Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success

by Jordan Belfort

The remaining 10 percent of communication is comprised of our words—meaning, the actual words we say as we verbally communicate. That’s right: only 10 percent.

A whisper from there creates the perception that what you’re saying has extra importance to it, that you really mean it. It’s like you’re saying to the prospect, “Listen, pal, this particular point is really important, and it’s something I really, really believe in, so you need to pay very close attention to it.”

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.

That sort of bottled enthusiasm makes a massive impact on someone emotionally, and it’s one of the earmarks of sounding like an expert. Just always remember to never stay in any one tonality for too long, or else the prospect will become bored—or in scientific terms, habituate—and ultimately tune out.

Some 200 million times more powerful than its conscious counterpart, your unconscious mind, with its blazing speed and near infinite storage capacity, is what keeps you alive as you move through the world.

Conversely, your conscious mind is literally starving for processing power as it tries to make sense of things while you move through the world. In consequence, at any given moment, it can only focus on 3 or 4 percent of the surrounding environment, and it deletes the rest—allowing it to focus 100 percent of its relatively meager processing power on a few key items that it deems most important. Collectively, these key items represent conscious awareness, and the way you analyze them is through logic and reason.

In essence, everything you’ve seen or heard has been neatly filed away there, no matter how insignificant it may have seemed at the time or whether you remember it now or not. Your unconscious mind recorded the experience, compared and contrasted it with similar past experiences, and then used the results to refine and augment your internal “map of the world,” as the phrase goes, which serves as your internal barometer for formulating snap decisions, instant judgments, and first impressions, your internal model of how you perceive your environment, how you believe it should operate, and how you believe you should operate within it, which types of behaviors lie inside your comfort zone and which ones don’t. Then, to help you navigate the map—and to ensure that your snap decisions, instant judgments, and first impressions remain consistent with the beliefs in your map—your unconscious mind also creates “patterns of behavior,” allowing you to instantly respond to situations that have been previously “mapped out,” in a way that’s fluid and elegant, consistent with your beliefs about yourself and the world, and that requires no conscious thought whatsoever. In essence, this three-step process of generalization, map-making, and the creation of patterns is what allows you to move through an unfamiliar environment without having to treat everything you see as if it were the first time you’ve seen it.

So, at the end of the day, whether it’s in person or over the phone, the strategies you employ and the outcomes you desire will always be the same: you’ll use words to influence your prospect’s conscious mind, and tonality and body language to influence their unconscious mind. And the outcome of the former will be an airtight logical case, and the outcome of the latter will be airtight emotional case.

In truth, there was more than one thing behind it, but at the heart of the transformation was a powerful visualization technique that I taught the Strattonites called future pacing. 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.

I would say, “Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and you will become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence, and people will have confidence in you. Act as if you have all the answers, and the answers will come to you.”

In other words, I told them that they should not only think like wealthy people but to also carry themselves that way, because it leads to the right state of mind. 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 allowi...

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.

As a salesperson—or as any success-oriented person—you must learn how to start triggering the key empowered states; otherwise, you set yourself up for a lifetime of pain.

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).

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 or their personal life. In other words, we can be proactive when it comes to choosing our emotional state, as opposed to reactive, which is what most human beings have been conditioned to think is our only choice.

NLP has distilled the entire state management process into two core elements,

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.

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 human beings as it relates to each emotional state is nearly identical across all cultures.

Now, let me ask you another state management question, albeit from a slightly different angle. Let’s say you were in a depressed state right now, and I offered you $50,000 to act happy for the next sixty seconds. Could you do it? Yes, of course you could! It would be as simple as consciously making certain obvious changes to your physiology, ones that you had used countless times in your life, since you were a little boy or girl.

NLP’s first leap of logic was based on the idea that human beings could proactively manage their emotional state with near 100 percent success by directing their focus and their physiology in a specific way.

