FOREWORD -- CREATIVE SELLING --The New Paradigm!

Creative Selling – The New Paradigm!

When we think of selling, we deal with the “how” of it.  CREATIVE SELLING deals with the “why” of it.  In the pages that follow, you will be guided with a narrative of actual situations that include the “what” and “how,” as well as the “why” of motivated selling.  Here we will make a departure from that norm to discuss what might seem counterintuitive or fanciful, but I can assure you that it works because it was used in all the cases covered in this book.

OVERCOMING THE PROBLEM OF CONDITIONING

We are victims of our conditioning taught what is expected of us and to think that answers will be found by an epiphany in the external world.  This externalization of truth keeps us on a treadmill of confusion, doubt, and anxiety.  We are awash in motivational theories and systems for “making the sale.” 

If we are lucky enough, and life gets painful enough, we are forced to turn away from what we know and turn toward what we don’t know and can find out.  This journey intensifies when we engage the unknown and take the road less traveled.  CREATIVE SELLING is that road less traveled. 

Once we realize what we are told axiomatically proves not to work, once we become aware of our inner need for something more appropriate, something that speaks to our soul, we start to ask questions and look for a different kind of nourishment.  We grow into our individuality.  We embrace the mystery of existence with a new way of looking inward for direction, watching for tiny clues, grasping the paradox that nothing is fixed and ordained nor random and accidental. 

We are not looking to make a specific sale.  We are looking to make a difference.  We see our role is to engage, participate, enjoy and have fun selling creatively.  We realize we were born to create and use our lives and experience as our artistic medium. 

CUTTING THROUGH THE CHAOS and NAVIGATING THE RIVER

To make a difference, we are looking for order found in intuition, which dissolves self-doubt to cut through the noise of chaotic blockage.  Intuition makes deep and lasting changes to our personalities because subjective experience, not facts, registers with us as real.  With intuition, we know what we need to know right when we need to know it.  Nature doesn’t waste time or energy.  Intuition presents information to us when we need it, not a moment too soon or too late, and uses any means available to reach us.

Let us make one thing clear, intuition is not unique; everyone has this sensing and thinking capability.  Intuition is neither a gift with which we are born nor is it a psychic phenomenon.  Moreover, it is not the opposite of logic.  It is a comprehensive way of knowing that includes left-brain analytical and right-brain conceptual states.  It is the process of creativity.  We experience our soul in our body as our personality is governed by natural law.  Everything we know occurs within those laws, and evolves in accordance with innately harmonious mathematical patterns.  It could be called sacred geometry of graphic design for which intuition trust increases; synchronicity builds, while inspiration makes us feel engaged and energetic.

CREATIVE SELLING is a world of action and accomplishment, of planning and doing where there is a place for logic, for focusing on major and minor goals of every call, where every call expands understanding and unifies and streamlines data to move inevitably to a sale, where thinking is mind spread throughout the entire body.

Fundamental to the journal you keep of each call is a clear perception of sense preferences of your client as well as yourself.  Is your acumen visual, auditory or physical: i.e., vision, voice or vibration?   Knowing this helps to understand those with whom you deal.

Our inherent intuitive capacities are more sophisticated than any computer or cell phone, especially when we are cognizant of everything in the calling environment, which speaks so loudly we sometimes can’t hear it.

Blocking out such acute perception might be cognitive biases shaped by early fears and negative experiences.  But if we embrace these, if we let our reptilian brain function, our intuition will soar and insight will penetrate the blockage to see clearly the situation.  The problem is that chances are we won’t trust our own insight and therefore not take the risk that is warranted. 

When cognitive biases dominate, the subconscious has a stranglehold on us as we are caught in a self-defeating web of beliefs none of which are true.  The reason CREATIVE SELLING triumphs is that you embrace stress, listen to its counsel and act upon its thundering cry. 

“Stress is the spice of life,” says pioneering endocrinologist Hans Selye, “without stress we are vegetables or dead.”  It is distress that saps energy, destroys motivation and finds us retreating into paranoia or false security.  Persons of such a mind are influenced by “old programming” and fear-based decisions, while largely unconscious that negativity is largely shaping their lives. 

LIVING IN ALIGNMENT WITH CREATIVE CONFIDENCE

For our mind to be aligned we must be in charge of our moods and attitudes. This is necessary to shift from intuitive blocking views to intuitive enhancing ones.  It helps to understand that consciousness breaks down to the subconscious mind, the conscious mind and the super conscious mind, or in popular parlance, the body, mind and spirit.

The super conscious mind and subconscious mind are our actual experiences, the geography we carry with us wherever we go, and the psychology that operates when we are vis-à-vis another person in a sales call.  This amounts to our perception of our world.  The conscious mind is a roving mind, which involves are awareness of the situation, in situ, and how we handle the dynamics of it, that is, the choices we make during the heat of the call.  Like an athlete, who moves without thinking, the conscious mind has no memory.  It simply is. 

The super conscious mind is the soul’s awareness; the subconscious mind contains information relating to survival, while the conscious mind contains no memory, knows nothing, but is agent of the free will.  It provides the moving point of choices and personal identity, and gives to experience its individual character.  The conscious mind is relational and operates like a motion picture in your head with flickering on-again and off-again images, meanings, and movements. 

My grandson recently told me of his uncle, my son, who owns a scooter shop, “When uncle Mike is in a good mood, he sells a lot; when he is in a bad mood, he doesn’t sell anything.”  He was expressing a profound truth about the conscious mind.

