To truly carry weight as a teacher it is far better when they, the teacher or trainer has been there and done it, but that is not always possible or desirable. Often “Those That Do Can’t Teach” - there just no good at teaching.

Plus we cannot just dismiss a good teacher, if he has the methods and tactics that will work for us, fine let’s use it, even if he can’t perform in anger.

At Enigin it is good that we have both types, we have very successful entrepreneurs who have made lots of money int he energy saving business but we also have those who have learned those methods but have rarely had an opportunity to use them fully. The knowledge is good, the practice is tried and tested by others.

So, having access to knowledge and the practical application is important and for Enigin Distributors they have to take on board the lessons provided in Enigin’s training - and then pass that on to others.

Hence, doing it and teaching it best, but often times those who are good at doing something can’t teach and have to leave it to others, who can’t do. It doesn’t mean it is not good training.

To most people this may sound like an anxiety dream, but University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock says that a high-pressure performance is not the raw material for bad dreams but for brain science.

Beilock specialises in what goes on in our brains and bodies during high-octane performances, she has spent her career learning why we freeze or choke under pressure and how to prevent it?
This is useful information for all related to Enigin to learn, whether you work for an Enigin Distributor in the field or in the office.

Bnet.com asked her some questions about the problem a while back and here are the Professors responses:

Are there any warning signs that you are about to choke?

There are a variety of brain and body reactions that happen in high-pressure situations, and some of these can be warning signs that our performance is doomed — especially if we interpret them in a negative way. For example, if you interpret a racing heart as “oh s**t,” then your performance may be about to crack. But if you instead interpret the same racing heart as a call to action, you might perform at a high level. And, of course, when the worries start, this is one major sign that a choke is coming.

And if you feel it coming on, can you do anything in the moment to prevent it?

In the book I talk about a number of techniques to “pause the choke” when we find ourselves about to crumble. Some of these techniques are specific to the activity we are doing. If, for example, one is performing a golf putt one has hit thousands of times in the past, slightly speeding up the performance or distracting oneself can actually be a good thing. This is because choking often occurs during these sorts of “automated tasks” when we try to control aspects of performance that are best left outside of conscious awareness. Singing a song to oneself, counting backwards by 3s, or speeding up so you don’t have as much time to think about every aspect of what you are doing can be good things. On the other hand, if you are performing an activity that requires a lot of thinking and reasoning — a lot of cognitive horsepower — where considering all the details is a good thing (e.g., taking a difficult test in school, reasoning about an on-the-spot question from a business client), then it’s important to do things that help quiet the worries and allow you to devote all your cognitive horsepower to what you are doing.

Here are a few tips:

First, think about what you want to say, not what you don’t want to say, because when you try not to think or do something, it is often more likely to occur.

Second, know what you know. If you have memorized the introduction to your speech or what you are going to say in its entirety, just go with it and try not to think too much about every word. If you didn’t memorize it, pause before key transitions to allow yourself time to regroup.

Third, remind yourself that you have the background to succeed and that you are in control of the situation. This can be the confidence boost you need to ace your pitch.

Finally, here’s one more: write it out. Our work shows that writing about worries and stressful events in your life can help increase “working memory” (a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness). It may even prevent other parts of your life (spouse, kids, house) from creeping in and distracting you under stress. This writing doesn’t have to be long, 10 minutes before a big event or regularly for 10 minutes a week can help ensure that we make the most of the brain power we have.

Your research found that high performers are the most likely to choke. Why is that?

Often the high performers put the most pressure on themselves, but that is not the whole story. High-powered people (those with the most cognitive horsepower) usually rely a lot on the prefrontal cortex, and the working memory housed there, to perform at the top. Under pressure, when worries co-opt these resources, high-powered folks don’t have all the brain power they normally have to perform at a high level, and thus they choke.

Are there any other characteristics that make a person more prone to choking?

Being a chronic worrier, being highly self-conscious, and a tendency to have negative outlook on a situation all contribute to choking.

I was fascinated by a study mentioned in Choke which demonstrated that black students’ scores on a standardized test rose significantly after the election of President Obama because they were less distracted by worries that they might be stereotyped. How big an effect can this “stereotype threat” have?

These effects are really interesting. It’s amazing to think that something as simple as checking off your race or gender before a test could impact your performance, or that seeing Obama — someone who defies stereotypes about blacks and intelligence — could change this. The effects are meaningful — for instance, the work we have done with women and math show that performance can be shifted around 10 to 15 percent on tests just by highlighting gender stereotypes in math.

