CHAPTER 1 "The Trusting Mindset" (Or How to Think Like a Squirrel) In the 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck, Austrian Alpine skier Franz Klammer took home gold with a final run that skiers still talk about in awe. No competitor had yet been able to catch the leader and defending Olympic champion Bernhard Russi of Switzerland; numerous times, officials had to halt the skiing due to dangerous, icy conditions on the course, and even though the final event had the green light, the course still seemed too slick to permit the kind of double-poling usually required for a fast start. Klammer, however, skated hard out of the gate, double-poling wildly. But the ice didn't give way, throwing his weight to one ski. To regain his balance, Klammer tried to shift to the other ski. He lost his balance in the other direction. The key to winning in Alpine is to run the straightest line from start to finish, staying in a low, aerodynamic tuck while keeping your skis gliding flat, almost frictionless over the hill. Klammer was anything but aerodynamic. He whipped around the sheered corners first on one leg then on the other, clipping gates, just missing the out of bounds fences, his arms and feet flailing, his skis slipping and clattering as he hurtled down the mountain. Most ski fans were praying for Klammer not to get killed. His own coach, Toni Sailer, later commented, "I closed my eyes and thought this was the end of the gold medal. I only dared re-open24 JOHN ELIOT, PhD them when I didn't hear the sound of a crash." Somehow defying all seemed to be waving red and white Austrian flags. Klammer snow flying. He barely avoided piling into the crowd of 50,000 who physics, Klammer barreled over the finish line, careening to a stop, looked for the scoreboard: Russi 1:46.06. Klammer 1:45.73-the fastest time of the day and the gold medal! The press was all over him. ABC's Wide World of Sports, famous for dramatizing spectacles such as the "Agony of Defeat" wanted to know: "How in the world did you do that?" "What?" said the gold medal winner, a battery of microphones stuck in his face. "WIN!" "Well, I'm a pretty good skier, you know," replied the charismatic Austrian with a wink. "No, how did you clock such a fast time with such a terrible run?" "What do you mean terrible? I think gold's a pretty good color"> One journalist pointed out that he was clearly off balance, his arms wind-milling, catching too much air yet somehow managing to ski faster than competitors who turned in nearly perfect Then came the classic reporter's question: "What was going through runs. your mind?" "What was going through my mind?" Klammer repeated, as if to try to understand what the guy was getting at. "Nothing. I was just trying to get there [pointing to the finish line]. Fast!" Evidently Klammer was not thinking about the correct line down the course or the proper technique to maintain flat skis. He wasn't thinking about gold medals, either. Franz Klammer was just racing. Where? To the finish line. di But how did he do that? How did he manage to keep skiing without thinking the same things that all the "average" performers (and reporters) in the audience were thinking-that he would break a leg or eat a gate of surely from t I wou answe sports and p into t about given perfo at th othe I hav ever focu or E Buf or J not wh in juc irr at Su tc fr 6.0 t r t Eying to a stop, 0,000 who Klammer 73-the Sports, Defeat" nones natic 22, r." is g 6. OVERACHIEVEMENT surely lose his number one World Cup ranking? How did he keep from thinking about crashing? Those are the kind of questions I would have asked Franz Klammer at Innsbruck, because the answers provide the secret of high-stakes performance not only in sports but also for actors, musicians, business executives, doctors, and performers in every other field that requires someone to step into the limelight and excel under pressure. How do they not think given performance when they're under the gun? about all the distractions and possible outcomes and the details of a Fortunately, over the past two decades as a teacher of top of many performance psychology and as a professional adviser to performers different fields, I have been able ask hundreds of other talented men and women how their minds work under pressure. I have found that the top players in every field think differently from everyone when all the marbles are on the line. Great performers focus on what they are doing. And nothing else. When Jordan Spieth or Ronda Rousey cannot seem to make a false move, when Warren Buffet or Bill Gates is in the middle of a deal, when Yitzhak Perlman or Johnny Depp blows the critics away with a performance, they are not thinking about their technique, what their teachers told them, what their attorneys or accountants advised. They are able to engage in a task so completely that there is no room left for self-criticism, judgment, or doubt; they are able to stay loose and supremely, even irrationally, self-confident; they just step up and do what they're good at, concentrating only on the simplest nature of their performance. Superstars perform so naturally and so instinctively that they seem to be able to enter a pressure-packed situation that would terrify or freeze most people-as if nothing mattered. They let it happen, let it go. They couldn't care less about the results. at the As we say in performance psychology, "they play with their eyes." They just look at the target and shoot. And the ball goes in; the deals get closed; the stage performance is thrilling. Often, in my opinion, the results are works of art. Asking Franz Klammer to recreate that gold medal run would be like begging Leonardo to paint another Mona Lisa. It just doesn't work that way. 2526 JOHN ELIOT, PhD The good news: research and experimentation have But before you can master this superstar's mindset, you that this kind of exceptional thinking is within everyone's reach. proven first Klammer, "What was going on in your mind?" they are inclined to understand why, when people ask great performers like Franz answer, "Nothing. 