Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

by Jordan Belfort

Even if you’re not in “sales,” you still need to become at least reasonably proficient at sales and persuasion. Otherwise, you’re going to find yourself living a severely disempowered life. Selling is everything in life. In fact, either you’re selling or you’re failing. You’re selling people that your ideas make sense, your concepts make sense, your products make sense: you could be a parent selling your kids on the importance of taking a bath or doing their homework; you could be a teacher selling your students on the value of education; a lawyer selling a jury on the innocence of your client; a pastor selling your congregation on the existence of God or Jesus of Mohammad or Buddha; a politician selling your constituency on the benefits of voting for a certain referendum—in short, selling applies to all people, and all aspects of life, both business and personal. After all, at some point in our lives, we’ll all have to sell ourselves to someone: a prospective partner, a future employer, a future employee, a future first date, and on and on.

Indeed, when you take all the apparent differences that can pop up in a sale at any time, it comes as no surprise that only a tiny percentage of the population feels comfortable at the thought of entering a situation that requires sales and influence. The rest of the world actively shies away from it—despite knowing how absolutely crucial it is to the achievement of wealth and success. Even worse, among those very select few who do feel comfortable, only a tiny percentage of them will ever attain the status of being a top producer. The rest will plod along somewhere in the middle, stuck in the muck and mire of mediocrity and averagism. They’ll earn just enough to keep “selling” worthwhile (after all, even a decent salesperson will make more money closing sales than in a non–sales related job), but they’ll never experience the financial freedom of being a top producer. It will always remain just out of reach.

Let me repeat that: the reason every sale is the same is because, despite all that individual stuff, the same three key elements still have to line up in any prospect’s mind before you have a shot at closing them. And it doesn’t matter what you’re selling or how you’re selling it; how much it costs or how much money the prospect has; and whether it’s tangible or intangible, over the phone or in person. If in a single moment in time, you can create these three crucial elements in a prospect’s mind, then you’ve got an excellent shot of closing. Conversely, if even one of them is missing, you have basically no shot at all.

For example, if a prospect is currently at a “ten” on the certainty scale, then it means he or she is in a state of absolute certainty at that moment. Conversely, if the prospect’s currently at a “one,” then they are in a state of absolute uncertainty at that moment.

Now, in sales, when we talk about certainty, the first thing that pops into people’s minds is certainty about the actual product being sold. In other words, before there’s any chance of a prospect buying a product, they first have to be absolutely certain that the product makes sense to them, insofar as it filling their needs, eliminating any pain they might have, being a good value for the money . . . and so forth. So—the first of the Three Tens is your product.

Then, along the continuum’s middle, you have the varying degrees of certainty between a 1 and a 10, with the number 5 representing a state of pure ambivalence. That’s where your prospect isn’t leaning one way or the other. In normal sales parlance, this is referred to as your prospect “sitting on the fence,” an expression specifically meant to highlight the delicate nature of this state. However, with the Straight Line System, we view a 5 in a far more positive light. In fact, to a seasoned Straight Liner, a prospect who is at a 5 has a big sign on their chest, saying: PLEASE INFLUENCE ME NOW! I CAN’T MAKE UP MY MIND, SO PLEASE HELP ME!

Now, when it comes time to ask for the order, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the closer you’ve gotten your prospect to a 10, the better chance you have of closing them. On the other hand, the farther away your prospect is from a 10, the worse chance you have of closing them. From a practical standpoint, if your prospect is anywhere below a 5, you have basically no chance of closing them. The reason for this has to do with something called positive intent, which serves as the very foundation from which all human beings make their decisions. In other words, human beings don’t buy things that they think will make their lives worse; they buy things that they think will make their lives better. However, the operative word here is think. You see, just because someone has positive intent doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting decisions will end up having a positive impact on them. In fact, with many people, it often doesn’t. Their lives are punctuated by a series of self-defeating decisions. However, even these “serial bad decision-makers” believe their decisions were good when they made them. That’s the definition of positive intent. In consequence, when you ask for the order, if your prospect thinks that your product is shit then you have absolutely no chance of closing them. Conversely, if they think the opposite is true—that your product is the best thing since sliced bread—then you have an excellent chance of closing them.

