Call Reluctance
What held me back? Was I a coward? No - I had risked my life
for sport and adventure many times, so lack of courage couldn't
be the reason. Maybe I lacked study and training? But that couldn't
be it either - I had forked over a lot of cash to the motivational
industry, taken the seminars, read the books and listened to
the tapes. If anything I was overtrained. My business was doing
OK but the big money had been escaping me. Why didn't I make
those calls? The honest answer was that somehow I didn't feel
like it.
A friend of mine in sales management told me I had "call
reluctance." Call reluctance? I had heard the word before
but this time I researched it: Horace Ziglar, brother of the
famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar, defined call reluctance as a
form of timidity in his book Timid Salesmen
have Skinny Kids. You can have lots of courage, he said,
but if you lack boldness you'll still be timid.
Timidity - Carry-Over
From The Past
Psychologists have just recently started looking at timidity.
They call it a mood disorder, dysthymia - Greek for "low
mood". And they tell us it wasn't always the big handicap
it is today. They believe that in bygone days the survival of
the tribe, and the gene pool, probably benefited from the presence
of many members with dysthymia - quiet individuals with cautious,
methodical and dogged temperaments.
You and I know darned well that these qualities no longer
get you very far in today's fast-paced world which rewards a
bold, confident, "out there" operating style. When
you do a tough presentation you know what an advantage it is
to be solid and confident inside. On the other hand, if your
inner mood is low, you know you'll fail to convince or reassure.
Your prospects pick up these inner states and get turned off.
Trying harder leads to further tightening up and more negative
results.
Mood Determines Income
Boldness may be the path to success, but only
one out of every ten people have a naturally bold temperament.
Even in the field of sales it's only about one out of five. What
about the rest of us who aren't naturally bold?
We take a giant hit, that's what.
Life penalizes people big-time for dysthymia. How big was discovered
just in the last ten years. It started in 1986 with a study done
by George Dudley and Shannon Goodson for their book The
Psychology of Selling. They studied two groups of salespeople
in similar positions and industries, but one group was timid,
the other not. Dudley and Goodson found that the average annual
income of the timid group was only one-fifth of the bold group:
$40,000 per year vs. $200,000 per year.
So you could say that if you lacked boldness in 1986, it cost
you an average of $160,000 a year. Today, with inflation, the
average hit you take for being timid is probably closer to a
quarter of a million bucks. Annually.
And that's not all: Keep in mind that dysthymia puts a damper
on your personal interactions too. Zig Ziglar reminds us that
"... you may be selling why your teenager should behave
and pay attention in the classroom; why an employee should come
to work on time; or why your spouse should want to stay married
to you." Yes, you're always selling - and they're either
buying it, or not.
The connection between mood and money showed up dramatically
in a 1990 study by California psychiatrist
Dr. Michael McGuire. He set out to determine "whether timidity
was an illness or a personality style." To do this he observed
two groups of about one hundred people each for two years - whose
only difference was their mood levels.
The members of the first group were dysthymic. The members
of the second group were perfectly matched with the first group
in intelligence, education, memory, and other qualities - except
one: They were not timid.
McGuire found the people in the bold group "better at
developing novel interpretive and behavioral strategies"
- they were better at adapting to change by seeing and doing
things in new and different ways. In other words, flexibility,
innovation, creativity. The bold ones were also "more likely
to initiate social contact" and showed "less fear of
negative evaluation by others." Put plainly, they reached
out more to others but cared less about what others thought of
them.
All these useful qualities were weak or missing in the members
of the dysthymic group, and although they were just as healthy,
educated and intelligent as the members of the bold group, they
had "fewer friends, fewer social contacts, smaller incomes,
and less living space per household."
McGuire found that being timid in today's world carries a
high penalty, which he simply described as "decreased access
to life's bounty."
Training Harder, Preparing Better -
But Earning Less
What if you, like me, are part of the eighty or ninety percent
of people born with a naturally low-key mood level? How can we
acquire the sparkle of boldness that seems to pay off in life?
The billion-dollar motivational industry promises us that
it can be done with training and effort. They assure us that
if we spend enough time and money, we can train and study ourselves
into a bolder operating style. I used to believe them, spending
thousands on seminars, books, tapes and videos. Chances are you
did too.
It turns out we may have spent much of our money in vain.
There is disturbing new evidence that training and preparation
- by themselves - do not translate into financial success. Remember
the two groups of salespeople from before, where the bold group
made five times as much money as the timid group? Here's the
rest of the story. The heartbreaker:
Without exception, the members of the
timid group had spent far more time and money studying and preparing.