So if you’re a woman going in for an important interview, for example, should you think about powerful and successful women before you leave the house?

Being exposed to women who defy the stereotype helps. But there are other techniques that I talk about in the book that work, too. For instance, we have shown that when women write about their impressive academic qualifications right before a test (rather than dwell on the fact that they are a woman), they do better on a math test. Other work has shown that thinking about all your different self-aspects — positive ones, especially, maybe you are a mother, a great cook, a good friend — helps take the emphasis off of your identity only as a woman (where a stereotype about math ability exists). Finally, some of the techniques I mention above (writing about your worries ,for example) can also help.

If a person starting out in a high-stakes career wanted to train themselves to be cool and unflappable under stress, what would you recommend?

A big one is to close the gap between practice and competition. Meaning, practice under stress. This gets you used to the pressure, so the high-stakes situation is not something you fear. Interestingly, this practice doesn’t have to mimic the extent of the pressures you will feel in a do-o- die situation. Even practicing under mild levels of pressure (e.g., your friends and family watching you) can help you get used to the real pressure when it comes your way.

The as we all know the adage “The best laid plans…” so often proves true, though in most cases it is not a case of failure but delays and challenges and natural tangents as a project progresses, adding tasks and outcomes.

In my experience, which at my age can be kindly described as extensive, very few projects come in on projected deadlines or budgets. Generally the process seems to involve getting as close to both goals.

It is rare that a project is so far behind that it appears to be an impossible task - usually it is some very small detail, confirmation or decision needing to be completed/made that delays a project, irritating but that’s life.

Hence I have to scratch my head when I see that the Commonwealth Games, like a mini Olympics for members of the British Commonwealth (formerly Empire), are facing huge problems because the purpose built participants village in Delhi, India, have not been finished, well at least a sizable area of the village remains incomplete.

A footbridge, a new one, has collapsed, roads were subsiding after heavy rainfall and a lot of the accommodation was no more than unfinished concrete block cubicles! In one block of rooms athletes got in early training having to run from a cobra.

How can planning for such a large even be so far behind? You could expect at times that the paint is only just dry as occupants enter their rooms - but this was way behind. The Indian Army has to arrive in numbers to finish off, complete and oversee the work.

I know some people will say that in many culture corruption and other political shenanigans can play there part. I recall a commentator for the World Cup in South Africa this summer mentioning how a local politician had been murdered as he looked to stop the bribes and corruption in the construction of one of the stadiums.

But if that is the culture I am sure it is included in the time and financial budgeting, but I am sure the reasons will become apparent as time moves forward. Just make sure you carry out your projects in a better way than they have in Delhi.

At Enigin we will keep moving forward, with a slight delay, but we will get there within plenty of time.

So…are you ready?

Much of this could be described as sales training - and we encourage Enigin Distributors and Partners to continue training their staff - often using such items as Enigin provided Warren Greshers’s podcasts.

But to help you along here is a list of good ideas that you should share with your sales manager.

Often, sales training is boring, useless or even counter-productive. But, as we always teach at Enigin, it doesn’t have to be that way.  So here is a set of rules to make your sales training much more effective and interesting.

• RULE 1: Set a goal to be the best trained sales organisation in your industry. This will allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition, which can be challenging in a world where customers can easily find similar products and services.
• RULE 2: When times get hard, increase your sales training. When sales are down, it’s ban be a waste of money to spend more on marketing and promotion, particularly if you do not ramp up your sales training. The best return usually comes from improving the ability of your sales team to sell.
• RULE 3: Include skills training in every sales team meeting. Set a goal to spend at least one third of every team meeting on sales training. You’re more likely to increase everyone’s numbers by improving skills than with more product training.
• RULE 4: Focus the training on fundamental skills. Most sales failures take place because of a lack of ability or practice in very fundamental skills, like questioning or presenting. Even top sports stars train the fundamentals every day. You should, too.
• RULE 5: Tie the fundamentals to your sales process. If you understand how those skills help move an opportunity through the sales cycle, you can identify exactly where additional training is needed, either on a group or on an individual level.
• RULE 6: Include role-playing in every training session. While it’s fun to knock around concepts about selling and sales theory, it’s only useful if the theory is tied to actual behavior. That means practicing, in a controlled way, so that the skills are really learned.
• RULE 7: Track the impact immediately after training. When you teach a skill, you must first ascertain whether the skill is actually being applied in the field, and what impact it is having. That way you can constantly improve performance.
• RULE 8: At each meeting, check for retention of what was taught before. Sometimes sales training involves eliminating bad habits and integrating new good habits. That requires continuing attention to make sure that the training sticks and continues to be used.
• RULE 9: Make sales training into a fun event. Sales training should ideally involve a contest, a competition, and/or prizes. Sales pros are naturally motivated to win, so turning sales training into an opportunity to win practically guarantees their attention and participation.

You see, tt is easy to go on in  the same routine, making the same successes and the same mistakes.

That is why training is vital - we are never to old to learn, and the pooling of ideas of methods provides a more rounded view of a matter and added to our own experiences helps us to gain skills, not lose them.

I would say it is very rare, in fact probably never, that you attend some training where you can say, I didn’t learn anything new. Even is the subjects and methodology are similar you will usually learn a new take or angle on it - adding to what you know.

Training should never end and at Enigin we emphasise the importance of training. During the residential training for Enigin Distributors we advise them to have a regular sales meeting, generally weekly, and during that meeting they should provide some training that is relevant for their sales teams.

They may part take in some role play or just listen to one of Enigin’s superb Warren Greshers audio discourses, then discuss how they can apply what they have learned. We also advise them to make it specific, not a general point but something the sales people can go out and practice and try and then report on how it went, or how they adapted it.

Let alone training courses in the traditional sense these sorts of training keep people focused and sharp. With so many resources online there can be no end to the variety of training that can be provided in house, and not just for sales but for anyone’s whole operation.

So do not get stuck in a rut, if it works don’t break it but enhance it with purposeful training.

For Enigin Distributors enhancing your negotiating skills is vital - so here from the desk of Enigin Training comes a useful articles from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Take these points in an apply them when in negotiations - here the concluding points:

Assuming that cross-cultural negotiations are just like “local” negotiations

You need to remember that differences do exist, that they are not necessarily negative, and that these differences can create huge potential benefits — as well as big problems if ignored. Services and negotiations need to be tailored to enhance your position with the other side.

Neale uses a case study that centers on the construction of a large American theme park in Europe. To convince local government officials that an American park would be a great opportunity, the American developers brought the European officials to a theme park in the United States.

Unknown to the American executives, the Europeans were dismayed and shocked with what they observed: highly commercialized American culture blasting from every fast-food bar, bandstand, and gift shop. This was not what they had envisaged for their quaint countryside.

Trying to dream up more enticements during the negotiation, the clueless American executives offered more free trips to the U.S. park for an expanded group of local European officials and their families. It was a disaster.

Had the Americans had a sensitive negotiator on the ground in Europe, they could have capitalized on the differences in the two cultures and offered a detailed presentation of an amusement park tailored to local tastes, skipping the junkets to the U.S. park.

Paying too much attention to anchors

Anchors are part of a bargaining dynamic known as “anchoring and adjustment.” This involves clearly setting the parameters for negotiation. For example, a couple was selling their house for $500,000. The first offer came in at $375,000, which was too low to consider. If the couple had acknowledged the offer with a counter, they would have started bargaining somewhere between $500,000 and $375,000. Instead, they responded that it was not a reasonable offer and told the buyers to come back when they had a decent offer. The buyers came back at $425,000. The seller then countered at $495,000. The buyers then came up to $430,000, but the sellers still didn’t accept the offer.

The buyers argued that they had come up $55,000 from $375,000. But the sellers were careful to remind them that $375,000 was not their starting point; rather, it was $425,000, the first reasonable offer. Using that anchor, the sellers argued that they had come down $5,000 from $500,000 — and the buyer had come up $5,000 from $425,000. Both had moved the same amount in negotiations. One more round of bidding had the house sold — for a price well above the buyer’s initial bid. “The point is: You’ve got to watch the anchors and where they are set,” says Neale.

Caving in too quickly

Accepting a well-priced deal too quickly can cause anger on the other side, too. If you list a used car for $5,000, you might really be thinking of accepting $4,500. But when your first buyer has it checked by a mechanic and then immediately writes you a check for $5,000 without trying to bargain, how do you feel? Disappointed. You’ll think you sold it for too little. The lesson is: No matter what the price, even if it’s fair, always offer less — if only to make your opponent feel good about the deal. You may come up to full price in the end, but at least your opponent will feel as if he made you work for it. “Never give anyone their first offer; it makes them crazy,” says Neale.

