Selling to the Top How I Went from Onions to Lamborghinis with Self Hypnosis by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.

The ability to sell ideas, products and services to other people is one of the most valuable skills you can develop, regardless of your chosen career. True sales ability is an almost mystical quality that self hypnosis can help you develop.

The underlying theme in what follows is about how an idea—in this case the notion of sales, of persuasion, of influencing and motivating others—can take root in the virgin soil of a young boy's mind and grow with him to become the élan vital of his life. It is about how the resonant idea of the sale grew into a system of beliefs, attitudes and values. They were the sharps and flats of the composition of his life; the musical key signature that determined the chords strummed by life's experiences. For a while, anyway. The immediate and obvious conclusion of this story is that self-hypnosis is a powerful tool for sales success. Self hypnosis can eventually thrust even the most mediocre salesperson into the big leagues. It can develop within the sales personality an irresistible force of the kind promised (but seldom delivered) by Positive Thinking. Self-hypnosis concocts a kind of interpersonal magic—a mysterious personal quality that makes people want to buy from you. This quality is a mojo that brings undreamed levels of success. It is a quality that guarantees victory over other people's innate unwillingness to part with their beloved lucre. A more subtle conclusion might be that the victory is ultimately Pyrrhic, that big-time sales requires one to live what Socrates called the unexamined life. Maybe. At any rate there are at least a few deeper, more valuable lessons in this bit of screed. I'll point out the ones I'm aware of as we go through the text. The others I leave to you to figure out. My dad had always suspected I was totally nuts but he was sure of it when I gave up sales and what was to him a gargantuan income to go to graduate school. He knew from my lavish lifestyle and the way I spent money that I made more money by several orders of magnitude than he had ever made in his life. To his way of thinking—he grew up during the Great Depression—a man who could make money like I could in sales did not need to do anything else. He never said it, but I am sure Dad thought me a traitor to my God-given talents. "Good salesmen are born, not made, Charlie," he would say to me, "Don't waste what you've got." The fact that I could sell proved, as far as he was concerned, that God meant for me to be a salesman. He had no idea what it took for me to become a salesman, nor did he have the vaguest notion of what it cost me to remain a salesman. But I am getting ahead of myself. I was a minority kid. That is, Dad was not a farmer. That makes you a minority member in a farming community. The tiny little town where I grew up was in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. Its name, Texhoma, came from the fact that the town sat astride the border between the two states. Half of us lived in Texhoma, Texas, and the other half in Texhoma, Oklahoma. Surprisingly there was never much debate about which side was better. You were more likely to hear impassioned arguments about whether Ford or Chevrolet made better pickups. Texhoma's population at its bustling biggest during my childhood was around 900. I think it is about half that now. If you have seen the movie, "The Last Picture Show," you've seen one of the many clones of Texhoma in the southwestern United States. It was obvious to me at an early age that I did not have much of a future in Texhoma. I would have to get out of there, and I would have to get a college education because I was not going to be a farmer. Those were the only two categories of grown-up activity that I knew about. You were either a farmer or you went off to college and learned how to do something interesting. One thing about it, though, I was not going to get too smart for my own kind. That was what my folks often said about someone who came back to Texhoma with a college degree. "He got hisself educated and now he's too good for his own kind." "Smart" and "good" were interchangeable in that context. Getting out and getting educated was not going to be easy because money was scarce and I was not a good enough student to get a scholarship. I discovered that about myself in the third grade when I got my first really significant report card. There was a place on the card for the teacher's comments about the student. Every parent was eager to hear what the teacher had to say about his or her kid so the teacher had to write something positive about each one. There were lots of interesting, uplifting, supportive comments on all the other kids' cards. "Mary Sue always turns in excellent homework and plays well with the other children." (She changed later.) "Ronnie speaks well and is very popular with the other students." My comment was