Archive for October, 2009

I was going through my bookshelf looking for something while dusting off the dirt. Frankly, I have no idea why I was looking for it. For some reason, I just stopped writing, got up from my chair and went to look for something.

I have hundreds of books, manuals, binders and printouts on the bookshelf. I felt myself pulling towards this book I read few years ago. It’s called “When you can walk on water, take a boat (Download FREE)” by John Harricharan. The title of the book is not only a beautiful metaphor about life but also something to think about.

When you can walk on water, take a boat.

It’s very much presented in a biographical story where you’ll think about “if it’s true”, “I wonder if all of this happened to John”.

This book will mean different things to different people. It can be true, it can also be a metaphor. When I first read the title of this book, I was like “Whoa, now that’s heavy duty”.

This book is not about religion, or just mindless babble on spirituality. You’ll read a story about how author goes through the process called “LIFE”. In a metaphorical way, he meets god in many shapes and forms (from Krishna to jesus to Buddha).

If spirituality is not your thing, then well and good, I will just like to talk to you about this metaphor about the book title.

Like I talked about how people goes through their life in motions. In the motions of life, even though we might be looking for shortcuts, we are doing it wrong. Life is not a go through process. Instead its a journey. And we are taking every step with out eyes closed and making it harder.

That’s what metaphor is saying “If you can walk on water, don’t waste your energy, take the damn boat”. When I first read the title, it hit me like tons of bricks. I was like “funny, how things can be so simple and we make it so damn complicated”, there’s no need to.

Personally I don’t know what this will mean to you as you are different from me. I do suggest you to take time out and read this book and it’s sequels “Morning has all night coming” and “Journey in the fields of forever”.

Couple of days ago, I was chatting with someone who is studying some persuasion techniques. He was talking about matching, mirroring and “swear to god” techniques that work .

I told him, “You cannot persuade anyone who doesn’t want to be persuaded”.

His response was, “No, that’s the beauty of these techniques, you can persuade someone like that”.

Yup, I can see, he is enthusiastic about what he’s learning right now and everything these persuasion experts are saying to him works.

His enthusiasm right now reminded me of the time I spend learning persuasion, NLP and hypnosis. I wasn’t much different from him at that time. Ah, it’s a process everyone goes through.

Young kids (age 4–7) can be great example of the the kind of people who are hard to persuade.

Have you ever faced a kid who has puffed up his cheeks, arms closed and looks away from you when you are telling him why he’ll not get THIS toy?

So far, I’ve not seen any scenario where kids were ever persuaded. They are dead set on getting what they want, and who cares about others…

In persuasion everything comes down to one simple thing, Does the subject want to be persuaded or not?

You cannot make up mind for others. You cannot force your will on others.

In hypnosis, the subject who says “I can’t be hypnotized”, often goes into trance faster. Their refusal is token refusal, it’s like a cry for them “oh yes, pick me, pick me, I want to be hypnotized”.

Now, I can hear people who are into sales grumbling about how often they get rejection and they have to overcome these rejections with ‘persuasive techniques’. So what’s happening there?

Again, the resistance is just a token resistance. Not real at all. If you are in setting with someone trying to sell, the person is interested in one way or another. You just have to over the barriers he/she produce to your sales pitch. People these days have automatic shields against selling. Yet, they are getting sold over things they have interest in.

So how do you go about people who don’t want to be persuaded?

You don’t. There can be many reasons they don’t want to be persuaded, yet.

Notice I said, “YET”. Persuasion changes with Every situation, every person. If they are not ready yet, then you have to wait for them to be open enough to get persuaded.

Like I said earlier, You cannot make decision for others. And it’s true in every walk of life. You don’t have to “attempt” to persuade someone. You just have to be good at Listening, Articulating and Understanding their problem. And the above 3 skills take time to master.

Varun

Desire. Commit. Succeed.

Yesterday evening, I spent 3 hrs in meeting with one of the sharpest marketing mind in New Delhi. We discussed content, marketing strategies and many others things that we are going to cover in my upcoming seminar on building business.

One of my foundational base is “Scientific advertising”. In this, you have to understand the nature of your product, your company, your customer base and so much more so that you can create a marketing frenzy. It goes beyond what you might think about marketing or selling.

