PEOPLE WANT TO BUY FROM WINNERS
One of my favorite scenes from "The Wolf of Wall Street" was when Matthew McConaughey was teaching Leonardo DiCaprio how to sell. I don't appreciate the vulgarity, but I do appreciate the core of what he says, which is that people want to buy from someone who exudes the energy of a winner, a success.
And winners are not stressed. They're relaxed, they're having a good time, they're super confident, almost arrogant, but in a fun way. They're having the time of their lives and they're inviting you to the party.
Now, it's easy to act like a winner when you feel like one, but what if you're not actually confident yet? What if you're not succeeding, or you're just having a bad day? Is your sales success destined to be at the mercy of circumstances, or can you manipulate your emotions to do what you want them to do?
THE ACTOR’S METHOD TO CONTROLLING EMOTION
One of the big things you have to learn how to do as an actor is to cry on cue. They teach you how to do this in method acting through an exercise by Stanislavski called sense memory.
You start by taking about five minutes to calm your mind, sit quietly, try to relax, and let your brain go into theta waves, which is basically like meditation.
Then you think of a situation that would upset you, and you focus on your five senses.
Let's say you were to imagine that your dog died. You would first focus on what your dog smells like. You'll focus on the nuances you hear. Maybe you'll hear the vet ask your mom how old the dog is, and then you'll hear your dog whimper a little bit, and then maybe you'll even hear your own voice talking to the dog about how much you love him, how he's always there for you, how you want to thank him for all those wonderful memories he's given you.
Then you might focus again on the smell of that room, it has that chemical taste. And then you might kind of taste that sour taste in your mouth because you're so nervous that you didn't eat. You go through those five senses, and I can guarantee you, when you get to the fifth sense, you're going to cry.
YOUR MIND CONTROLS YOUR EMOTIONS
Now, I never really put down my dog, but it didn't matter because the mental movies we actors played in our heads were almost as real to us as reality. Even back then, I was fascinated by how much control your mind had over your emotions. Even when you were fully aware that what you were imagining was not real, it felt real just the same.
Now, the good news is that when we needed to do a scene that made us excited and happy, guess what? We did the exact same exercise. The only difference was the scenes we played in our minds. We would think of something amazing, funny, or exciting.
What would it really be like to win the lottery, or get to the top of a mountain, or fly? Sure enough, once we train our imagination, we can act out any scene of ecstasy and show real emotional life through our characters because we're not faking it. We really feel it.
EMOTION IS ACTIVATED BY RECALL
Let me ask you a question. When you're upset, whether you're anxious or depressed, is anything bad happening to you at that moment? With very few exceptions, it isn’t that you're being tortured at the moment. If you're depressed, it's more likely that something happened in the past, and if you're anxious, it's probably that you're afraid of what's going to happen in the future.
Now, I'm not trying to minimize this. I'm just trying to point out that it's not occurring in the present. You carry that emotion in your mind, and you activate it by what you call up in your memory, imagination, or thought.
It's like sense memory, whether that thing you believe or focus on is real, relevant, or true, whatever it is you're focusing on, is what you will feel.
GET YOUR BRAIN OUT OF AUTOPILOT
When your brain is on autopilot, you're basically letting your brain decide which reality, dream, or horror story you're going to live in today. And your brain will naturally drift to the most emotionally triggering thought. If you want to be able to focus on something, you have to make it more emotionally compelling than the distractions. And you do that by endowing the object of focus with an emotional trigger.
Now, here's the important thing. Sense memory is not done during an audition, or in your case, during a pitch or presentation. It is created beforehand on your own time when you are alone in your room. When the scene or meeting begins, just call a single trigger into the mind from that mind movie we created, and all the emotions we built up and connected to it will come flooding back as if they were real memories.
MIND MOVIES
If you've done your homework for your mind movie, in which you are the king of your own little world and really dive into detailing every sense, your sense of smell, your sense of hearing, your sense of taste, your sense of touch, then all you have to do before you make a sales call is to remember one of those moments or one of those images and it triggers the emotional life that you need to bring to the call.
Maybe you create a scene that makes you feel confident and another one that makes you feel super happy, and just before you jump into your call, you just need to recall that memory and get yourself into the right state.
I want to encourage you to try it this afternoon. Instead of letting the conversation in your head be dominated by replaying what you should have said to a member of another political party, try using a sense of memory about the vision that you have for your life. Don't just say it. Focus on it and what it would be like when you achieve it. What does the scene look like? Whose voice do you hear? What do you smell?
ENDOWING OBJECTS
Some people will endow objects that can bring up the emotional recall faster. For example, maybe they are most confident playing baseball, so they do a sense memory of baseball when they are holding a real baseball, and afterward just tossing the baseball back and forth in their hands will trigger that emotional memory.
Emotional recollection is an art form. If this were easy, everyone would be a famous actor. And just like muscles, it's a skill that gets better the more you practice it. Just imagining the smell of a baseball field once is not enough to overcome your stage fright. But if you practice it, you may find yourself winning an Oscar or at least closing a few more deals.
Sensory memory and emotional recall can be used to get you into a state of confidence. It can be used to get you into a playful mood. It can be used to get you to focus on what's in front of you instead of all the distractions of the day. You can even use it to give something like training more of an emotional boost than it might really have for you. And, of course, most importantly, you can cry on cue when you don't get what you want.
Take the initiative to think of scenes that would make you feel great, think of times when you felt super confident. Go through all five senses one by one. What did you smell? What did you taste? What did you see? Then think of an object that reminds you of that memory.
MICHAEL JORDAN
Michael Jordan is famous for doing this. People would always think he was so in the moment, but really what he was always doing is he would think of situations that would make him riled up so that he would constantly be giving his all when he was training. He gave an example of this young guy who beat him one time, so he made a whole mental movie out of it, and he used this emotional trigger over and over again during training to really motivate him.
The next exercise I want you to do is to literally just write down a scenario that will get you into a state of confidence before the sales call. Think of a scene that makes you feel happy and giddy, and then think of an emotional recall, or maybe an object that you can use to easily get yourself there.