different from all the others. It is still indelibly etched in my memory: "Chars is very neat." That was it. And she didn't mean neat in the sense of cool. She meant neat as in tidy. It was bad enough that she misspelled my name, but to simply say that I was neat . . . !?!? During the numerous years and times that I was an undergraduate in college it was fashionable for teachers to help students get in touch with themselves. One of the favorite ways of doing this was to have everyone write their own epitaph. I was subjected to this exercise so many times I became jaded and adopted as my standard epitaph, "Chars was very neat." Sometimes people would ask what it meant, but mostly they were too busy getting in touch with themselves to really give a damn. As for the cost of going to college I was on my own there because my family didn't have a pot to bleep in. My mother was always pushing education but I don't believe she ever said anything about paying for it. I had the impression, especially while I was still pretty young, that you just went out and got an education. That was the only expression I had ever heard. "Get an education." "Get your diploma." Wasn't it like getting anything else? "Get a new hat." "Get a job." "Get screwed." No one ever really explained that to get an education you had to learn a whole lot of stuff, and while you were doing it you had to pay a whole lot of money. Somehow the concept seemed absurd later when I realized I would have to actually pay for education with my own money. That was especially onerous because I didn't even have enough money for the things I really needed like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari, or a motorcycle. Necessities like that. One thing I knew from the very beginning, though, was that salesmen raked in the dough. One of the earliest things I can remember my dad saying to me was, "Charlie, you wanna do good in life, you go be a salesman. Salesmen really rake in the dough." I remember the first time he said that because it was right after I had been screwed for the first time. I had hoed weeds all day for the Jackson sisters and they paid me with a box of onions. A box of onions! What the hell did an eight year old kid care about a box of onions? Like I said, my first screwing. Unfortunately it would not be my last. Dad was also fond of saying that salesmen named their own hours. At first I was not quite clear about why hours needed names, but later I figured out what he meant. So, hey, if salesmen named their own hours and raked in all the dough, that was good enough for me. I would become a salesman, then a college graduate and a doctor. That was what my mother was always urging me to be. "Be a doctor and help people." So you can see I was motivated to sell things early in life. My first chance at the big-time was in cosmetics. One day when I was about eight I asked Aunt Pete—my wealthy great-aunt Pauline—if she had any odd jobs I could do to earn some money. I figured if I did any hoeing for her she would pay me with real money, not onions. Aunt Pete was the local Avon distributor. She had a basement full of Avon merchandise and a lot of order pads, so she gave me one and some samples and told me to go forth and take orders. She paid me a commission of five percent on all the orders I brought in. Screwed again, although I did not realized it at the time. Years later I learned that for every dollar in commission Aunt Pete paid me she made over $12. She was one of the wealthiest people in Texhoma. Small wonder. I banged around with the Avon thing for about a year selling cosmetics to old women. (When you are 8, any female who wears a brassiere is old.) I didn't make much money at it—I don't know why not, at five percent commission—but that didn't really have much meaning for me at that age. The important thing was that I was in sales and ipso facto on the way to the good life where I could name my own hours and rake in the dough. (I didn't learn stuff like "ipso facto" until much later.) You grow up in the Bible Belt of the US where life is an incessant round of church services, Sunday schools, choir practices, and revivals, and you learn to be pretty conservative about how you look. Take haircuts, for example. God did not like long hair, and if it touched your ears in any way, it was long. So haircuts were an important part of a good Christian's grooming, and I got mine at Gus' Barber Shop. For as long as I could remember there had been an old, unused shoeshine chair in Gus' shop. One day when I was about nine I asked Gus about it. He said lots of kids had tried to make a go of shining shoes over the years, but none of them had ever been successful enough to stick with it for very long. He said I could give it a try if I wanted to. My "rent" would be to keep the shop clean and deal with the towels. I would be expected to be there for two hours every day after school and all day on Saturdays. So I took the offer and graduated from part-time Avon