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

You see, at that particular moment, you’re blocked from accessing your internal resources—in this case, your sales skills—so no matter how great of a salesperson you could be, you’re simply unable to access that greatness.

The same thing goes with your personal life.

Let’s say you’re a parent.

Now, obviously, you love your kids to death, and you pride yourself on being an amazing parent. In fact, you’ve even read a few books on parenting, to give you strategy and insight, so you really know what you’re doing. But let’s say you come home after a really tough day at work, and you walk in the door in a state of anger and impatience—two very disempowering states—then how good of a parent can you be at that moment?

Again, not very good.

Your anger and impatience have blocked you from accessing your resources for parenting. So, despite the fact that you still love your kids just as much as usual, and despite the fact that you still possess all those wonderful skills for being an amazing parent, at that particular moment you’re blocked from accessing them.

Here’s the bottom line:

As a salesperson—or as any success-oriented person—you must learn how to start triggering the key empowered states; otherwise, you set yourself up for a lifetime of pain. There are no two ways about it.

However, one point I want to clarify here is that what I am not saying is that you need to, or for that matter should even want to, live in empowered states all the time. That’s completely nuts!

Just think that through for a second:

I mean, what do you call someone who walks around all day long with their chest puffed out, in a state of absolute certainty?

You call him an asshole, right? We hate those people!

And you don’t want to be one!

I don’t want to belabor the point, but this is a far bigger problem in the self-development world than you’d think, especially with people who attend seminars that focus solely on inner-game skills. The problem that arises is that when you teach those skills without the context of a real-world application, the attendees almost invariably get the wrong message.

The key distinction here is that once you’ve learned the technique for triggering an empowered state (I’m going to teach you the most powerful one in the world in a moment), you only want to use it at certain key moments, when it matters most, like before you enter a sales encounter, or try to close a business deal, or enter into a negotiation, or even if it’s just an important decision you need to make in your personal life.

In fact, in the latter case, you definitely want to make sure that you’re in an empowered state, because human beings, as a species, make their worst personal decisions when they’re in a disempowered state (and their best decisions when they’re in an empowered state).

In terms of achieving success in sales, there are four key states that you need to learn how to trigger at will within state management. We call them the four Cs:

Certainty, clarity, confidence, and courage.

These are your linchpin states for achieving wealth and success. If you don’t learn how to trigger them, then you’re playing Russian roulette with your future—essentially hoping that you’ll be in the right state when you enter a sales encounter, versus knowing you will be because you have a surefire strategy to do it. The name of that strategy is olfactory anchoring.

I created olfactory anchoring almost a decade ago, in response to my personal need to instantly trigger an empowered state under what were becoming increasingly odd circumstances.

As the story goes, when I was on my first global speaking tour, I began to find myself in situations where it was crucial for me to be in an empowered state despite the fact that the surrounding environment was often working heavily against me.

For example, I was constantly getting cornered into doing last-second TV interviews, talk shows, radio shows, newspaper interviews, sponsor requests, and photo opportunities, all of which required that I look my best, act my best, and, in fact, be my best at all times. No matter how tired, jet-lagged, or completely burned out I was from being on a multiyear speaking tour, I was expected to perform, plain and simple.

In addition, on those very same days, I would also have to get up on stage and give anywhere from a two- to a ten-hour talk to as many as twelve thousand people who had paid good money to see me, so the moment I hit that stage, I had to take my state from zero to 100 mph in a matter of seconds.

That was the reality I was facing.

At the time, I had just started using a state management technique called NLP anchoring, which was part of a group of techniques and strategies that make up a body of knowledge known as neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, for short.