One of the most overlooked skills in business is intuition. You heard me right – it is a skill. That means it can be taught and learned and strengthened over time. This is a skill that comes in handy in a number of situations. It’s a skill that golfers use to lag their first putt close enough to the hole to have a tap-in to close out the whole. You may have seen the movie Happy Gilmore in which Happy Gilmore, played by Adam Sandler, learns to go to his "happy place" so that he can overcome his putting woes. What is the happy place? It’s a quiet place between your thoughts where you are fully experiencing a situation with your whole body – not just with your mind. And your body and mind then together become this incredible computer that instantly makes the right calculations that lead to the right response.
Here’s another example. If you’ve seen the movie Backdraft, you may recall the scene where Kurt Russel, playing the lead character – a fire-figher, finds himself in a burning building that he knows is about to collapse. His intuition enables him to save his life and others too. How does he know what’s going to happen? – from experience. He has experienced situations like this before and his body perceives stimuli that give him clues in split second. Unlike mental activity, intuition is instantaneous.
Intuition is when you access a lifetime of experience – compare it to a situation you are presently experiencing – and making an appropriate response – all in a split second. How do you do this? By listening to your body. This is how an experienced sales professional knows when it’s time to close the deal. They just know. It’s that simple. They know because they’ve been there before and have recorded information that they can now trust.
What if you don’t have a lot of experience? Find someone that does and listen to them. Make their experience your own.
To summarize, here is my simple formula for living a better life in general, and if you are in the profession of selling, having greater success with that too:
1. Acquire Experience – Get in the Game!
2. Go to Your Happy Place! – Listen with Your Whole Body
3. Trust that You’ll Make the Right Choices
That’s it. Lesson concluded. It really is easy. And it really works. You’ll also discover there is a lot of scientific data to support this, but let’s leave that discussion to the body-mind experts. Just know that it works. But keep in mind one of the keys to this method. The more you trust it the better it works. Why? because you can’t fight your way there. Trying too hard creates more chatter in your mind that makes it difficult to really listen.
So, go out there now and live more, sell more, and enjoy life. I trust you will.
