Last night, I finished my second reading of Dave Sandler’s book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.
As you might know, Sandler was a sales trainer. His book is about his sales system, which Sandler developed after having something close to a nervous breakdown, day after day, trying to make sales using the old-fashioned approach of tried-and-tested sales techniques — “Would you prefer it in red or in blue?”
Curious thing:
The first real teaching Sandler does in his book is not about the initial step of his sales system, but something he calls I/R theory.
Sandler sets it up with a little exercise. You can try it yourself, right now.
Imagine you’re on a desert island, and you’ve been stripped of all your roles.
In other words, imagine yourself without any professional skill or accomplishment… without family relations and responsibilities… without local, national, and religious affiliation… without all your hobbies, talents, and memberships.
Imagine yourself completely isolated and stripped down to just your identity — your sense of being you.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you evaluate that identity?
Many people, says Sandler, rebel at this exercise, and claim that without their roles, they are nothing. Zero!
Many others give their identity a 3 or a 4, or maybe a 5 or a 6.
And yet, Sandler insists that everybody’s identity, yours and mine included, is always a 10, regardless of the roles we play and how well we play them that day.
Sandler gives some sort of argument to make his case. A baby supposedly has a “10” identity… and by induction, it must hold for adults as well. “How could it be otherwise?” Sandler asks, waving his arms a little.
Now, Bejako bear being a particularly skeptical species of bear, chances are good I would have simply rolled my eyes the first time I read this.
But it just so happened that at the same time I was first reading Sandler’s book, I was reading another book also, called The Will To Believe, by American philosopher and psychologist William James.
James gives a rational argument why believing stuff — even without any rational argument for believing it — can make a lot of sense in a lot of situations.
I won’t repeat James’s argument. It doesn’t matter tremendously. Just for me personally, it reminded me something I had realized before.
If you ask me, belief is not something that happens to you. It’s not done to you from the outside, by somebody putting facts and arguments into your head like they put leis around your neck when you arrive to Hawaii.
Rather, believing stuff is a personal, creative act, much like seeing is a personal, creative act.
Remembering this in the context of Sandler’s I/R theory was enough for me to honestly say, “Fine. Let me choose to believe I’m a 10.”
I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.
But why does it matter? Numbers are kind of arbitrary. Why 10? Why not 11, like the guitar amplifier in Spinal Tap?
You can label the numbers how you will. The important thing, says Sandler, is that you will find ways to make your role performance — in his case, sales success — fit your identity, your self-image.
So if have a self-image of, say, 6 out of 10, and if things in your life go bad, down to 2, you will find a way to get back to normal, back to 6.
On the other hand, if things go too well — a 9 or a 10 — you will find a way to get back to normal, too.
And if you’ve ever wondered why things never stay too good for you — why they never stay at a 9 or a 10 — maybe this is an explanation why.
Maybe try imagining yourself on a desert island, just you without any roles you play, and choose to believe you are in fact a 10.
If you do give it a go, let me know how it works out.
And as for making sales, and connecting with people, and writing day after day without quitting because things have gotten too uncomfortably good, you might like my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that: