ANTHONY GALIE BELIEVES YOUR EMOTIONS play a significant role in whether you are a success or a failure in your business.
“If you believe in the business, is that going to improve or hurt your sales?” he asked the attendees at the NTDA Convention. “Obviously, your emotional state affects your performance. The interesting thing about visualization is that it allows you to control your emotions in a lot of ways. You've got to get in touch with your subconscious. It's a very important part of your business experience, and most people ignore it.”
Galie has his own practice as a psychotherapist, is a published author in leading technical journals, and a columnist for key trade and industry publications. He also has been a guest lecturer for colleges and universities and a consultant to such organizations as the American Cancer Society.
His presentation, “The Subconscious Aspects of Business,” was geared to defy logic, because he believes that's what stands in most people's way. He told the attendees about the subconscious — how to use it to develop positive outlooks, how to train it to improve concentration, and how to get it to achieve results.
He covered techniques to isolate problems and stimulate creative solutions, emphasizing the way to understanding life trends, the development of purpose, and the power of suggestion and how it is used.
Galie said most people are able to stay focused on their goals for only a few days at a time. After that, their performance begins to diminish. And in the absence of repeated, external reinforcement, it is difficult to remain enthusiastic and properly motivated. The result? A good week of productivity followed by poor performance.
Getting and staying motivated
How can somebody get and stay motivated over a long period of time?
“The people who are centered and focused and motivated — that doesn't happen by accident,” he said. “They don't wake up one morning and get hit by a lightning bolt and suddenly become motivated. They work at it every day. They don't sit down to write their goals once or twice a year. They write their goals three or four times a week.
“So why don't most do it? The most common answer I've heard is, ‘I'm too busy.’ I had one guy who said, ‘The first time I sat down at my desk, I couldn't find a piece of paper.’ ”
He said his Goal Setting 101 course would start with writing down a list of goals, then reading those goals into a tape recorder, inserting the tape into the deck in the car, and listening to it once a day.
“You'll hear yourself continually reminding yourself of what you need to do to weather this economic market,” he said. “It has the same psychological effect as television commercials. Most people are conditioned by them.”
As an example, he started the jingle of one commercial, saying, “Winston tastes good …”
“Like a cigarette should,” one audience member immediately chimed in.
“That commercial has been off the air for 30 years,” Galie said. “Any of you ever sit in front of the TV and say, ‘Today is the day I'm going to learn the Charmin jingle’? How did you learn that? Passive repetition. Clearly, it works, or advertisers wouldn't be spending billions of dollars a year doing that to your brain.”
Becoming a success
He said the more successful a person is, the more likely that person hypnotizes himself or herself to be a success.
“They may not call it hypnosis,” he said. “They might be saying things like, ‘I didn't have much of an education, but I had a dream. I could see myself being a success.’ They always talk about this picture in their mind.
“You're carrying pictures inside of your head. And those pictures are affecting your performance. If you're walking around telling yourself it's a bad market and things are getting worse, you're going to have a hard time making a go of it. If you're walking around telling yourself you have control of things and things are turning around, you can do quite well.
“If you don't have dreams, chances are you'll have nightmares. The larger the goal is, the more the visualization should be. It doesn't necessarily have to be extremely realistic or attainable. I don't think it's an accident that we call the extremely successful people in our culture ‘visionaries.’ These are the people who dream what everyone else says can't be done. And then they go out and make it happen. They may fall short of the goal, but they go a lot farther than the people with no dreams whatsoever.”
He said that for the past 15 years, he has been teaching motivational, goal-setting seminars throughout the country, primarily to the financial services industry and has interviewed hundreds of top producers.
When he first started asking them why they thought they were successful, he was struck by the similarity of their answers. Many of them attributed their success to hard work, dedication, and “love of the business.” Some attributed their productivity to good role models, some to good work habits.
But the most common answer was that they could “see” themselves being a success in the business. They told him that they would sit down on a regular basis and attempt to form a clear picture of what they were attempting to accomplish.
“I believe that most top producers are practicing some form of self-hypnosis,” he said. “The word may sound frightening, but the fact of the matter is that we spend a huge portion of our waking day in some form of trance. Have you ever driven past your exit on the freeway or pulled into your driveway and wondered if you had stopped at the stop sign? Or have you seen someone so absorbed in a TV program that they didn't hear you call their name? And how many hours a day do you spend daydreaming or drifting?
“Ask someone to spell a complicated word like ‘psychoanalysis’ or remember events from the past and chances are you will notice them going into a brief trance. They will break eye contact, look out into space with wide eyes, pause for about 10 seconds, and then come up with the answer. In those seconds, the person is not fully conscious, but rather in a brief trance. We all spend large amounts of time in this state of mind, but the top producers have learned to make use of it. They regularly and deliberately enter this state to help them visualize their goals. Over time, repeated visualization can alter one's ‘self-image’.
Many people refer to self-image, but my experience has been that few people understand it. We carry around a picture of ourselves in our mind's eye. What we think we look like in relation to the rest of the world around us and this picture has some profound implications in how we will behave.”