Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

Now, in terms of how to start using this in the real world, you’ll find that with just a little bit of practice, you’ll be applying the right tonality and body language unconsciously—meaning, automatically—whenever you find yourself in a situation of influence. But, until then, you need to be extra vigilant about consciously applying the right tonality and body language to every word and every turn of phrase. This will ensure that your prospect stays firmly in your magnetic zone and doesn’t tune out.

Before we move on to the next chapter, I want to go through some key nuances regarding the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind—specifically, how they work hand in hand with one another to guide all your prospect’s decisions, especially during those crucial opening seconds, when your ability to bypass their conscious mind and speak directly to their unconscious mind will dictate whether you succeed or fail at taking control of the sale, and then again at the end of the sale, when your ability to speak to both minds at once will allow you to push past the action threshold of even the toughest prospects and achieve the highest level of Straight Line competency, which means that you can close anyone who’s closable.

So, that being said, let me start by dispelling one of the greatest myths regarding the relationship between the two minds, which is: that the conscious mind is the more powerful of the two.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Some 200 million times more powerful than its conscious counterpart, your unconscious mind, with its blazing speed and near infinite storage capacity, is what keeps you alive as you move through the world. Working around the clock, it controls your entire autonomic nervous system—regulating your heartbeat, your blood pressure, your respiration, your digestion, your hormone secretions, and every other system in your body that seems to hum along effortlessly without you having to think about it.

Broadly speaking, the primary goal of your unconscious mind is to keep things the same, or, in scientific terms, maintain a state of homeostasis. Your weight, your body temperature, your blood sugar level, the amount of oxygen in your blood, the amount of light hitting your retinas; each of these things and countless others like them are constantly being adjusted to maintain a certain set point that a million years of evolution has deemed to be optimal.

Conversely, your conscious mind is literally starving for processing power as it tries to make sense of things while you move through the world. In consequence, at any given moment, it can only focus on 3 or 4 percent of the surrounding environment, and it deletes the rest—allowing it to focus 100 percent of its relatively meager processing power on a few key items that it deems most important. Collectively, these key items represent conscious awareness, and the way you analyze them is through logic and reason.

For example, at this very moment, 95 percent of your conscious mind is dedicated to your primary focus, which is reading the words I’ve written, and listening to your own inner monologue as it debates what you’ve just read. The remainder is dedicated to your secondary focus, which consists of a handful of things that are happening close enough to you to be picked up by one of your five senses, and are either too extreme or too intermittent for your conscious mind to become desensitized to them and block them out—a blaring TV in the background, a noxious odor, the banging and clanging from a nearby construction site, someone snoring, your own breathing if you have a stuffy nose.

Meanwhile, the 96 or 97 percent of the world that the conscious mind is deleting is being captured in its entirety by the unconscious mind. You see, not only is it responsible for regulating all your bodily functions, it also acts as the central depository for all your memories.

In essence, everything you’ve seen or heard has been neatly filed away there, no matter how insignificant it may have seemed at the time or whether you remember it now or not. Your unconscious mind recorded the experience, compared and contrasted it with similar past experiences, and then used the results to refine and augment your internal “map of the world,” as the phrase goes, which serves as your internal barometer for formulating snap decisions, instant judgments, and first impressions, your internal model of how you perceive your environment, how you believe it should operate, and how you believe you should operate within it, which types of behaviors lie inside your comfort zone and which ones don’t.