order taker to big time shoeshine boy. It didn't take me long to discover why no one had ever made a go of it. Very few of the farmers and cowboys coming in for a haircut asked for a shine. For one thing it was strictly a matter of faith that there actually were boots or shoes under all that mud and manure. During my first week I doubt that I shined more than two or three pairs of shoes and, no more than I knew about shining shoes, that was probably a blessing. Gus' shop was directly across the street from the Texhoma Hotel, a perennially derelict and frequently closed establishment that, like the rest of Texhoma, had seen better days. At this particular time the hotel had been recently re-opened by a hunch-backed professional gambler named Perry. Mister Perry, that is. Perry was a disreputable, godless, whited sepulcher, according to the received wisdom of the more knowledgeable Texhomans. He was also a slender, dapper guy whose shoes were always, I now noticed, beautifully shined. Perry's mien scared the hell out of me. He had a kind of sinister look about him, and it wasn't just the hump in his back that made him seem so threatening. He had jet black hair pasted to his scalp and a thin, sharply-chiseled face that made him look like a Hollywood version of a river boat gambler. In truth he looked more like a Mafia hit man (Hollywood again), but I didn't know about that sort of thing until later when I was learning stuff like ipso facto. Perry's countenance probably worked well for him at the poker table, but it did nothing to encourage this young boy to bother him with silly questions about things like how he got his shoes so shiny. But I sure wanted to know. It quickly became an obsession with me. I was just sure that my shoeshine business would blossom if I could just get a pair of shoes to look like his. I had to know how to do it. In my youthful egocentrism I had no doubt that my entire future, the rest of my life—maybe even the future of Western civilization—depended upon my possessing the secret to Perry's shoeshine. Desperation finally won out over my fear. One day, sometime in the second or third week of my growing humiliation as a failed shoeshine boy, I screwed up my courage and asked. "Mister Perry, how d'ya get them shoes to shine like that?" "I spit on 'em," he growled back at me. Whoa! Run . . . hide . . . sink into the ground . . . blanche . . . oh no, my face is turning red . . . ask a silly question and get a silly answer . . . get out of here, you dumb craphead . . . I was turning to slink off, thoroughly crushed and ready to work up a real good case of self-pity, when he asked, "You wanna know how to do it or not?" Is the Pope Catholic? Does a fat hog bleep? Does a bear bleep in the woods? Of course I wanted to know. Actually, much to my surprise, Perry acted like he had been hoping I would ask. That proved to be one of those pivotal points in my life. It turned out that Perry had been a shoeshine boy when he was a kid. "I know the ropes, kid," he said, "and I'm gonna teach 'em to you." Until that day I hadn't even known there were any ropes. Now I was going to learn all about them. I was excited. I did of course have misgivings about accepting Perry's help. Would it corrupt my eternal soul to associate with the likes of him? Would I get kicked out of Sunday School again—yes, it happened with embarrassing regularity—for taking instruction from someone who was definitely not a God-fearing, Christian man? These were very real questions for me but I was afraid to say no to him. Besides, I was greedy. Virtue versus cash was a no-brainer for me. The first thing he taught me was how to shine shoes well. A Perry shine was essentially a spit shine, so he was not being facetious when he said he spat on his shoes to shine them. But spitting on customers' shoes was not cool, so I kept the lid of a polish can filled with water on the stand. After slapping on the polish with my hand, I put a few drops of water on the shoe and rhythmically slapped the polish and water for about three minutes. The water treatment could also be repeated with the final ragging for a spectacular shine on a really good pair of shoes or, as was more often the case, boots. Next came flair. For Perry it was a given that every shoeshine would be a good one. But just giving a good shine wasn't what it was all about. After all, any smart aleck punk could shine a pair of shoes. Smart aleck punk. I can still vividly see and hear Perry with his hooked nose and harsh voice talking about smart aleck punks and how I'd better not turn out to be one. "Henderson," he would growl at me, "you'd better not turn out to be one of those goddamned smart aleck punks." I frankly did not have any idea what a smart aleck punk was so I did not know if I was one or not. I used to lay awake nights worrying about it. Perry's unvarying expression was almost, but not quite, a sneer. I never saw him laugh but he was not totally without a sense of humor. His manner always confused me. He was a harsh, cynical man, disdainful of most people and all kids—yet he gave most generously of his time to teach me, and he obviously wanted me to be successful. Once the customer was in the chair the show began. Rag-popping, dual-brush rhythms, and—my God, the glory of it all!