That’s when I decided to give those hypnosis recordings a chance and eventually I started seeing the benefits of listening to them.
I was becoming more confident.
I was able to access more resources within myself and eventually became the second top selling salesman...behind only one guy...we'll call him Steve.
The funny thing is that I was much more of a "people person" than he was.
He was pushy and would resort to “hard closing” people when he needed to.
Yet still he seemed to beat me every month.
Then one day my boss sat me down and he said "Paul, you know you're a better sales person than he is right?"
"Yeah I guess so" I replied "but he always seems to beat me".
"He beats you because he makes more presentations than you do" he said.
You see, to a degree sales is a numbers game.
The more people you present to, the more chances to sell, the higher your chances of making a sale.
More appointments = more sales.
I figured out that my biggest obstacle was that I wasn't setting enough appointments.
And because of that I wasn't making as many presentations as he was.
I quickly realized that he was using something right out of Erickson's bag of tricks called The Double Bind Pattern.
In its simplest dictionary terms, bind means to enforce a certain kind of responsibility to someone.
In linguistics, a bind is where a statement is made to trigger a corresponding action, a simple pattern of source-and-effect.
Binds typically create an illusion of choice by the use of words that normally suggest an option or a choice, where either option a receiver chooses will still go along with what the speaker wants.
The Double Bind pattern is where the listener is offered two choices, choice A and choice B.
In this structure, choice A has the same meaning as choice B, only phrased in a different way.
Here’s an example: “Would you like us to set an appointment now or should we just mark a specific time when we can meet?”
Choice A is “set an appointment now” and choice B is “mark a specific time when we can meet.”
Both phrases mean the same thing, only worded in a different manner.
In the example, the choices given to your listener is between an appointment now and an appointment scheduled probably tomorrow, which is not a big difference at all.
Once I started using this pattern I was able to triple the amount of appointments I booked and then I beat Steve and became the number one sales person.
Then I discovered the power of the Metaphor and how you can use it to open someone’s mind to a new point of view.
Then Tag Questions...
Then the Universal Quantifier...
So naturally I became curious to see how many more of these patterns I could put to work and how I could apply them to all areas of my life not just selling.
And I found tons.
The problem was that since I wasn’t planning on using these techniques in a therapeutic setting like Erickson did… I needed to figure out how to organize them in such a way that they could be used in the situations that I needed them for like..