And because I have worked with pretty darn successful companies in New Delhi. I realized they have no concept of marketing and selling. Often their marketers are doing the job of salesman (and doing a piss poor job of it) and their marketing is literally man-handled by people who should have nothing to do with marketing at all.

For Example :– One of the Marketer for this publishing company was more worried about selling the advertisement page for the magazine rather than creating a strategy which results in automatically selling those pages, building a database or may be more effective brand awareness.

And these marketers have gall to brag about how successful their last campaign was. When you ask them what are they going to do afterwards, their silence give you the answer. Sometimes I wonder what exactly they think their job as marketer is?

Ah, I digress.

The problem with institutional advertising is, it’s too time consuming, too resource hogging, too pricey and almost always gets results which cannot be substantiated. This is where most business owners get owned and swallowed by their own business.

And this is exactly where I am going to show how anyone can handle their own marketing with just a shift in mindset. If your base is “scientific advertising”, then you’ll see results of your campaign and be able to realize and make informed decisions whether you should scrap this campaign or not before it starts bleeding your account dry.

And that’s how exactly you should be doing your business.

For example :– I helped a marketer with a full page advertisement which was going on 4 national monthly magazines with re-creating the offer, changing image position and improving the overall impact of the advertisement. The results was staggering. He could not believe how much response his ad got. His office was swamped with calls and people tried to get their hands on the offer.

The best part was he knew when to scrap this campaign as it started losing steam and instantly changed the offer with new advertisement improving his results. 

Now this is what I call smart marketing. I did help create the advertisement, but it’s his job to make sure he runs it and follows it afterwards. Most MBA grads spend spray shinning their diploma/degree rather than understand how to actually successful market and campaign their products.

I’ve been working on the concept of self image for quite a few years now. One of my earliest discovery lead me to believe it’s more important to have a good self image than self confidence.

It doesn’t matter what kind of situation you are in, you can always work on your self image and improve results you are getting.

About 3 years ago, I found a book by Dr Maxwell Maltz called, “Psycho Cybernetics”. He also puts a lot of importance on the self image rather than confidence. The more I studied, the more I was convinced the power of self image.

If you look at peoples lives (or yours own life), you’ll see, you are a product of habit. If you change any habit, you change as a byproduct of that change. Everything depends on your mental image of yourself that you carry with you always.

Mental image like “I am a failure”, “I am just damn unlucky” or “Damn, I am good” or “I am better marketer than a seller”. Anything that’s your story becomes a mental image.

Your mind starts confirming the image you have in mind by changing your habits. I wonder if you noticed this phenomenon, let’s say you wanted to buy a new car with a special color and suddenly you start seeing this car a LOT more than you used to.

Why? Because your mind creates an abstraction around your sight to make you see things you want to.

Why? because it makes it easier for mind to process the details around you. Otherwise, you’ll end up remembering SOOOOOOOOOOO many things that you’ll go crazy.

So taking the above in consideration, If you think you are unlucky, you’ll start procrastinating every single time and always ending up losing. If you think you are better marketer, you’ll find yourself getting lots of ideas but not being able to close the deals. And so on.

So the process becomes

Mental Image -> Mind confirmation –> Habit change -> Live Results.

You see, the concept of self confidence never even comes up. In fact this concept is so damn flawed that the only one who teaches it are the self development teachers who teaches but does not do it. You know, like they say “Those who can’t do it becomes teacher” is pretty darn true.

Again if you are not confident about selling or may be you can remember anything you read. All you need to do is start changing the image.

I have developed a very sharp memory since my teenage years. About 4 yrs ago, I somehow developed a habit of saying “Ah damn, I just can’t remember people’s name”. And suddenly I found myself forgetting a heck a lot of people’s name. It was like my mind was confirming what I was saying. At that time I was working on the concept of self image so I didn’t have technology like that to create instant change but What I did was started working on my memory and start getting results in 8–10 days.

That’s how powerful this stuff can be. Your self image, your mind is Powerful tool that hasn’t been utilized 100%. Heck I doubt anyone can utilize his mind (may be I need to change image on this idea too).

Change your self image, change your mind, changes your habits and Life.

Varun Pratap

Desire. Commit. Succeed.