I grant you that study and preparation do have some value
- you learn useful facts and uplifting anecdotes. But study and
preparation won't make you bold.
What Determines Your Boldness?
That's how far I had gotten in late 1994. I now knew beyond any
doubt that the level of my income - and even the quality of my
life - depended on the level of my mood. When I tried to interact
with people or situations when my mood was low, everything was
harder and more complicated because I tended to become cautious,
nervous and suspicious, even uptight, jumpy and shy. The others
usually pick such emotions up right away, and get turned off.
When my mood was down it seemed like my inner engine was out
of tune, but when my mood was up, no matter what was going on,
I could handle it all - with good cheer, ease and power. I needed
to get a handle on my mood. What determined its level? How could
I go about raising it?
Discovering Mood Elevation
My co-workers became very involved in the subject and began to
help me with my research. Our "day jobs" are in the
field of anti-terrorist systems and hardware. In violent crimes
you deal with adrenaline, so we had a lot of data on that. Adrenaline
produces keen, wide-eyed alertness.
Adrenaline is one of the neurotransmitters,
very special substances which our bodies produce from the foods
we eat. In 1970 Dr. Julius Axelrod won the Nobel Prize for discovering
how they work. Neurotransmitters surround our brain cells and
influence how they communicate. Two among the neurotransmitters
are special: Serotonin and dopamine ('ser-o-TOE-nin' and 'DOPE-
a-meen'). They determine your mood.
Both of these two neurotransmitters
elevate your mood, but in different ways. Mood is not a simple,
one-dimensional thing, not just a matter of "up" or
"down." Serotonin is the neurotransmitter of serenity
and laid-back solidity. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of energy
and initiative. We learned that if you have ample serotonin,
your self-esteem will be high and your inner experience will
be one of laid-back flexibility and leadership power. At the
same time, healthy levels of dopamine will enhance your inner
experience of energy, boldness, optimism and assertiveness.
How can you be laid back and moving forward
at the same time? Behind that seeming contradiction lies a powerful
insight that can change your life. It seems weird to associate
"laid-back flexibility" with "leadership skills"
but it's a scientific fact which SUCCESS magazine dug up and
reported as early as 1992 in a piece they called "Elixir
of Leadership." You see, ample levels of these two neurotransmitters
are associated with an operating style of boldness, while lower
levels are found with states of timidity and "up-tightness."
So if your mood is down and your boldness is nowhere to be
found, a simple chemical imbalance may be responsible for the
problem. And when your brain's natural levels of these neurotransmitters
is restored, then in all likelihood your mood will lift. Bingo.
Now you may ask - just as I did at the time - why the hell
aren't these amazing insights more widely publicized? Wouldn't
they be tremendously helpful to businesspeople like us who have
to reach out and influence others daily?
Sure they would, but remember, timidity is not a disease;
"How to make salespeople sell better" is just not very
high on any scientist's list of priorities. That's why these
powerful methods had remained unused until a number of personal
performance coaches in California, Japan and Europe began applying
them to boost their clients' success rates.
We began to learn about these leading-edge professionals first
on Usenet. Some of them were medical scientists, some were sports
psychologists, others self-taught trainers. Their clients are
business leaders, movie actors, media personalities, athletes
and politicians. Have you ever wondered what empowers such high-profile
people to stroll out and face live audiences, in performances
or in business meetings? To radiate a dynamic, positive presence
instead of freaking out or freezing up? How do they overcome
the cold terror which public speaking strikes in the hearts of
the rest of us? We learned how:
Some were simply born that way; some do it with drugs and
burn out. But the ones who are doing it happily day after day,
do it with careful management of their neurotransmitter levels,
watching what they eat and what they avoid, under the guidance
of their personal performance coaches.
Few or none of these coaches had published much beyond their
workbooks. We spent a lot of money tracking them down to talk
to them.
Our research was beginning to interfere with our company's
main business, so in 1995 we spun off "the mood-elevation
thing" as a separate non-profit project and called it InnerNet
Research Inc. No salaries were paid, but some of our business
associates were so pleased with the early results that they made
donations to cover the costs of our sleuthing missions to Japan
and Europe.
Raising Neurotransmitter Levels Naturally
We were well aware there was another way to boldness, a very
popular shortcut - the antidepressant Prozac. Couldn't we just
lie to our doctors, pretending we were deeply depressed, and
cop a prescription?
