Straight Line Sales Psychology : Inner World "State Management"

The ability to manage your emotional state of mind drives everything you do. There are certain states you want to be able to trigger in yourself before you begin any sale and there are also certain states you want to be able to avoid, like the feeling of massive uncertainty, when you’re about to close a sale. Once you master your own states, you will be able to use this same concept to influence other people.

This article is about managing your physiological and emotional state, no matter what is going on around you at the time, so then you can access all the resources (e.g. skills and training) you have to be successful in that sale.

Your state dictates how you operate in the moment. There are a number of ‘positive’ states that lead to wealth and success, and then there are ‘negative’ states that are disempowering and will undermine your success as a salesperson. These will be explored in more depth later in this article.

Positive States are:

• Certainty
• Clarity
• Confidence
• Courage

Negative States are:

• Uncertainty
• Fear
• Greed
• Overwhelm

Essentials of State Management

There are 3 elements to state management:

• Mental Focus
• Physiology
• Emotions

You change or create a state by changing these three elements — what you choose to focus on, the movement of your body, and the emotion you create as a result of that. If you choose to focus on negative aspects of your life, and match your physiology (e.g. head down), you are going to end up feeling disempowered and uncertain about yourself, and will ultimately end up attracting more negativity into your life.

If you choose to focus on positive aspects of your life, and match your physiology (e.g. smiling), you will feel more empowered and certain about yourself, and ultimately attract positive things into your life.

The Ideal States: The Four C’s

There are Four Ideal States: The Four C’s:

There are certain states that empower you and certain emotional states that disempower you. Empowering states can help you to achieve wealth and success, whereas negative states can lead to failure and poverty.

There are four empowering states that are called the 4 C’s:

• Certainty
• Clarity
• Confidence
• Courage

Four Ideal States: The Four C’s:

When you have total clarity about what you’re doing, you’re confident you can succeed, you have the courage to put yourself on the line, and you’re in a state of total certainty that you can make it happen. In this state you become a force of nature and you can influence just about anyone you get in front of.

When you are in any one, or ideally more than one of these empowered states your best physical and mental resources are available to you. You’re able to maximize your potential in the moment. Conversely, in a disempowered state, these resources tend to disappear.

Four Disempowering States:

Just as there are four empowering states, there are also four disempowering states.

• Doubt
• Fear
• Uncertainty
• Overwhelm

The key to being effective in sales, and in any area of your life, is first to be aware of the effect your state has on your behaviour and what states you tend to live in. In addition you need to be able to trigger the states you want in yourself and your prospect to maximize your results. When you feel certainty in your product you transfer this certainty to your prospects. This is called emotional transference.

Managing Your State

The 5 Modalities Of State

The key to managing your state is to identify the modalities that influence you, so you can use them to create strong, positive states. The way we process the world around us, how we make sense of the world, is through our five senses. And, these five senses are called your modalities.

1. Vision (Sight) — This is typically the dominant modality for most human beings. 'Vision' is what we actually see to interpret the world around us.
2. Auditory (Sound) — The second most dominant modality, this is what we hear around us. For example, many athletes will listen (sound) to specific music on their iPods before a big game, match or race.
3. Kinesthetic/Somato Sensory (Touch) — Sometimes called your "gut feeling". We also use this modality to connect for fully. For example, performers will stand in a circle and holds hands (touch) before going out on stage.
4. Gustatory (Smell) — Smell can trigger an energetic (or other) state within you. For some high level executives, the aroma (smell) of coffee is enough to get them charged before an important board meeting.
5. Olfactory (Taste) — Taste messages can affect whether we experience pleasant, aversive or even nostalgic feelings, influencing our conscious thought.

The KEY to managing your state is to understand and identify the modalities that influence you and others.

Setting Anchors

Neurolinguistic Programming

NLP refers to the association between the neurological processes in the brain (‘neuro’), how we use language (‘linguistic’), and our patterns of behaviour that have been learned through experience (‘programming’).

Setting Anchors

The easiest way to train your body to go into the empowering states you want to be in can best be accomplished through the use of anchors. Anchors are learned associations between a specific state and a very specific trigger.

You can set anchors for yourself even if you’re feeling uncertain and disempowered. In the key moments when you need to change your state — like in a sales situation — you can trigger a state of certainty. The more you fire off your anchor, the easier it gets to fire it off again and again. It’s important to remember, you can’t set an anchor if you’re in a state that’s less than ten out of ten. You have to get to the highest level of the state and in the exact moment when you’re in a “peak state”, that is when you set the anchor.

Line up what you focus on with how you move your body to generate an emotion that happens automatically. This is called creating a high-level ‘Peak’ or performance state. This can be any state: certainty, clarity, confidence, or courage.

More specifically, there are certain movements we might find ourselves doing automatically when in certain states. For example, when we feel confident we stand tall and might make certain hand movements (e.g. make a fist). We can use these movements or gestures as our ‘anchor’.

When you combine this anchoring technique with the outer world skills of the Straight Line — you’re unstoppable. Having both creates a powerful combination in terms of the results you can produce.

Anchoring Exercise

This exercise may seem strange at first and will take you out of your comfort zone. You may want to do this in a private and familiar environment. Also, you will need to do this exercise with your eyes closed.

Focus again on the experience you described previously when you felt absolute certainty about something. You may have had absolute clarity about a solution to a problem or answer to a question. Recall more details about this experience in terms of what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste. Say ‘yes’ repeatedly as you recall this experience, and as you feel more certain say ‘yes’ louder and do your associated anchoring move. Continue until you feel 100% certainty.

State Management Close

The key to success with the state management process, is to keep practicing it every day until it becomes habitual.

The anchoring exercise may feel unnatural to begin with, but once you start to see the positive impact it has on your prospects, you will be prepared to look a little weird in the short term, as it leads to your success and wealth.

Practice, practice and more practice is really the key message here.

By Jordan Belfort's "Straight Line Sales Psychology : Inner World "State Management""