Masterclass with John La Valle – NLP in Business

Michel: [00:00:02] Hello, everyone. I’m Michel Wozniak. And I’m pleased to co-host this masterclass with Nathalie de Marcé.

Nathalie: [00:00:11] Hi, everyone.

Nathalie: [00:00:13] Our special guest today is Mr. John La Valle. He is the president of the Society of Neurolinguistic Programming. He’s specialized in business and he’s co-training with Dr. Richard Bandler and Kathleen La Valle. And he’s also the author of the book Persuasion Engineering. If you need to know anything more about us, just see the links beneath and you can find our Web sites. Now, since 20 percent of the people who registered don’t know what NLP is, John. We are going to begin with the first… No no no, before that.

Michel: [00:01:03] Yes before that, Let’s give some numbers. OK. Absolutely.

Michel: [00:01:09] So just for all of you to know there are about seventeen hundred people who registered. So a thousand seven hundred people from 57 countries. So we received more than a thousand questions. And Nathalie did a great job synthesizing and compiling them. So just before we start, subscribe to the channel, because we are going to answer as many questions as possible, if not during this master class, but afterwards also in the next in the coming weeks, we’re going to create some videos to answer many of those questions. This channel is content oriented and we will bring a lot of value to anyone interested in NLP and also in strategies. So there is one French channel. This is the one on which you are now. And I also created an English channel that you will find in the description of the video just below, where we will post the same contents in English. So if you are more familiar with English, just subscribe to the English Channel that is referenced below. Okay. Also during the whole master class, feel free to comment during the live. We are going to keep track of your comments. Be constructive and we will offer answers. If not live, will answer after the event. In that series of videos that we’re going to announce also to you. So we’ll publish in French on the French channel and in English on the English Channel.

Nathalie: [00:02:40] Yey! So, are you ready, John, to get on the grill?

John: [00:02:46] Yes. Hello, everybody. Hello, hello. Hello. Out there.

Nathalie: [00:02:52] Super. So the first question is from Laila, from France who asks: In a few words what would be a clear and striking definition of NLP?

John: [00:03:07] Very simple. NLP is about how the brain works and works along with language, as well as neurochemistry, of course. But most people miss that point. And so NLP’s been around for a long, long time. While there’s a lot of the things we can do with it, I’m going to give you how I figure out for people the best way to describe the two parts of NLP. One is that, first of all, there’s two parts to the entire technology. First, there are the basic skills and those skills, by the way, there are no new skills that I can think of or that anybody’s come up with. Somebody might call them new skills, but in fact, they’re not. We have the language pattern. We have the anchoring, things like this. These are sets of skills. When you take those skills and you put them together, those comprise techniques. So the techniques, by the way, while they work and I tell people the following thing, they’re going to work every single time until the first time they don’t. So if you teach techniques, then you’re not teaching skill. You’ve got to teach the skills in order for the techniques to really work just about most of the time. Because if something doesn’t go down right now, you’re working with someone or whatever. And all of a sudden you’re not reaching the result, if you have the skills, you can quickly figure out what to do next. Basically, it’s about how the brain works, and with language. Remember, it’s Neuro Linguistic Programming. And my favorite part is the one in the middle, that one with Linguistics. So Neuro about brain which includes, by the way, neurochemistry, which most people don’t teach. But we’ve been teaching it since the 90s. Linguistics for the language part and Programming basically means how do we organize our thoughts. How do we organize our strategies, things that get us through everyday life. So.

Michel: [00:05:02] Excellent. Thank you, John. So the next question, which is very connected to the first one, is from Paul. And he is asking, how can you reprogram yourself to achieve success?

John: [00:05:15] Let me say a couple of things about that Paul. First of all, NLP was not really what people called a self-help technology. It was never a self-help technology. It was really meant to work with other people to help other people get the results they want in their lives. OK? Now, can you go in and reprogram yourself? Probably. But that means you’ve got to live the technology, not just try to run programs and do things inside of your own mind with techniques. They worked for you? They could. The best way to be able to get programmed for success is to work with someone because the most difficult thing about working with yourself is you can’t calibrate yourself. If you studied NLP at all, you understand about it and how you have to basically observe the other person for changes and just even look at them, like part of my body from here up, you’re not going to see everything. So if you were working with me, you can’t see my foot move. You can’t see my hands move. But the other person, when you work with the other person, if they’re well trained in NLP, they know how to calibrate you. They could see a finger twitch and that could mean something and they could check it out. Maybe it means something. So to program yourself, the best and the only way I know about programming yourself and this may sound a little bit weird, is to change your environment and put yourself in an environment where all there is is success. Work with people, hanging out with people, talk with people, have coffee with people who are successful. And you can glean some of those things, being with those people. So by changing your environment, putting yourself in a very successful environment really, really helps. I’ve been very fortunate in my life. And so people would say, I only know a lot about business because I’ve got a lot of experience in business. I’ve got an MBA in business. You know what I learned? I learned how to get an MBA in business. That’s it. Most of the things I learned in my MBA program, I don’t ever remember using it at all. But I started out when I was young. I didn’t know the word entrepreneur at the time. But I started my own little business. You know, I was about 13 years old. I won’t tell you what it was. It wasn’t illegal. But I’ll go past that part and then I had to get a job. My father said, no, no,  listen, you know, that’s a summer job and I’ve got a real job. So I said I’m not going to carry newspapers around and wait to get paid for the newspapers and things delivering them. And then I got a job in an ice cream place. I don ‘t know if you have those kind of places over there. But the name of it is called Carvel. So they make soft ice cream and things like that. So I did that job. Now, the guy who who owned the place, he was a real pain in the neck. However, he taught me a lot of things. And I remember these things. And he stayed on me, you know, and I was like, I go home every night, I can’t work for this guy. But anyway, I realized that I was learning some things, that he was teaching me things, not just about making ice cream. But about quality, business, running a business, things like this. Then I end up going to school, college, everything else, and worked for a couple of different companies. And I worked in every part of the company you could think of except for accounting and finance. I was just interested in doing accounting inside the company. I worked in human resources, and I worked my way back. I worked in human resources, quality control, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, all of these things. And I was fortunate and I continue to say I was very, very fortunate to learn because of my experience and the people who decided to mentor me. A few executives, they just they took a liking to me. I just still don’t know why but they taught me things, OK? They take me aside: Listen, I know you did this thing on this project. You might want to consider this the next time, blah, blah, blah, you know, and so my experience. But the other thing I realized was that I put myself in a different environment than what I had at home. My dad worked hard. He was a factory worker. The people he knew and the people he hung out with were factory workers. I remember going to Bowling once. He said: Son, I want to go bowling with the team. I said: All right. I must have been 10 years old. And they talked about the management and the supervisors and they were drinking beer while they were talking. And I was all okay, except I wasn’t really learning anything. And that was OK because I was with my dad and his friends. But I realized that if I wanted to learn more things, I had to be in the environment. So I would first thing I did was put myself in the environment to be successful. Now I consider myself to have been very fortunate or lucky, let’s say lucky. I found that luck is a combination of good skill and being in the right place at the right time and recognizing your opportunities there. So put yourself in a different environment. Go hang out with people who were successful, you know, go go make friends with them and go to meetings with them and things like this. So that’s one way to do it. Instead of trying to program yourself for success, because you can trick yourself into doing the wrong thing anyway, because you can’t calibrate yourself. You know, you could be doing something in your mind and thinking this, this, this. And meanwhile, that’s part of your conscious mind. So what you’re aware of is going to be your conscious mind, what you’re not aware of is what’s going on in your unconscious mind. And your unconscious mind may not like what you’re doing and you may not know it, which means you don’t end up being successful. So you can fool your unconscious mind basically by putting yourself in the environment with successful people. If you keep hanging around with the people who are pretty much, you know, at the same success level, let’s say, as you are, remember, you’re going to be talking to yourself about things you’re talking to them about. You’re hearing them talk about things, but it’s all at the same level that you’re all at. But if you start hanging around with people who are already successful and they’re out there and they’re more than happy to help out, I’m sure they are. I don’t care what country you’re in. You just have to get them talking about themselves and things like that, you know? Then you have a better chance of programming yourself for success and you know, NLP is not just about techniques. Like I said, it’s not just about techniques. And you probably have a whole lot of questions here about techniques. And I’m going to be the first one to tell you, there are some techniques that I’ll say: Just try this technique out. You’ve got to live NLP. I mean, that’s really what it comes down to. So part of that means hang out with people who are successful and glean what you can from them about how they got to be successful and what are they doing to stay successful. Because then that’s the best way of getting it into your brain, your life. You know, I live NLP. I’m pretty sure I do. That doesn’t mean I do everything perfectly every day. It means I do make mistakes. I know when I make a mistake and I put something in my brain so that I go: Ohh, I have to do this differently the next time. And I might not even know what to do the next the next time. But I do recognize I made a mistake as soon as I make it, at least usually. So hang out with people who are successful. Find out what happens. That’s really a great way to do it. You might find out that some of them decide that they like you and they will mentor you as well. You just don’t know. They’ll be the best success programmers that you can find. That was a little bit a long answer there, but.

Nathalie: [00:12:58] That was amazing. Now we have Dalila from France who wants to know how to communicate about the benefits of NLP to people who don’t believe in it.

John: [00:13:15] How to convince them? Basically?

Nathalie: [00:13:19] Yeah. Basically how to communicate the benefits of NLP.

