The more you look for specifics, the more you’ll see that their meaning is not so specific. For example, let’s say your prospect is very short. That doesn’t tell you how he was treated, or how he developed his personality. On the other hand, things that are less specific, such as the cultural and religious More...

I’m going to have you start putting your observations together into values that your prospect probably holds, and then decide what sales pitch is most likely to appeal to those values. But we’ve only begun to hint at what you’re looking for when you do people reading. That’s hard to do, since everything about a More...

Here is an example of exactly how I handled a crazy-making prospect. And note that this person wasn’t crazy at all. Most crazy-making prospects aren’t. But they make you feel crazy, invalid, insecure, angry, or some other objectivity-threatening emotion. Here’s a slightly more detailed learning example of handling a crazy-making prospect. As you’ll see, there More...

If you’ve never tried this, you’ll find it can actually be rather liberating. I mean, don’t you deserve to be crazy from time to time? In this antidote, you borrow a page from the rapport-building technique or mirroring to mirror what is making you crazy or uncomfortable. I have done this with various unusual prospects. More...

For starters, you need some canned responses that you can try with your crazy-making prospects. The ones below are a good selection. One of them should work with just about every oddball prospect, including the ones that seem odd but really aren’t. By the way, don’t forget about the neurodiversity section. That goes a long More...

During the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans in Louisiana, reports of looting cause a small white area’s population to think that blacks were going to come and loot their homes next. Nothing like that was going to happen. In fact, many believe that the news media portrayed the people who were More...

There is a story of a westerner who came seeking enlightenment from a Zen master. The Zen master offered to pour tea, and the visitor accepted. The Zen master peacefully filled the man’s cup, and continued pouring as the tea overflowed onto the table. The visitor said, “Stop, you can’t pour any more tea can More...

Now we know that we must keep cool to be objective. That means, that the higher the stakes, the more internal pressure mounts against staying objective. Also, our minds can play tricks on us where we unconsciously don’t want to see something. One of the scientists at Chernobyl saw radioactive soot raining down and, because More...

Now that I’ve gotten you off to a good start, let’s preserve your objectivity. As you’ll recall, I made a really big deal about how important it is, and how vulnerable it is. It truly is a gift to cultivate. You must start with patience. It isn’t just that it takes time to put your impressions More...

This means that, in order to cultivate your objectivity, you must first protect your objectivity. You do that by creating a more spacious mentality; by developing the patience that people watching requires. But let’s say you are in a rapid-fire sales situation in which you only have a small amount of time to size people More...