Don’t Gloat

Finally, when you’ve cut a sweet deal, never do the dance of joy in public by turning to your opponents and telling them you would have done it for less. Gloating will only drive your opponent to extract the difference from you sometime in the future. Today, flagging corporate allegiances and rampant job hopping make it essential to keep on professional terms with your negotiating opponents. You may find yourself on the same side of the bargaining table one day.

Article by Barbara Buell

For Enigin Distributors enhancing your negotiating skills is vital - so here from the desk of Enigin Training comes a useful articles from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Take these points in an apply them when in negotiations.

Successful bargaining means looking for positives in every possible circumstance. “If I can trade off issues that I care about more and you care about less, then we’ve been able to create value in a transaction,” says Margaret Neale, professor of organizational behavior and director of two Stanford Business School executive education programs in negotiation. “That’s the silver lining.”

Sometimes negotiators fall into traps and leave resources on the table because they can’t see that silver lining. Some common pitfalls are:

Poor planning

Successful negotiators make detailed plans. They know their priorities — and alternatives, should they fail to reach an agreement. You must know your bottom line, your walkaway point. In addition, you need to understand time constraints and know whether this is the only time you will see your opponents in negotiation.

After preparing your own agenda, outline the same for your opponents: What are their preferences, alternatives, and bottom line? Once at the bargaining table, test your hypotheses to determine what the opposition’s priorities really are. Prepare a written goal and analysis sheet for yourself.

Thinking the pie is fixed

Usually it’s not. You may make this common mistake when there is a “congruent issue,” when both parties want the same thing. For example: In the context of an overall negotiation involving salary, bonus, and vacation, the boss wants to transfer a junior manager to San Francisco. The manager is eager for the San Francisco assignment. But frequently, the employee will look at the situation and believe that since the boss gave him a desired promotion the employee must compromise on the transfer location. The employee might actually suggest a transfer to Atlanta. His psychology is: “I can’t expect to get everything I want, so I’ll take the middle.” The boss is ambivalent about the transfer and figures she can get someone else to go to San Francisco. You think it is unlikely an employee in a career negotiation would miss such an obvious opportunity? Neale repeatedly has performed this exercise in her classes and finds that 20 to 35 percent of the students assume it’s a fixed pie and miss an opportunity to get what both parties want.

Failing to pay attention to your opponent

Negotiators need to analyze the biases their opponents bring to the table. How will they evaluate your offers?

One way to get inside your opponent’s head and influence his attitude is to shape the issues for him, a technique called “framing.” If you get your opponent to accept your view of the situation, then you can influence the amount of risk he is willing to take.

For example, you are a purchasing manager renegotiating an hourly wage contract with a subcontractor. The subcontractor currently makes $10 an hour. You are willing to elevate the subcontracting firm to $11 an hour. Another organization recently boosted its rate with your subcontractor to $12 an hour. You know that when the negotiators for your subcontractor hear your $11 offer, they may think they are going to have to give up a dollar an hour.

You must get them to focus on the point you are starting from — $10, not $12. You frame the issue positively by talking about all the ways your contract is different from the others. Your contract has some advantages outside of the hourly pay. The other side will be more willing to risk lower wages for the purported other benefits. A common mistake is negotiating from a negative frame: “The other firm’s deal offers more, but we can afford only $11.”

Look for the rest of the article in the next post.

Conference calls are becoming a main stay for businesses according to research conducted by mobile headset-maker Plantronics.

The research discovered that office workers are spending an average of three hours more a week on the phone than they did just 12 months ago.

It appears this maybe partly economic — 40 per cent of those in the survey stated that they needed to cut spending and this had led them to use conference calls, plus an environmental element.

54 percent of businesses felt heir calls were not as effective as they could be, often due to a lack of etiquette — with late joiners, heavy breathers, disappearing acts half-way through a conversation.

So the question is how can Enigin Distributors improve things in their energy saving business?