—a rhythmic hand-slapping to rub in the polish. To have this kind of fun and get paid for it too. "Sure, you're gonna shine their shoes, see, and you're gonna do it good, see," he often told me, "but show 'em somethin' too, boy, show 'em somethin'." I seldom see an old Humphry Bogart movie without thinking about Perry. Give me a couple of brushes and a shoeshine rag and I can still be moderately entertaining. All of this was important and contributed to my success as a shoeshine boy. But the really essential ingredient of success was what Perry called the hustle. The Hustle according to Perry was composed of three parts. First came the pitch. This is where you let people know they needed a shine and that you wanted to do the shining. Ask for the business. Ask for the privilege of giving a top notch shoe shine for the paltry sum of 15 cents. (This was back when 15 cents was more than just dead weight in your pocket.) Paltry sum. I said that a lot, too. I didn't know for sure what it meant, and I 'm sure the cowboys and farmers I used it on didn't know what it meant, but Perry had said it so it must have been okay. I think he picked it up from some W.C. Fields movie. Perry also told me he was the ping-pong champion of the Lesser Antilles, and I know he picked that up from a W.C. Fields movie. Hustle included pitching everyone. This was very important. Never mind whether their shoes or boots looked old or new, shined or scuffed, clean or dirty. Ask them if they wanted a shine. If you were not busy in the shop, go out on the sidewalk and pitch everyone walking by. Smile and be courteous. Compliment their footwear. "Them's good lookin' boots, Sir. Shine?" Ask for the business. Say "sir" a lot. When I first took on the shoeshine job I thought of it, if I did any thinking at all, as being just that: just shining shoes. But Perry showed me that success came not from the quality of the shine, but from the selling. He gave me my first real taste of selling and its rewards. For three years, from age nine through 11, I made good money shining shoes. I knocked down enough to buy things like the fanciest bicycle in town, the only Schwinn within a hundred miles. The best Daisy Rider BB guns (I had several). An expensive bow and good arrows. Plenty of cigarettes, pipes and tobacco (yeah, I smoked). Most of what I bought was stuff I did not need. I should have been saving more of my money, but you know how it is with pore folks. Eventually my lucrative little shoe shine business and all of my newly acquired worldly possessions were too much for me to handle. I went AWOL for several days -- who knows what I was doing -- and Gus turned the job over to his son, George David. He was the same age as I and we were good friends. I was devastated, but it was nothing less than I deserved. George David stuck with it for several weeks. He did not have the right stuff -- i.e., he had not had Perry as a teacher. All of this happened at the beginning of summer. The best season for barbering and therefore shoe-shining was just setting in and Gus told me he liked the way I kept the shop clean. After all, I was nothing if not neat. Later, when George had moved on to other things, Gus wondered if maybe I could come back and pick up where I left off. That was probably my second experience of the joys of telling someone to kiss my ass. This was getting to be a habit. Gus told me I was a smart aleck kid. So I was one after all. The doubt and wonder could end. I decided maybe being a smart aleck kid was not such a bad thing after all. There I was, 11 going on 12, unemployed for the first time in my life. Life sucked. In those days there were lots of ads in the backs of comic books touting all kinds of money-making schemes. One that had always looked particularly appealing to me had to do with selling fireworks. So I sent off for information and received an exciting, beautiful full color brochure picturing the company's various wholesale "assortments." I ordered a small assortment which I quickly sold. I ordered a bigger assortment and sold out again, and so on. That was the beginning of my fireworks business, which I repeated every summer for several years. Selling firecrackers and roman candles was fun and lucrative but it left me with a lot of time on my hands, so I used my folks' lawn mower to start mowing yards. Once again, Perry's tutelage came to bear and I had no trouble getting customers, except now I was going door to door to make my pitch instead of waiting for people to come by or into the shop. Eventually I had too many customers to keep up with on foot, so Dad let me use his old beat up pickup and he walked. (That was the kind of dad he was. Besides, it was a