99 Journalists and fans tend to take such responses as displays neurobiology of high performance actually confirms Klammer's answer: What he was thinking was, at a cognitive level, truly "nothing." of arrogance or coyness, or rehearsed, canned sound bites, but the To be sure, great performers are well-trained, experienced, brains work during a performance is a lot more like a squirrel's than divinely talented. But the way their Einstein's. Like squirrels, the best in every business do what they have learned to do without questioning their abilities; they flat out trust their skills-which is why we call this state of mind geared for high performance the "Trusting Mindset." Routine access to the of the pack. By all accounts, to be free to turn your skills loose under Trusting Mindset is what separates great performers from the rest is a divine feeling. The source of that sensation, however, and the ability to do it, is hard-wired in every one of us. In fact, you've probably already experienced the Trusting Mindset, without the gun even knowing it. must 37 "As if It Doesn't Matter..." If I were in the room with you right now-about six feet away-I'd ask you to toss your car keys to me. You'd be able to handle that, without any right? In fact, I bet that if I asked you to do it six times in a row other instruction, you'd toss those keys right at me, chest high, every single time. I'm pretty sure about the result because I perform this experiment every year in my performance psychology class by tossing my car keys to students, and having them return the toss. Sometimes I use a whiteboard marker or an eraser (if I don'toven ach. ust anz to ys де S >> OVERACHIEVEMENT want them running off for a joyride). But whatever the instrument, they toss it back perfectly, a bullseye, toss after toss, without the slightest of error. If you're like my students, you'll be thinking: "What's so amazing about throwing a set of keys to someone six feet away? That's not hard." You're right. Key-tossing is a skill that we all seem to have. I bet you could do it sidearm, left-handed or right, even behind your back. Tossing an object a few feet is so easy that, as the saying goes, we don't even think about it. To perform exceptionally whether it's hitting a golf ball pure, closing a critical deal, pulling off a big sale, moving an audience with a violin concerto, or even transplanting a heart-requires you to be in that same state of mind, empty of all doubt, without any thought about the mechanics of what you're doing. All those years of education, training, and experience... you cannot pull up those lessons in your memory as you perform. That's the opposite mindset, the Training Mindset. In the TRUSTING Mindset, you have to let all that expertise be there, instinctively. Our ability is maximized when we let our skills do the work, not our heads. As professional golfers like to say, "you have to trust your swing." You have to just toss the keys-pure Trusting Mindset. The results of putting the Trusting Mindset into play are never disappointing. Anyone who has experienced its astonishing benefits is eager to figure out how to tap back into it, making it the Holy Grail of high-stakes performance. Unfortunately, people tend to devote too much time to thinking critically and evaluating themselves. In my teaching and consulting, I have found that people get it better once they understand more about how their brains actually work under different circumstances. The Neurobiology of High Performance You can break down the Training and Trusting Mindsets into an almost bi-polar set of descriptors. Take a look at the following chart:28 THE TRAINING MINDSET Active Mind Judgmental Analytical Scientific Wanting It Now JOHN ELIOT, PhD Calculating Effortful Critical Intentional Controlling THE TRUSTING MINDSET Empty Mind Accepting Instinctive Artistic Patient Reacting Playful Quiet Rhythmic Letting It Happen telephone These contrasting qualities of thinking, which produce different performances, also depend on a different neurobiology as different, in fact, as you and a squirrel running across a wire! When you stand at the top of a telephone pole, 50 feet in the air, and look at the infinitesimally thin wire you're trying to cross, a million issues are likely to race through your head: I'll never make it; it's too far; it's too high; the wire's too small, too unsteady; I can't balance on this thing; I'll kill myself; this is crazy; it has nothing to do with "real courage"; and so on. The squirrel, on the other hand, just scurries across the wire, as we say, without thinking. Of course, that's because squirrels cannot think. Their sensory system receives sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches. Their brains are able to process this information, act accordingly, and execute skillful patterns of behavior. The human brain can do all of this, but it can also complicate matters: we can evaluate the sensory