What if the prospect doesn’t trust you? For instance, let’s say that, during your sales presentation, you accidentally said something or did something that rubbed the prospect the wrong way, to the point where they no longer trusted you. What are the chances of them buying from you then? I’ll tell you what they are: Zero! Nothing! Zilch! Plain and simple, if your prospect doesn’t trust you, then there’s absolutely no way they are going to buy from you. And, again, I don’t care how certain they are about your product; they still won’t buy from you. In fact, if they’re that intent on purchasing your product, then they simply find someone else who sells the same thing—a salesperson they trust—and they will buy it from that salesperson instead. It’s as simple as that. So, that’s what makes up the second of the Three Tens: You!

For example, do they think you’re a likable, trustworthy person, who is not only an expert in your field but also prides yourself on putting your customer’s needs first and making sure that if any problems arise you’ll be right there on the spot to resolve them? That would be a 10 on the certainty scale. Or do they think you’re an unlikable “snake in the grass,” a stone-cold novice who’ll stick the knife in their back the moment they turn it from you, because all you care about is extracting the maximum amount of commission out of the deal and then moving on to the next target as quickly as possible? That would be a 1 on the certainty scale. And in between those two extremes you have all the varying degrees of certainty as you move up and down the scale. For example, maybe the prospect thinks you’re reasonably trustworthy, but they just don’t like you very much. Maybe you broke rapport with them as a result of something you said during your sales presentation—or perhaps it happened even earlier than that, at the moment the prospect first laid eyes on you. Maybe there was something about the way you looked, or the way you shook their hand, or how much eye contact you made, that turned the prospect off and, hence, stopped you from falling into a deep state of rapport with them. Or maybe it was the way you asked questions when you were trying to gather intelligence, to identify their needs and values and to see if they were financially qualified. Perhaps you came off as the “...

THE THREE TENS 1 The product, idea, or concept 2 You, trust and connect with you 3 The prospect must trust and connect with the company

My point here is that, no matter what product you’re selling, whether your prospect walks in your door or answers your cold call or clicks on your website, they will always enter the encounter with a preconceived notion about you, about your product, and about the company you work for.

LOGICAL CERTAINTY Logical certainty is based primarily on the words you say. For instance, does the case you’ve made to the prospect add up on an intellectual level? I’m talking about the actual facts and figures, the features and benefits, and the long-term value proposition, as it relates specifically to that prospect. In other words, from a sober, emotionless perspective, does the idea or thesis that you’ve presented to them make sense? Does your product or service truly fill their needs? Is it priced fairly when compared to the competition? Does the cost-benefit ratio make it an unequivocally great deal?

EMOTIONAL CERTAINTY On the flip side, emotional certainty is based on a gut feeling that something must be good. Once it hits us, we feel a craving inside that simply must be fulfilled, even if there’s a heavy price to pay for fulfilling it. Unlike logical certainty, emotional certainty has to do with painting your prospect a picture of the future where they’ve bought your product and can see themselves using the product and feeling good as a result of it. We call this technique future pacing, and it serves as the very backbone of how we move someone emotionally. When you future pace someone, you’re essentially playing out the post-buying movie in the best fashion possible—allowing that person to experience your product’s amazing benefits right now, along with the positive feelings they create. The prospect’s needs have been filled; their pain has been resolved; any itch the they had has been scratched, and they are feeling wonderful as a result of it.

You see, people don’t buy on logic; they buy on emotion, and then justify their decision with logic. The logical mind is analytical by nature, so the more information you give it the more information it wants to know. In consequence, if you get your prospect to a high level of logical certainty, they’ll say, “It sounds great, let me think about it . . .” or “Let me do a bit more research and I’ll call you back.”

