Chapter 2: Thinking Differently

If you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur, you’re over-stressed as business is no longer as it was a couple of years ago.

What changed?

People? Circumstances? Family issues? Health issues? Economic environment? Some of the above? All of the above?

The smart business owner’s first advice is that if your phone does not ring with inquiries and orders, you don’t have a “people calling in” problem – you have a “dialing out” problem, and that’s fair. Reaching out to possible clients is always an essential part of business.

But even then, you might say, people don’t want to buy my services. They worry about the poor economy.

You chat with them about what’s keeping them up at night and you find out that it is the level of uncertainty that drives everyone crazy.

So, the business owner or the salesperson begins to be afraid of calling and talking to customers because _____ (insert here the Limiting Beliefs one might come up with which are masked as reasons).

Uncertainly is something we all deal with. Nobody knows exactly and with 100% certainty what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week, or next month. What makes the difference between proceeding with courage or being stuck and afraid?

Would it make a difference if you reach out to prospective or existing clients with a helping hand rather than anxiety to show them how together you can both benefit despite uncertainty?

To do so, you need to have a different mindset, and here is where NLP and Time Line Therapy® can be most useful and helpful.

In NLP, you can discover how to proceed with incomplete or partial information and yet arrive at the results you intended by the conscious use of language without guessing or mind reading, without misunderstanding, dogma, or judgmentalism (done by the knowledge of Values from the NLP Master Practitioner Training).

In NLP, one of the techniques, called the Cause and Effect Frame, shows us that in business there are either reasons for not being a success or results. No matter how good the reasons are, results are all that matters. NLP helps with changing that which keeps you stuck in reasons and shows you practically how to move to results.

NLP Reframing techniques show people different points of view, or solutions to their financial problems they could not think of before.

In finding “out of the box” solutions to any business problem - i.e., lateral thinking, where Edward de Bono was the ultimate recognized master. The normal way of thinking for people is up (toward big picture) or down (toward specifics and details). Edward de Bono’s paramount advice was to give that up and think laterally. But he did not describe a specific technique easy to replicate for everyone about HOW to do this. In NLP the technique is called Hierarchy of Ideas.

Lateral thinking (solutions to think out of the box) is all about freeing up your imagination and creativity. NLP offers a simple but very effective series of steps by which the mind is free of the constraints of linear and one-sided thinking. The technique is part of what is called Submodalities. Other very valuable techniques are the use of metaphors in several distinct but certain distinct ways, anchoring, reframing, presuppositions and natural language, which is language mastery.

Sleight of Mouth technique from the NLP Master Practitioner Training course allows a salesperson or business owner to dance dances around the client’s objections.

Time Line Therapy® techniques allow a sales person to remove the belief that no one is interested in purchasing their product or service.

If you want to be pro-active and learn how to build new relationships, have new customers or repeat business, you must be pro-active and learn how to think differently. This action will lead to a much higher level of certainty and results and with them, financial prosperity.