John: [00:13:26] Ok. Real, real short, simple answer. Give them an experience of it. It’s very hard. Even Richard cannot really explain and describe NLP. I heard people ask more time. So, what’s NLP? Listen, I came up with the name. I discovered all these different things that work. I don’t even know how to tell you, you know, what it is and how to convince you of it. But I knew years ago that the best way. Here’s the deal. You can talk to somebody and you can explain all kinds of things to them. OK? Regardless of how sincere you are and how much you love the technology, they’re not going to necessarily get it up here. They’re just not going to get it up here. OK? The best way to convince someone of something is to give them an experience of it. Ok? I’m going to give you a fast example. It has to do with me. Back years ago, when I was working with Richard. But I was not co-training with him just yet. And he said to me, I was staffing for him, you know, doing small group sessions during the trainings. And he said to me: John, I hear you doing pretty well with language patterns and things. I go: Well I don’t know, I guess, you know. And he said, well, how about you get on the stage, and this is a rare opportunity, when Richard does this. Well, how about you take the microphone this afternoon and teach them language patterns? And I thought Oh oh… No, no. Oh, boy. I said, well, Richard, that’s good, but can I do it tomorrow? Because you know what? I want to brush up a little bit and everything else I’m thinking in my mind. I’m going to read my books tonight. I’m going to study all this stuff. And he said, oh, yes, sure. OK. So you want to do it tomorrow? I should, yeah. But that be great. OK. Tomorrow after lunch. I should get be great. He gets up after lunchtime, grabs the microphone. He says now John La Valle is going to come up and teach language patterns. Come on up hare, John. Well, that was on the same day. That was only minutes after he said: Yeah sure, no problem, John. I’ll let you do it tomorrow. He threw me right in there with the sharks, basically. So that experience, more than anything else, taught me that I learned what I learned. Let me start with that. OK? So the best way to do it is to give someone an experience for NLP. Now, you might wonder, well, like, what do you mean? So it’s very simple. If somebody comes, and they’re complaining about: Oh you know, I had a bad day, blah, blah, blah. I go right to submodalities just to give them an experience of it. Now, a lot of people, they down-talk about submodalities: Oh, that’s Bandler with his submodalities. Well, let me tell you about submodalities. It’s the way that we encode the information. It’s not even the final encoding. We can change the coding. Ok? We can change the way we coded something. In other words, if you had an experience with a dog, and you didn’t like the dog, you know, the dog frightened you or whatever, you’re going to have images and sounds inside of your mind and feelings that go with them in a certain coding. Now, maybe the pictures are in black, maybe it’s a still shot. I don’t know. Maybe the sound is really loud in your head. And the feeling is like, woooo, you know. Well, I just look and I go: wooow, excuse me. Why don’t you try this, and I have them shift their submodalities right there. By the way, I could be sitting in an airport. I don’t really care where I am, ok? I had a woman sitting on an airplane once she sat next to me. And as she sat in a chair, we called her the white knuckle rider, she was so tense, grabbing onto the armrest that her hands were white from grabbing on so hard. I said: Are you OK? And she said, no. And I said: What’s up? She goes: I hate flying, I’m afraid this plane is going to crash. And she’s making all these pictures in her head about this stuff, the things that aren’t going to happen necessarily, right? And I said: can I help you with that? She said, sure, that would be great. I don’t know what you can do. And I just, you know, I chided her a little bit and I said, you know, you make pictures in your head. And she said: What? Do you how many times I get that response from people? They say, what? I go: You’re making pictures in your head. And she does this thing. Oh, yeah, you’re right. I go stop making those pictures, make better pictures and then calm down a little bit, you know? And she said, ohh, but how do I calm down? I said: Liste, you can calm down a bunch of different ways, start by changing the images, because those are the ones that are driving what you’re feeling right now. OK? So I give people an experience for it. There are some people who come and say: NLP doesn’t work. Well, I got news for them. Right? The thing is, if it didn’t work, they probably saw an “operator” or a “programmer”, I call them programsters,  that didn’t do everything they could do. OK? We get tested all the time. We get checked all the time, you know, people say: OK, so you’re a master trainer, huh? So show me how you walk out water. That’s a stupid thing. I’m over-exaggerating it. But the fact is, that’s what happens. So I never take on a challenge. I never take on a challenge. If someone says: prove to me that it works. I don’t have the proof that it works. I can. But I’m not going to. Because you’re challenging it. The other thing that goes on and most people really aren’t aware of it, unless they come hanging with us, is neurochemistry. We teach about neurochemistry. We don’t go in-depth with it. But you know what? Your brain fires off all kinds of neurotransmitters. The are good ones, not so good ones. And those things are important to understand and to recognize at least. You know, so, for example, someone would come in like the woman, I saw her sitting next to me. I looked at her and I could tell there was something not right. You know, she was very uncomfortable, breathing heavy, you know, all this stuff, you know, and especially I saw her hands on the arms of the chair. And that told me there’s something not right here and therefore something needs to change. I was also thinking, so I’ve started make some pictures in my own head. And here we are. I’m sitting next to this woman who’s terrified and we’re going to take off on this plane. And when we’re in the air, she’s going to go: Waaaaaaah!! I have no idea what she’s going to do. And I don’t want to be sitting next to her when this happens. So I either had to change my mood and move my seat, which is not going to happen, or I could change her state and I chose to change her state to teach her a couple of things. We had a great flight, by the way, it was about a three hour flight. And she said to me: Wow, this is really OK. I’m doing OK. And I said: great. She goes: What do you do? Now, that’s a tough question. I said: I do whatever I want to do. And my favorite thing to do is one of two things. One is to help people and two is to help people make money. Those are my two favorite things to do. Help people have a good life and to help people make money. And she said, well, well, well, where did you go to school? I go, that’s not important because I didn’t learn how to do this in school. So give someone an experience of NLP, because here’s the deal. When you’re speaking with them and trying to convince them, all of that comes under the category of: this is your opinion. And no one actually has to consider your opinion. Period. But the other thing is they can not repeat that. People can not deny their own experiences. Period. So give them an experience that they just cannot deny. Period. Done. It’s easy enough to do. You don’t have to sit down, you don’t have to swing a watch in front of their eyes. And do the hypnosis thing like that. You don’t have to do all that. Very conscious. I do the unconscious parts when I can, of course. But I do what I can, you know, I do what I can to just do it consciously with them. Here’s the reason why. Because I’ve heard people, I’ve heard other people training and they say: Oh, don’t worry about it. The students say: I don’t get it. They go: Don’t worry about it, your unconscious got it. Don’t buy that. Don’t buy that. That is one of the biggest lies on the planet. OK? Because you still have to give them some kind of conscious understanding of what they just learned. OK? It all goes together in your brain, not just the unconscious stuff. In order for them to develop the skill, they’ve got to have a conscious understanding of what they just did so that they can readjust and make it better and better and better. They can’t do that if it’s out of their awareness, how would they know what to correct? How would they know what to develop, redevelop, fix up, make better. They wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t know. Make them experience it. That’s the thing to do.

Michel: [00:21:39] Thank you. That’s very precious advice, because this is a question that comes very often. And now we have one question from Saulius from Lithuania. If I could master one thing in sales and it would boost my sales the most. What would be that thing?

John: [00:21:56] Just one thing?

Michel: [00:21:58] Yeah.

John: [00:21:59] I know what you do. I’m going to take a guess at this. Can he answer you at all?

Michel: [00:22:05] I don’t know if he’s connected right now, perhaps he will write something.

John: [00:22:10] Listen, I had this question the other day. I was on another Zoom, and the guy said to me, what’s the one technique that you could tell me that is going to work immediately? Starting like tomorrow? And I said, well, first, you just made a mistake, because you don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Let’s start with that. OK? So. Yes. True. And I said, but here’s the one thing. If you really want to know the one thing, you can call it NLP or call it whatever you want, right? The most important thing you could do immediately that I know will work is get off your butt and start doing things. Ok? Not be sitting back and waiting for something to happen. I know that sounds kind of simple. Maybe even it seems like it’s off the cuff. But you know what? That’s what you have to do. A lot of people, you know, especially in today’s environment, with this virus thing, this Corona thing or whatever, and they’re waiting, they are worried, they’re waiting, they’re worried. They’re worried. They’re worried. Do things. Look what we’re doing here today. OK? You know how many Zoom things I’ve done in the last few days? Do you know how many times I’ve been on a phone with people for last few weeks, for that matter? So you’ve got to do stuff, you know, don’t just sit back and wait. So you’ve got to be able to do things. The other thing is, now, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but this doesn’t apply to everybody. It only applies to people who have come to really learn, basically, because you mentioned the book. I’ve really learned the basic simple elements of persuasion engineer. OK? Because once you have that set of tools in your mind and you’re able to use those skills, once you have that down pretty well, then I tell you the following thing: How much are you making? They go blah blah, I’m making this much of… Double it. What? Double it. Some people come to that one particular problem and quadruple their income. Now, that also means that they’re in charge of how much money they can make. So the other answer to the question is, if you want to make more money, if you’re in a sales position where you’re salaried, you’re stuck. I’m not going to lie to you. You’re going to make so much money no matter how much you sell, because the company is going to pay you a salary. Now, if you’re on a salary plus commission, I’m going to tell you this, you’re also stuck, because you’re going to get a salary and that salary usually is the amount that they know is going to keep you comfortable. And anything you make above that, so more than that, it’s going to become extra money. But there’s no reason for you to go work that hard for most people because they’re comfortable. OK? If you’re not hungry, man, you’ve got to be hungry. And I don’t mean you have to be hungry because you need more money. You’ve got to be hungry because you want more excitement. You want more of the thrill of the chase and all these different things: Why do people sell? You know, there’s lots of different reasons why people are in sales. Some people just like the thrill of it. They love the thrill of the chase. And so that’s important. That counts. So I don’t know what is the environment that you’re in. I was with a guy, I was doing a training years ago in the 90s, early 90s with the US country second largest new home builder. The second biggest in the country. And we go to a dinner one evening and he has some of his salespeople with them. They all drove up in their cars and a few of them, we’re talking, young guys. We’re talking some of these guys were twenty four, twenty five, twenty six, twenty seven. And some of them are driving up in Porsches, Jaguars and cars like this. And I’m thinking: Boy, these guys must do pretty well. And as I was thinking about this, another guy came up and said to the boss, he was vice president, he said: I’m thinking of buying a condo. Do you think I can afford it? You know, based on where we’re headed with the company and my sales track record. The boss looked at him and said, yes, of course, you can! Go out and get that thing before the prices go up and mortgage rates change. And he said, Oh, thanks a lot. And I could see in this kid’s face he was going the next morning to buy this place. And I looked at Bob, that was his name. And I said: Bob, do you think this guy can afford to buy that condo? He said: no. I said: Why would you tell him that for, then? I said: You guys drive pretty nice cars. They’re young guys. He said: Yes. I keep them hungry. They’re on there on pure commission. I keep them hungry anyway, because as long as they stay hungry, they’re going to keep selling like crazy. And they do. Now, that’s with what I left, and in my brain, I said: Of course, if somebody is not hungry, why are you going to work harder? OK. So there’s a lot of that going on. So I’ve got I’m not sure what kind of a job you’re in, you know, in your country. Basically, salary, salary plus commission, whatever. But you’ve got to be hungry. There’s an old saying, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And now that’s been around quite a long time. So if you don’t have, you know, things you you’re not getting, you’re not going to be hungry. Now, that does mean that it’s all about things you can get, right? But it also means, you know, some people sell. I know a guy. I’m not going to mention his name. I know a guy that is still so hungry because he loves he loves the thrill of the chase. And this guy goes after every opportunity he has to sell to people that he’s involved in within the businesses he’s involved in. He loves this stuff. He loves the excitement. He gets up in the morning and he is like drooling, like he wants to get out there, start making phone calls and things. So there’s some people who do that. I mean, that’s their gratification and that’s what they’re hungry for. They’re hungry for that good feeling of success and everything else. So what’s the thing you can do? Well, first thing is go do things. The “things” part is too general, of course, you’ve got to figure out what those things are that would make you feel happy. OK? And do enough things to be successful. Now, one more thing, because you see in NLP, we ask this crazy question. I say crazy question because it’s really kind of incomplete. We say to people, we’re going to work with someone and say: What do you want? And they say: Oh, I just want to feel good. Well, that’s easy. I can do that in three seconds. It’s called anchoring. I’ll elicit a powerful state from you, boom, I anchor it, boom, I fire off the anchor and I teach you how to fire your own anchor off, and you’re gonna feel happy. Easy. That’s a very incomplete answer to a very incomplete question. My more complete question is more around this. What is it the result that you want to get? My next question after that is, do you have the resources to do that? So basically, it goes like this because people say: Oh, I want to have a bazillion euros in the bank. Well, great. That’s really nice. That doesn’t count. I’m really sorry. Ok? They go: I want to have a red what I call a Testasterossa because I’ve driven one once and I have to tell you, it’s a Testasterossa. If you’ve never driven one, go drive one. And so they say: I want to have a Testasterossa in my garage. I go: It doesn’t count. I’m really sorry. All of those things are the rewards for doing certain behaviors. This is a behavior driven technology. Nothing changes unless the behavior changes. Period. I’m going to repeat that. Nothing changes, OK? Nothing changes until the behavior changes. Behavior, not just the feelings. Oh, I feel good. Great. What are you gonna do? I don’t know. You have to get results. So my first question would be, so what is it that you want to get as a result or what is it that you want to get as a result in your life? And they still might say: Well, if I had a Brazilian dollars… No no, forget that bazillion dollars in the bank thing. My basic premises, if they can take it away from you, it doesn’t count. Period. They can take your bazillion dollars. They can take your Testasterossa, all those things. They can take all these things away from you. So my next question is, can you get them again? If you can get them again, then you have a good set of skills. That means you can go make the money again, even though they took the first one away. You will get another car because you have the skills to earn more money. This is all behavioral driven, not just, you know, not just all of airy, airy stuff. You know, like. Wow. Yeah. I just want to feel like I can float among the clouds. Well, I got an answer for that, too, but that’s not going to help you to get the results you really want in your life. So everything is really results and behavior driven, especially if you’re in business. Oh, my gosh. I saw a lot of business meetings where I go: So what do you guys want to do? Basically, They all look at each other basically because they don’t know. Now, does that mean they don’t know what they want to do because of my question? Or is that mean they just don’t know? Period. So I have to ask another question. What results aren’t you getting that you want to get? OK? And I might may have to start there. So it really depends on the environment I’m in and why I’m there, for people. So results, results, results, results. I told you when I was a kid, I was a little bit embarrassed when I ran my first little company that I had. It wasn’t really a company. And it was only doing good during the summer time. But I can tell you this, I had more money in my pocket on any given day, than my dad made it a month. Ok? And I was actually embarrassed about that because I knew, number one, I couldn’t tell him. And if I went and handed it to him, he’d say, where did you rob that from, where did you steal that money from? And I couldn’t tell him that part. So that was a lesson for me, too. OK? Because I was able to make money easily. And it was sales. I was selling little things, you know? And so that was another thing. I realized the result, because if someone said to me: What are you doing for the summer? Because all they see me doing, by the way, is reading a book. I’d be reading a book. OK? And my friends came over and they say, do you have any more of those.. It’s not illegal things. I’ll be clear about this, OK? Or drugs or anything like that. Do you have any more of those items. And I say, yeah. And they go: Where are they? They’re in the bag. You can take out what you want, give me money. Here’s how much. Put the money in the bag. I’m reading the book. OK? So people were wondering, like, you know, how I was able to be… By the way, I was treating my friends to things and they’d be thinking: where did La Valle get the money? Well, La Valle was working for it and I was really working for it, it wasn’t like I sat back. I set up a little organization. I set up, you know, my little little marketing things, you know, so people knew what I would have to offer and they came to buy stuff. Plain and simple. And I learned that lesson. So that was a result. Now, because I got used to having that kind of money in my pocket, we’re talking we’re talking probably five, six, seven hundred dollars a week. Now, it wasn’t all year long, but that’s a lot of money, especially back there, this was in the 60s. I’m going to give my age. But when I started then work for the ice cream place, well, forget the newspaper thing. That didn’t work. That lasted one month. I think I ended up with fifteen dollars for the month. Then when I worked for the ice cream place and I saw how much money I was making, I thought: Oh no, this is not going to work because I was too used to getting real results that satisfied me. So results, results, results, results. Behavior, behavior, behavior, behavior. With the behaviors you are going to get to the result. Period. If my answers are too long just let me know.