Instead, we want to weed these people out as quickly as possible, during the intelligence-gathering phase. (More on that later.) Remember, it’s not the job of salespeople to turn nos into yeses; it’s simply not what they do. Instead, we turn “Let me think about it” into a yes, and “Let me call you back” into a yes, and “I need to speak to my wife” into a yes, and “It’s a bad time of year” into a yes.

You see, at the end of the day, objections are merely smoke screens for uncertainty for one or all of the Three Tens. In other words, if you ask for the order and your prospect is not high enough on the certainty scale, then they’ll throw out a smoke screen in the form of one of the common objections, as opposed to coming clean with you, which would mean revealing specifically which of the Three Tens was holding them back. Now, there are some exceptions to this, which I’ll get to a bit later, but my point is that, more than 95 percent of the time, the common objections are merely ploys on the part of the prospect, who would rather bow out of the sale gracefully than have to look the salesperson in the eye and confront them about their lack of certainty concerning the Three Tens.

So, to avoid the possibility of a head-on confrontation, the prospect conjures up a little white lie, a special lie, a lie that gives the salesperson just enough false hope to make them think that there is a shot of getting a callback by ending the encounter now, without pressing the prospect any further. To that end, the prospect will often start off their objection with a quick one-liner about how much they like your product. For example, the prospect might start with something like, “It sounds pretty good, Jim,” or “It seems really interesting, Jim,” and then follow it up with, “I just need to speak to my wife first. How about I give you a call back tomorrow?” And, with that, the prospect has set themself up to gracefully bow out of the sale, while the salesperson, if they were naïve enough to buy into this charade, has not only eliminated any chance of closing the deal but has also been set up for massive pain when they start dialing through the list of callbacks, which consists of people who had no intention of buying in the first place.

“The key here is that, from literally the first word out of your mouth, everything you say and everything you do is designed to keep your prospect on the straight line, and slowly nudge him forward, from the open to the close. You guys follow me so far?”

“Good,” I replied quickly. “Now, as a salesperson, every once in a while, we get one of those perfect, lay-down sales, where the prospect seems to be almost pre-sold before we even open up our mouths.” As I continued to speak, I began drawing tiny arrows on the center of the line, starting just after the left X, and then moving down the line, to just before the X on the right. “It’s one of those sales where everything you say, and everything you do, and every case you make about why the prospect should buy from you, he keeps on saying, yes, yes, yes, without giving you even a single objection, right up to the moment where you ask him for the order, and he agrees to close. That’s what I mean by a perfect straight-line sale.

“First, you’re developing immediate, massive rapport, on both a conscious and unconscious level; and second, you’re gathering massive intelligence, which up until tonight, I used to refer to as qualifying. But, starting right now, I want you to wipe that word out of your mind forever, because it doesn’t even come close to describing what we need to accomplish here. “You see, with the Straight Line, you need to gather intelligence—and I mean massive intelligence—which goes far beyond trying to figure out whether or not a prospect is financially qualified. “When you gather intelligence from a prospect, you’re doing all of the following things: “First, you’re identifying their needs—and not just their core need but also any secondary needs or ‘problems’ they might have. “Second, you’re identifying any core beliefs they might have that could impact the sale, such as not feeling comfortable working over the phone or with making quick decisions, and also not trusting salespeople in general. “Third, you want to find out about any past experiences they’ve had with similar products, both good and bad, and how they feel about the salespeople they bought them from. “Fourth, you want to identify their values—meaning, what things are most important to them? Are they looking for growth or income, or do they want to set themselves up for retirement, or to give their profits to a certain charity, or a religious institution? It can even be that the prospect is an action junkie and they’re ...

