I drink coffee, others meditate, some relax and some play a tune. It doesn’t really matter what you do, but you have to be in the mood to do anything, especially if you’re an Inside Sales Specialist.
Record bosses in the 1960s recognised that their artists needed to be in the mood before they recorded their numbers in the studio. To ensure Carole King recorded Tapestry successfully, they positioned her so she could see the band playing to allow her to perform. Karen Carpenter preferred to sit behind the drums before she was coaxed out slowly to sing in front of the audience.
Everyone has to be in the mood. But what happens if you get out on the wrong side of the bed?
You have to choose your mood. Here’s how to choose your mood:
- Decide what state of mind you need for the task in hand. For example it might be “energetic”.
- Think back to a time when you were full of this state, e.g. energetic.
- Go back in your mind’s eye to that moment and recall the crescendo of the feeling.
- Create a reminder by touching something or singing a tune, or smelling something, or saying something.
- Repeat the process.
Hey presto, you’ve created an anchor, as we call it in NLP. Next time you need this same state of mind, just fire off the anchor or the reminder you set in the first place.
I’ve loads of anchors. I listen to particular tunes. I’ve burnt a CD for the car and have a playlist on my phone which has various tunes to give me different states. For an energetic state, which I need when I do my big talks, I use David Bowie’s Queen Bitch. This also fires a visual reminder of the set on the Old Grey Whistle Test when Bowie and Mick Ronson are giving it large.
And I often say to myself “Give it large Paul, they’re ‘aving it large”, a phrase from Teddy Sheringham, when my team won the Champion’s League in 1999 and had all the energy needed right into stoppage time.
If I want a state of pure happiness, I press my posterior fontanelle at the back of my head. Google it if you want to know where this is. That fires back a visual and kinaesthetic anchor of lying on Blackpool Sands in June 1992 when I’d just proposed to my wife. A perfectly happy time.
Or I drink coffee, which always gets me picked up, or is the actual ritual of drinking it an anchor?