information and the situation, analyzing all the angles, and then intentionally instruct ourselves to improve our performance-all qualities of the TRAINING Mindset. This ability to reason, evaluate, and make rational calculations is what separates us from other animals, and, to be sure, such rationality is a blessing in life-except when you are performing under pressure. Then you want to put aside the Training Mindset and respond to the stimuli bombarding you as much like 2e OVERACHIEVEMENT Trusting Mindset. a squirrel as humanly possible. Squirrels are natural masters of the I want to help you find your inner squirrel. Consider that moment in a physical examination when the doctor taps your knee with his reflex hammer-and your foot kicks straight out, reflexively (i.e. without a thought). It's called a "myotatic or flexor reflex," and the neurobiology goes like this: The blow of the hammer compresses a sensory nerve in the knee, altering its chemical structure, which, in a chain reaction, sends an electrical signal along the nerve up to the lumbar section of the spinal cord. This ascending nerve connects to a parallel descending motor nerve that dispatches the electrical signal down to the muscle group that causes the leg to extend. If you're sitting on the examination table and the doctor taps your knee without warning, your foot will actually kick out even before your brain gets the signal that the doctor is armed with a hammer. Neuroscientists call this chemical-electrical response "closed loop information processing." (Mention that to your doctor during your next physical, he'll be impressed.) The classic flexor reflex is a human response that is far less complex than the neurobiology of a squirrel scurrying across a telephone wire. There are actually four types of closed loop processes: 1. Monosynaptic Reflexes (the flexor reflex), which are the shortest and quickest, involving the fewest neurons 2. Multisynaptic Reflexes, organized through spinal cord interneurons (e.g., responding to stepping on a piece of glass accidentally, or picking up a scalding cup of coffee) 3. Brainstem Regulatory Functions (such as controlling the heart and lungs) 4. Patterned Intentional Behavior, organized in the thalamus (the same kind of processing the squirrel is using) With each progressively more complicated function, more neurons and more neural junctions are involved. Of the human body's roughly 100 billion nerve cells, the flexor reflex needs onlytwo to function properly. Higher thalamus, might those at the brain stem or thousand. The cerebral cortex, however-home of number of brain thought, judgment, reason, and calculation-needs billions of level, the Training Mindset, is called open looped-open, literally, t nerves to do its thing. Information processing that occurs on that interpretation. Once the cerebral cortex gets involved, the transfer from incoming sensory data to outgoing action is influenced by any s adding input, thus slowing the system down, impeding behavior efficiency, and increasing the chance of error? The squirrel has no cerebral cortex. But the animal does have a thalamus, a bunch of clusters of neurons in the brain, ganglia, called "pattern generators" that produce programmed activity in to stimuli. It's the highest level closed loop processing available to the brain. The squirrel runs across the wire or finds food by executing ingrained instincts-trusting them, so to speak. The signal in, gets turned into a pattern in the thalamus, and a response is sent out. If the wind is blowing the wire to and fro, that sensory stimulus is sent to the squirrel's thalamus, which modifies the motor pattern sent out to allow the squirrel to react to the change and s balanced on the wire. With no cerebral cortex, the squirrel i distracted by any complex assessment of information, cannot say "Oh, crap!" nor judge likelihood of success, and thus sticks with a closed loop process-with virtually no misplaced steps, I balance, or fatal falls. loss of We humans can assure a similar kind of closed processing by taking our cerebral cortex out of the game, as it were, and allowing ourselves to react to sensory stimuli with motor responses we have already stored. The star basketball player looks at the rim and shoots No evaluating the distance, no decisions about how high to extend the shooting arm over a defender, how much to flick the wrist for perfect rotation, or what the consequence might be if missed. No use a 30 ses, such couple hundred conscious response comes stay is not 2 Neuroscience teaches us that there is a positive correlation between the number of neurons involved in performing and the for mistakes.as andred onscious ons of on that ally, to ansfer by any down, or.2 ave a alled onse the ing es 1S ry or y t OVERACHIEVEMENT pattern generator-the up the spine to the thalamus into a central thinking period. Neurologically, the sensory information shoots "superior colliculous" is the one in charge of the kind of motor skills used in basketball-where it is organized, transferred to descending neurons, and sent back to cause the arms and hands to do what a basketball player has trained his arms and hands to do. In other words, look and shoot. For the star basketball player, it's instinctive just as it is for a squirrel-executed the same way as tossing a set of keys. Unless you are distracted by your inner critic. Conscious thought will convert these to open loop operations. Once the cerebral cortex is activated, the system begins to look a