“So, getting back to the Straight Line: “When you’re off the line, you’re looking to (a) continue building on the rapport that you already have, and (b) use that rapport to help you gather the more invasive intelligence, like how liquid the prospect currently is. “And at the same time, you’re always making sure that the encounter stays within the boundaries, as you continue the process of moving the sale down the Straight Line, towards the close. “Essentially, those are the three basic tenets of the front half of the Straight Line: 1 You must take immediate of control the sale. 2 You must engage in massive intelligence gathering, while you simultaneously build massive rapport with your prospect. 3 You must smoothly transition into a Straight Line presentation, so you can begin the process of building absolute certainty for each of the Three Tens. “So, again, during the front half of the sale, you first take immediate control of the sale; then you use that control to gather massive intelligence, which entails asking highly specific questions, which I’ll map out for you in advance, to make sure that you’ve gathered all the intelligence you need—and I’m going to circle back to this later, because, starting tomorrow, you’re going to be asking a lot more questions than you used to. “And next, as you’re gathering all this intelligence, you’re going to do it in a way that allows you to build massive rapport with your prospect at the same time, which is absolutely crucial, by the ...

“In fact, think of this as goal-oriented communication,” I continued, spitting out the phrase at literally the same instant it popped into my mind. “Every word that comes out of your mouth is feeding into one single goal, which is to increase your prospect’s level of certainty to the highest possible level, as you’re moving him down the straight line towards the close. Here—let me draw it out for you on the board. “Imagine a continuum of certainty between one and ten,” I said confidently. As I began turning back to the whiteboard, I saw one of the Strattonite’s hands shoot up. It was Colton Green.

I said, “Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and you will become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence, and you will become confident. Act as if you have all the answers and the answers will come to you!” I told them to act as if their success was a foregone conclusion—that it was time to accept the fact that they had true greatness inside them, greatness that had always been there, dying to come out, but it had been buried under countless layers of insults and bullshit that society had dumped on them, in an effort to keep them down and make them settle for a life of mediocrity and averagism.

At the heart of the system are five core elements. To this very day, they’re exactly the same as the day I created them, and they serve as the backbone of the entire system. As you may have guessed, I’ve already touched on the first three elements, namely, the all-important Three Tens: 1 The prospect must love your product. 2 The prospect must trust and connect with you. 3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company. In essence, as you move your prospect down the straight line, everything you say should be specifically designed to increase your prospect’s level of certainty for at least one of the three elements—with your ultimate goal being to move all three of them to as close to a 10 as possible, at which point you’re going to ask for the order and hopefully close the deal. However, that being said, what you need to remember here is that this is not the type of process that happens all at once. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, you’re going to have to ask for the order at least two or three times before you have any chance of your prospect saying yes. Now, when you finish the main body of your sales presentation, you’ve reached a point on the Straight Line where you are going to ask for the order for the first time and wait for a response—and then the back half of the sale begins, which gets triggered when the prospect hits you with the first objection. Alternatively, this is the point in the sale where you’ll find out if you have a lay-down on your hand...

Looping is a simple yet highly effective objection-handling strategy that allows a salesperson to take each individual objection and use it as an opportunity to further increase a prospect’s level of certainty, without breaking rapport, and then seamlessly transition into a close.

We call this level of certainty a person’s action threshold, and it comprises the fourth core element of the Straight Line System. By way of definition, we refer to people who are very easy to sell to as having a low action threshold; and we refer to people who are very difficult to sell to as having a high action threshold. Now, that’s all fine and dandy, but what makes this concept so absolutely crucial to a salesperson’s success is a remarkable discovery I made that proved to be the linchpin strategy that allowed people with very little natural sales ability to close at the same level as a natural born salesperson, namely: that a prospect’s action threshold is malleable; it is not set in stone.

So, for these ultra-tough nuts to crack, we now turn to the fifth core element of the Straight Line System: the pain threshold. You see, at the end of the day, pain is the most powerful motivator of all—causing human beings to quickly move away from whatever they believe is the source of their pain, and to move towards whatever they believe will resolve their pain. In essence, pain creates urgency, which makes it the perfect vehicle for closing these tougher sales. To that end it’s absolutely crucial that you take the time to uncover precisely what your prospect’s pain is and where it comes from. Once I have that information, I can then position my product as a remedy for their pain, and then verbally paint a picture for them of the future—showing how much better they are going to feel as a result of using my product, which has taken away all their pain and has them feeling pleasure again.

