As you may have surmised by now, I’ve been influenced by Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street) I credit him for some of the material in this book and I do recommend you take his Straight Line Selling course. More of that later. Jordan has a unique way of managing the inner game which I will share with you now.
“My past failures and insults are now my muscle”

Do you want to know what the real secret to success is? It’s this:
Be willing to do today, what other people are unwilling to do, to get what you want tomorrow.

There it is in a nutshell, thousands of years of personal development boiled down to eighteen words. I suggest you copy these words and burn them into you psyche. There is nothing else required to succeed. Let’s dive deeper into what it means.

Be willing… this means you are prepared to do what it takes.
… To do today – not tomorrow, next week but today, preferably now.
…what other people are unwilling to do – for instance you practise your craft longer and harder, you make more cold calls, you phone the CEO when other target middle management.
…to get what you want tomorrow – you know your rewards come later; you are prepared to be patient.

Language

I write a lot about language in my other books, but here are a couple of words for you to eliminate from your vocabulary immediately, because of the negative effect they have on your psychology ie the inner game.

The first word is ‘problem’. What does problem make you think of? Aargh! Something has cropped up that has spoiled things and now xyz won’t work. This word puts you in an resourceful state of mind. Contrast that with ‘challenge’. This word has positive connotations. People like challenges, they test us, and they motivate you. Think of if someone says “I challenge you that you can’t do such and such”. You think right then I’ll show you. You roll your sleeves up.

Become a Creator of Circumstance

So two words describing the exact same scenario can affect how you think and therefore what you do next. This is the key – things will always happen and obstacles will always occur, it’s what you do next that counts. Become a creator of circumstances not a creature of circumstances.

The next word for you to eliminate is ‘should’. The word should describes an obligation. If you say to someone else “You should do xyz” they will feel obliged to. People don’t like to feel obliged to do something. They might perform the task but it won’t be as good as if they want to do it. Also catch yourself saying to yourself I “should do” to yourself. Again it implies an obligation to do something, which again implies it is not your goal. For example two people both have a few pounds to shed. One says “I really should lose a few pounds” and the other says, “I’m really motivated to lose a few pounds”. Which one of them is likely to lose the weight? Yet again one word effects your actions and therefore your results.

By the way if you are looking to lose weight contact me and I will show you how I did it.

Managing your State

Have you ever been in a crowded place and spotted someone you know? Think about that for a moment. Recently I saw an old colleague at a football game, where there were 90,000 people. How could I possibly spot someone out in such a crowd? Pure luck or chance? Well yes and no. I will explain.
Our conscious brain can only concentrate on a very small number of things at one time, but our unconscious mind is silently taking in everything we see and hear, as well as noting how we feel, what we smell, how warm or cold it is? For us to function effectively it makes sense for us to be conscious about only a few things, or we get overwhelmed. So the unconscious mind does three things to manage the information overload:

Deletion

Most of the information coming in is irrelevant so we delete it. Until there is a threat or, like a familiar face at my football game something novel to pique our interest. This is great as it stops us from overloading. It’s not so good when you realise how much we miss, including opportunities in business and selling. I go into this faculty of our mind on my post about het law of attraction (LNINK)

Distortion

This is also something to consider. Have you ever heard two people arguing over a referee’s decision in a football game? Clearly, they both can’t be right. At least one of them is incorrect because their mind has distorted what they have seen. Again, what we think we heard or saw isn’t necessarily what really happened. A prospect who says no, might not really be saying no. Ask for clarification.

Generalisation

This is useful because it means we don’t have to re-learn how to open a door every time we approach a new door. Our mind generalises to help us. This is a door and therefore this handle will open it. It is automatic and unconscious. However, we need to be careful with automatic generalisation. Whenever you hear the words – always, never, all, everyone, nobody take note as there is a generalisation coming and with it an untruth.
By being aware of deletions, distortions and generalisations, you can be more precise in your own language but also not take what your prospect says as necessarily the truth. Ask proper questions to pin down the truth. (LINK).