Nathalie: [00:33:31] I love your answers. They are absolutely amazing. The next question is Agathe from France who’s asking how can I use NLP in my communication to prospects to get a good conversation rate without knowing the preferred channel of the interlocutor.

John: [00:33:58] Well, I don’t know how you could not know the introducting channel. Thinking that you mean how do I know if they’re going to be mostly visual auditory or kinesthetic. The most powerful.. First NLP is a communication technology. When I realized that I was like: Oh wow, oh man, I’ve got to do better in this. Let me give you a quick example. I was already learning NLP, by the way. I was already doing probably, I might have even been in my master prac. I don’t remember now, but, I was working at a company, and my boss said to me, because I was training managers. He said: John, put what you want in your budget, oh no he said: Tell me what you want in your budget for next year. I said, OK. I’m back to the office. I plotted it all out, drew up a nice little visual thing. I made up a chart. I came and I handed it to you. He said: I’ll put it on my pile of papers over there. And a few days later, I said, did you get a chance to look at my budget proposal? And he said: No, no, no, no, just tell me what you want. I thought ohhh… I went back to my office, luckily I made copies. I mean, everything looked good. I brought it back to him. I said: Here. He said: Put that on my files. It took me three times, three times before I realized he wanted me to tell him about it. If I talked to him and gave him my budget auditorily, which I did. I went in there, OK, one more time. And I said to him, did you get a chance to look at my budget? Visual, visual, visual. He said: No, no, no, just tell me what you want. I said, OK, I want this, this, this. He said: No problem, I’ll take care of that for you. Now it was done. I could have saved myself three trips. I don’t know how you can not. Getting, paying attention to people when they’re communicating with you. First of all, you don’t have to start the communication. You can say, hi, how are you doing? And I say, I’m doing good. Then you can ask a crazy another question. I teach people, when they go into a sales call, for example, the worst thing that people do is they bring in their PowerPoint presentation. They bring in their fancy, very expensive and well-made brochures. And they want to show it to the person. I would never do that. I don’t even like PowerPoint. I don’t even use PowerPoint even in my classes. OK? I only use a flip chart, and four markers, when I do a training, I don’t do PowerPoint or anything like that. I see people following along in the manual or the training things. I say: What are you looking at the manual for? What I’m telling you right now is not in the manual. Everything in the manual I’m not going to cover very much. I want to give you new things. You can go back and read the manual at night tonight while you wait for the class tomorrow. But the point is, you want to get the other person communicating with you. You don’t have to communicate with them. You want to get the conversation started. Just try to tell somebody, just look at them, and say: Wow, that’s really a nice shirt. Wow. Hey, that’s a nice one. Nice earing. I like your earrings. They really look good on you. Wait, wait a second. They’ll start communicating back. They say, oh, really? Oh, my. You know, these are my grandmother’s. You go: You’re kidding. Wow. How long have they been in the family? Now you’ve got a conversation going. You really want to start a conversation? That’s the way to do it. I can tell, and I’m making this up now and mind reading this part, that in order for you to generate that question, that you must have some kind of, I don’t want to say anxiety, but you have some kind of a feeling that stops you, baby, from getting into a good conversation with people. I’m going to tell you how to do it. You don’t have to be the person doing the conversation, the conversing let me say. You just have to ask a bunch of questions and you don’t even have to ask that many questions. I go to a new prospect, and especially if they’re an owner of the business and something I say is: This is great. I love it. Tell me more about your business. I just get started. When They start, let me tell you: “My great great grandfather started this business”. I sit back, I just sit back and I go: Wow, this is gonna be a good ride, baby. And you know what? They’re gonna give me all the information I could possibly want or need. I don’t have to ask many questions. I might ask a few. And by the way, if they say enough information and I want more, I say, well, tell me more about that. This is simple. I’m not a great conversationalist, by the way, you can ask my wife. If I want to do it, I can do it. But the fact is, I know you probably won’t believe this. I’m really kind of shy, actually, in groups of people unless I’m training. I don’t generally go start conversations. The worst thing I might ask somebody just to get something started is I say: How are you doing? Are you staying out of trouble? That’s my question. I say: Hey, how are you doing? Are you staying out of trouble? Sometimes they go: Oh yeah. Well, that’s too bad. And sometimes when they say: Oh, I’m in a lot of trouble, I go: great. That’s good. That means you’re busy. Those are the things. We could be a conversationalist. I’m sorry to tell you this ladies, but I sometimes teach the guys in a regular class, you know, not one of these, you know, sex class things, you know, none of that stuff. I teach them how to be a conversationalist because they just don’t know how. And by the way, you don’t have to be able to be a great conversationalist. Just have to know how to get the other person talking about them. That’s more important than you talking about you. Get them talking about them. Believe me when I tell you this. If somebody has got a red Testasterossa, just say: Wow, you’ve got a Testasterossa. That’s fantastic. I bet you really enjoy driving. And they’re going to start telling your stories. Very simple. How can you do all of that without listening while they’re speaking, and picking up their favorites. Everybody uses all the senses, by the way. I’m tired of people coming to say, well, I’m sorry. I just don’t make pictures. Yeah, you make pictures. You might not see them really well. Maybe you’re not aware you make pictures, but I could help you see pictures really fast. Everybody uses all the parts of their brain, or they’re dead. Period. Ok? Even blind people have images in their mind. They might not be what we see and how we see it, unless they went blind later in life. If they were born blind, they still process visual stuff. Might be shadings of light, might be shadowing, might be nothing. But there’s something in there. OK? And if you can listen to them, they’ll even say: “Well, as I see it”. And they can’t see. So why would they say this? How can I actually reference that? So when people were communicating with you, if they’re going to use visual words or auditory words or kinesthetic words or, you know, the non-specific words and even olfactory gustatory words, how do you miss those? There’s only one way I know that you can miss them, because you’re in your own head thinking about stuff. Well, get out of your head. Stay out of your head. You’ve got to pay attention to person right here. I keep telling people I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now. The party is right in front of you. It’s not in here. Well, the action is right in front of you. You’re dealing with someone else. Whatever it is, that’s where the action is. Action is not in here. So as soon as you go inside your head, you may not come back out. Period. You’re gonna go in and worry about: Oh, my God, what would they say if I said this? I don’t know. Say and find out. I find most people many people anyway, have a great sense of humor. Great sense of humor. And if I say something funny to get them started, so that they chuckle and laugh, just a few thing’s going on. One, I started the conversation. Two, I’ve got the neurochemistry running in the direction I wanted to run it. Very simple. All the stuff is connected. And just imagine it’s all about just words. That just fascinates me. I do a newsletter. You know, most of the articles are called like: words are just words. Because most people think words are just words. Let me tell you. I’ve seen this for years. You’ve heard the fact that somebody says: Well, you know, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Ah. One word is worth a thousand pictures. You’ve just got to figure out which words those are, but you’re only going to get it from the person you’re communicating with because they’re going to give them to you. Very simple. You don’t have to figure very much out with People. Just pay attention, open your ears, open your eyes, open all your senses and pay attention to.

Michel: [00:41:52] Yeah, okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. There are plenty of comments thanking you for your answers, which are really, really interesting. And Houda from Belgium is asking if you should talk about a single exercise that allows to improve our career in the business. Which would it be?

John: [00:42:14] Something to do?

Michel: [00:42:16] Yeah. An exercise to improve your career in the business.

John: [00:42:20] Learn as much as you can learn. You’re never gonna learn everything, you know, there’s so much out there to learn. I tell you, I based all my experience, my experiences built my skills. And when I had an experience of something, I’d go out and I try it out and do I make a hundred percent every time? Noooo. Do you think I made mistakes? Ha ha, we won’t go there right now. But you know what? If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making decisions. So the one thing I can tell you to do, sometimes, you just have to close your eyes and jump. You know, I don’t mean jump off things. But, you have to just stop worrying about what could happen, because if it could happen, then it could not happen. You don’t know. Jump right in there. Just dive right in. OK? That’s the best thing I could tell you to do. And if you do that every day, you know, I wake up every day and people laugh, they don’t think I do. I do this every day. I had to stop using music because my wife, she gets up at a different time than I do. I’m usually up around 4:00 in the morning or so like that, and she’s usually up around 6:00 ish. And I used to play music. So my alarm clock would go off and I’ve got a big Bose system, not a big one, but we’ve got a Bose music system in our bedroom. And I would wake up to Aretha Franklin. All right? You know, I just jump out of bed and go: Yeah, I’m ready to go for the day. So now I don’t do that anymore. Now I’ve got music in my head. And the first thing I do is I open my eyes and I do this. First thing I do. I look up and I go, well, there’s no dirt up there. So I guess I’m okay. I’m alive. That’s important. If I’m looking up and I see dirt or a closed box, I’m done. I’m just gonna go back to sleep and enjoy whatever I am. But basically, the first thing I say to myself is: Take a nice deep breath and I say: life is good. Life is wonderful. And then I start thinking, I got to go on the Internet now and do my e-mails and then things change in my mind. But that doesn’t last very long. I got to do some e-mails and that’s why I got up one morning, that early in the morning. Get experience. Go out there, man. Just, there’s so much, it’s a big world out there. I know it’s tough now going out right now, but there’s a lot of things you can do. I know people who are sitting in a lot of questions. Well, what can I do during this riot or this Corona thing? You know, I’m sitting at my house, blah blah blah and I’m not earning income or I’m earning a little bit income. First of all, get out of your pajamas! Let’s start with that. Get out of your damn pajamas and get dressed. Ok? Ladies, put your makeup on. You want to put makeup on? Put your damn makeup on in the morning. Guys, you want to shave? Get up, go shave. Who cares? Now, people say, how have you come up with all this stuff? I go: Because I don’t want to be bored. Let me start with that. When I first wanted to make a business by myself, I thought, I’m OK, I’m gonna do it OK. A good friend of mine called me up, this way I’ve got this thing about what we should be doing during these times. Go on the Internet! Put little videos together, videos of your kids having a good time and be acting silly and stuff. If you’re a mother and a father, act silly with your kids and put it up on the Internet, you might get a million views. You never know what people might say: What are you doing anyway? Well, right now I’m at home, but what I really do is I sell A, B, C, D, E, F, G. If you want to know more about that, email me. What’s wrong? You can do that. I mind my own business and I can get up in the morning, you know, whatever, get on the Internet. And a guy called me, a friend called me. So you’re in your business and I said: Yep. Let me ask you a question. You’re working out of your house? Yeah, of course I work at my house. What do I need to pay an office? I always had the opinion if I had an office and I’m paying for the office when I’m not in the office, I’m not making money. When I’m making money, why am I paying for the office? I might as well stay home and work. So my question for you is, because I think I’m going to help you here. I said: Go ahead. A friend of mine. He said, how do you know the difference between when you’re home and when you’re at work? And I thought: Huh. And I wanted to challenge him, so one of my favorite Meta Model challenge violation questions was, I said: What do you mean? He said: Well, when I first got into my own business, I could wake up in the morning. Such a beautiful day so far. And I can go around and cut the grass. It’s early in the morning. I’d cut the grass and I’d wash the car. And I think: Ah you know what? I’m outside already, I’ve got my relaxing clothes on and stuff. I’m gonna go for a walk. I get home, I’d be back in the house at three o’clock in the afternoon and realized I wasn’t doing anything to build my business. And I thought: Yeah, that can happen. It could very well happen. He said: So I decided, here’s what I did. I said, OK. He said: I get up in the morning. He said: and what I would do is I jump in the shower and I shave, everything and put on a jacket and a tie. You know, I’m not a suit man, sorry. But I’d get dressed up like I’m going to work. I would leave my house. I said: OK. Then, I go out to have breakfast. This is great. Then I go to work. So I’d come home, I’d take my jacket off, leave my tie on, and I would do my office stuff, whatever I have to do, make calls or whatever it was. I said: Ok. He said: Lunch time? I put my jacket on, I go out for lunch. I meet with some friends, maybe we go to a cafe, maybe we go to a diner or have a hamburger and after lunch, I’d come back to work. And I’d work in the afternoon. I said, OK. He said: At five o’clock, I put my jacket back on. I’d leave, I go home, I leave work, like right down the street. I get a cup of coffee, maybe a Coca-Cola or maybe a drink. I said: Yeah. He said, then I’d come home, take my tie off, my jacket, my shirt, put on my home clothes. And if I had to cut the grass, I’d go cut the grass. Or I wait until the weekend. And I thought, this is golden. This is, wow. I mean, I am so glad this guy told me this. Now, I didn’t do it, because knowing NLP, as she was describing it, I was really, really running it in my brain. So when I tell you I’m up usually between four and four thirty in the morning, take care of office stuff, I’m up at four, four thirty in the morning doing office stuff. Anybody who’s following me on Facebook, I wish everybody happy birthday. It’s their birthday that day, then I pop into the emails. I get all the emails done that I can get done. My days usually finish by about seven o’clock in the morning. Think about that. Ok? And I’ve done that. I didn’t change the actual environment, because I’m still in my home, but I developed a routine and I keep up the routine. And I’m still doing it. As a matter of fact, before I came on to the Zoom, I thought: Oh oh, I’d better go shave and put a nice, decent shirt on anyway, you know, because I’ve got to get on the Zoom thing. Otherwise you would have seen me unshaven because time was going by for the day. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. I was already pounding at the keyboard, you know, for most of the morning and other things. Richard was on a zoom just before this one without, you know, in Italy. You guys are going to have Richard two coming up, right? One of these days, next week or something? OK. So, that’s what I did. So get dressed, get dressed in the morning. No, you don’t have to put a full suit on or those kinds of things, but get out of your pajamas. I see my neighbor, you know, he comes out. He’s got those lounging pants on and everything. I said: Are you working? He said: Yeah, but only a couple days a week. He said: I have to go into the office twice a week. I said: OK. Well, at least he’s doing that. You know, he’s got a couple of kids, too. So I do see him playing with the kids, the yard, things like that. But at least he’s leaving his house and going to work. If you can’t leave your house, you still can get dressed. You know, have your kids get dressed. Oh, my God. When it comes back to these kids going to school, what am I going to do? They’re not going to want to go back to school. They’re so used to relaxing, having a good time. I said: Have them get dressed. Have class. It doesn’t have to be reading, writing and arithmetic, you know, open up a history book, you know, find something. Go on the Internet start Googling things and have the kids Google it for you. They’re probably better at it anyway. And then talk about those topics and things. You could do all kinds of things all day long. For the person who’s asked that question, you’ve just got to change things. You just have got to do things. That’s really what it comes down to. And, you know, so I know it sounds simple, but that’s because it is.