THE FIVE CORE ELEMENTS OF THE STRAIGHT LINE SYSTEM 1 The prospect must love your product. 2 The prospect must trust and connect with you. 3 The prospect must trust and connect with your company. 4 Lower the action threshold. 5 Raise the pain threshold.

1 Sharp as a tack 2 Enthusiastic as hell 3 An expert in your field Those three things absolutely must come across in the first four seconds of a conversation; otherwise, you set yourself up for a major uphill battle. Now, in truth, if you screw up the first four seconds, you have another ten seconds, at most, to play catch-up ball, but after that, you’re completely done. It’s basically a lost cause. You can’t influence anybody.

The simple fact is that we all want to deal with pros or experts, and we also want to deal with people who are sharp and on the ball, and who are enthusiastic about what they do. Experts have a certain way of talking that literally commands respect. They say things like “Listen, Bill, you need to trust me on this. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and I know exactly what you need.”

However, as it turns out, I was actually wrong. In 2013, a professor at Harvard University published a study on this exact topic—the importance of first impressions—and what the study found was that it wasn’t four seconds until a prospect made the initial judgment; it was actually five seconds. So I have to apologize for being off by one second. Apologies aside, what the study also found was that if you make a negative first impression, it takes eight subsequent positive impressions to erase that one negative first impression. Frankly, I don’t know about you, but in all my years in sales, and with all the products I’ve sold, I can’t think of one industry where, if I screwed up the first meeting, I got eight subsequent chances to redeem myself. It simply doesn’t happen.

1 First, you’re sharp as a tack. If they don’t think that you’re sharp as a tack, you’re wasting their time. You must come across as someone who’s totally on the ball, a born problem-solver who is definitely worth listening to because you can help them achieve their goals. In essence, you have to sound and act like someone who can help the prospect fulfill their needs and desires. You can accomplish this by demonstrating mental speed and agility, fast decision-making, and a unique pace of delivery that immediately impresses the prospect and builds trust. However, to achieve lasting success, you must actually become an “expert in your field,” so that you do, indeed, know what you’re talking about. In other words, you can’t just talk the talk; you also have to walk the walk. So while you’re busy “acting as if,” you’re working at lightning speed to learn everything there is to know about your industry and the products you’re selling, so you truly do become an expert. 2 Second, you’re enthusiastic as hell. This sends a subliminal message to your prospect, telling them that you must have something great to offer. You must sound upbeat, enthusiastic, and full of energy, and be a positive influence in their lives. One of things that I had to learn the hard way was that just because you can sell someone something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Today, I have a strong belief in sales as an honorable profession, and I’ll only operate in sales situations where I have an uny...

When you immediately establish these three things, they roll up into one simple fact in the prospect’s mind, namely that you’re a person worth listening to. In other words, it makes sense for them to take time out of their busy day, because someone who’s as sharp as you and enthusiastic as you, and who’s achieved your level of expertise, is going to: 1 Get to the point quickly 2 Not waste the prospect’s time 3 Have a solution to their problem 4 Be an asset to them over the long-term In addition, once the prospect has come to this positive conclusion about you, their brain will instantly extrapolate your value to its logical end, which is: You can help them achieve their goals. You can help get them what they want in life.

So if your words won’t do it, then where do you turn? The answer is simple: your tone of voice. Specifically, how you say what you say has a profound impact on how it’s perceived and, for that matter, how you are perceived; and not just during those all-important first four seconds, but throughout the entire conversation as well.

