How PDP Will Help You Achieve Your Sales Goals (and any other goals)...
25 Feb 2008
One of the reasons I believe I have been so successful in teaching people professional selling skills is that I also teach techniques which I call Psycho-Dynamic Programming (PDP). PDP is a combination of several techniques, the two main ones being visualisation and affirmation. Visualisation involves seeing a picture of yourself in your mind as having already achieved your goals. Affirmation is used to repeat over and over to yourself a statement telling yourself you have already achieved your goals.
Here is a true story which illustrates what PDP can help people to achieve – almost as if by magic, followed by instructions on how to do it.
My youngest daughter’s name is Natasha. She’s now twenty-six years of age and this is her story.
From the age of sixteen, Natasha had a dream. She wanted to get a place to study Spatial Design at Central St Martins College in London, probably one of the world’s most prestigious design colleges. At the appropriate time during her A Level studies, she submitted an application for an interview. Approximately two thousand people applied for just twenty places.
She was selected for an interview and, on the appointed day, my wife drove her to the college. The selection process was that her portfolio of work was to be left in a classroom along with the other candidates’ work. The selection panel would then view their work in private, after which they would interview them one at a time.
Natasha’s interview lasted less than five minutes. She was told that her work was simply not up to the required standard, that she had shown little or no progress over the two years that her work represented and that she would definitely not be offered a place. She left feeling totally devastated, She cried uncontrollably all the way home. She wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for 24 hours.
When she had finally calmed down sufficiently for me to speak with her, I suggested she applied to the one other college in the UK that offered a spatial design course. She was concerned that she should have applied for a place months earlier and felt it was too late. I suggested that she applied anyway and, as she had been taught to do on several occasions in the past, use visualisation. In this case, to Visualise herself as having already been offered a place at this college and studying there. She agreed to do that.
One week later, a letter arrived from Central St Martins College. It was a circular sent to everyone who had attended the interview saying that somebody had lost their portfolio of work and would they look to see if they had taken it by mistake. Natasha looked in her portfolio for the first time since that day she had been rejected and found the missing work mixed up with her own. She telephoned the college, told them she had the missing work and asked if there was any possibility that her work had been judged on the standard of this other person’s work. They told her that was not possible, that was the end of the matter and would she please post the missing work back to them. They’d refund the postage.
Two weeks later, she received two letters in the post. The first she opened was from the second college she had applied to for an interview, offering her a date to attend. “You see”, I said proudly, “visualisation always works”. She looked at me, smiled sweetly and said “Dad, I have to be honest. I wasn’t visualising for an interview at that college. I was still visualising getting a place at Central St Martins.” ‘Oh’ I said – rather deflated. Then she opened the second envelope. It was a letter from Central St Martins asking her if she would come in for a second interview as soon as possible. That took place a week later and they were so impressed with her work that she was offered an unconditional place, irrespective of her exam results. That’s the power of visualisation.
And It gets better!...
Four years later she obtained her degree and for the next two years she worked as a intern for several well known magazines. Then she heard about a position as a design stylist which was available with Living Etc., which is the UK’s best selling interior design magazine. She applied for this position along with several hundred other people, many of them far more qualified and experienced than Natasha. And – you probably guessed by now - she visualised getting the job and she did! That’s the power of visualisation.
For those of you who are not familiar with the process of visualisation, and as a reminder to those who are, this is what you do.
You find a quiet place where you are not going to be disturbed for fifteen minutes. You sit down, get yourself comfortable, close your eyes and get very relaxed. The simplest way to do this is to listen to the sound of your breath going in and out of your body focus and feeling your breath going in and out of your body. Do that for two minutes’
For the following thirteen minutes, you create a picture in your mind in as much detail as possible of precisely how your life would be if you had already achieved your goal. See the pictures in the greatest of detail and see yourself in those pictures.
For example, if your goal was to double your sales, buy a new Porsche 911 and move to a new 5 bedroom detached house, you might create a picture of you receiving a huge bonus cheque with the your goal figure clearly printed on it, and being applauded by the rest of the sales team. You might see yourself driving your new Porsche 911. See the colour of the car, see the colour of the upholstery. If you are into engines, see yourself opening the bonnet and looking at the engine. Hear the roar of the exhaust. Feel how you would feel sitting at the traffic lights on a bright sunny day with the top down. You could see yourself driving into the drive of your new five bedroom detached house. See the house. See the colour of the brickwork. See the colour of the front door. See your partner and your children in the front garden waving to you. Hear them calling hello to you. Imagine how you would feel. Whatever the pictures, sounds and feelings would most represent to you having already achieved your goals, is what you see, hear and feel.
You need to do that twice a day for fifteen minutes - and I promise it gets easier every time you do it.
You’ve read what Natasha achieved using visualisation. Hundreds of thousands of other people world-wide use this technique to achieve their goals too. It only takes 7 days for you to start seeing extraordinary results. What do you have to lose?