RIDING THE CURRENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

My son prides himself in being rational, logical and realistic.  He doesn’t see himself as being addicted to defining things, jumping to conclusions, or settling for pat answers for results when pressed, which describes the subconscious mind’s dominance in his behavior.  The more loving and super conscious your view, the more accurate your intuition on the conscious level.  Changing perceptions by changing your views leads to a more self-enhancing intuitive world.

When the mind turns to love instead of fear, intuition occurs naturally as you are now living in a creative and fluid way, detached from worries, from shoulds and should nots, from strong opinions.  If you trained yourself to shift directions from fear to love – that is, love what you are doing – you are more likely able to adjust your speed to the situation to meet the needs of the moment.  This will find you initiating the correct response, while abandoning outworn behaviors that are crippling your deeper self.  The super conscious mind or soul is telling you to slow down, let go, go with the flow and let your intuition take over. 

CREATIVE SELLING rides the current of consciousness descending into the situation at hand, and then ascending again into a higher consciousness.  We materialize and dematerialize, manifest and dissolve, involve and evolve in a typical day.  You don’t think so?  Consider the times in a day that you space out, your mind wanders, then suddenly comes back just as you are entering the driveway to your home.

Indeed, in a sales call, we can rock into clarity, then confusion, plunge into apathy, recover our specific purpose, and then expand into waxed eloquence.  We do this as the tempo and temperature rises and falls as our conscious mind processes information.  Should the customer, turn his seat around to show you his back, and commence clipping his nails, you may suffer a panic attack, become manic depressed, or fatigued.  Your subconscious mind kicks in with your conscious mind coming to the fore to find you saying, “Obviously, this is a bad time.  I’ll set up another appointment with your secretary.”  And before the customer can react, you are gone.  Intuition found you in survival mode with your circuits open with you in charge.

CREATIVE SELLING is meant to operate at a peak level coordinating the different planes of consciousness while not forcing anything.  Your personality filters all the congruent and incongruent data in real-time with synchronicity and natural efficiency.  You trust the endings and beginnings of your sales calls as a continuum of your mind changing direction.  You feel the exhilaration of spaciousness, an open imagination, and a comfort with silence and noise that spikes your curiosity and steels your courage.  Stated another way, CREATIVE SELLING is an identical twin to the intuitive process.  How so?

Consciousness passes through the excitement of the challenge to specific concepts and plans.  It moves naturally from your mind as motivation and then to forms and formats of execution to major and minor goals for each call so that some level of success is always experienced.

RUNNING ON EMPTY

What we see in our mind’s eye is what we are.  It is the descending phase of the creative cycle.  It is a virgin world, whole and undisturbed.  It is a world ripe with possibilities, which we are confident we can have, but it is also a world in which we can be stuck on “must have.”

When so obsessed, our energy is consumed in form with getting or having not in giving or renewing.  Our reserves are gone and nothingness looms.  We commence to think in terms of emptiness failing to realize that emptiness is liberating and pleasurable.  Our culture places a negative value on emptiness when with Buddhists it is divine.  Why?

With the ascending phase of CONFIDENT SELLING, we can have and can be.  It is the welcoming phase of the creative cycle.  We backtrack from the debilitating loss of direction, motivation, interest, the inability to sleep, and from crushing anxiety, boredom, and seductive addiction.

When we are energetically dead, when we are running on empty, we stop; we let go; we let flow.  We enter the pause that refreshes.  It is okay to take a “time out,” and regroup.  It is okay to not do or not do right now.  It is okay not to think. 

A strange thing happens, I know because I have been there, not once but several times in my life.  Each time the world looked so black that I thought my life was over, each time I was told I wasn’t cut out for this type of work, and each time I stepped back in retreat with no idea what would come next, and each time my springs that I thought was dry proved to be overflowing with possibilities.  The mystic Krishnamurti says, “When you cease to think, to do, and to form complex plans and simply let go, being is immediately present.”  Chronological time disappears and psychological time takes over with you finding yourself where you are supposed to be instantaneously.  By opening to reality, to what is, you immediately feel your super conscious or soul with the unknown transforming into the known.

CREATIVE SELLING gets underneath all your, “Yes, buts” to unlock what may be blocking your success whatever your field of endeavor as shadows and dark clouds are endemic to all experience.  It is the black bag in which all our feelings are stashed, feeling society does not authorize us to feel, feeling that find us stuck and unable to get off the treadmill.

This is a personal journey, a hero’s journey, as well as mainly a counterintuitive account of how comprehensive awareness of what is invisible can trigger the appreciation of a new paradigm that is a significant departure from sales and motivational literature. 

CREATIVE SELLING systematically develops conventional themes in unconventional ways, along with case histories that illustrate the emerging partnerships between buyer and seller.  In every instance, you will recognize the importance of environment as you are showing how the energy flows and how insights are determined intuitively. 

When you are trying to sell a product, interview for a job, handle a relationship problem, or pull yourself out of a funk, the cohesive details of the environment are critical to seeing the situation clearly.  You are aware of the place and space with its assortment of scent, color, sound, heat and atmosphere.  In CREATIVE SELLING, you will see how important they are as context shapes content of your delivery. 

Understood is that intuition is fluid but highly personal. Your mind is open and relaxed; your character is informal and trusting. To encourage this emergence of intuition, your emptiness is filled with everything around you.  At the same time, nothing around you must remind you of the square structured world of logic you left, the world of preplanning and much anticipation.  You are now connected with the energy of the surrounding field.  When this is so, you are a listener, not a teller, a learner, not a knower, open to new experience and new knowledge.  You are ready for CREATIVE SELLING.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 1, 2012