tiny town and only five or six blocks from our house to the pool hall where Dad spent most of his spare time. ) With wheels I was able to hire other kids to do the actual mowing and trimming and I added even more accounts. Bought a couple of lawn mowers. Got serious. The pickup was an old Chevy with hardly any paint left on it and a tear in the front fender. Everyone knew when I was coming because that fender would vibrate and screech, making a God-awful noise. I eventually fixed it with a piece of scrap chrome that I bolted across the tear. If it won't go, chrome it. If you have been keeping up, you have figured out that I was about 12 years old by this time. You want to know how, at that age, I could conduct a business that required driving. All I can say is, times were different, it was a small town and about the only law was one Oklahoma Highway Patrolman for most of the panhandle — about three counties. He would cruise through town maybe once every week or two. If he did happen to see me driving, all I had to do was make a run for the Texas side of town. Yard work was no good during the winter so I couldn't work after school the way I had with the shoe shine business. So I started hauling trash. This was back when everyone kept a barrel out in the alley in which they burned their refuse. So I would contract with them to pick up their trash on a regular basis. I think I charged 50 cents a barrel. Once again I was able to make a go of it because of Perry's teaching. I was getting better and better at persuading people. It did not take me long to discover that trash barrels burned and rusted out at a pretty fast clip. There was a market, but where to find empty 55 gallon drums? There was a colorful old character named George Washington (really!) who lived about seven miles north of Texhoma. For some reason —or for no reason other than simple weirdness—he had amassed about a zillion empty 55-gallon oil drums on his property. After seemingly endless negotiations he agreed to sell me 100 of them for $50. Back then in that part of the country the dicker was everything. It was a test of your virility. You were not a man until you could hold your own in a horse-trade. To let someone get the best of you in a deal was as bad as losing a fight. So old man Washington was not about to let me get even a fair deal, much less come out on top. But somehow he got confused about the 50 cents I charged to empty a trash can. He thought that was the price I was going to charge for a barrel. He was giddy with the thought that he was really getting to me because I wasn't going to make anything. Plus I had to cut the tops out of the barrels before I could sell them. He clearly thought I was stupid. The fact is, I sold every one of those barrels for $5 apiece. I cut the tops out of the barrels with a hammer and chisel. Well, I did some of them myself. I quickly figured out it was going to take me about forever to do all 100 barrels, so I hired Leonard Rhoden, the biggest kid in town my age, to do it for 35¢ a barrel. I had hired another classmate to help me haul trash—we also did other things, like cleaning up vacant lots, selling scrap iron, cleaning out garages and hauling off the junk, and so on. So I now had two employees, which gave me my first experience of the joys of being an employer. (That was meant to be a facetious remark.) But I was raking in the dough and that was all that mattered. Paul Huntington had come to Texhoma to be the band director when I was 10 or 11 years old. I was already "in the band," as we used to say. I played 4th chair clarinet which, in case you are not familiar with this sort of thing, was the bottom of the heap. I would have been relegated to 50th chair if there had been one, I was that bad. No, worse than that; I was not good enough to be bad. The only reason I was in the band at all was because I knew how much my folks had sacrificed to get me a clarinet. Actually, I hated that horn and never practiced. It had all been a big mix-up. I had wanted to play the cornet, and when I was in third grade and old enough for band, I told my mother what I wanted to play. Except I had the name wrong. I thought they were called clarinets, so that's what I said I wanted. A few days later Mom drove the 20 miles to Guymon, to the only music store in that part of the state, and bought me a used, beat-up metal clarinet. When she gave it to me, it was hate at first sight. Anyway, back to Paul Huntington. I remember the first time I met "the new band director." It was on the street about a week before the start of the school year. He asked me if I was in the band. Yes, I said, but I wasn't very good. We'll change that, he said. And we did. Paul was young, in his early thirties at the time, single, and kind of funny looking. Actually he was quite eccentric in a street-wise sort of way. That probably came from the fact that he had worked in a lot of different music situations to get through college: the standard issue dance and show