Transcription
If there was one characteristic that I could give that would make somebody an excellent salesman, it would not be the ability to script. It wouldn't be influence techniques. It wouldn't be persuasion techniques. It would be confidence.
If I'm training someone to go recruit foreign assets to spy on their own country for America, I need confidence. Number one. There is nothing else. Would you all consider me a confident person? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. I can probably out-confidence anybody. I never feel a need to, but I can. I can do anything. But I have the same, if not more, limiting beliefs as everybody here. When Eli's introducing me 10 minutes ago, there's something in my head that said, "Everybody's gonna laugh at you. They're going to know you're faking it. You're full of..." I don't care if you've done this for 30,000 hours. I don't care if you wrote the number one best-selling book. "They're gonna know you're faking it." That's still in my head as I'm standing here. It's in my head. It does not go away.
So the beliefs we had as kids, those beliefs about ourselves and what we're capable of and what we should do, everyone in this room carried into adulthood without our consent and without our awareness. What if I had an alcoholic dad or an parent? "Don't make too much noise. Always ask if someone needs help. That's the only way Mom's going to like me." So the moment that those limiting beliefs start coming up, I want you to get into a habit of identifying those over and over again and keeping them in a folder. And here's the second part: I want you to keep a running list of the limiting beliefs and whatever is your most embarrassing or most powerful limiting, limiting belief, and have it really big, right on your desktop, right on your phone wallpaper. "I will never be good enough." Right in front of you.
What it's going to do is make you look at that and say, "How stupid. How stupid is this?" Can you convince your dog with words? Can you convince your dog with a poster? Then it's not going to rewire your life because there's an animal brain that makes all those choices. And the animal can't read. Your conscious mind is going to be there to remind you that it's very, very stupid. And the relationship starts to change very rapidly over time. So what I want you to do is pretend those limiting beliefs are coming through a radio station, some kind of Sirius XM, whatever. I need you to name that radio station and figure out what that's called. So the moment it happens, what do you have as ammunition? You know the name of the words that, that we're listening to. So now this thing has a name. When we name something, we take ownership of it.
I want you to imagine yourself, and I want you to make this as vivid as you possibly can. You're walking through a mall and you have a six-year-old kid. You're holding this kid's hand. And every five or six steps, the kid looks up at you and says, "Somebody's gonna laugh at you. They're going to judge you. It's going to be funny." We would smile at that because of the source. And then you look down at that little kid and realize that's you. Those are all the things that kept you safe as a kid. Where all the things that you as a child thought would keep you safe. The moment we make a decision to hear those things as fiction, everything changes. Confidence changes.
How do we trigger limiting beliefs? We push a little bit outside the comfort zone. There's no secret five-step formula technique. Get the hell out of the comfort zone. The limiting beliefs are going to come up. Identify them. Write them down. Put a wallpaper, make them into a wallpaper of your phone, of your desktop. And what does a dog respond to? Words or emotion? So what's the emotion that's being felt when you see your limiting belief in big lights, big billboard of it? You're like, "Wow, that's stupid." Shame, embarrassment, anger, but never enjoyment and never acceptance. If you're looking at it, it's right there in front of you. Everything changes.
If you were selling something and you genuinely believed, and I want you to understand the word genuine, not like self-help seminar genuine, but like real human life, actually believe that your product is the best in the world, and that your salesperson in the world, and that you can connect to anybody better than pretty much anybody, would that be slightly delusional? Is believing you're not worth it delusional? It's believing you shouldn't stand up delusional? You're already delusional. All we're doing is picking what we're delusional about. Why can't I just do the other thing? I'm already lying to myself. I'm already delusional. I'm just going to choose to do the other thing. And when you start to act confident, they're going to come up again. And what our first response to those, those limiting beliefs should be gratitude. What would you say to a six-year-old kid trying to tell you that? "Well, thank you so much. I realize you're trying to help me. I really appreciate that, but I'm a grown-up now."
And that's what's holding people back. That's what's holding salespeople back who lack confidence. Managers and leaders and companies who lack confidence. This is it. The soil has to come first. The limiting beliefs have to be number one priority because the beliefs are what's under everything. Finally, when it comes down to confidence, I want to talk to you about what confidence actually is. And I think it's a mixture of two things. So all of our doubts about confidence, everything keeping you from confidence, is lack of safety. Confidence is safety. In the words, overconfidence, which is how I described it to make it seem more dangerous, overly confident. Over what line? Overconfident people have an advantage that other people will never, from birth to death, they will never enjoy. Overly confident people get better results and better outcomes from humans than anyone else in the world. Think Bill Clinton's delusional? You bet your ass he is. Overconfidence, unfair advantage, better results than anyone else in the world when it comes to leadership and obviously sales.
So I said confidence was about two things. The first thing I said was safety. The second thing is a generalized, remember that word, not specific, generalized expectation of positive outcomes. Just basically, things are going to be all right. That's it. Things are going to be just fine. Now I'm completely safe. I'm at home and I'm comfortable. Instead of having a positive affirmation watering the plant, you change. You get rid of this that the plant's sitting in first. And the roots will change over time. We have to focus on the hardcore stuff, which is at, at the bottom, in the soil, is where it matters.