lot like a California freeway at rush hour (particularly like intersections referred to as "spaghetti junctions")-millions of neurons releasing multiple kinds of neurotransmitters into hundreds of synaptic junctions all at the same time and converging at the same pattern generator (or worse, simultaneously at conflicting pattern generators). It is up to the brain to figure out where all the signals should go. When the cerebral cortex gets very active-all that reasoning and evaluating that goes with the Training Mindset-the brain's pattern generators get overloaded and thus the system gets bogged down, producing less efficient, less successful action, with a greater number of mistakes. In short, you don't perform with your "A-game". But you are still capable of being a skilled Truster. As the experiment showed, we are born key-tossers. Tossing a set of keys seems to require no thought, very squirrel. The consequences are minimal (next to none) so we don't bother to use our cerebral cortex. We just act, and thus the thalamus produces whatever pattern it has stored via a closed loop. But if I told a large group to come back next week for one chance to toss that same set of keys into my hand, chest-high-this time for a $1,000,000 prize to the most accurate tosser-enter open loop processing. Things would likely turn scientific; people would start practicing. A few contestants would surely find a way to sneak into the room at night to get in some repetitions on the "game field." They'd set up video cameras to help them work on their key-tossing technique. "Did I keep my 31M 32 wrist square with the target? Was my elbow aligned for the optimum toss?" I wouldn't be surprised if people started going t simple, "minimal synaptic" task, not to mention to the gym to get into key-tossing shape. a fun game, is now difficult and filled with a potential for anxiety. What was a room-and end up choking. Imagine if we turned key-tossing into a Once the pressure is on, people try to toss a set of keys across a college sport with full-ride scholarships. Summer key-tossing camps charging 65 dollars an hour for private lessons. How-to books would for kids would appear. Coaches would pop up around the country, Sports would sign an exclusive TV contract, Nike would buy rights hit the display shelves at Barnes and Noble. Before you knew it, Fox print their logo on the keys and, depending on the genius of the promoters and advertisers, we'd be on the way to 40 million people to watching "The World Series" of key-tossing. If you think that's crazy, remember that the multi-billion dollar professional sports industry evolved from games invented by kids in backyards and sandlots. And then consider the rapidly increasing popularity of the X Games-professional skateboarding, sky diving, and street luge-and there are even lumberjack championships on ESPN where men and women compete against each other sawing massive logs. I recently read of people training for an annual hot- dog eating championship on Coney Island, which is the finals of an official international league-I kid you not: MLE, Major League Eating-featuring point spreads, performance enhancing drug accusations, instant replay review, a six-time title holder who has turned his wins into seven-figure endorsement deals, and an average of 1.95 million TV viewers each year. But it's still just eating hot dogs-or skateboarding, or chopping down trees. What has changed is the mindset. That instinctive, free-wheeling, "What's the big deal?" trusting attitude has been replaced by an analytical, critical, evaluative, "there's a fortune hanging on this toss so I better make sure I've got it right" training approach to performance. Superstars do not think that way. : When it's go time, when it really counts, technique is not on their mind. Like a child playingn O OVERACHIEVEMENT tag or kicking a soccer ball against a backboard, they give their skills free reign and do not focus on anything else but the target of that particular moment. Or in the words of hot dog eating champion Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi, weighing in at a mere 145 pounds: "I was standing right next to him [6 ft. 5 in., 400 pound foe Eric "Badlands" Booker], but I was too focused on my game. I didn't want to suffer the mistakes I had made in the past, where was looking around to see what everyone was doing. It was just me and the dogs." That is the Trusting Mindset at work, albeit for the curious honor of eating a "world record" 110 hot dogs in 10 minutes. ("The Tsunami" won his first title in 2001, eating double the number of hotdogs as Booker-and two other 400 pounders!) When the job is on the line, great thinkers resist the urge to be smart, cautious, or scientific. They manage to keep their cerebral cortex off the playing field or out of the boardroom. For them performance is simply "child's play"-which suggests a useful definition of the superstar's edge: The Trusting Mindset is what you were in before you knew any better. -vd The Feel of It - Athletes who've actually been in the Trusting Mindset are notoriously inarticulate about what happened. Franz Klammer could not get much beyond the description that "nothing" was going on in his mind. Most athletes tend to stress how little control they try to exert-"I was playing out of my mind," is a common description- while they let their skills simply take over. Similarly, astronauts, pilots, and well-trained soldiers who have performed super-human feats with their life on the line