On the flip side, if a sales encounter takes place in person, then a second communication modality comes into play, working hand-in-hand with tonality to help us get our point across. We call this second modality body language. Serving as the dual linchpins of an immensely powerful communication strategy known as unconscious communication, tonality and body language play major roles in how we get our point across—both while we’re talking and as we’re listening. In essence, your tone of voice, how you move your body, the facial expressions you make, the type of smile you offer, the way you make eye contact, and all those little friendly grunts and groans you make while you’re listening to someone talk—the oohs and ahhs and ahas and yups—are an integral part of human communication and have a massive impact on how you’re perceived. In terms of percentages, tonality and body language comprise approximately 90 percent of our overall communication, split evenly down the middle, with each modality having approximately a 45 percent impact, depending on which study you buy into (and there are more of them than you can count). The remaining 10 percent of communication is comprised of our words—meaning, the actual words we say as we verbally communicate.

HUMAN COMMUNICATION Tonality—45% + Body Language—45% = 90% Words—10%

I’m talking about something called bottled enthusiasm, which sits just below the surface and literally bubbles over as you speak. It’s about enunciating your words with absolute clarity and stressing your consonants so that your words have intensity to them. It’s like you’re talking with your fists clenched, and there’s an active volcano inside you ready to erupt at any second—but of course it doesn’t, because you’re an expert who’s in total control.

Now, in terms of how to start using this in the real world, you’ll find that with just a little bit of practice, you’ll be applying the right tonality and body language unconsciously—meaning, automatically—whenever you find yourself in a situation of influence. But, until then, you need to be extra vigilant about consciously applying the right tonality and body language to every word and every turn of phrase. This will ensure that your prospect stays firmly in your magnetic zone and doesn’t tune out.

However, when it comes to airtight emotional cases, we rely far more heavily on unconscious communication, in the form of tonality and body language, than on the words others say. When the sales encounter is over the phone, we’ll use our ten core tonalities to move our prospect emotionally, while the words they’re attached to will move the prospect logically; and when the encounter is in person, we’ll also use body language to move our prospect emotionally, while our words will continue to move them logically.

In short, future pacing entails running an imaginary movie through your mind where you get to see yourself in the future having already achieved a certain outcome. The result is that you get to experience the positive feelings associated with a future achievement right now, as opposed to having to wait until a few years from now, when you actually achieve it.

As previously mentioned, the technical term for this is state management. In essence, when you’re managing your emotional state, you’re temporarily blocking out any troubling thoughts or emotions that might normally make you feel negative—thereby allowing yourself to maintain a positive state of mind. What makes state management so important in achieving success is that your current emotional state determines whether or not you’ll be able to access your internal resources at that moment to achieve your outcome. When you’re in an empowered state—like “certainty,” for instance—then you’re able to access your internal resources, which then sets you up for massive success. Conversely, when you’re in a disempowered state, you’re blocked from accessing your internal resources, and you’ve set yourself up for massive failure.

The key distinction here is that once you’ve learned the technique for triggering an empowered state (I’m going to teach you the most powerful one in the world in a moment), you only want to use it at certain key moments, when it matters most, like before you enter a sales encounter, or try to close a business deal, or enter into a negotiation, or even if it’s just an important decision you need to make in your personal life. In fact, in the latter case, you definitely want to make sure that you’re in an empowered state, because human beings, as a species, make their worst personal decisions when they’re in a disempowered state (and their best decisions when they’re in an empowered state).

In terms of achieving success in sales, there are four key states that you need to learn how to trigger at will within state management. We call them the four Cs: Certainty, clarity, confidence, and courage.

These are your linchpin states for achieving wealth and success. If you don’t learn how to trigger them, then you’re playing Russian roulette with your future—essentially hoping that you’ll be in the right state when you enter a sales encounter, versus knowing you will be because you have a ...

At the time, I had just started using a state management technique called NLP anchoring, which was part of a group of techniques and strategies that make up a body of knowledge known as neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, for short. Operating on the fringe of mainstream psychology, NLP’s basic premise is that the human brain functions similarly to a computer and hence can be programmed as such to make near instant changes to certain key behavioral patterns. The only sticking point, however, is that before you can make any changes, you need to know two important things first: How to write code for the human brain What type of software to embed the code in It sounds complicated, I know, but in reality it’s the exact opposite. Let me explain, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. According to NLP, the software of the brain is language, and the way you write code is by creating language patterns, which consist of a group of words—as brief as a short sentence or as long as a few paragraphs—that have been structured in accordance with a series of basic yet extremely powerful linguistic principles that can be used to reprogram virtually any person’s brain, including your own, in a number of very profound ways. One of those ways forms the basis of NLP anchoring. The basic premise of NLP anchoring is that human beings have the ability to choose how they feel at a particular moment in time, as opposed to it being chosen for them by what’s going on in their surrounding environment ...