bands, a military band, a circus band, and who knows what else. He played a lot of instruments and he had, for me at least, a lot of charisma. He was especially cool because he looked the other way when I would sneak back to the instrument room and have a smoke during school hours. Under Paul's influence and inspiration I caught fire (nothing to do with smoking in the instrument room). Got it in my soul, as they say. I started practicing and eventually took solo chair. Became concert master and student director. Won a few regional and state contests. All this time Paul was playing weekends with a dance band composed of band directors from around the region. They usually worked on Saturday nights, sometimes traveling 200 miles round trip just to play a gig. But they made good money working in VFW and American Legion halls. When the tenor player had to drop out of the band, Paul asked me if I wanted the job. Never mind that I had never even touched a tenor saxophone. I hadn't even played non-serious music for that matter. But Paul told me I could do it, so I took some cash and headed for Guymon to buy a used sax. I didn't have enough money, but the music store let me charge the balance with $10 a month payments, no interest, no security. Like I said, things were different then. The sax was a Conn 1050 big-bore. I never did learn what that meant, but it was a beauty. And big! I don't think I had ever even seen a tenor saxophone up close before, so its size was a bit daunting. But Paul had been right; with some practice it did not take long to translate clarinet skills to the sax. It took me a few months to begin to feel comfortable in the band. It helped that the other guys were all band directors. They were used to nurturing young musicians. With their support and help I caught on fairly soon. Those weekends were a magic time for me. We would drive to the jobs in Paul's new Studebaker. It was a high-powered, sporty work of automotive art, very fast for the mid-1950s. The speedometer went up to 140 mph. We never got it up to that speed, but we were often going over 100 when it was three a.m. and we were trying to get home while we could still stay awake. Those flat, straight prairie highways, late at night, with no other traffic and rarely a cop were an irresistible invitation to speed. We did! As usual, my experience with the dance band eventually involved sales. Someone had to book the band to keep it busy, and the haphazard method of waiting for an American Legion Hall or a VFW to call left lots of holes in the performance schedule. What was needed was someone who had the will and the ability to promote jobs for the band in return for a percentage of the take. We needed a booking agent. Naturally I was eager to take up that mantle. I started staying in touch with VFW and American Legion halls all over that part of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Not only was I booking our band, I was booking other bands too. They were mostly professional western road bands like Tex Beneke and Chill Wills. Sons of the Pioneers. Texas Playboys. What names! What music (!) By this time I was 15 and feeling pretty cocky. I had moved up the sales food chain from a guppy taking Avon orders to a big shot promoter selling entertainment packages. I was a real barracuda, ready for the big time. Or so I thought. Thus when my family and I moved to Denver between my junior and senior years I naturally figured I would really do some big time selling. No more penny ante small town stuff for me. If you've ever been in sales you have probably heard someone say in jest, "Last week I couldn't even spell salesman. Now I are one." That is pretty much the way it happened to me. Getting sales jobs was not hard. Selling was. All of that Okie promotion stuff really had not prepared me for life in the city. There were several jobs and I tried lots of things that first summer in Denver. Automobiles. Kitchen appliances. Cookware. Nothing worked; I was not the hotshot I had thought I was. Dad must have been right, I thought, when he said that salesmen were born, not made. I guessed I just was not one of them. This failure was accompanied with a great deal of emotion and disappointment; I was not going to be able to name my own hours and rake in the dough. Scanning the classified ads in the paper, looking for something that did not require selling and would be open to a hick kid, I ran across an ad for a rock 'n' roll band. Al Cole, the owner of Joe's Place, needed a group for weekends. I called and scheduled an audition for the following week. I did not have a band, of course, and I had never played rock 'n' roll. I ran ads for musicians, hurriedly put together a group, practiced night and day and, much to my surprise, we got the job. The place was a real dive, only one block from skid row in lower downtown Denver, but I didn't care. I played there every weekend for over a year. It was a real education. (Joe's Place was a 3.2 joint —sold only a weaker