Pavlov concluded, was that each time he repeated the experiment, the dog’s brain would develop a stronger link between the sound of the bell and the sight of the meat, until, finally, the link had grown so strong that the mere act of ringing the bell would be powerful enough to trigger salivation.

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.

In the summer of 2009, I gave birth to a wildly effective state management technique that I proudly named olfactory anchoring.

As Bandler explained, not only does the anchor need to hit you all at once but it also needs to stand out in a dramatic way. A common, everyday sound or gesture simply won’t cut it. It needs to be extreme—the more extreme the better, in fact—and the more unusual the better too. In essence, you want to use something that’s going to hit your brain in an unforgettable way and literally shock your senses. That’s what a great anchor does, and it’s absolutely crucial that you have one.

Step #1: Choose a state

For the purpose of this exercise, let’s choose a state of absolute certainty, as this is the state that you must be in when you enter any sales encounter.

Step #2: Choose your focus This is where you close your eyes and go back to a moment in your life when you were feeling absolutely, positively certain. A perfect example of this would be the moment after you just closed a really tough sale, as a result of sounding totally awesome. For whatever reason, you were at your very best that day, and now, as you bask in the sale’s afterglow, you have that superconfident feeling—that feeling of absolute certainty where you know you can take on the world and close anyone who’s closable. Once you’ve located that memory, I want you to create a vivid picture of it in your mind’s eye. I want you to take in the whole scene, so you can see all the players who were there, looking just the way they looked, including how they were dressed, how their hair was styled, and even how the room looked.

Step #3: Choose your physiology This is where you’re going to change your physiology to match the exact physiology of the state that you’re trying to anchor. For example, in this case, you’re going to make sure that you’re standing certain and holding your head certain and walking certain and talking certain and even breathing certain, so that literally every aspect of your body, including your most minute gestures and facial expressions, is resonating with the emotion of absolute certainty.

Step #4: Intensify your state This step involves using your five sensory modalities—also known as your five senses—to take the picture you’ve created in your mind’s eye in step two and use your brain to manipulate it in a way that intensifies the feeling of absolute certainty that it creates inside of you.

As I explained above, the way to use these modalities in anchoring is to take the picture in your mind’s eye and alter it so it becomes more powerful to you emotionally.

PUTTING YOUR BRAIN TO WORK I want you to start by taking the still picture you created in your mind’s eye and putting it into motion, so you can actually see yourself moving in the picture, and being your best self, as you go about closing this huge sale. If it helps, you can even put a frame around the picture and imagine that it’s a flat-screen TV. The point is that by turning a still picture into a motion picture, you’ll start feeling more connected to the scene and your state of certainty will start to intensify—especially when we execute our next step, which is to add on dialog from your memory. So, do that right now: add on the appropriate dialog, as best as you can remember, and give yourself that same, perfect tonality and body language.

All these little adjustments you make, using the power of your mind, will, in fact, intensify your state even further, which is crucial, because you can only set an anchor when you’re at the absolute pinnacle of a state! (This strategy alone won’t get you there, but it sets you up for olfactory anchoring in a very big way.)

Once I hit upon the idea of using the sense of smell to set an anchor, it didn’t take long to find the perfect product. There were two requirements: It had to be a scent that was extreme enough, unusual enough, powerful enough, and pungent enough to meet Bandler’s criteria, yet still be pleasing enough to the nose to not gross me out or become its own negative anchor. It had to have an unobtrusive delivery system that was portable, practical, and personal to me—meaning, I could easily slip it into my pocket, remove it without fanfare, and then use it to fire off my anchor without the scent escaping into my surroundings and impacting the people around me. The name of the product I found was BoomBoom. See what this is at www.boomboomenergy.com. BoomBoom came in a sleek black tube about the size of a ChapStick, so all I had to do was unscrew the top, give myself a blast up each nostril, and, just like that, I popped into my ideal state.