Managing Fear – the three ways

1. Ignore it. This is the victim’s way. They just take it and it prevents them from ever doing anything worthwhile. It leads to failure and is the loser’s way.
2. Act in spite of it. This is better than the losers’ way. They do it in spite of the fear. They are scared and may be successful but anxious.
3. The third and most resourceful way to manage your fears in sales and in anything is to accept it. This fear you feel is masking something much deeper probably from your childhood. It is usually from two core fears that humans have:
a. That you are not enough
b. You want to be loved because you are not enough.

The post The Inner Game appeared first on Mike Holden Sales.

Is intuition real and can we cultivate it?  What do dreams have to do with intuition? Does intuition and dreaming point to what is significant?

Three profound questions. Is that significant?

The law of 3 s

One great way to test whether what you are noticing is significant is the Law of Three’s. If you notice three related coincidences, then it is a good chance that this is the answer you need. You can use this in lots of ways. It could be a hint to go in a certain direction (buy a certain book).It might be that you have an ache in your back. It goes away to be followed by a pain in the hip. That goes away and makes way for a sore knee. The fact that you notice three things is significant, to focus on your structural health. Maybe look into starting yoga.

Is the Law of 3s Real?

The reason why I believe this law of three’s is real is that because you filter a vast amount of sensory information, you don’t even register it. You even disregard and forget many things. For instance, let’s take the example of buying a book. How many books have you browsed and then forgotten, because there was nothing out of the ordinary. How many times do you hear a recommendation about a book and disregard it immediately. And yet you noticed this book recommendation because it was the third time. The crux here is not that it was a coincidence or anything supernatural, the goldmine of information for you to grasp here is that you noticed.

What you notice is always significant.

Gut feelings

It took me a long time to trust that my gut feelings were real and should be taken seriously. It is usually when things go wrong that I look back and realise that I had a hunch and a gut feeling. I have two major examples that looking back had major impacts on my life.

The first was when I was looking for work in my early thirties after a failed attempt to get into business. I had two interviews lined up, both for commissioned sales companies. One for an engineering firm and one for a training company. The interview with the Managing Director of the engineering company went well. We liked each other and talked about our mutual love of self-development. I was offered a second interview to meet the board. The second interview, with the training company, was a group interview with other candidates. As I walked into their offices, I felt an all too familiar gut feel. Don’t walk away from this – RUN. I can’t put my finger on it why. It was just a no – no. However, the training company offered me a job, it was great money, with the chance to earn massive commission.

Much to my later regret, I took the job at the Training Company and turned down the second interview at the Engineering Company. Although it felt right to go with the engineering firm, my logic persuaded me that the training firm was better.

The Aftermath

I left that training company three months later. This doesn’t begin to describe the horror of my experience here. It was sheer drudgery. I hated the place. I didn’t like the company and their values, shall we say, were not the same as mine.

What followed was around nine months of wilderness for me. I will write about this time one day, but for now all I will say is that things just fell apart.
To cap this story off, years later one Sunday morning, I picked up my weekend Financial Times and settled down with a mug of hot coffee. I flicked through to my favourite column – How I made my first Million, in the Money section. Low and behold, there was the MD of the engineering firm, being featured. I was gob-smacked. There was the man I turned down, who could have been a mentor and friend.

Once bitten, twice bitten, thrice shy

The second story, will help you figure out how to trust someone you meet in business, in seconds. After three months of renovation, my very first investment property was ready for letting out to tenants. This was a small two bed apartment in a block of six flats. I put the property up for let with a local estate agent. I quickly received a phone call from another property manager, who got my number from another owner in the building. He offered to better any offer the original agent made to me to manage the property. He wouldn’t even charge me to find a tenant. We agreed to meet up at the flat; it was all agreed over a hand-shake and it was a weak hand-shake. It was limp and lifeless and he completely avoided my eye contact.