Now, obviously, the proactive nature of NLP’s state philosophy is attractive to anyone in sales, and for that matter anyone who wants to live a more empowered life. To that end, NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements, both of which are under a person’s conscious control. The first of these two elements is: What you choose to focus on. In essence, at any particular moment, you have the ability to choose the precise direction of your focus; and based on that choice, you’ll fall into a state that’s congruent with what you’ve chosen to focus on. For example, if you spend the next few minutes focusing on everything that’s great in your life—a recent business success, being in a loving relationship, the health of your children, a recent goal you achieved, a family getaway—then you’ll quickly pop into a positive, empowered state that reflects all those wonderful things. Conversely, if you spend the same amount of time focusing on everything that’s wrong in your life—a recent business failure, a divorce, a sick child, a recent goal you failed to achieve—then you’ll quickly fall into a disempowered state that reflects all those crappy things. It’s as simple as that. The second of these two elements is: Your current physiology. Comprised of the sum of all the possible ways that you can move and hold your body—your posture, your facial expressions, how you move your appendages, your rate of breathing, your overall level of motion—physiology of hu...

In NLP, the ringing sound of the bell is referred to as an anchor, the act of ringing the bell is referred to as firing off an anchor, and the process by which two formally unrelated items become linked together in this way is referred to as setting an anchor.

The most common state that salespeople will try to set an anchor for is a state of absolute certainty, and the most common anchor they’ll choose to try to link it to is a combination of shouting the word “yes” and simultaneously clapping their hands. Now, if you’re thinking that screaming the word “yes” while executing a single clap of your hands doesn’t seem quite as intense as tempting a starving dog with a piece of juicy beef (while ringing a bell that’s loud enough to wake the dead), then you’re in the same boat that I was: feeling frustrated, skeptical, but still hopeful for an answer. Yet, on the flip side, I knew that the science behind NLP’s approach was sound, and that the payoff for cracking the code would be incalculable—not so much to me, but to the tens of millions of people who would be attending my live events over the next few years. You see, unlike most people, I was blessed with a natural ability to manage my state at an extremely high level, so anchoring was really more of a luxury to me than a necessity. Unfortunately, though, for every oddball out there like me, there are ten million normal folks whose natural abilities in this area lie on the opposite end of the spectrum. In consequence, I continued to experiment with a number of different strategies that could be combined with basic NLP anchoring in order to ratchet up its effectiveness. It took just a bit over a month, until I finally struck gold. In the summer of 2009, I gave birth to a wildly effe...

The reason I began studying it was a desire to learn two specific strategies that NLP was particularly well known for at the time. The first strategy was a timeline regression, which was designed to help people crack the code of their limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering beliefs; and the second strategy was anchoring, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, was designed to help people trigger a peak emotional state at will.

The first vulnerability had to do with how intense you were able to get your state to at the precise moment when you introduced the anchor. The key, Bandler explained, is that you have to be at the absolute tippy-top of the state, in terms of the emotional intensity you feel inside, in order to successfully set an anchor. Anything less than that, and the anchor won’t set. In terms of how this would relate to the certainty scale from Chapter 1, you’d have to be at an absolute, unequivocal 10, with no ifs, ands, or buts; only then, at that precise moment, when you felt the certainty literally bubbling up inside you, like a seething volcano, could you introduce an anchor and truly set it. So that’s the first aspect of NLP anchoring that tends to trip people up: the difficulty of trying to artificially get yourself into a state of absolute certainty or, for that matter, absolute anything, as opposed to being there organically.