talk about being a little concerned at first-"and then my skills kicked in." Actors and musicians tend to34 moment." Some performers have described talk about it in spiritual terms: "I was in the present." "I stayed in the an almost out-of-body experience in which playing the role or the music comes so easily feeding off the audience's response, watching themselves as if that they have the feeling of hovering over their own performance, And while the press has not quite gotten to asking wizard entrepreneurs, CEOs, heart surgeons, or other highly successful external observer. business executives what it felt like to score big under pressure, I athletes and musicians I have worked with or interviewed have, and their answers are pretty much the same as what I hear from were so totally involved in what they were the many They thinking through their steps or evaluating themselves. remember only the feel of the performance; they weren't cautiously I think you know the feeling. Go back to key-tossing-to that sense of doing something that doesn't really count, the freedom of performing like a kid at play. Nothing is riding on throwing keys so you just let them go, and perfectly so without trying to be perfect. Here's another example I like, one that former college football coach and NFL Super Bowl champion, Jimmy Johnson, used to help his players play with more abandon, which I now use in my class: Put a two-by-four board on the floor and walk from one end to the other. JOTO 186 can It is not hard. Not one of my students has ever fallen off the board. If you videotape yourself, you will see that your foot hits the middle of the board every step of the way, as if you were walking down the street. Your eyes just look past the board at the far end, to where you're going, and your feet just move. Now suspend that board 30 feet into the air and walk from one end to the other. A whole lot harder. I suspect that your form would change CAPE VOUSI stayed in the t out-of-body mes so easily performance, ves as if ing wizard successful pressure, I hear from erviewed: they can utiously -to that om of eys so erfect. coach 5 his he e an 60 OVERACHIEVEMENT and say, "No way!" You'd inch along, maybe extend your arms for balance, look down at the board or the ground below. Or maybe you'd stand at one end Yet the process it takes to walk across that board-on the ground or 30 feet in the air-is EXACTLY THE SAME. Even for the mid-air walk, all you have to do is look at the other end and go, if you were as walking down the street (or walking along the board as if it were on the ground). Theoretically. Practically, it's a different matter and this, I believe, illustrates the feeling that accompanies the Trusting Mindset perfectly. A tightrope walker is in a Trusting Mindset in an environment where everything screams: "Watch out! Be careful, gauge every step, get back in the Training Mindset!" The difference between circus performers and the rest of us is that they have conditioned themselves to perform just like simply, as if out on an afternoon stroll. squirrels and step onto a sky-high, swaying wire, effortlessly and Speeding Toward the Bottom Line It is easy to see how this kind of trusting mentality might work for an actor or musician caught up in the moment of performance. Like a downhill skier, they are in no position to stop and evaluate what they're doing. They, too, have to adjust on the fly. But what about the business world, where rationality and evaluation rule, where success is determined by profit and losses? Every quarter, financial officers are checking the balance sheets. In business, the definition of a successful performer is "making your numbers." Surely, that requires depending on the higher processing of the cerebrum. rum But legendary business performers don't think this way. Like legendary athletes, they divide their time between working on their game and playing it, between training and trusting. And while in business verbal skills are likely to be more important than motor ones, business superstars practice accessing their inner squirrel in order to perform their best in high stakes situations. 35rate lete out spot. ng of etball orks). ialize oca's ding ice, the on nt of d. r UVE EVEMENT employees, of books on "10 proven strategies to sell anything" to all of their or actually have their own, hundred-plus page sales manuals: 1) You dial the number; 2) You say, "hello"; 3) You begin by talking about...; 4) You raise the problem, and then say It's as if the work could be successfully completed by a well-designed step by step, the kind of easy personal and emotional connection computer program. But when you are thinking about how to sell, that increases your odds for selling disappears. The big sale is a lot less likely to happen if you are counting up the number of widgets you're selling, translating that total into gross and net profits, or keeping a watchful eye on your approach and delivery, instead of engaging your customer. Such self-consciousness only fires up your cerebral cortex, those billions of neurons go to work, and in such an overloaded mental state, mistakes get made: You fail to pick up subtle but important cues from a sales prospect, you stumble over your notes in a presentation to the board, and when questioned, you give poor answers or explanations. After it's over you say, "Oh, I should've..." Selling is very different from trying to be a salesman. Getting an A in "Sales and Marketing" at the Harvard Business School is not the