Nathalie: [00:50:46] Exactly. Perfect. And related a little bit to that, Nina from France asks: How to use submodalities in business?

John: [00:50:57] How do you use what?

Nathalie: [00:50:58] How to use submodalities in business?

John: [00:51:03] Oh, that’s a great question. I know people will say: Oh, that’s such a stupid answer to a great question, but that is a great question. If you realize the language, because remember, I mean, I’ll give you an example. You remember that every word that you have is encoded in submodalities. There are also ways of using your language to shift people’s submodalities. Now, I’m going to give you an example first. At least in the US, I’ve been listening to this now for eight, twelve or thirteen years. Ok? From two different administrations, not just the presidents themselves, but even some of their people and even some of the people here in the Congress, because they will start picking up on on: That’s really interesting. That’s true. I have not ever heard before this, before this, twelve years ago, and I watch a lot of TV, I mean news. I don’t watch all kinds of television. I like the news. I don’t know why I liked it, but I guess maybe because you know, following their language patterns and finding out what’s new. First of all, I never heard anybody use the word calculus. As a politician, they don’t even know what calculus means. Nor they evan had to build a calculus. Let me start with that. But they’ve all been shifting submodalities before inserting the idea by saying the following thing: Let me be clear. And just saying that, for most people, whatever the blank images or whatever the image is that’s in their head, it’s going to become more clear. So all of the words you have in your mind, the words that think about this, if you know some modalities, then, you know, get down the list, is it a movie or a slide? You can use words that change a slide into a movie. It’s just about knowing how the adverbs work, how the verbs work and these things. That’s what you do. You’ve got to be able to study the language and what works better. The other part is, most people don’t realize this, modal operators, for those of you know what those are. For those of you who don’t know anything about NLP, these are motivator words. And what these do is they put the juice behind the verb. So here’s an example. And you guys could all play along. I know this is content oriented, but I think this is worth it. I’m not going to cover all the words. So let’s say, for example, you’re all goint to go out and go back to work or do something in order to earn income. And I’m going to use the word Monday just for this experiment. And then you say this to yourself, and I want you to notice the feeling you get with the word. OK? Say to yourself: I wish I could take off from work on Monday. And as you do that, just noticed the feeling. Now say to yourself: I want to take the day off from work Monday. And notice the feeling. And I’m gonna ask you a question. I can’t see your hands raised like I would see in a class, but is that feeling stronger or weaker than the other one? I’m going to guess it’s stronger for most people. And if you said then: I need to take the day off from work on Monday. Is that one stronger or weaker? There’s no right or wrong to the answer, by the way. It’s just a matter of which one’s going to be your favorite modal operator. Ok? So that’s important. And there are other ones. OK? If you said, well, you know: I must take off from work on Monday. That’s going to have a stronger feeling to it, for some people but not for everybody. And that’s quite important. So let me tell you what I don’t do with people. If I go and do a training thing or let’s say an initial meeting with a company, and they come in and they say the following thing. Wow. And I hate when they ask this question like this or they make this statement like this: We want to do a training needs analysis. And I’m thinking, well, there’s a modal operator for you. If I asked them what they need, guess what? That is going to be non-negotiable. In their mind, that is non-negotiable because needs are non-negotiable. You need to breathe. You need to have water. You need to have sustenance. Ok? You don’t need to have a good time in the park. Not really. The need is not negotiable. You might want to go have a nice walk in the park, and that’s OK, but if you put all of those needs into one place, not negotiable. So when it comes to training, they’re basically telling you they’re interested in what the needs are, when there’s a whole lot of other categories involved in doing trainings. I never do a needs analysis. I do an everything analysis. If I do it at all. I’ve stopped doing those analysis years ago anyway. So, how do you use submodalities in business? By the language that you use. Now, let’s say that you have, let’s say we get to the point where you think taking off on Monday. Let’s say that you’re at the point where you say, OK, let’s see. I’m going to take off from work Monday. Now, you have an image of that. You have maybe sounds with it, I don’t know, certain feeling with it, but you would say is: I’m going to take off from work Monday. Now, there’s a couple of problems with that, and I’m going to slip a little bit into grammar, which we hardly teach in our schools anymore. It’s first of all, it’s too long and two, it’s the verb, the way the verb is used. So I’m going to change that. But the first thing I want you to do is if you say to yourself: I’m going to take off from work Monday and now I want you to see that image in your mind. Plain and simple. Now, I want you to say the following things because I’m going to change the verb, ok? I’m going to take out part of the sentence, and say this: I’m taking off from work Monday. Notice what changes. If you had a slide before, I bet you now have a movie. If you had a movie before, I bet it’s now faster or slower. But the thing I know for sure is you get to a decision point and you actually make a decision. Because if you say: I’m going to take off work Monday, it means you’re going to. Going to means you haven’t made the decision finally. That’s what the language does. That’s how you start using submodalities in language. And it doesn’t have to be just in business. It could be all over the place. Does it matter? I take every opportunity I can to use, whatever I can to find out what’s going to work better. You know, you’ve got the whole element of rapport going on as well. That’s another whole subject, we could cover at another time. The fact is, I can find out and try any patterns that I want. And it’s how I learn with the cab driver, with the clerk at the hotel desk, with the waiter or the waitress in a restaurant. OK? Doesn’t matter to me. I do this anyway. I mean, people say, well, I don’t use my NLP at home. I just use it at work and I’m thinking: You’re not using it all. Because if it’s not part of your life and how you have formatted your brain, then you’re missing something, because everything first of all is learning dependent. Right? Learning state dependent rather, so. By the way, if you haven’t gone home and used “rapport” and tried to make better rapport with your kids or whatever in your house, whatever your home, you’re missing something. Because I bet there are times, listen, everybody doesn’t have a rosy life. Every day is not just so grand and wonderful. You know, things happen, we can’t help, but things happen. It is virus thing. Things happen. Now, you have people experiencing really bad stuff in their homes because they’ve got to get nasty with their kids or with their spouse. Why is this? I don’t get this. These are people that love, these are the people that you live with. You know, I don’t get all this, but if you were living NLP, what that means is you’ve put NLP into your environment and you don’t have to think about it. One day you’re all going to meet my son. My son’s name is John Sebastian. John Sebastian is now thirty four or thirty five going on consultant. He actually was going on consultant when he was 20. He says: Dad, you know what you need to do. I go: No, what son? He says: Well, you ought to take a look at this, blah blah blah blah. He’s an NLP trainer. He’s been an NLP trainer since he was a teenager. He doesn’t train NLP. He runs a business. He runs his own business, even if he has negotiated for people. You think we’ve sat him down and taught him NLP? No, not at all. He grew up with us. And he also grew up with Richard, because we would take him to seminars and he would sit in the back and play with his little toys when he was very small. And he just picked these things up. And I do remember Richard did teach him math once, you know. We were in a seminar in Germany and we took John Sebastian out of school for two months to get a real education over in Europe with seeing new things and experiencing new people and languages. We went to Germany, Austria and England and we traveled around like that. He was actually picking up some of the German language, actually, while he was there, because he kind of took a liking to it. I guess the structure of it. And I’m running a class. And Richard says, well, he says, OK. You do take your afternoon. And I said, OK. And I’m doing the afternoon class. And Richard popped his head in. Then I say him leave and then I saw him pop his head in. And then he disappeared. I didn’t see him, but I didn’t see him leave the room. I’m like, where’s Richard, you know? Now, I couldn’t really well say that over the microphone in the seminar, but I mouthed it to the back to my wife, Kathleen. And I said, I actually want to know where my son was. I said: Where’s John? She went [indicating with her finger]. He was under the table with Richard. Richard was teaching him math. Why was he teaching him math? Because John didn’t like math. Why didn’t John like math? I don’t know. He was under the table, nobody could see them, and you know, I gave the class a break, an exercise or something. I went picked up under the table, and they are under there, got the pencils out, and Richard showing him how to do math. Other than that, we didn’t teach him NLP. My son, he’s already negotiated contracts for people, he was 22 years old. We didn’t teach him NLP, we didn’t make him go to school and sit in the chair and do the exercises. Never happened. Never happened. One time I saw him when I came home, doing something. He must have been about seven or eight. He’s got Richards videotapes in the VCR watching them on television. And I think. What did you learn? He goes: nothing. It’s nice. But Mr. Richard, he calls him Mr. Richard, Mr. Richard is really funny. I thought that means that stuff is going in. Don’t fool me. But I didn’t say anything to my son. So. You’ve got loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of opportunity to use it, put energy into your environment.

Michel: [01:02:14] Yeah. Thank you. It’s all really all about living NLP. And the next question is very connected to that. I think you already answered partially to it. At least it’s about the present situation with the Corona virus. And the question is from Thomas from Switzerland. How do we position ourselves in the current situation and what strategies should we put in place?

