DEJA VU
by Richard White
The hair on the back of your neck
stands on end and you feel strangely spooky. You have
just seen and heard something that you are sure you
have experienced before. Was it a dream? Was it a premonition?
Was it an event just forgotten about? Science is still
struggling to explain and reproduce the déjà
vu phenomenon.
There is a different form of déjà vu
that is simple to reproduce, although slightly less
easy to explain. Top performers in most walks of life
and especially in sport use it every day. It is a standard
ability that we are all born with and most people use
fleetingly without realising its true potential. It's
the ability to use your mind's eye to repeatedly imagine
what you want until it happens. At the highest level
of sporting achievement, in activities as diverse as
golf, football, running, karate, and even table tennis,
sports coaches are seeing the dramatic improvements
in performance that can come from using mental rehearsal.
In this article we look at how you can start to harness
the power of mental rehearsal to further boost your
sales results.
Daydream your way to success
Mental rehearsal is as natural as daydreaming and a
powerful resource to any sales person open minded enough
to begin experimenting with it. Using mental rehearsal
regularly, little and often, can have a profound impact
on results. Mental rehearsal can be easily learned and
can help improve many different areas in sales performance,
such as:
- Integrating newly learned skills and techniques
so they become habitual;
- Improving self image and boosting confidence;
- Making personal and performance goals more compelling
and increasing the likelihood of success;
- Changing automatic emotional responses to certain
events (including rejection);
- Increasing performance levels of new skills, especially
inter-personal skills; and
- Preparing for sales meetings including potentially
difficult circumstances.
Making sense of it all
The unconscious mind is the realm of the five senses:
sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. When we experience
things, they get stored in the five senses. When we
recall a memory, we recall these senses. The secret
that sports psychologists have discovered is that imagination
works with the senses too and where performance is concerned,
the unconscious does not differentiate between an experience
that has really happened and one that has been imagined.
Your mind is the only place where you are guaranteed
to do things perfectly whilst you are still developing
your skills. Real experience plus mental rehearsal can
greatly accelerate your skill level. Amazingly, you
can actually programme your neurological system to do
an activity just by rehearsing it in your mind's eye
over and over again.
Sports coaches also encourage their performers to mentally
rehearse winning competitions and events as they have
found that we unconsciously begin to move towards compelling
goals that we vividly imagine. The practice of mental
rehearsal is supported by decades of research into personal
success factors from all walks of life, including sales.
Become a director of your
own movies
When mentally rehearsing, it is good to think of the
process similar to creating a digital movie in your
mind. This is not an ordinary movie where you are just
a character. It is a virtual reality movie where you
experience everything as if it was real. You have all
the options available to movie makers such as freeze
frame, cut and paste, fast forward. Changing some of
the qualities of the mental movie can have a dramatic
impact on how compelling the virtual reality experience
is. Things like colour, brightness, zooming in and out,
sound, texture, smell and sensations are all a matter
of personal preference and something to experiment with.
In your movie you can slow down things that are normally
performed for real in a split second (such as making
eye contact) to a frame-by-frame basis if necessary.
Alternatively, you can speed up things that take time
to do in reality, such as giving a sales presentation.
This way you can give the presentation in your mind
perfectly hundreds of times in the time it would take
you to do it once for real.
Design a happy ending first
Unless you are mentally rehearsing a fixed procedure,
it is normally easier to start to design your movie
by selecting the final scene first and work back to
the beginning. The great thing about designing your
own movies is that you can make sure you always have
a happy ending! Here's an example of a final scene from
an important meeting with a hot prospect:
You imagine you are sitting in your car driving out
of the customer's car park. You glance over to the passenger
seat where you can see a copy of the signed contract.
You are on a high as everything has worked out just
right. You congratulate yourself at how you skilfully
managed to overcome the objections that arose and still
managed to close the deal. You are looking forward to
celebrating this significant deal with your workmates.
Now go back in time and create some more scenes from
key parts of the meeting. Keep working backwards until
you get to the beginning. Once you have all the scenes
in place, play the movie from beginning to end. After
running through the whole movie a few times you will
be able to run through it much faster whilst still getting
the same impact.
Getting into the mood
While you can do mental rehearsal anywhere, it seems
to work best when you are relaxed and in a slightly
dreamy state - Just like daydreaming. First thing in
the morning is a great time - when you are just beginning
to wake up and before you are fully awake. Snooze alarms
are great devices for mental rehearsal! For most people
mental imagery will come most easily in this state and
for that reason it is prime time. There are other ways
of getting into a dreamy state, however, which do not
require a period of sleep first!
One method of getting into the right state for mental
rehearsal takes less than five minutes for most people.
Sit in a quiet area with your hands lightly on your
knees, close your eyes and take some slow deep breaths
from your diaphragm area. Breathe in slowly through
your nose and breathe out slowly through your mouth.
Focus your attention on the sound of your breath. As
your breathing begins to get slower you will notice
the sound of your breathing, you become aware of the
sensation of your knees beneath your hands, the feeling
of your legs on your seat and your feet on the ground.
As you continue to relax, and focus your attention on
your breathing you will notice how breathing becomes
increasingly still and effortless.
With a little practice this state can be achieved very
quickly, anytime and anywhere. This means you can use
time before appointments, on a train or any spare moment
you have to mentally rehearse something many times over.
Getting down to it
Mental rehearsal is easy for anyone to do and can produce
powerful results. The down side is that it is also easy
not to do. Just like in sport, non-directive coaching
from a supportive and encouraging sales manager or external
coach can really help to develop and nurture this all-important
habit in others. The best way for sales managers to
coach in mental rehearsal is to use the process themselves.
Mental rehearsal can be just as useful as a tool for
sales managers as for sales people. Whatever type of
performance you are engaged in, why not make déjà
vu experiences work for you?
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