As I left the building having handed over the keys, I was filled with feeling of woe, which came right up from by gut. This person could not be trusted.
However, logic ruled. If I stayed with him, I would be better off each month, financially and he would find a tenant for the flat completely free.

Fast forward to four years later, I shuck hands with my new property manager. A good firm hand shake, great eye contact and a genuine smile. Thank God that is all over I thought. Here’s someone I can trust. My family and I had just spent the previous month getting the flat back into a habitable state, after the first manager had been using the flat as a cannabis farm.
Always trust your gut.

Record your dreams

Your subconscious communicates with you in many ways. This communication between the conscious and subconscious faculties is a two way process. One method of communication is the dream. Dreams are symbolic representations, as we try to make sense of the world. The conscious mind, can grasp a tiny bit of what goes on. Like a laser, this focus is sharp but narrow. The subconscious mind is the opposite. It’s grasp is enormous, probably infinite. However, it is unfocused. It sees the whole picture, the ecology. Having evolved before humans could speak, the subconscious doesn’t use language or words, like the conscious. Instead it uses pictures and symbols. If it does use words, they will be an aphorism or lyrics from a song.

Archetypes

The subconscious also uses archetypes. Do you have a particular person or place that comes into your dreams. This person in the dream doesn’t represent the actual person, but is a representation or a part of you. I often dream of a couple of friends from primary school, who I’ve not seen for decades. One was a leader the other was a follower. These two archetypes represent two parts of me the teacher and the student. So whichever of these is in my dreams, I need to think about myself as the reciprocal.

Other dreams can be metaphorical. For instance, I dreamed recently that some old family treasure was buried deep under a derelict building, deep underground. All I needed to do was go and dig deep down underneath all the rubble of the past, to find the treasure. Translation – what we are searching for in life is almost always deep within our own psyche. It’s often within life’s baggage (our crap), where we find it. Get yourself a metaphorical shovel and go digging. Yes, it’s dirty hard work and often painful. But that’s where the treasure lies.

My recommendation to you is to start recording your dreams as soon as you can. If you think that your subconscious mind has downloaded and recorded everything you have ever seen, heard or read, then you have the wisest teacher right there for you.
I tie this in with my morning journal writing (another recommendation). At first, these dreams will not make sense, but over the weeks and months, you will notice patterns. You will start to get aha’s. you will begin to learn the language of your own subconscious.

The post Intuition and Your Dreams appeared first on Mike Holden Sales.

Your job whilst you are taking action and assessing your results, is to follow the signs. This is because coincidences and curious happenings will take place.

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”
― William Hutchison Murray

Take notice

You follow the signs by taking notice. Notice what happens around you when you take action. What unusual things happen, by that I mean what things happen that aren’t usual. A friend you haven’t heard from calls out of the blue, with a proposition. You get a sudden urge to travel a different way to work. Maybe you come into a small but not insignificant amount of money. Is it a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not, it doesn’t matter, what matters is that you noticed it was different. This is the key.

You are recognising that your subconscious is flagging things up to you, that are not normal. Your subconscious is telling you ‘Take notice of this, it is important’. From steps 1-3 you are telling your subconscious what you want. In step 5, you listen and notice your subconscious communicating back to you. Step 4 taking action is the link between the two. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is the Reticular Activating System.

Reticular Activating System

The Reticular Activating System is a part of the brain stem. The brain stem is the oldest part of the brain in evolutionary terms, which regulates heartbeat, breathing and digestion. In other words, this part of the brain keeps you alive and you also have little conscious control over it. This is the part that makes you breathe after holding your breath. The RAS sits at the top of the brain stem and acts like a messenger between this old part of the nervous system and the higher thinking centres. The RAS is also in contact with the sensory organs. It therefore monitors everything you see, hear and feel. Even though most of what our eyes and ears pick up, we filter out, the RAS is monitoring in the background ready to alert you to danger.

Because the RAS sits between the brain stem and the sensory faculties, you can jump out of the way of danger, without your conscious thought. If you step out in front of a bus, your survival depends on shifting quick. You don’t need the conscious analytical mind getting in the way.