John: [01:02:39] Great questions. The current situation is this. Everybody is in fear. Everybody is in fear. But it’s the fear of the unknown because nobody really knows what’s going on and nobody really knows what’s going to happen. My thing is, what you should be doing now is doing whatever it is you were doing as best as you can, preparing for when these economies open up, because it’s going to be gangbusters. It’s not going to be like: Well, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. You’re going to have restaurants that will have been forced to close. You’re gonna have some people who gave up and sold their businesses. But that doesn’t mean you have to do this. You can start doing things now. You have customers? Get on YouTube with them, do Zoom things with them. Answer their questions. If you’re teaching NLP or doing some NLP things, do a couple of Zoom things and give some people, you know, how do you do this technique? There’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Stay engaged. Keep the people that you know engaged. A couple of weeks ago, I had a very great surprise. My sister is in Texas and she’s older, and there’s a Zoom thing tonight. There is a Zoom thing every night, you know? No, no, no! This is with our cousins. Of course, my question was what cousins? Which cousins? Because I have probably over 80 first cousins, 80. Italian families, you know? And she said, oh, well, this part of the family, and there’s probably going to be about a dozen of them there. I said, well, give me a link. I just haven’t seen my cousins that much. We’re all older now. We all got our own kids, we all got our own jobs, our own careers. I got that Zoom thing. I had a massive absolute bliss. I even asked her: How long is it going to last? Usually not more than half an hour. Three hours. Three hours, we were all together. So these are the things. I mean, if you have a business, you can start doing things. I tell people like our trainers, I have a trainer. They go, what am I supposed to do now? Because we don’t do online training. We’re doing a little portion of it online at the moment. And we have been allowing some things to be done online. The fact is, you can’t really do online trainings and have people really learn how to do NLP. Not really. So there’s enough of the content that we can deliver. That’s easy enough online. When it comes to the actual working face to face, because NLP was meant to be working with humans face to face, not on a screen. I don’t care how good you think you are, you can’t calibrate everything because first of all, they’re only showing you from here up anyway. I mentioned that before. However, you can refresh their skills. You can play games, NLP games, you know, language games, things like this, just to keep them refreshed, because chances are if they’re out there seeing clients, they are probably not seeing clients right now. No? And they could be working with their clients. How are you doing? I’m just checking up on you. How’s everything going? You know, what else can I do for you right now? Blah, blah, blah. There’s lots of things you could be doing. You know, the only thing I know is, life is not going to be the same when we get back. When we get back, it’s not going to be getting back to normal. Normal is going to change, that much I know. It’s definitely going to change. What it’s going to be like? I have no idea. I wish I did. I wish I did. I don’t have a crystal ball I can look in. What can you be doing? You could be preparing more, doing stuff. Just get up! Get online with your customers, online with potential customers. I’m not a fan of doing, you know, working with potential customers and trying to nail a sale online like this. But hey, if it’s the best thing you can do right now? Go for it. You know, you can’t do anything wrong. I mean, it’s better if you’re face to face with them because they can always shut off the computer if they don’t want to listen to you anymore. Things on phone, they can hang up the phone. That’s why I tell people you’re going to work with a potential client, go face to face with them. The chances are they’re not going to hang up. Basically what they can do is say: Now get out of my office, leave, you know, Blah, blah, blah. And by the way, I’d remind you, people in sales, if you’ve never been thrown out of someone’s office, I don’t mean “asked to leave”. Basically, you know, get out. If that has never happened to you, you’re not working hard enough. Get up and do things, just do things. Get out your jammies. Do things.

Nathalie: [01:06:54] Great. Sofiane from Belgium is asking: How do you sell your skills to businesses?

John: [01:07:12] I don’t know how to sell my skills to businesses. So, results. We’re going to go back to that word. I want to find out what are the results They want to achieve, even in a business. You know, if you’re going to ask and listen: What do you want, what do you want to be able to do, or what do you want as a result, they’re going to say: Well, I mean, we don’t want this. We don’t want that. Don’t throw that information away. That information’s very valuable. Don’t throw it away. Yeah. I don’t sell my skills. If someone says, well, what’s this NLP? Most most of my corporate customers don’t even know that I do NLP and train NLP, at least not initially, because there’s no point in me saying, well, I’m NLP trainer. Big deal. So you might find that out in a lot of places. That’s why even if you go in it and tell people, well: I do this, I sell this thing, this service. So what? So what? What results have you gotten? And that’s what they want to know. And what results can you help me get? I do this with people who are writing job interviews. I make it even easier. I’ve read job interviews: I was the president of my sorority or my fraternity. My answer to that is: So what? What did you do? What did you accomplish as the president of your sorority or your fraternity? Because you know, all those things are set up to run charity events, besides drinking beer on the weekends and having a good time and partying. But the reason why the fraternities and sororities exist is to support charity events and raise enough money and they donate it to a charity. That’s great! I love that! I work in a community service group in our area. We’ve raised thirty thousand dollars and donated it to a local orphanage. Ok? We’ve donated, I can’t even count the amount of money we’ve donated to St. Jude’s Hospital. I don’t know if you even know what that is. But here in the US, that’s a very well-known hospital where they do what they can to cure kids with cancer and stuff. And they don’t charge anything. They don’t charge. They don’t charge the family a thing. They’re only working on donations. But if you just say, well, I was the president of the sorority or fraternity, my response is: OK. And then what happened? And they go: Well, even on a resume, I was in charge of 50 people, I was in charge of seventy five people. So what? What did that result in? It had to result in something. How much money did you make for the company? How much money did you to save for the company? How much money do you make for the charities? That’s what I want to read in a resume. A lot of people are afraid to put that information down because they’re afraid you’re going to call the company and verify it. Well, that’s easy. Don’t lie! Tell the truth! I took the company, one company, when I was working. I was employed with that company. It was the worst, worst, worst company for safety. There were more fingers lost and things like this than I can even count. But the company said, John, I have a wonderful golden opportunity for your career development and a challenge. Oh, great. And he said, I want to see if you can straighten this safety thing out. I said: Great. Well, it took me probably close to a year, Probably it took me six to eight months to do this. But when I got finished with this company, these people went, are you ready? Five years with no, that’s zero, no lost time accidents. I don’t know what happened, because I left after that. Now, to me that’s the result. If I can go to a company and they go: Oh, you want to be the vice president of manufacturing. What your great claim to fame? So, well, besides being fired by the same guy six times, which also happened, I said I took one plant on a safety project and ran until they got zero, no, zero lost time accidents for five years. Let me tell you, that gets their attention, because I’m not joking, they can call a company. I don’t really care. The other one is they have put me in charge of things. That’s all results. And the guys I worked with, I move back to that: Listen, hang out, hang out with people who are willing to help you out and mentor you. And they’re already successful. This guy was the plant manager at this place. And I could tell you what, I can’t tell you how many dreams I had about running over with my car in a parking lot. And he was just that kind of guy. This guy was just.. He was just.. But I realized, he was really being nasty with people because he wasn’t getting the result he wanted out of them. And I thought, well, that’s not the way to do it, but let’s see what happens. Well, he finally got the result. People started paying attention to what he was doing. And it was very simple. Every day he would ask for the results of the production. He’d say, how are you running? How you run last night? And we go: Well, we’re running on ninety five percent. What? Ninety five percent? He’d turn around to walk away. You didn’t get to finish. He said, don’t come back and talk to me until you do win on a percent of this. I’ll take 90 percent of that and I’ll take 95 percent of this. And he turned around and walked away. He came to the Christmas party. Fine. And all of a sudden, there was no Christmas party planned. And one of the secretaries went and said to him, we haven’t made any plans for the Christmas party. We should be doing one the next week or two weeks. He said: How are we running out there? There was no Christmas party. No Christmas party, because we weren’t running to the standards that he set. Now, the standards that he set were actually fair, but we weren’t running them. They were tough. This guy was tough, but it was all result, and he kept going back to that word every single time. Result, result, results. So.

Michel: [01:13:10] Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There is also Stephanie from France who is asking: How do you quickly lift the customer’s financial brake on the sale?

John: [01:13:26] Say it again?

Michel: [01:13:27] How do you quickly lift the customer’s financial brake on the sale? So if the customer actually has a problem with the price of your product during a sale,

John: [01:13:39] OK. It depends of course if it’s a product, or if it’s a service, If you’re a consultant and if it’s a service, you’re selling your brainpower. So there is no reduction so far as I’m concerned. There is no reduction. Now, if it was a product and you do have other people in the area, who are selling the product, then you do have to consider. Can you make a concession? Can you, you know, take more of a discount off, you know, a little bit more money off the price, blah, blah, blah. The other thing is, you know, the question first becomes, is it an objection? If they’re making an objection, and I’ll teach some persuasion too. An objection doesn’t mean no. An objection is a challenge for you to solve their problem. We’re giving you a problem to solve. Your price is too high. Now you can challenge that in a bunch of different ways. You’ve got to be able to back up whether or not you can do it or whether or not you don’t want to do it. I’ve been in lots of situations like this. So the first step really, first step is be prepared to walk away. Why? I’m not telling you to walk away, I’m saying be prepared to walk away and leave it on the tape. That’s number one. Number two, you’ve got to take away close. To take away close is great: This isn’t for you. We turned people away from our seminars just because we don’t want them there. We do a little research and we find out. They’d like to start trouble. Now they’ve had problems with these other things. No, no, this isn’t for you. Go somewhere else and learn NLP, I don’t want you here. Corporate wise, I’ve told people that right in front on them. There are number of ways of handling them with their objections. But again, I’ve got to tell you, objections don’t mean no. That’s why there are ways of overcoming some of these. If it’s the price, and it’s an object you’re selling, products, you know, then an easy one really is one of my favorites is they’ll say: Oh, the price is too high. And I do something. Basically, I’m going to move this out, out of that domain that they placed it in, and I’m going to give him two more choices to make. Two choices, they can make one. And I tell them, I go: The price or the cost? Now, most of you probably have a question when I say that. And it’s probably a question you probably have which is: What’s the difference? That’s great. When they ask a question back, I’m obligated to respond. So I say: Ha. You want to know some modalities? Just go back to the lady who said how to use submodalities in business. You also have your voice. So you can increase, you can change your voice. You can change the volume. You can change it. You know, the rate of speech, you could change all kinds of things. You could even change distance. So when they say: What’s the difference? I say: Wow, there’s a BIIIIIG difference between the price and the cost. Price is the little bit you pay today. The cost is how much it going to cost you the longer you decide to wait. So you’d really better off deciding now. Most of the time, they consider that. They considered that, and sometimes they’ll say: Well, yeah, but, you know, I can get at… If it’s the same product, you do have to consider what you’re willing to do. Sometimes they go: I can get a similar product. I go: Yeah, I know. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted a bicycle. And my dad didn’t have a lot of money and the bicycle I wanted was twenty five dollars, but that was a lot of money. So my dad went got me a cheaper bicycle, was ten dollars. He said: Here, this will be good. It’s a ten dollar bicycle, got two wheels, got the pedals, got handlebars, you’ll be fine. And I thought, yeah! All right. The bicycle fell apart within a month. Parts were falling off of it. And we were replacing the parts. We had to buy a new wheel, buy this, buy a new chain, all these things. Then it dawned on me. I said: Dad, you know, we got the 10 dollars bicycle, I understand that. But then over the next month, you know, we’ve spent another 20 dollars. We paid five dollars more for his bicycle. It’s still only worth $10. Dad looked at me. I won’t tell you what he said. He said: You are a little smart ass. I said: Yes dad. Of course. So there’s lots of different ways of handling it. Just remember, it doesn’t mean No. It’s because they’re asking. Objection is they’re saying: solve this problem. If you’re willing to negotiate a different price and that’s the only thing left to settle on, you condense it, and make it the final objection. In other words, you know, you’re selling it for 100, they go, I can get it for 90. You say: Is that the only thing stopping you from giving me your business? Oh, yeah. I know that’s it. So if I can get you a better price, you’ll give me all your business. That’s what you’re telling him. I want to make sure. Yes. Great. Do not give them the price right then in there, because they will resent you for it. Because though: So you could have given me that price to begin with. The idea is to say: I’ll get back to you, I’ll get back to you this afternoon. And you go back to your office. You have to talk to somebody, talk to them. If you don’t have to talk to anybody, no problem, then you call them back: I can give you 90. I can match it. They’re going to say: How about eighty nine? You go: Let me tell you something. Call me back when you come to your senses. Wanted a better price, I gave you a better price. By the way, don’t ever forget the following thing when it comes to products. One person sells for 90. You can sell it for 100 hundred. You sell it for a hundred and your service is worth 110. And the other person’s isn’t. When I would give a price for my consulting. First of all I tell them. Nobody tells you to do this in sales. The things I tell you, nobody tells you. They call me up and they go: Hello John. And I go: What is bringing you in? And I say, first of all, I go: Well, how did you find out about me? Because I’ve got a private number, consulting number. Somebody that you did work for highly recommended you. And then we’re thinking of bringing you in. And I say: Well, you don’t want me. I tell them that, right at the gate, right there. Say: You don’t want me. Of course, they’re stunned. They go: Why not? I go: Because I’m expensive. I’m also worth it. Then they say: Well, how much? I go: It depends on what do you want? I mean, what you want, what results you want to get. And I’ll give you a price. That’s it. So, I’ve had it where people do the, you know, they go: Okay. Well, I’ll have to get back to you. That’s a lot of money. And I go: One guy said, you know, there’s this other consultant, I will make up numbers, OK, who said they can do it for a thousand dollars. I’ve got a guy who can do it for eight hundred. But my thousand is 24 hours a day. Not in your office, helping you out from nine to five. Oh, no. I’m with you twenty four hours. Twenty four hours in a day. If you decide to come up with a question at three o’clock in the morning and I’m sleeping down the street in a hotel, call me. It may take me a few minutes to wake up, but I’ll answer that phone. And one guy did it once, he kept me up till four o’clock in the morning. He was drinking vodka. I was drinking water. He thought it was vodka.

