A marketing lesson I learnt early on was this: A good sales person can sell a refrigerator to an eskimo. For most of my corporate life, this had a profound impact as I was continuously looking for ways and means to sell a service or a product or even my resume.
Even as an executive coach, I had trained myself to observe behaviour traits that could serve as an opening gambit in my sales pitch – be it an individual or someone in the corporate hierarchy who could provide me with gainful employment.
The more I made an effort, the farther the goal appeared to go. It was as if my hard sell approach was making it harder for my interlocutor to trust my abilities. Don’t be surprised – isn’t this what all advertisements do for us? They sell us something that we probably can live without.
What broke this pattern was a meeting with an 82-year-old who was to teach me a new skill. Being from a corporate world, I expected to see a person in a nicely ironed trousers and shirt, if not a suit and tie. Instead I saw a man dressed in his pyjamas and a casual shirt walk in. What I did notice though were a pair of crystal blue eyes that was piercing and compassionate at the same time.
What happened to me over the next 10 days is beyond description. As if by sheer magic, my life journey suddenly shifted from the outward to the inward – that was the power of Dr. Richard McHugh – the man who started each of our journeys with NLP.
A journey where appearances matter the least and it is okay to be who I am.
Because, there is no way I can pretend to be another.
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