Consider these points:

• People may not be able to see you but they can still hear you. Use the same etiquette in a conference call as you would in a face-to-face meeting. You wouldn’t dream of check your emails or begin talking to someone else during a meeting, so why do it during a conference call?
• Treat the other callers as an audience: Thirty percent claimed to lose interest because other caller’s voices were boring or annoying. As with other presentations, conference calls require the speaker to engage with his audience, holding their attention. Vary your tone of your voice, the pace at which you speak and the power to vary and convey your message. Your energy and passion for the subject will be projected through your voice helping to keep listeners engaged.
• Like most skills, this needs to be taught  Conference calling maybe more common place but most people have never had any formal training on how to use it effectively. It will pay great dividends to provide or get some training on using the equipment and on presentation skills. This becomes even more vital if you’re using conference calls to pitch to customer.
• Use equipment and surroundings wisely, noise cancelling headsets and/or suitable office space to participate in a conference call. Think about any attendees who will be dialling in remotely as they will need the right equipment too.
• Provide a script for your conference call. Not that users need to know what they’re going to say word-for-word, but provide the meeting with a clear structure. Create an agenda for the call, providing clear direction ensuring that all the time is used effectively. If involving more than two people the call requires a moderator, who will drive and control the conference. This will stop the call from digressing while ensuring that each contributor gets enough time to cover their points.

The research revealed that just in the UK about four out of every five office workers are now taking part in three or more conference calls each week, hence businesses cannot afford unproductive conferences, business owners and managers need to have the correct supporting technology and training in place to make them work.

At Enigin we are also using conference calling to greater extent and many of our workforce have had high level presentation training which equips them well when participating in conference calls - make sure you provide the right level of training for your staff.

The term training refers to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of the teaching of vocational or practical skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies. It forms the core of apprenticeships and provides the backbone of content at institutes of technology (also known as technical colleges or polytechnics). In addition to the basic training required for a trade, occupation or profession, observers of the labor market recognize today the need to continue training beyond initial qualifications: to maintain, upgrade and update skills throughout working life. People within many professions and occupations may refer to this sort of training as professional development.

This certainly fits in with the Mindshare Training course that Enigin provide for all their new Distributors at their headquarters in Cornwall, UK.

Although the attendees are generally all well experienced in different areas of professional life, many with excellent qualifications or business expertise, they all admit that they learn so much more than they though possible within the short period of the course.

One thing they are encouraged to do is to also become trainers themselves, why? As the definition states above that professional development is important and they need to be able to pass on the Mindshare Training to their teams in their territories.

What they learn technically about not only about energy saving and products but marketing, management, sales, recruitment and customer relations are all vital to building a successful energy saving business and enigin Distributorship.

Not that many years ago people would learn through apprenticeships, college and university and then pick up knowledge through experience and from sharing skills with colleagues - formal training ended and was rarely ever returned to, but training now is vital for the whole workforce to be able to develop and maintain a companies place amongst, or hopefully ahead, of its competitors.

So all of us need to develop, you never stop learning and you shouldn’t for your own satisfaction and for professional reasons.

When they visit Enigin for Mindshare Training, we tell Enigin Distributors that not everyone will say yes, despite them have cutting edge energy saving technologies from Enigin.

You need to realise the truth about sales rejection - rejection isn’t real.

You heard me right. Rejection is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. It’s an half-baked attempt by your brain to impose a reason for an event that has nothing to do with you.

If you can free your mind from that illusion, you’ll be far more successful in sales.

Let me explain.

Fear of rejection is the bane of sales success. If rejections scare you, you’ll avoid cold-calling, balk at hard bargaining and hesitate to close.

Suppose you make a cold call and the prospect hangs up on you. While that’s a textbook definition of “rejection”, the truth is that the prospect’s reaction has nothing to do with you.

What’s actually happened is that you accidentally broke the prospect’s rules. You had no way of knowing that the prospect was busy and that the prospect thinks it’s OK to hang up on unfamiliar callers.

Now it may very well be true that if you said something different or called at a different time, you might have made a sale, but that’s just a fiction that you’re making up in your mind.

If you had called at a different time, the prospect might just as easily have added a expletive before hanging up and then sent a memo directing the company to never buy from you ever again.

The prospect’s reaction really didn’t have anything to do you with personally, because anybody else taking the same action at the same time would have gotten the exact same result. You simply you took an action that didn’t work.

The “rejection” part of the story is just a hallucination that your emotions are creating in order to “explain” what happened.

The problem with fear of rejection is that, once it’s got hold of you, it gets stronger and more debilitating the higher you set your sights.

Once you realize that “rejection” is just an illusion, you can focus on noticing what works and what doesn’t, and on changing your approach to make the most of what you’ve got to offer.