Nathalie: [01:21:23] That’s amazing, done. Thank you so much for all this knowledge that you are sharing with us.

John: [01:21:30] Those are just experiences.

Nathalie: [01:21:32] Amazing. Nezha from France, related to Corona virus. She says: Many leaders live in a blur of uncertainty due to the lack of perspectives, in the midst of the covered crisis. How to turn doubts and questions into perspectives?

John: [01:21:53] Well, here’s the problem. The general overall problem and why this happens is nobody knows what’s going on. I watch the news, that’s why I watch the news. Every day, it’s something different. While, we’re working not now, my country now is now working on, with a 100 different companies, on a vaccine. They don’t even know which one is going to work. They have this one medication thing that they already know works, but not exactly for everybody at the same time, but they could be using that. So they are using, some doctors using it. Some doctors, we’ve been told: No, no, you’re not allowed to have that. I don’t know. There’s too much conflicting information. That really is a real issue that’s out there. They have a blurred vision because it’s conflicting information. I’m going to liken this to the experiences that people have on everyday basis, whether they believe this or not. And I learned this again. I learned this when I was in manufacturing. If you walk in to your office and there’s papers all over the place and different things all over your office, your brain is going to be blurred for lack of a better word, and it’s going to be very hard, you’re going to walk in and go: Where do I start? Your brain, everything’s going to be like bllllll. If you walk into your office and your desk is neat, your books are on a shelf, right, whatever, you’re probably going to know where to start. Well, it’s the same thing. There’s too much conflicting information. I learned this as I was in manufacturing because it was a baking business, baking industry. Big, one of the country’s largest big bakeries, and sometimes things would go wrong, you know? Things would be flying all over the place because the machine broke down and blah, blah, blah. And people kept trying to make little minor adjustments to kind of get everything back on track. I never did that. I never did that. I do the same thing with NLP when I teach NLP, by the way, or working with somebody. I stop what I’m doing. So I would stop the whole production. Stop. I’d go: Shut everything down. Now, management didn’t like that, by the way. They were going: Oh my God, we’ve got to get the stuff out the door. The only thing we’re sending out the door is garbage. Shutdown. Make everybody clean everything up. Clean. Papers clean. Floors clean. Machines clean. Everything shiny again. Everybody ready? Right. Go. Let’s go. Starting up again. And we start like that. Clear the slate and start again. So that’s not happening now with this because we’re getting too much conflicting information. How do I deal with this? I expect the unknown. I expect the unexpected. I’ve done it for a long time and I’ve made it OK because I go: You know what? It’s not so much what we need more than anything else, fast. This is for anybody. And I’m thinking I may have learned this myself when I was younger, is: There was a thing when they asked Richard the other day, actually today too on resilience. It’s not resilience that’s most important thing. And what’s really most important thing is adaptation. We’ve got to be able to adapt minute by minute, maybe daily by day, every day, each day. We’ve got to adapt what’s going on and make yourself OK doing that. You may not even know what to do, but make it OK. I’ve already decided years ago, I’ve got a favorite t-shirt of mine that says: Don’t you trust your government to do the right thing? Because I don’t. Because there’s too many people involved in the thing. Someone is going to ultimately make a decision. It’s either going to be my government or the people. Right now, it looks like the people are making the decisions because now, to go out, I don’t know if that’s a good idea myself. I’m not even suggesting that people should do that. I’m saying that if you should go out, you’re going to go out, be careful. Very careful. I still go out, I put my mask on, I put my gloves on. I go to what I call the stupid market, I go to the supermarket and do my shopping and stuff. I call that the stupid market because people go crazy! You know, I can’t even believe that we ran out of toilet paper! How do we run out of toilet paper? This is the United States of America. You know, we’re not suppose to run out of toilet paper or paper towels, anyway. It’s the craziest thing. So I expect this now and I’ve expected this for long, not this particular thing. Nine one one hit? Everybody was frantic and I was like, OK, here we go, another adventure. So people say: Aren’t you scared? I say: No, I don’t want to be scared. I don’t want to be scared. Fear is not a good place to be unless somebody is gonna kill you basically, or something like that, and you need a state of fear. And that’s OK, fear. Do you want to punch this one out? That’s very different. But to be fearful of what I don’t know what’s going to happen next, I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. Then you hear all the rumors, you know. And by the way, there were lots of rumors before after nine one one. Then there was rumors when Obama was the president. Then there were rumors now that Trump’s the president. There was all kinds of rumors, you know, and they were the same rumors about every president. George Bush was going to suspend the Constitution, which he can’t do by himself. He’s going to suspend the Constitution and therefore, we’re not going to have any rights. Then it was President Obama. Oh, Obama’s going to suspend the Constitution. Then we’re not going to have any rights. Now it’s Trump. Trump’s going to suspend the Constitution. Nobody suspends the Constitution. You’ve got to be crazy to suspend the Constitution. That’s just one example. That’s one example. And I don’t know how it works in all the other countries. You know, how the governments were set up. I know about the United States. I know how some countries are set up. But, you know, they’re not really set up the way the United States is set. We’re very unique the way we were set up and that’s a problem. Because, you know, you can go to either in New Jersey here. And so you can drive in New Jersey. And you could easily break a driving law. And I could go to Florida and it’s OK to do that same thing I broke the law for in New Jersey. So in New Jersey, I can get a ticket and in Florida it’s OK because there’s different laws in different states. And we want to keep track of this corona virus thing? And everybody’s got their own opinions? Oh, my gosh. And then they start blaming this. This is why people.. My thing is, it’s probably a lot easier. Don’t let the fear, it’s not a good neurochemistry thing. So it’s not a good neurotransmitter thing to be developing into those neurochemicals that have you fear or go into negative states. We’re not very resourceful. Not very resourceful. When I was young and I guess I was in the Boy Scouts, they took us in the woods, they took us to it, we slept over and did camping stuff in that, we learned how to cook on a fire. We had to make the fire ourselves or we weren’t going to eat, to catch our own fish. And all these things. We had to learn how to get water and make sure it was safe to drink. If you were taking it out of a well or something, you know, whatever. And so I guess in my own mind, I was always thinking to kind of be prepared, but I never knew what to be prepared for. Now it makes sense to me. Be prepared for you don’t know what’s going to happen next. And that’s an okay state because I’m okay with it. My wife’s okay with it. My son is going to be a father in a few months. He has no idea what the future holds for his child who is gonna be born. He has no idea. But you know what? He’s OK. He’s doing ok. I just spoke with him before we got online.

Michel: [01:29:37] Ok, thank you. Yeah. You want to add something about this?

John: [01:29:49] I’m good. Expect the unexpected. I don’t know. It sounds kind of crazy and be prepared.

Michel: [01:29:57] Yeah. Because one question that came on the chat was actually about what’s the right strategy to have now, so I think that this is the answer also to that question. OK. Good.

John: [01:30:09] If I had a real good answer for it other than that one? I’d give it to you, but I don’t have it. Expect the unexpected.

Michel: [01:30:17] Ok. So, Christina from Spain is asking how to create a good hook to make online sales?

John: [01:30:25] How to make a good hook, to do online sales. My first answer is: I’m not a fan of online sales. I’m not a fan of over the phone sales. I also understand that it’s possible. And I’m not even sure if there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just not that my favorite thing to do. I prefer face to face sales. So I guess if I was going to do online sales, I don’t think there is a good hook for every person. That’s gonna be one problem. You can generalize things, of course you probably read all or any of these words out there, like this is the best thing since white sliced bread and everything else. But I prefer French bread, by the way. And that’s first on my list. Italian bread is second. But this white sliced bread thing. Here’s how wonderful it is. The best you’ve ever tasted in your life. Blah blah blah. I don’t know if that even works. If I had to do online sales, I would first opt for phone call. You can certainly say something in the online marketing, because that’s marketing. I guess I should make the distinction. There’s a difference between marketing and sales. Marketing gets you interested enough to go to the door. Sales is then you open the door, invite the person and sit them at your table. You know what you want to feed them. Find out if they’re gonna buy what you want them to buy. So most people don’t know the difference between marketing and sales, and it’s a very big difference between marketing and sales. If I were doing certain marketing, I can get people, people say also: Could you increase my sales? I could probably increase the people knocking on your door. But it’s up to you to do the sale. Because I can’t do the sale for you. I can help you to create marketing that gets people be interested in what you’re doing. So there’s a difference. So that’s what I’m saying. So if you do good marketing, then you can probably get the person to give you a call. There’s nothing wrong with saying: Hey, if you’re really excited with this, give me a call. And then it’s very easy. I mean, if you’re gonna do this on the phone, say: And I promise, just give me a call, we’ll talk or I can call you, give me your number, I’m not going to bother you, I’m not going to call you every day and come after you chasing you every day. I’m not gonna do that. I’m not a beggar. Give me 10 minutes. If I can’t solve your need or if I can’t make you happy in ten minutes, hang up the phone and we’re done, you’ll never hear from me again. Nothing wrong with that. Everybody thinks because you’re going to be in sales. You have to hang on to their leg like a like a puppy until they buy it from you. No, no. That’s not a good way. That’s not a good reputation to get. I know people who’ve done it and their reputation is junk because it would be too much, too much, too much, too much, people are blocking their email, blocking their phone and all this stuff. So doing it online is not the sale, do it online is marketing. So maybe you need to get better marketing done. There are a lot of different places you can go to check out unless you want to do some of your own. I wouldn’t overload. I know a lot of people have these things called click funnels. Those work to a certain degree for certain services and things like that. And then you can upsell and all those kind of things. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with those. But you first, before you get them to do the clickfunnel, you have to get them build the first one. If they read the first message, you’ve got to get them to go to the first one. If they’re not willing to go to the first one, guess what? Then your initial marketing.. They knocked on the door, or maybe they didn’t even want to knock on the door. I give you an example. There’s a lot now who have these online video thing. Oh, listen, first of all, they lie in the beginning. They say, I’m going to give you the solution to this problem, but you might have. I go: Oh, cool, the problem I have. You go find out. Then I’ve got to sit and listen to a video. A video is going to run for half an hour. And soon they start with the board thing and they start drawing all this crap out. I click off the video. The only ones I might stay on were the ones that go: Listen, if you don’t have time to do this video thing, click here and I’ll let you read the presentation. I can at least read through it and get it. But I’m not going to sit there and watch, I don’t have a half an hour in a day to sit and watch a video and get to the end. And it goes: Now to get the solution, just send me nineteen dollars and ninety seven cents and I’ll get you the PDF ta da da. And by the way, once you do that, if really one more about blah blah blah. I’m just not that kind of person. Not that kind of person. I’m not even a sales guy. But I’m interested in sales. So I want it to be easy. Why do I want it to be easy? Because I know that most salespeople work very hard. So when a salesperson comes to me, I’m a lay down customer, I’m what they call a lay down customer. I already know what I want. I walk in a store and I want that. I go and buy a car. I go and buy a hundred thousand dollar car. I walk in and: I want that car. They go: Well, let me take a look. You want to sell the damn car? Or you don’t want to sell the damn car. I want the car. Oh, okay, that’s it. And they should feel good about that, but no. Then they feel terrible because they didn’t have to work at it. But a sales people who were in sales a lot, we feel sorry for the sales people we want to make it easy for them. My nephew graduated college and I wanted to get him a nice suit. We take him to the store: I’m going to buy you a suit. What for? I saw you graduated college, your birthday’s coming, Christmas is coming, so I’m going to combine this. So he tries on a suit. So the guy goes, it’s a nice suit. It’s a beautiful suit. It looks good on the kid. He says: All right, good, I’ll take it. I said: Listen. You looked at that other one too, and I saw the look on your face, you’d like that one, did you try that one? He said: Why? I said, because I want you to have two suits. The sales guy is like, wow. I wish I had an uncle like you. Right? Now, I wasn’t doing it for the sales guys. I was doing it for my nephew. He ended up with I think two suits, maybe three, I forgot. And then I said to him, you need shirts with those suits. So make sure he’s got at least two different shirts, for each suit, and ties. I want him to have at least three different ties to go with those three suits and socks. And I looked at my nephew and he’s like: Uncle, this is way too much. I go: No it’s not. You’re a good kid. Good kid. I want you to stay a good kid, I think you should look professional when you go to the office, because he had a great job. He got a first job. Finding a job like this kid got, out of college, oh my God. Then I said to him: How are you doing on underwear? You need un underwear too? I can get them to match the suit, if you want. He says, what good is that? I go: Man, the girls see you in the same underwear to match your suit. Are you kidding me? He laughed at me. What? I was making it easy. That’s us salespeople. We don’t make it difficult. We pretty much know what we want when we walk in. We’ve already done some of the research.

