. Do what you can."

SP: You seem to be very firm in separating your responsibility and that of others. When I did the research for this interview, I got this comment from an author who listened to one of your tapes, saying: "He shows little empathy and appears somewhat narcissistic." Do you feel that's true?

DR. DYER: I know that's a notion a lot of people have. I am aware that your reputation is totally outside of your control; only your character is made by yourself. Everybody who knows me knows that for every dollar that I spend on myself, I spend ten on other people. I always have been generous to a fault. There are a lot of things that I do because I feel they are helpful to other people. I see myself as a giver. I give a lot of money to charity; I spend a lot of my time to help unfortunate people. Yet, this still comes from enjoying what I do for others. I am not an "I-I-I, me-me-me" person. I know, if you listen to some of my tapes, they do in fact give that impression. I admit that. It's something I have tried to correct. In fact, my new book Eykis will dispel a lot of that, because Eykis is love. I think I have grown.

SP: Thank you.

To celebrate Dr. Wayne Dyer's life, please share how his message has helped you in your personal or professional life.