The magical part of the Reticular Activating System is that you can ask it to look out for certain things. This is what you are doing in steps 1-3 of the Law of Attraction. You are programming the RAS to alert you to anything that could help you move to your goals.

The RAS, then goes to work in the background, constantly scanning the environment for opportunities, threats and answers.

Coincidences

Have you ever noticed, when a friend calls you up, who you haven’t spoken to for a while, just as you were thinking about them. Or, what about the book you picked up in the store, but decided not to buy, even though the blurb seemed to suggest you needed to buy it. Later you hear about this book on a podcast, then a colleague suggests that you should read it. Coincidences? It doesn’t matter. What is important is that you are noticing. Take the example of the friend who calls you up. Is that telepathy or a coincidence. Honestly I don’t know. But what I do know is the human brain. And I know that you are programmed to notice coincidences and things that are out of the ordinary. It is nature’s way of keeping us alive. Whatever is novel in our environment could be a threat or an opportunity. Your RAS is constantly scanning for these coincidences and will flag them up to you. As this faculty is largely unconscious, these hunches seem to pop up from nowhere.

I am not about to debunk telepathy or ESP, because frankly I don’t know if they are real. I do know that some research has shown they are real, but mainstream science denies it. (See Where Science and Magic Meet by Serena Roney-Dougal). I am more interested in results. The good news is that whatever the Law of Attraction is, you can use it and it will work. You can actually program your RAS to go to work to scan the environment, for what you want. You just need to notice the coincidences. It is the RAS saying – ‘This could be worth looking at’ or ‘Watch out, avoid this’.

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When I read some books on the law of attraction, I am often infuriated by the lack of any mention of the word Action. How can this be? This is the most important step in how to use the Law of Attraction and yet it is often neglected. People think the Law is a way to get results without taking any action. This is just not so. You need to take action.

Do something – anything

What action should you take if you don’t know how to get your goal? The answer is to do something, anything that will move you towards the goal. Get in the game. The action could be something small, but make a start.
Repeated small actions towards you goals will eventually make your dreams come true. This is so critical – daily small actions in the direction.

The great thing about taking even a small action towards your goals, is that your outlook changes. The view changes. Obstacles that seemed large, appear smaller as you approach them. I do recommend planning as much as you can, although be prepared for you plans to be thrown out of the window once you get started.

Another advantage of doing something, is that you can tweak. Once you take action, you start to get results. They may not be the results you want, but these results are precious. Why so? Because feedback is the key to success. As you take action and note your results, you can adjust your actions to see if they improve your results. You can keep adjusting and adjusting and your results will get better and better.

What happened next after the visit to the garden centre?

An athlete will learn to derive happiness from the actual training. The Olympic Gold Medal maybe in the back of the mind but they will fall in love with the Dawn runs. In a similar way, an entrepreneur can fall in love with the process of prospecting for new clients, whilst the end business goals will be at the back of the mind.

Back to our story of our back garden. It didn’t take long to put up the trellising, so I decided to plant the climbers as well. As I dug a small hole for the second plant, the spade crashed against a stone about 10 cm down. So I adjusted a few centimetres back to see if I could dislodge it – crash, again I struck the stone. I moved back about 10 cm – crash. I thought, “Wow, this may be a flagstone”.

As I removed the turf above, it was clear that it was a flagstone. Ok so I thought I would remove the turf bit by bit until I had uncovered the whole flag. But oh no – another flagstone, then another. After an hour of back breaking digging, I had indeed uncovered an intact patio, which the top soil had hidden away for at least 20 years. Over the next few weekends, I transformed the area into the patio and flowerbed we had dreamed of.



So the next time you have a dream or goal, which seems just too big to start. Start anyway; you never know what you might uncover.
There is also another curious thing that happens when you take action. Coincidences happen. This is where the scientific makes way for the spiritual. It is where the unexplained happens and it is this area, where the magical element occurs. That will be the subject of a future post.

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