The Market Outfit

I always say to my children, as long as you try your best, there
is no such thing as failure. I believe this one hundred percent
and it is a philosophy I am trying to install into my kids.

When I worked in the insurance industry, I used to sit the
insurance examinations. I would always study hard and give it my
all, however there were only three options as results. These
were, distinction, pass or fail. I hate this word fail, in their
eyes I failed twice, but did I though? As already stated, I
could not have tried any harder, therefore how dare they call me
a failure.

This result of fail is also a very negative and some what cruel
mark. The question I would like answered, is did I fail by a
long way, only a couple of points or quite a few points? Seeing
the word fail tells me nothing. I personally think that
everybody should be given a mark, possibly with an A for the
best mark, going down to a G for the worst.

I was discussing this very subject with a colleague from work.
He actually agreed with the points I was making and told me
about an argument he had with one of his teachers when he was at
school. He had overheard this particular teacher, discussing his
sisters previous years examination results, with another
teacher. They were being very critical about her, basically
saying how badly she had done. My colleague knew how much effort
his sister had put in and told the teacher as much, stating that
in his eyes she had passed every one of those exams.

Whatever you do in life, as long as you try your best, your can
do no more.

Lawyers and psychologists aren’t the only professionals who find themselves the butt of jokes. Consultants suffer their share of barbs, as well.

Steady and somber TV newscaster Eric Severeid wisecracked that a consultant is an ordinary person “more than 100 miles away from home.” Countless others have quipped that a consultant is someone who is paid to borrow your watch and then to tell you what time it is.

By some standards, every meddling in-law qualifies as a consultant, albeit an unpaid, uninvited one.

It makes you wonder, then, why do companies support large and small consulting firms year in and year out, and why are increasing numbers of individuals seeking them as “coaches” to guide them to wealth, fitness, and happiness?

As a consultant’s consultant, I try to address this question with my students at UCLA Extension, who sign-up for my “Building Your Consulting Business” course. I ask them, as an ice-breaker:

What are people really buying when they hire you?

What value are they expecting to get?

Answers fill the expansive white board in front of the room:

Advice. Expertise. Experience. Objectivity. Perspective. Credibility. Credentials. Improved productivity. A friend. A listener. A justification. A scapegoat. Change agent. New skills. Training. Data collection. A report.

On more than one occasion a potential client has said the following to me:

“We don’t think you know any more than we do, but our people are getting tired of hearing it from us, so we’d like them to hear it from you.”

(If you look hard enough, you can find an insult in that comment!)

Some clients are saying, “Tell us what we already know,” and others are saying, “Tell us what we don’t already know.” While it seems foolish to request the former, there are some solid reasons for doing so.

Many of us forget what we’ve learned. Just look at salespeople, experienced ones, who seem to descend into that netherworld known as a slump. If anyone needs a consultant, they do.

What am I doing wrong? Why aren’t people buying from me? Have I lost my touch?

In many cases, a ride-along will reveal much, during which a consultant merely observes a salesperson in front of prospects, sometimes posing as a trainee. Is the seller doing the basics, the essentials? Is he or she breaking the ice, establishing needs, selling benefits, and above all, closingasking for the deal in an appropriate way?

Is he losing sales he should be earning, and why?

Often, seasoned salespeople become so distracted by their product’s details that they complicate things, over-talk, and violate that age-old maxim: Keep It Simple, Stupid! They might over-analyze and under-sell. Compared to rookies, veteran sellers can forget to do such elementary things that, by comparison, they make upstarts and recent trainees seem like geniuses.

So, a consultant might be just the right person to NOT listen to their excuses, instead focusing on their behaviors, good, bad, and irrelevant.

Sometimes, a consultant is the equivalent of the traveling peddler of the 19th century, who brings news of the outside world to remote villages along his route. Despite the fact that we live in an information age, most company insiders keep their blinders on when they’re at work, believing that the best methods are already being employed, so there is no need to review or update them.

A typical consultant works in multiple environments, transferring technology and skills across industrial sectors as he goes. What he observes working well in a software company might be a perfect fit for a distributor of office products.

Incumbents in these respective sectors aren’t going to make such discoveries on their own, because their noses are stuck, for the most part quite justifiably, in their own provincial trade publications. A consultant, in effect, makes them see what is otherwise not apparent to them.

Perhaps most significant is the contribution that a well-traveled and experienced consultant or coach can make in terms of expectations. Salespeople as well as non-salespeople work on quota systems. Sometimes they’re formal structures, to which salaries and incentives are tied.

In most cases, quotas are informal, unwritten, and even unconscious. They’re implicit statements of what management believes is possible, in terms of achievement. Unchallenged, and unexamined, these quotas exert a gravitational pull downward.

They say, don’t try any harder, because this is a good job. Stop at this point, and prevent your associates from challenging this threshold, as well.

A consultant may be the only person who can come in and say, “Hey, the four-minute mile was broken by Frank Ryan years ago! You can’t believe how fast people are going, today!”

I consulted to a fundraising company that represented a wonderful charity. My best suggestion was incredibly simple:

Ask for twice as much in your initial presentation to potential donors.

Until I came along, they were too timid and too complacent to try such a bold move. But it worked incredibly well.

Of course, cynics might claim that anyone could have suggested that.

Put your consulting hat on: What do you think?

Dr. Gary S. Goodman ©2006

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of www.Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service. A frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide, Gary’s programs are offered by UCLA Extension and by numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations in the United States and abroad. Gary is headquartered in Glendale, California. He can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com

Didn’t your father bug you about will power, and how it separated
the boys from the men, and if he was from the computer-age,
the girls from the women?