Nathalie: [01:37:33] That’s amazing. Well, Meghana from India is asking: How can I be more confident about my abilities and knowledge? That’s a very good question because it comes a lot.

John: [01:37:50] I hope you’re ready for this. You need to go out and prove to yourself, that you have the skills and you have the knowledge. Do what you think you can do so that you know you can do it. Get out of the thinking thing and do the knowing thing. Now, there’s always gonna be people who are going to say: Well, yeah, I don’t know how old you are, but, you know, the old thing was when you wanted to get a job, and someone said: you don’t have enough experience. How am I going to get experience? I’m just out of college. I’ve got to get the experience. But I don’t have the experience. You want me to have experience. But you won’t give me the experience. But you can always get the job. I’m convinced of that. You’ve got to know how to. It’s not just enough, I can say to you: You know what? There have been a time when you’ve been in a good state of confidence, and anchor it. But that won’t necessarily transfer into you going out and proving to yourself how much you really know. That isn’t going to happen. You have to remember how to anchor yourself every time first, and that’s, you know, all those things. And I’m not into the confidence. I’m not into the confidence, real competence thing. I’m going to competence to be confident. So number one is if you have the skills and you have the knowledge, make sure you have the skills and the knowledge. I’m not even saying you have to be an expert, but go out and prove to people that you can do it. Very simple. Go on, prove it. ne of the first jobs I went interviewed on was Bakery thing. Actually, I had work for a couple of companies before that. They were smaller companies. And I sat down with the guy and the plant manager and he said to me: This is a baking company. This, I mean, we have a large bakery out here, ten lines of baking bread and stuff. Have you got any baking experience? Actually, I do. I bake bread at home. And he said: Well, you know, let’s, you know, listen, I like your resume. You know, you sound like a nice guy, but baking bread at home is very different and baking bread out there. So why should I hire you, not knowing how to bake? I said: Because I don’t come here to any preconceived notions. I already understand that. You’ve hired other guys from other bakeries and they turn things around in your business and they do things differently and mess you up. I can’t do that because I don’t have any way to do it. You’re going to be teaching me the way to make your product. He said: Oh. All right. He said: Ever been in a union environment? Worked in a union environment? I said: No. I’ve worked in worse. So, what do you mean? I said: I had forty five women working for me. Ok? No, I’m not against all the women. But we know what happens if one doesn’t get her way and they start talking to the other ones? It’s like a union. They weren’t unionized. But you know what? You may as well have been because if I’ve had a problem with one, then they’d all jump in and it was like forty five women against me. So I had to learn to manage them. He said: Huh. How many? He said. Forty five. OK. He said: No guys? I said: Too. Two guys and they hid. They were hiding, always hiding. They weren’t going to get in problems either with the ladies. The ladies were great by the way. They did a lot of work for me. They’d like working for me. They did a lot of stuff, but man, first time I had a problem with one and I realized this was going to spread around, I said: That’s what a union does. So, now, you know what? No, thanks. I can work in a union because I worked with forty five of them. You give me one of your managers that you’ve already hired, ask them to put up with forty five women in one place at the same time. And I put my skills against theirs any day, and he just looked at me said: Hmm, it’s all right, I’m done with the interviews. You know what, I’ll give you a call this afternoon, and let you know my decision, which means he already made one, because if he was going to say no, he would have told personnel to call me and tell me no. He said, I’ll call you this afternoon and let you know what I want to do. It’s your skills, man, to Prove you can do it. Prove you can do it. When it comes to the confidence thing, I want to tell you something else you can do. I never know what the confidence thing or the lack of confidence thing is. But I’m going back to my favorite topic, which is submodalities. For some people who are confident, I start to think, I don’t have to know what it’s about. Whatever it is, see, I’m going to talk about confidence because most people would see me talking to executives even when I was working in a company. And I was always I want to say friends with them, but I treated them like a peer, like they were my peer. I never thought, well, my God, here comes the voiceprint. People: My God, the president’s walking around. I go: Great, where is he? Hey president, how are you doing man? That’s what I did. And I would still do that. So I realized years ago something. I’ll throw something else here because it’s all modalities anyway, as I said in the beginning. It’s all to do with, let’s say, even discrimination. But the confidence thing first is about this. So if you’re not confident I bet when you think about the situation that you would be in, where you would want to be confident but you’re not, I’m going to guess, number one, it’s probably got to do around people. I don’t know what position they’re in. I’m going to assume for the moment that they’re above you and that’s in the submodalities. So let me use: They’re up here. They’re not your peer. So I’ve always treated, I don’t care who they were, I’ve been called disrespectful to executives when I was working in the company because an executive would ask me a question, I’d given straight off the cuff answer because that’s me. You ask me a question, I’m going to answer it. I’m not even guaranteeing you’re gonna like the answer. But that’s me. And and I don’t do it to give them a hard time. I give them because they ask me a question and I think they deserve an answer to the question. They don’t always like the answer to the question. I treat them as a peer. So if Nathalie asks me a question, I’m going to answer the question to Nathalie. Right? And I’m going to see Nathalie as a peer because I take all my trainers, Michel and everyone. I think of them as peers of mine. We were team. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m the president of the Society. Big deal. I don’t think I treat any of my trainers like: Are you going to do what I tell you to do, David, I’m the president of this place and you’re gonna blah blah blah. I don’t think so. I have a wife that can do that for me. She does it to me. Now, listen, John, you have to blah blah blah, no, she doesn’t really do it. So I never took authorities, figures, ever. And did never put them above me. I think I learned that basically because this was prior early childhood programming from my parents, mostly my mom: Don’t ever let anybody act like they’re above you. Because you can be better than anybody else, but don’t ever try to be better than anybody else just to prove you can. I thought: I don’t know. I went to Catholic school first for about eight years. Nine years. Right? With the nuns and stuff. And I didn’t look at them, as, you know.. The first one I ever met in the class when it was my first day of kindergarten was Mother Superior, who came into the room. Nice little nun lady. Right? And some of the kids stood up, most of us kept sitting down and the nun in the class, not Mother Superior lady, said: What’s wrong with you children? When the Mother Superior walks into class, you all stand up. First thing I thought in my head, I was five years old, was: Why? Why should I stand up for her, and what does Mother Superior mean? Oh, I know, she must be the head of all the nuns. She is superior to the nuns. But this would tell my brain was working, and I stood up like anybody else because I was, like, scared of a nun hollering at us, you know? And she got that ruler in her hand like this. I think they should put the nuns in charge of this virus thing. They should get rid of this thing going on. But that’s the thing to keep about: where are the images of what you are not confident? If you think you have the skills, then you think you have the knowledge, you believe you have. You believe you can use it. That’s really good. It’s the result. Can you use these skills? Now you can’t learn NLP from a book, I don’t care what anybody says, and you really can’t learn it all just online. I keep telling people this. You’ve got to interact with humans in face to face. That’s what it’s for. And I tell people the same thing. Richard says the same thing. And you know what? I understand you need brain surgery. I just went read a book in the library. I can do the brain surgery for you. No, and are we doing brain surgery? In a way, in a sense. You know, I wouldn’t want to fly with any pilot who only learned on the computer pilot thing. Whatever that flight simulator thing? I mean, I learned to fly and I flew around on flight simulator, I reached the expert level come on let’s hop in plane. You’re right, sure, yeah. You go ahead. I’ll meet you there. So, your confidence, where is it? You know, what’s the situation if you’re looking up to it, bring it down here. That sounds kind of simple, but you know what? It’s your brain! You’re not using what you have in your brain. Now, here’s the other thing. I mentioned discrimination before. I figured out years ago, I worked with Union. I had seventy five union guys, working for me. We’re talking Teamsters, ok? I got along with the guys great. Now, the guys were all involved in this. And I grew up in a very multi cultural neighborhood. Couple of them actually. The guys that worked for me: Black guys, white guys, yellow guys, green guys, blue guys, purple guys. Catholics and Muslims and Presbyterians and atheists. But you know what? Together, along. I talked to them, one day, not to all. How do you guys get along? What is it? And they would say: Well, you know, we’re buddies. We’re buddies. And they would gesture like this. We’re friends. We’ve worked we’ve worked together for years. Important. I thought: huh. Submodalities, very simple. They’re not worried about the religion, not worried about the thing. They don’t care whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat. If they cared, if you were a Democrat, a Republican, they’d chide you a little bit. Especially if your guy. I know you voted for Rrrrr. But they got along. They worked together. They didn’t create problems for each other. So the other thing I noticed was a guy, the guy I worked with, he was a supervisor and he had come to me and said he was quite disturbed. His a black guy. And we were peers. And he said to me, I don’t get it. He said, you know. I’m not saying I deserve a promotion, but, you know, to keep passion over me. And I said, well, have you spoken to them about it? And he said: Sure. I said: Well, what do they say? They go: Well, you need a college degree. You don’t have a bachelors degree. Then you need a masters degree. Then you’ve got to have this. Then you got to do that. He said: I came to all this differently, I’ve done everything they wanted me to do. And I said: who is “they”? Who is “they”? And he gave me the manager’s name. I said: Look, I’m not gonna start anything. I just want to know who it is. And I observed this guy a few times, this manager guy that kept telling him: You’re a good guy, but, you know, you’ve got to go learn this and you gotta learn that, which was all bull. You don’t learn anything in college that you’re going to use on your real job, as far as I can tell, unless you’re a scientist. Right? I mean, as far as I can tell. People ask me, they go: What did you learn in college? I learned how to graduate. My parents wanted to make sure I graduated. I went to college and graduated. I got an MBA. Why? Why did you do that? Because I had nothing to do. I was in Marlin, down here for four or five years and I had a chance to go jump into an MBA program. It was in Maryland and they just started the MBA programs that were happy to get people in there because I had so many undergrad credits. My MBA, I’m gonna make people jealous now. My MBA was all of 15 credits. No, 30 credits. All I had to do was 30 credits, because of all my undergrad business courses. So it took up space, I learned a couple of little things, right? So I’m talking to this guy, and I said to him, I got him to talk about the union guys. It’s what I did. I said, you know, I’ve got to work with the union guys. He goes: Yeah. And he looks down. I didn’t say I’m not going, as he was doing auditory internal dialogue. Is he doing a kinesthetic thing? What’s going on here? I said, you know, a lot of those guys are really good guys. He added, they quite do a good job, you know, some of them, though, you know, some of those people. As soon as he said “those people”, I realized what was going on. And if there were certain people that he would, in his mind, discriminate against whether he’d verbalize it or not, you look down on them. Literally looks down on them. He would have all their pictures of them down here. I thought, holy moly. Holy moly, this is, man. What a discovery this is. So. Whatever your confidence thing is, man, if you’re confident, you know you’ve got the skills and you know you’ve got the knowledge, prove it. Go out and prove it. As we say, now put your stuff on alignment and go prove it.

