Creating congruency by ?walking my talk'

We have all had the experience of having days where we are on a roll. We are in the flow and people just can’t help but want to do business with us. We have also all had the experience of feeling like we couldn’t sell a machine gun in a prison riot.

The ever-elusive “zone” is the holy grail of selling. If we are in the zone, everything seems to flow naturally and things fall into place. Is it possible to make our access to the zone more consistent and predictable? How can we access the zone when we have difficult days or are dealing with especially difficult people?

The most powerful part of our communication is unconscious. When we are in the zone, there is an alignment between our conscious and unconscious, which is why we feel such a sense of flow. Think of a time when you casually threw a piece of paper at a wastebasket and it went in. You threw the paper without thought – there was no voice in your head, no conscious conversation with yourself about getting the paper in the basket. If you then tried to repeat the same thing, telling yourself how to do it, odds are that wad of paper ended up on the floor. So much for the effectiveness of your “inner coach.”

When you are in the zone, there is no separate conscious voice. In fact, we often have our deepest experiences with a sense of oneness or completeness when we are in this state. Why are we not in this state more often? Why can’t we predictably access it? There are many reasons, but one of the most important is the conflict between our conscious and unconscious minds when we are trying to perform. We are often and largely incongruent.

And people are incongruent because they are not sold on what they are selling – they are not buying what they are telling others to buy. Simply put, they are not walking their talk.