Program your Subconscious

by Graham Denton

What your mind can see, the rest of you can achieve. That's a fundamental principle of all mind-body training, and it's a valuable principle for the professional salesperson to apply. One good explanation of its power can be found in The Secrets of Super Selling: How to Program Your Subconscious for Success, by transactional therapist Lynea Corson and sales trainers George Hadley and Carl Stevens. As the subtitle implies, the heart of this book is the reprogramming of your hidden mind away from negative positions and toward positive effects.

The selling "secret" that gives the book its name involves three steps. To get what you want in your life, the authors say, you must:

1.Identify specific details of your goal.

2.Identify unwanted thoughts and feelings about reaching that goal.

3.Program your subconscious to empty any unwanted thoughts and feelings and achieve your goal.

Notice that, although the gist of this programming process seems very negative -- the erasing of impediments -- it only can begin after you've clearly defined the goal, where you want to get to once you've redefined yourself. This is an essential beginning. As the authors say, "Your subconscious doesn't need you to tell it how to produce the result. It only needs to know exactly what it is you want."

As an illustration, they cite the example of a car and truck dealership which needs, toward the end of a season, to move last year's vans. That's a general goal. To make it more accessible to your subconscious, they say, begin with Step 1: identifying the specific details of that goal. These might include finding families who need more car space, finding buyers with a certain level of income and a good credit rating, and selling all vans within the next sixty days at a certain profit margin.

The next step would be to identify unwanted thoughts and feelings. These might include the idea that people with big families (who might need a van) can't afford one and the idea that van sales often fall through for lack of adequate financing. The final step, programming your subconscious to eliminate these thoughts and feelings, would involve writing "positive denial statements" about each one. For example: "I no longer believe that people with big families can't afford vans; I sell my vans easily to such people" and "None of my deals fall through because of credit problems; everybody either gets good credit or pays cash."

These denial statements, the authors say, are not negative. They are in fact "strong statement of your refusal to buy into negative thinking." To reinforce them, they suggest a time-honored method. Read them aloud every day, or put them on tape and listen to them regularly until your inner thoughts are redefined -- "until the old belief is erased from your subconscious." Such reprogramming will not make your sales automatic. But it will make them possible.