Michel: [01:51:45] Okay. Okay. Thank you. I have one question from Carla from Costa Rica. Based on your business and company’s experience, what would you recommend to increase the employee commitment and satisfaction?

John: [01:52:01] Employee commitment?

Michel: [01:52:02] Employee commitment and satisfaction.

John: [01:52:04] Hello, Carla. I know who Carla is. It’s very interesting how to get employee commitment. First of all, they’ve got to believe in you. Ok? However you get them to do that. I did my thesis, my master’s thesis. I did it on something called long words, kind of scares people but that’s fun. It was on socio-technical systems design. And what it meant was, because companies were doing participative management. This was in the 80s. Participative management, that’s where the employees supposedly would run the business or the place. We tried to do it in one place. And it didn’t work all that great. We hired some consultants in, whatever. We accidentally, “sort of”, accidentally had it installed in another place, that’s a place, by the way, where I got to do that zero lost time accidents. We did it accidentally. Sort of. In other words we didn’t do it formally. We didn’t do it formally. Then we did it formally at another place and that place went crazy. Because when you put the people in charge, that means they get to make the decisions. And then there’s minimal management. And then there’s no status. You know, nobody’s better than anybody else and minimal managers, there are a lot of managers, only two or three, actually. And the plant manager or the head of the building, the place. And he’s the only one who can actually pull veto power. If they make a crazy decision, he can go no, no, no. We’re not doing this. It’s a very dangerous thing for them to do. So that meant we had to make sure these people were trained, number one, to make decisions, employees, and we trained them to make the product because this was a brand new place. And we had to make sure that the head of the place knew that anytime he pulled veto power, the entire effort of what they were trying to do there, would drop down at least 10 notches. So we had to teach them scales in order to facilitate good decision making. So the way to get people to buy in, and it’s not money, on people it’s not money. It’s not money. I can talk about that. Money is not a motivator, actually. The way to get them to do this buy-in is they have to have input and true consideration, if you’re going to ask them, what do they think? And so you ask them, what do they think? You’re asking them for their opinion. Once they give you their opinion, my question is: What do you do with it? This is a really slippery slope. I’m going to tell you, it’s very slope. I’ve had companies asking me if I can put together and do and run for them an employee opinion survey. I say: Can I do it? Sure. Will I do it? No. They go: Why no? My first question is: If you want to do an employee opinion survey, you already know something’s wrong. You may not know what’s wrong, but you know something’s wrong, or you wouldn’t want to do an opinion survey. They go: What’s wrong with an opinion survey? It’s very simple. You’re going to do this opinion survey. You’re going to ask them all these questions. You’re going to talk about things, and they are going to collate all the information. Then what are you gonna do? They go: Well, then we’ll know. I go: Big deal. They’re not going to know what your opinion is of what they told you. They’re not going to know if you plan on doing anything about it or not. So if you ask people what they think, just because you want to involve them, but then you’re not going to do anything with their opinion. Don’t waste your time. Run your business. Run your business. You make the decisions and don’t bother anybody. And you won’t get buy-in unless you’re really nice to them. Now, there’s going to be short term, that means until the next person comes along and wants to pay them more money. Because that’s what happens. I did an opinion survey once for the company I was working in at the time, as the training guy. The president said: We’re going to do an opinion survey. I just said: Why? He said: Listen, I already know all your stuff. I’m gonna get back to everybody on the results. I said: Really? He said: Yes. And good or bad, I’m going to answer them. I said: OK. He said: So you’re coming with me, because I want to travel around to all the plants and every office in the country and you can make sure I’m there and answer the questions. I said: Fine. And I did. And this guy was great. Everybody said: We’re scared. Yeah, OK, I got that, you’re scared about the opinions. Then one question was: I feel safe and secure in my job. It was in the 80s, things are going like this. I feel safe and secure in my job. And most of them went: No, not really. And when came the time to answer that question, he said: OK, so, 90 percent of you said you’re not. You don’t feel safe and secure in your job. He said: 90 percent. Thank you so much, I’m one of them. I don’t feel safe and secure in my job. And I’m the president of the company. Get used to it, kids, get used to it, keep your resume up to date. I thought that was a great answer. Now I thought half would be screaming: No, no, no, we’re going get fired. He’s gonna fire half of us. No, no, no. That’s not what happened. But he just laid it out right up front. So if you want to get buy-in and you really have to include them, it’s gotta be heartfelt, it can’t be glossed over kind of stuff. Nobody goes: Oh, I love my employees. Yeah, you love your employees. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you like them. But you don’t love them enough to give the piece of the action. And a piece of the action, by the way, isn’t always the money. Piece of the action is a buy-in when they feel that you’re committed to them. I did a whole paper on this. This was a study I did. And when I presented my thesis, by the way, the professor said, this is really great idea, but I don’t think it will ever work. I said: That’s interesting, Prof. Because it’s not a proposal. This is the case that I’ve already done, three times. He said: can I check that out? I said: You want the president of the company’s number? He said: sure. And I gave it to him. I don’t know if he ever called or not. I Said: Here. Here’s his name. Here’s his number. Call. He said, wow, you’ve done this already? I said: Yeah. But you’re in school, here you’re the Prof, I got that, you’re running an MBA thing and you’re telling me that you don’t think this proposal will work, but your life experience is zero with running manufacturing plants. So, yeah. You’ve got to think about what you do with your voice, how do you treat them? I’m sure you treat them nicely because, you know, you’re a nice person. You know, you’re right. Having a breakfast party for them or dinner taken with them once in a while, that’s not it. That’s not it. You know, it’s an everyday thing. And I’m not saying it’s easy to do. If you really had to think about asking them: So how do you think we could do different here, what could we do differently with this? And they say: Well, I think you should change X, Y, Z. Back when I was doing the thing at the plant. I gave it to the employee, with the idea to say: Here is something. I don’t know. Make this work for me. Because I don’t take problems. People come to me with problems and even when I was in management, people would tell me: I’ve got a problem. Did you bring solutions with it? I will tell you that to have a solution, you bring your choices. Now, get out. Get out of my office. Don’t bring me a problem again without alternatives. I can help you make this decision, but I’m not going to come up with one for you. Your problem is not my problem.

Michel: [01:59:58] Ok. Perhaps because time is almost over.

John: [02:00:03] Oh, no.

Michel: [02:00:04] Yeah, yeah. So there is one question that could be interesting now to finish really this session. It’s from Nidal from France. And he was asking: What will be the major mental changes after this crisis?

John: [02:00:25] I think that a couple of things are going to be “good”. First of all, there’s going to be a great sense of relief when people are finally out there and going out and getting back, and doing things and walking in the park with their kids, going at a local dessert shop, an ice cream parlor and whatever, restaurants and stuff. There’s gonna be a great relief. So there’s gonna be a better brain chemistry, let’s say that. I think hopefully that people have more of an appreciation for the people that they’ve been stuck with three months in house and just be able to sneak out and get something to bring back so you can have dinner or whatever. I think there’s gonna be a greater hope. There’s gonna be a greater appreciation for this. I think that when the kids go back to school, the teachers should prepare themselves for hearing things like: That’s not the way my mother taught me to do it. That’s going to happen. And I think people are going to have an appreciation for appreciating really what we have. We’re going to appreciate the things we have. People want to go out and buy all kinds of stuff. And I’m not into that “bye the stuff” stuff. Believe me. I got stuff. I stopped buying stuff a long time ago. Now I only buy the central things I really need. If I needed a video camera to do things, I’m gonna buy a new video camera to do things. So we’re gonna start appreciating the things we have and hopefully get rid of stuff need. And I mean that both physically and mentally. Get rid of the stuff we don’t need. I don’t know how well people are going to learn from all of this unless when they’re relieved and people say: How did you make out why you’re doing this? They say: You know, I really learned to appreciate my kids bouncing up the walls and everything else. Yeah, a couple of times I wanted to send them to their room, but then I realized they were just kids. And why did I buy a dog at this time? You know, if you already have a dog, by the way, you know the dog sits home going: What are you still doing home? Then a cat. Probably cats are going: Unexpected for them to be here all day long. When do they leave, when are going back to work? So I think people are going to have a different level of appreciation. I also hope and I think some people are going to this. A lot of people. We’re gonna have another appreciation for other people. Out there. Now we’re still doing social distancing. You know, I know there’s gonna be a certain part of the population that’s probably not going to learn very much at all. You know, when I hear somebody hollering at someone else in the supermarket because their mask isn’t on, right, hanging below their nose, that’s none of your business, you know. And stay away from the person. You know, I got to tell you one more. I’m in this stupid market one day, right? We put arrows in the aisles. So you had to go down one way and go back the other way. If we get something, there’s old people, you’re going to make them walk twice the distance. So if there’s something in this aisle, they’ve got to go down this aisle, go all the way around and come back down this aisle to get that one thing they want. And they’re older people. They already got problems with their knees. Older stuff. Right? And I do. I got a problem on one knee. So this is stupid. And I told this to the store manager, he said it’s a mandate. It’s not a mandate. All the stores aren’t doing this. It’s your store. I’m going down the aisle one day and I’m going down the right way. So the guy comes down the wrong way and this woman berated him. You know, you’re going down the aisle the wrong way. Can’t you see the arrows? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have respect for anybody? And I’m thinking psss.. I feel sorry for her husband. Then, I’m going down the wrong way one day because I just got tired of going down the right way. I went down, I didn’t go very far, and this woman’s coming down the right way in her sweater with her cart. And then I saw her back up a little bit, then she came forward again and then she looked at me. I thought: Gosh, I’d better apologize and said: Well, I’m really sorry. I’m coming down the wrong way. And she looks at me and she says: Don’t worry about it. She says: I am, too. I just walk backwards so nobody knows. And I thought, that’s adaptation. It’s adaptation. I laughed, I laughed. She winked. She goes: Yeah. She goes: You know, you go down the wrong way, just go backwards because they’ll think you missed something, You’re still looking for it in the aisle. These are the things I hope happen with people that they start being nice about these things. Now, these are tough times and there’s no doubt about it. These are tough times. But you know what? There’s food out there. There’s water out there, hey! And there’s toilet paper out there. So, I don’t know what the big deal is, you know, and I talk about the same thing. Why should we be worried about toilet paper that we’re really not going to need, because there’s no food. So all these things, I hope, I hope, I really do hope. I believe in humans. You know I do. I believe in humans. I know there’s a small percentage of them that, you know, I don’t know what else I can help them out anyway. I really don’t. But I think for most humans, they’re going to come out with some epiphanies and some real learning things. And that could be better for the entire planet, actually. You know, I’m certainly hope so.

Michel: [02:05:42] Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. Thank you very much.

John: [02:05:47] I want to thank you.

Michel: [02:05:48] Precious. That was really precious. There are so many other questions.

John: [02:05:55] I know, I could go for two weeks!

Michel: [02:05:57] Yeah, well, we actually will keep answering the questions, you know, with regular videos. Perhaps sometime we’ll do another session with you if you wish.

John: [02:06:10] Yeah, I might come back.

Michel: [02:06:10] It was amazing information. Thank you. Thank you to all of you who watched already the video. All those who are going to watch also the replay, because most of the French speaking people are waiting for the replay with the translations. Yeah, so that will be good. Thank you, Nathalie.

Nathalie: [02:06:30] Thank you Michel, thank you.

John: [02:06:35] Thank you everybody for putting up with me.

Michel: [02:06:39] Thank you to everyone of you. So don’t forget, subscribe to the channel. We’ll have a lot of new contents, all content driven. We are not selling things here. It’s just about giving you content. Richard is coming in a few days on the 25th, in nine days. So do yourself good and see you soon.