After much research we admit to not discovering a definition for this willpower that was both consistent and conforming to 21st century science.

Today it is considered a myth by many, and like nostalgia for more innocent times, the more we examine it, the less we have.

Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President said, - We all require pigheaded persistence-and-determination in the face of stubborn resistance and adversity. -
Willpower is defined as overcoming something or someone.

How about overcoming us?

When one part of us wants to lose ten pounds of ugly fat, and the other part answers - Cut your head off!, and reaches for that shiny, delicious chocolate donut, we are getting closer to how willpower plays out.

Descartes

Forget for a moment his Cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am.

What he did in 1620-50 was create a trichotomy (dividing into three), Soul, Body and Mind, what was previously a dichotomy (two branches), just Soul and body. He’s responsible for the separation of mind from body.

Today, the cutting edge scientists never refer to Soul; they cannot find it with fMRIs. They refer to Bicameral Resonance - two governing parts of our brain.

Many have trouble pointing out (imaging), the half called Subconscious mind.
Psychological literature has no difficulty laughing at the anatomically invisible soul, yet they consistently refer to the - invisible - Subconscious as the seat of our emotions and behaviors.

Our conscious mind is easy to find, it is our Temporal, Frontal, Occipital and Parietal brain cortices. Cognitive skills are activated by our prefrontal cortex.

Your left-hemisphere runs logic, reasoning, math, language and music - including reading and writing, listening (comprehension), and communicating. Pretty heavy.

What about this? The average college graduate is absolutely convinced, (see: Gallup research), that we are sentient creatures that control our lives through conscious analysis followed by intelligently thought-out behaviors. It is that or we are criminals or demented. It is accepted we are left-hemispheric dominant folks.

Subconscious

Everything in our lives from motivation, to decision-making, to behaviors, are permitted by our subconscious mind or inhibited. Counterintuitive to commonsense - it is not our all knowing, all powerful conscious mind that decides ourlifes’ decisions.

Healthy minds are led by our subconscious, with a nod to our fellow traveler with the big reputation. One more step - feelings follow imagery, meaning cause-and-effect is based on what consistently appears on the movie-screen of our subconscious mind.

If there is no agreement by both minds - there is no decision or satisfaction with our
conscious, logical, reasonable decision. Don’t laugh, but the heart has its reasons.

They call it Cognitive Dissonance - conflict between our thinking. Conscious mind
does have a veto power of half-a-second, but it is rarely exercised.

Stress and anxiety, even panic occur when logic and reason choose one path - romance is an outstanding example - and our emotions (heart), is a contrarian.

Right-Brain

Consider using the term right-brain for Subconscious mind, and left-brain for
the other half of mind.

Our right-brain specializes in looking at wholes (holistic), is intuitive,
subjective, random and synthesizing (combining, putting together). It accesses
feeling, searches for patterns, it run parallel-processing, and multi-tasks.

Righty is independent yet interdependent, and communicates with Lefty through
your corpus Callosum, Anterior and Hippocampal Commissures.

The most interesting reality about our right-brain is first, that it runs our lives,
and second, that it takes its goals and objectives from our conscious mind.

How and when we can consciously give order to righty is often the secret of
success in life. It is based on auto-suggestion, affirmations and meditation.

Consider this: both halves work together 100% of the time, but one half
is dominant. We live in a left-brained economy, (except during war), which values
thinking and doing - based on logic and reasoning. Engineering, computer programming and all forms of science are left-brained skills, while creativity and
imagination is best left to our right-brain.

During waking hours we operate in Beta cycles per second, and are left-brain dominant.
During twilight-snoozes and sleep-time our Delta (REM) cycles per second are
dominant. This is certainly not a partnership of equals - our left-brain is constantly
attempting to keep input from righty to a minimum.

It treats righty in an adversarial way, more like a child or wife of the 19th century.
Be still and be useful, and thankful you are permitted around. Perhaps that is the cause and effect of up to 26% of mental illness in the population - according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Endwords

Proactive-Interactive-Reactive change occurs in us only when we inform and influence our Subconscious (Right-Brain), to permit it. Persistence and determination does not cut it. The law of Reversed Effort consistently reveals that
the harder we try (more willpower) - the worse the results. When will is in conflict with feeling, our willpower always loses.

Change occurs when our right-brain mental filters and censors are down; our right-brain is conservative and overprotective. Our conscious (left-brain) can initiate
new behaviors, but it must be by subtlety and indirectness.

Ask psychologists how easy it is to promote meaningful change in even the smallest way - for people who are spending hours weekly at it, at a cost of $350 an hour.

Yes, Virginia, change is possible - 5% of alcoholics improve - that is not a typo.
Dedicated folks stop smoking, and IQ can be raised up to 50%.

Motivation - feelings - habit-through-repetition are required to modify our existing behaviors.

Speed reading graduates who practice for 15 minutes daily for 21 days with new
strategies will triple their reading speed, double their memory. They can read
and remember three books, articles and reports in the time their peers can hardly
finish even one.

Reading (snailing), is exclusively a left-brain skill, while speed reading combines massive right-brain strategies with core left-brain input.

If you desire a massive competitive-advantage, the ability to operate on the
fast-track for your career promotions - motivate both hemispheres of your brain for
optimal success.

Author of Speed Reading for Professionals, published by Barron’s
Educational, business partner of Evelyn Wood, creator of speed
reading, graduating 2 million, including the White House staff
of four U.S. Presidents.

http://www.speedlearning.org

hbw@speedlearning.org