“Once Difficult, Now Easy”—This is the battle cry of applied Creative Psycho-Cybernetics. You have undoubtedly acquired this book for one of two reasons: one, some aspect of selling is or has become difficult for you, in which case we guarantee it will be transformed to “easy!” by the time you finish; or two, you are doing very well but are looking for a little edge, a way to do even a bit better. You will be rewarded as you read on.
Over 30 million copies of Dr. Maltz’s first book, Psycho-Cybernetics, have been sold worldwide, a great many to sales professionals, mostly at the urging of their sales managers, peers, or friends. In Zero-Resistance Selling, Dr. Maltz’s most powerful methods are directed specifically and exclusively at the selling experience, with the objective of wiping away all resistance that occurs between prospect and salesperson and within the salesperson himself.
There are a few “basics” of Psycho-Cybernetics you will need to be familiar with before we begin:
Self-Image
While in practice as a plastic surgeon, Dr. Maltz encountered many people who exaggerated their physical problems far beyond reality, like a man with slightly oversized ears who insisted he had “giant elephant ears” which prevented anybody from taking him seriously, so he could not get ahead in life. Dr. Maltz also worked with patients who insisted they saw little difference in their reflection in the mirror, even after surgery had actually made miraculous changes.
Dr. Maltz became increasingly convinced that people often had an inner image of themselves damaged by emotional scars. Through extensive research, counseling with hundreds of patients, and his own remarkable insights, Dr. Maltz developed a unique understanding of this inner image and how it sets up and enforces the parameters of achievement and happiness for each individual. The self-image is held in the subconscious mind and becomes a composite of everything you’ve ever been told, read, learned, or experienced about yourself. In a way, it is your opinion of yourself, and it literally sets the limits of what you can and cannot accomplish.
From birth on, your authority figures—parents, grandparents, teachers, even peers—are busy “programming” your self-image, telling it things about you and your relationship to the world that may or may not be accurate, may or may not remain accurate as you mature, and may or may not be helpful. For example, the “Don’t Talk to Strangers” may be very useful for a five-year-old boy, but not for a 35-year-old salesman! The programming that is repeated most frequently and forcefully, and is reinforced by experience, becomes like the grooves etched into a record or, to stick with the computer analogy, the system installed on your hard drive.
The good news is that it can be “re-programmed” in a very deliberate, goal-directed manner. In this book, you will discover how your self-image may help, but probably also hinders your success in selling, and how to liberate your self image from inaccurate programming.
Servo-Mechanism
This is the core of Psycho-Cybernetics. Dr. Maltz determined that the subconscious mind has within it an awesomely powerful Servo (servant) Mechanism, controlled by the self-image, that works tirelessly to guide you to whatever objectives it is clearly given, much like the guided-missile technology. The Servo-Mechanism has a split personality; it can be either an Automatic Success Mechanism or an Automatic Failure Mechanism, depending on what is asked of it and what is communicated to it through the self-image. The mechanism has no built-in bias in one direction or the other. In this book, you will learn how to communicate with this Servo-Mechanism so it operates as an Automatic Success Mechanism.
Dr. Maltz developed a concept called “Theater of Your Mind,” to facilitate effective, vivid mental rehearsal. Today, more than 30 years after he wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, his ideas about mental rehearsal have become the basis for the booming field of sports psychology. The same mental rehearsal strategies that help athletes excel and perform well under pressure can give your selling career a giant boost. Mental rehearsal is especially important because the self-image cannot differentiate between real and synthetic (vividly, repetitively imagined) experience, so this is one of the best ways to reprogram the self-image.
You’ll become more comfortable with these terms and concepts as you proceed through this book. For a complete understanding, you will probably also want to read the original Psycho-Cybernetics and Psycho-Cybernetics 2000, both readily available in bookstores. Or, for a complete catalog of available books and cassettes, you can contact The Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation at (602) 265-1922 or fax (602) 269-3113.
The goal of this book—Zero-Resistance Selling—means a new kind of selling experience, free of all the resistance and obstacles manufactured inside the mind, and free of the resistance served up by prospects who sense insecurity on the part of the salesperson. Get a picture in your mind of going to the refrigerator and taking out a stick of butter, to put on a piece of bread. The butter is hard as a rock from being refrigerated. If you use an ordinary knife taken out of the drawer, you’ll have to push hard, probably saw back and forth, just to chip a pad of butter off the whole stick. Then spreading it will be a problem, too.
But picture yourself with a heated butter knife in hand. Armed with that warmed knife, you slice through that cold, hard stick of butter effortlessly. Armed with the understanding of your own self-image and the Creative Psycho-Cybernetic Techniques in this book, you will soon slice through all resistance effortlessly. Anything that has been difficult for you will become easy! You will become the effective salesperson you’ve always wanted to be.
Dan S. Kennedy
President, The Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation, Inc.