same as being what the celebrated General Electric CEO Jack Welch used to call an "A-player" in the sales department at GE. One, in fact, is a classic example of the Training Mindset, while the other is a result of the Trusting Mindset. d That is not to say that great salesmen can ignore training. Far from it. Hundreds of hours of practice and sacrificed weekends spent at training programs are necessary to develop your talent. But there is a time to evaluate how you did and what you must do in the future to improve. And there is a time to perform. When sales count, when the company's bottom line is in your hands, it's time to enter the Trusting Mindset. The best executives go there all the time; they've purposefully devoted so much time to practicing thinking that way that they can switch it on at will. And so do the entrepreneurs, surgeons, diplomats, politicians, and other best- in-their-class performers. best 3738 JOHN ELIOT, PhD "When I concentrate on the target, I forget everything else" in Tokyo. He's actually talking about his accomplishments says Hisashi Yamada, a top engineer for the Toshiba Corporation champion archer. But Yamada switches on that same kind of trusting focus at work where he is leading a joint team of Toshiba and NEC engineers in a tense race against Sony and Samsung to develop the next generation of 3D NAND memory chips. From "forgets about everything else," he is likely to be more successful at of competitive archery, Yamada knows that when he his years whatever he does. more often and more quickly than athletes or even In fact, business people have to switch into the trusting mode tight rope artists. Performing on the high wire, like most sports, is a programmed affair: The show is at 7:00 p.m., and so at 6:45 you are business, the phone will ring and suddenly you're talking t who has just announced that he's pulling a ready to go. In to a client million-dollar account you are in the middle of a step. Only someone who's conditioned from your company. You are not only already out on the high wire, her instincts to be in the Trusting Mindset can keep from falling- from losing that million-dollar account. as a How do great performers in every field switch on the trusting mode at will? Some do it intuitively, and that is why we call them "natural talents." Others, however, have learned to trust their abilities and their experience by gradually spending more and more time at work in the Trusting Mindset. You can learn it too, but you have to be willing to be uncomfortable at first. If you're skilled at using your Training Mindset, just letting yourself trust will feel quite foreign. Often when I describe the Trusting Mindset to my clients, they immediately ask, "What do I have to do to make it happen?" I tell at me as if I'm them to do nothing-and then repeat it again and again. They look . But that's exactly how the best perform; they practice thinking of nothing when the pressure is on. More practically stated, they practice giving their performances specifically using the kinds of thoughts and feelings in the Trusting column of the chart above. They devote time every week to working without judgement a 11 t F S S S tJOHN ELIOT, PhD 36 spot. a product and must be prepared to answer questions on the Consider sales. The salesman on a call has to give a spiel about information will occur just as it does for the key-tosser or basketball For the experienced salesperson, the closed loop processing of Sensory stimuli will be sent to the parts of the brain that specialize player (though using a different set of neurological networks). in cue recognition and language production (Wernike's and Broca's areas, named after the scientists who discovered them). Depending on a customer's questions and reactions, a skilled seller will a pattern of explanations, facts, or illustrations. Just generate as athlete relies on the right motor patterns ingrained from years of practice, visual, spatial, and verbal patterns-stored during their education sales pros, or any top business executive for that matter, will trust the and on the job experiences-to be at their side during an important deal. They, too, just let it happen. When you talk to great salesmen, they tell you stories of pulling off an amazing close. Typically, the result was Sunday, They went into a meeting, began talking to the guy on the other side of the desk whom they didn't expect to be in a buying mood. They break the ice by talking about the football games on marveling at how Emmitt Smith took over Walter Payton's all time NFL rushing mark at 33 years old in really the last game available to break that record in front of his family and home crowd. Suddenly, they realize that they were both at the same game-sitting only two rows away from each other! The experienced salesman reacts to that coincidence by building on it, keeping the conversation flowing, looking for more connections that might create the kind of bond with his client that will clinch a sale. They proceed to discover other things in common: friends, colleagues, interests. Before they know handshake worth $3,000,000. it, two hours have passed, and, better still, the meeting ends with a Neither the genuine pleasure of those two hours of work nor the sale that resulted was planned. No formula exists for pure salesmanship any more than for an astonishing round of golf or a great night on stage. Yet many companies give thousands of copies of er IT b I S t 1
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