Sales & Persuasive Techniques: Buoyancy: Develop A Resilient Mindset – Part 11/15

Now we’re going to talk about what kind of mindset you should cultivate to be the most effective persuader. Dan, came up with this concept of buoyancy after spending some time with a fellow named Norman Hall. Norman has spent 40 years selling brushes door-to-door in the business district of San Francisco. Dan spent a lot of time following him around. And one day, Norman got frustrated at him. He told me that I don’t understand how hard his job was. He said that every day, he faced an ocean of rejection, not a pond of rejection, an ocean of rejection. And that’s what it’s like when we are persuaders. People are going to say no many more times than they are going to say yes. And we have to learn to deal with that.

And here’s the thing, human beings hate rejection. I hate rejection. I’m used to it. I still hate it. You probably hate rejection. In some ways, hating rejection is like hating the weather. You can’t really do anything about it but you have to equip yourself to deal with it. And it makes you better in your job as a persuader if you’re able to be more buoyant. But I think there’s a larger second point, too. Which is that your life is going to be full of ups but it’s also going to be full of downs.

You’re going to get rejected in your personal life. You’re going to have disappointments. You’re going to have failures. You’re going to have regrets. Buoyancy allows us not to let that sink us. And it allows us to stay afloat. And if we’re able to be resilient, if we’re able to be buoyant in the face of all of this negativity, we’re going to make it to the next day. We’re going to make it to the day after that. We’re going to survive and we’re going to thrive.

The Keys To a Successful Pep Talk

For several decades, social scientists have been studying something called self-talk. That is the human capacity to talk to ourselves. I talk to myself. I know you talk to yourself. It’s cool. Everybody does it. But how we do it can make a world of difference.

Suppose that I am in a persuasive encounter. Say I am going to go pitch a new book. And I am going to go to a big meeting and I am going to sell this big idea of this great book. Now, the traditional form of self-talk that we’re taught in pop culture, in certain sales training, by our athletic coaches, and whatnot is positive, affirmative self-talk. I say to myself, you can do it. You got this.

There is a better way to do this. And that is called interrogative self-talk. Instead of affirming yourself and saying you can do this, turn it into a question and ask yourself, can you do this? And if so, how? Now, these make the self-help gurus grow nuts. How dare you question yourself? How dare you introduce doubt here. But what the science tells us is that they’re totally wrong, that interrogative self-talk is enormously effective. Let me show you why.

Let’s go back to me, pitching the idea of a new book. Maybe I stopped in the bathroom before the pitch meeting is up. Telling myself that I can do it. Again, better than doing nothing. But what if I do it this way? I ask myself, “Hey can you do it? And if so, how?” What happens? The nature of the question, the nature of the interrogative is that I kind of has to respond.

So how do I respond to that? I could say and tell myself that I can do this and that I have done this several times before, and that my book was really great. I could also tell myself that all I just need to make sure of is to convey the central idea and why it’s both substantially interesting and commercially valuable. I can further question myself if I can do this. And I’d say, Yeah, I can do this. The last time I pitched, I didn’t do a good enough job of listening. So I got to chill out a little bit, maybe listen a little bit more.

So what is the point of all these going in here? I’m rehearsing. I’m preparing. And so while positive self-talk can be valuable, what’s actually more effective, in a way, is more muscular is the interrogative self-talk because it inspires you to answer the question. And in answering the question, you prepare, you strategize, you rehearse. And that improves your performance.

Bouncing Back From Rejection With Explanatory Style

Here’s another way to increase your buoyancy and that is to change your explanatory style. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Explanatory style is basically how do you explain your failure or rejection. And a lot of us explain it in a way that is personally debilitating and often inaccurate. One very important piece of research in this whole body of evidence comes from a fellow named Martin Seligman. He did this research several decades ago. And he went on to become one of the founders of positive psychology. But earlier in his career, he studied life insurance salespeople, most of them, men. In Pennsylvania. And they went out and followed these life insurance salespeople trying to figure out who is effective and who wasn’t.

In some ways, it was a measure of the training that they had. What kinds of training are effective and what kinds of training was not effective? And it turned out that their actual explicit training didn’t matter all that much. What mattered was their explanatory style, particularly how they explained failure. And there’s a huge lesson in here. And it’s this, human beings really don’t like rejection. It feels terrible. We have a tendency to think of it as a catastrophe and so what some of this research tells us is how do we de-catastrophize rejection?

What he found is that people with a certain explanatory style were able to do that and remain buoyant in the face of rejection. Seligman ended up fashioning what he calls the three P’s; Personal, Pervasive, and Permanent. Our tendency when we face rejection is this.

Go back to the idea of me pitching my book and let’s say that I get rejected. I told myself “Ugh, it’s all my fault.” That’s normally how we feel. We make it personal. But is that accurate? Because chances are maybe I could have done better probably. But maybe that wasn’t all it was. Maybe they have another book just like that. Maybe this publishing company doesn’t have enough money. Maybe they have other kinds of projects and they think this is going to get in the way of them. So when you face rejection, ask yourself, is this personal? And it’s most cases, it is not entirely personal. And so, you can de-catastrophize by looking for the ways it’s not personal.

The next one, I might say if I get rejected, “Ugh, this always happens.” – pervasive. But you know what? It doesn’t always happen. So if you feel rejected and you feel like this always happens, check yourself. It doesn’t always happen. There have been times when you prevail. There were times when you were persuasive. There were times when you got what you wanted. It just so happens that this time you got rejected. It’s not necessarily pervasive.

The final P- “Ugh, it’s going to ruin everything.” That’s the ultimate catastrophizing. And we feel that way sometimes, it’s going to ruin everything. Permanent is our third P. But is it really going to ruin everything? Most things don’t ruin everything. And so you have to check yourself, is this really permanent? And most things are not.

And so, one of the best things you can do, to stay afloat in that ocean of rejection is to change your explanatory style and enlist the three Ps. Ask yourself, is this personal? It’s probably not entirely personal. Is this pervasive? It’s probably not entirely pervasive. Is this permanent? It’s probably not. And rebut those, start building those kinds of habits and you will be more buoyant. What I like about this exercise is that it’s not only applicable in our work lives but also applicable everywhere.

Treat yourself the way you would treat a friend. There’s another principle in the science of behavior called self-compassion. We tend to be relatively compassionate with other people. And we’re less compassionate with ourselves. So I want you to show a little self-compassion. If you’re feeling pessimistic, here’s what you can do. What would you say to your best friend who came to you and ask you if the situation was their fault? Not only as a sympathetic friend but also as an accurate observer of reality, you would say, “I don’t know if it’s totally personal there.” And they would continue to say “This always happens.” And you’d say that it doesn’t always happen. They’d say that it’s going to ruin everything and you’d definitely say it will not.

And so, if you are feeling this. If you are in this situation. What you should do is treat yourself the way you would treat your friend. And that will begin to allow you to develop some of the muscle memory to do this effectively over the long haul.