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

Operating on the fringe of mainstream psychology, NLP’s basic premise is that the human brain functions similarly to a computer and hence can be programmed as such to make near instant changes to certain key behavioral patterns. The only sticking point, however, is that before you can make any changes, you need to know two important things first:

 How to write code for the human brain

 What type of software to embed the code in

It sounds complicated, I know, but in reality it’s the exact opposite. Let me explain, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

According to NLP, the software of the brain is language, and the way you write code is by creating language patterns, which consist of a group of words—as brief as a short sentence or as long as a few paragraphs—that have been structured in accordance with a series of basic yet extremely powerful linguistic principles that can be used to reprogram virtually any person’s brain, including your own, in a number of very profound ways.

One of those ways forms the basis of NLP anchoring.

The basic premise of NLP anchoring is that human beings have the ability to choose how they feel at a particular moment in time, as opposed to it being chosen for them by what’s going on in their surrounding environment or their personal life.

In other words, we can be proactive when it comes to choosing our emotional state, as opposed to reactive, which is what most human beings have been conditioned to think is our only choice.

A vast majority of human beings believe that their current emotional state is a result of outside forces that are being exerted on them. For example, if positive things are happening to you, then you’ll end up falling into a positive emotional state; and if negative things are happening to you, then you’ll end up in a negative emotional state.

Now, obviously, the proactive nature of NLP’s state philosophy is attractive to anyone in sales, and for that matter anyone who wants to live a more empowered life. To that end, NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements, both of which are under a person’s conscious control. The first of these two elements is:

What you choose to focus on.

In essence, at any particular moment, you have the ability to choose the precise direction of your focus; and based on that choice, you’ll fall into a state that’s congruent with what you’ve chosen to focus on.

For example, if you spend the next few minutes focusing on everything that’s great in your life—a recent business success, being in a loving relationship, the health of your children, a recent goal you achieved, a family getaway—then you’ll quickly pop into a positive, empowered state that reflects all those wonderful things.

Conversely, if you spend the same amount of time focusing on everything that’s wrong in your life—a recent business failure, a divorce, a sick child, a recent goal you failed to achieve—then you’ll quickly fall into a disempowered state that reflects all those crappy things. It’s as simple as that.

The second of these two elements is:

Your current physiology.

Comprised of the sum of all the possible ways that you can move and hold your body—your posture, your facial expressions, how you move your appendages, your rate of breathing, your overall level of motion—physiology of human beings as it relates to each emotional state is nearly identical across all cultures.

In other words, human beings, as a species, will all adapt virtually the same physiology when they’re in a happy, positive emotional state. Put another way, people who were born and raised in Papua New Guinea don’t smile when they’re depressed or frown when they’re happy any more than Eskimos do, or people who were raised in Portugal do.

For example, if I pointed to a closed door and said to you: “Behind that door is a very happy woman! For a prize of ten thousand dollars, I want you to tell me which of each pair of these physical traits best describes her: Is she smiling or is she frowning? Is her head held high or is her head slumped over? Is she breathing fully and deeply, or is her breathing slow and shallow? Are her shoulders pulled back, or are they rolled slightly forward? Is she standing up straight, or is she slightly hunched over? Are her eyes opened wide or are they slightly narrowed?” (And, of course, the same questions would apply if it were a depressed woman.)

Now, just so you know, I’ve asked both of those versions to live audiences all over the world—the US, the UK, Australia, South Africa, China, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, Canada, Iceland, Germany, and pretty much anywhere else you can think of—and no matter where I’ve been in the world, the entire audience always answers these questions in the same exact way.