We considered this option for maybe a week until our research
turned up the dark side of Prozac: As of December 1995, 35,230
adverse reactions to Prozac - including aggression, hallucinations,
hostility, assault, manslaughter and suicide - had already been
reported, resulting in 2,394 deaths. The wholistic practitioner
Dr. Julian Whittaker wrote that of all the drugs he ever cautioned
people against, Prozac is the one drug which terrifies him most.
He calls Prozac's potential side effects "...far more serious
than addiction alone."
That's why we came to call our drug-free way of mood elevation
"Natural Prozac." You see, the same brain chemicals
which Prozac simulates artificially can also be produced naturally
from nutrients in certain foods and food supplements. We immediately
started testing these natural methods on ourselves by making
changes in our food intake and adding selected food supplements
from the health food store. I should mention that none of us
were surviving on junk food - we were "eating healthy"
already.
These changes boosted our levels of the two "good"
neurotransmitters, for example through increased intake of certain
meats and dairy foods, some legumes, and complex carbohydrates.
We found that other common foods can drop you into a state of
timidity and even depression. For instance, egg whites, gelatin-based
foods and certain protein supple-ments can sink your neurotransmitter
levels like a stone, dropping you within hours to the point of
subclinical depression. We've experienced it in our own tests,
and Dr. Peter Kramer reported it being
done experimentally on US Army recruits.
So we concentrated on eating "up" foods and avoiding
"down" foods. And it worked, just like the performance
coaches said it would. We found subtle changes taking place within
days and becoming obvious within weeks. New higher mood levels
were established solidly in one to two months of proper "precursor
loading," with everyone reporting strong positive changes
in mood and outlook, plus the welcome side effects of increased
physical energy and greater psychological "toughness."
We documented the methods and wrote them up into a report we
call FOOD, MOOD and MONEY. We subtitled it How to Eat Your Way
Into Unstoppable Confidence. Our report contains the methods,
tips, hints and shopping lists of leading edge performance trainers,
plus our own personal experiences with them.
A month later we had to add a second report. We had learned
among our circle of volunteers that certain common prescription
drugs can aggravate your timidity and even plunge you into depression.
Our research on this subject is called Down Drugs Warning and
subtitled "Prescription Drugs That Can Make You Timid Or
Depressed." For example, if you're taking certain types
of high-blood-pressure drugs, diuretics, ulcer medications, birth
control pills, tranquilizers, or one of many other common drugs,
chances are you're living under a cloud that is depressing your
mood, optimism and energy, not to mention costing you money.
If a drug you take is on the list, ask your doctor to substitute
one that won't compromise your joy in life or reduce your income.
We made copies of these two reports for the volunteers on
the research team. What we had in our hands had cost us a lot
fo time and money. We considered it a bargain. It changed my
life. The others pretty well said the same.
We Want To Show You How To Lift Your
Mood
As I said, none of us had been shrinking violets before we started
mood elevation, but people noticed that we were doing business
differently now, with a lot more steam behind it. Even today
I have to remind myself that call reluctance had once been one
of my problems. Now it feels like my "inner engine"
is automatically propelling me forward. Instead of hesitating,
I just do the next thing, and the next thing - cold calling,
making contact, pitching an idea - whatever the next thing is.
There was a strange psychic side effect --- one coach had
told us to expect it: Not only would we be chatting with people
more freely, he predicted, but total strangers in public would
come up and talk to us because, as he put it, we would have a
more approachable aura. He was right. Strangers will approach
you - very nicely and politely - several times a day. I'm serious.
It's like they trust you on sight.
Word got out and we had to make a lot of photocopies for our
friends. Then a couple of magazines (AdVenture and SUCCESS) reviewed
our report. SUCCESS called it "...easy, simple, powerful!!"
Now all hell broke loose and literally thousands of people called
and asked for the information. We had the report printed and
bound professionally, and shipped 20,000 copies in a little over
a year.
We have just published the new expanded second edition, 50
percent larger, full of anecdotes and reader feedback, more detailed
and even more powerful. You can try the methods in FOOD, MOOD
and MONEY at no financial risk to you: If using our methods does
NOT double your annual income over the next year, just mail the
report back to us with a short note, and we'll refund the full
purchase price.
Do you know how many readers of the first 20,000 copies returned
the report for a refund? None. Nada. Zero. As you can tell, we're
rather proud of that record. So let us bear the risk and order
the report --- knowing you can return it and get your money back.
You've got nothing to lose but your blues...
S
u m m a r y