Well, simply put, I figured out a laughably simple way to eliminate steps two, three, and four from NLP’s five-step anchoring process, leaving behind a leaner, meaner, and infinitely more user-friendly two-step process that I officially dubbed olfactory anchoring—because of the odorous centerpiece on which its foundation was built, namely BoomBoom.

Well, in the end, what I eventually came to realize was that the only surefire way for me to be truly at that ultra-intense level of absolute certainty that’s required to set a legitimate anchor was to wait until I was actually in that state organically and set my anchor then. In other words, why try to manufacture an ultrapeak state of absolute certainty through a series of powerful yet entirely subjective NLP techniques and never really know if I ever got there? All I had to do was wait until I closed a really big sale, in the real world, which caused me to pop me into a peak state of absolute certainty organically, and then, right then—and I mean right then, in that very instant—when I was basking in the afterglow of closing an awesome sale, and I knew in every cell of my body that I truly was in an organic state of absolute certainty, as opposed to an artificially manufactured imitation, I would bring out my BoomBoom and take a giant whiff up each nostril—boom! boom!—and just like that, I’d have set myself one powerful anchor.

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Anchor So to sum it all up: with zero preparation, beyond simply choosing what state you want to anchor, all you have to do is wait for that awesome moment when you close a really big sale (or any situation that causes you to organically pop into a state of absolute certainty, or absolute anything, for that matter), and then, right then, in that very instant, when that moment hits, you whip out your tube of BoomBoom, unscrew the cap, take a deep, prodigious blast up each nostril so you can literally feel the rush of the mint and citrus bathing your olfactory nerves, giving you that pleasant, invigorating burn. Then ball your hands into a pair of fists and start squeezing tightly, with your fingernails digging into your palms so you can really feel it, and belt out the word “yes” in a forceful yet controlled manner, so the bulk of the volume and power is directed inward, right to your solar plexus, where it resonates with your heart and soul and liver and loins and your very gizzard itself. And that’s it. You’ve just set yourself an extremely powerful anchor that you can use the next time you’re about to enter a sales encounter.

Here’s how it looks, laid out in steps: Step #1: Choose a state Like before, let’s choose a state of absolute certainty. Step #2: Set your anchor You wait for a very specific moment, and then take out your BoomBoom, unscrew the top, and follow the steps above—take a massive blast up each nostril and then ball your hands up into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms, and belt out the word “yes” in a powerful yet controlled manner. Then, ten seconds later, with the scent of BoomBoom still lingering but the initial rush gone, repeat the process again. And that, as they say, is that. You’ve anchored in a state of absolute certainty. Now, just to be safe, you can repeat this process one more time—the next time you close the same type of awesome sale—and stack a second anchor right on top of the first one. It certainly can’t hurt, as anchors become stronger when they’re stacked; but, either way, even if you only set the anchor once, it should be very powerful the first time you fire it off, which should be right before you’re about to enter a sales encounter. And just to make sure your anchor stays firmly locked in, for the next month or so, whenever you close one of those especially awesome sales, the ones that cause you to pop into a peak state of absolute certainty, take another one-and-one of your BoomBoom, and keep stacking anchor on top of anchor on top of anchor, until the linkage is so engrained that it will stay with you forever. So that’s olfactory anchoring i...

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I’ve seen it work its magic with countless people, who’ve been impacted by this in a far more profound way than I. After all, state management was always something that came easy to me in a sales or business setting; but I’m the exception to the rule. For every guy like me, there are a million others who are the exact opposite, and they are held back massively for no other reason than that they lack the ability to show up to a sales encounter being their best self. To that end, I can’t even begin to tell you how gratifying it’s been to be able to throw those people a lifeline, in the form of a little black tube with a wickedly pungent smell. All it takes is a quick shot up the left nostril and a quick shot up the right, and managing your state becomes as simple as taking a few drops of Visine to get the red out. In fact, between the awesome power of the Straight Line System and the assurance olfactory anchoring gives you that you’ll be in a state that allows you to tap into that power, you’ve set yourself up to accomplish virtually anything you put your mind to.