beer with 3.2% alcohol content—so it was legal for 18 year olds. I was not 18 but I looked like I was and no one ever asked for my ID.) Later in the school year, after football season was over and I only had to be in school mornings, I answered an ad for a dance instructor. "No experience needed. Professional training provided." I got that job and spent the rest of the school year working afternoons and evenings—except Friday and Saturday nights, when I was working at Joe's Place—teaching and selling dancing lessons. Get it? "Selling" dancing lessons. There I was again, but this was not straight commission so I had an hourly income while I was trying to learn to sell. The studio would run promotional campaigns, like the offer of a free dance lesson, and I was supposed to sell a course of instruction to the ladies who came in. (There were female instructors/salespeople to deal with the men, of course.) I did not do very well at this, either, and just barely managed to hang onto my job and my hourly wage. There was a commission on every sale but it was against the hourly pay. I don't think I ever actually earned more than a few dollars in commission over my wage. I did learn a lot about dancing, though. When I graduated from high school the preacher at our church talked me into trying to sell cookware. Preaching did not pay very well, he had worked his way through seminary selling cookware and other hope chest items to "single working girls," and he still did it to supplement his church pay. It was not hard for him to persuade me to try it. I still had dreams of the rake-and-hour-naming thing. I was trying to sell pots and pans part-time, go to college full-time, and work seven nights a week (six nights and Sunday afternoons, actually) with my band at the Turnpike Bar and Grill. And I was not doing any of those things well. I still didn't get the selling thing, I didn't get the studying thing, and the music was just basically work. I eventually flunked out of college and the Army got me. Fast forward a few years, I'm out of the Army and back in college and—yep, you guessed it—I'm paying my way by being in sales. But now things are different. During my stint in the Army I had begun to play around with self hypnosis so I used that to help me in sales. The results were almost mystical. For a long time not much happened. Then things started changing, and the change was dramatic. It was gradual, but nonetheless dramatic. To make a long story more boring, I was eventually selling so well I set some national sales records. For example, in some of my best weeks, working full-time during the summer between semesters, I sold over $10,000 worth of cookware, china and crystal. That meant there were weeks when I wrote more than 25 four-hundred-dollar orders. That was a lot of hustle paying off in a big way. Perry would have been proud of me. Later I changed to selling encyclopedias and there were frequent evenings when I would write $1,200 worth of business. All of this made a vast difference in my style of living and in my attitude. As to the style of living, I was long past the days of driving my old Ford, the one I had paid for with earnings and tips from Joe's Place. I drove Cadillacs, Lincolns, and some high-powered foreign cars. I dressed well and generally lived high on the hog. I developed sales skills and self-confidence, and attitude out to here. About that attitude. It was better and it was worse. It was better in that I felt a lot more confident and of course I was having a lot of fun. (I'm sure I was an insufferable arse.) It was worse in that my academic interests plummeted and I dropped out of school. But I've talked about that elsewhere. The point here is that just about anyone can use self-hypnosis to make magnificent changes in his or her ability to sell and persuade others. Without high pressure, and without tricks or con games. Just good old Type A animal magnetism. And it gets your head working "in sync with the sale," as I used to say when I was a sales manger. To be in sync with the sale means that you say and do the right things to position your product or service into the pre-existing wants and desires of your prospect, and you say or do nothing to kill the sale. These are two pretty big orders, especially when you consider all of the subtleties and nuances of non-verbal communication and perception. That is why you cannot make selling a science. There is just too much for one person to keep in mind, or be aware of or alert to, at one time. This is also why a good salesman makes it look like he has something with which you must be born. When you are in sync and your subconscious mind is firing on all cylinders, no one can stop you. You are a magician with a special mojo that continually amazes and delights you. And makes you lots of money. There are other ways to get your mojo working—there are certainly lots of salespeople who do not use self-hypnosis (and there are also a lot of bad salespeople)—but the only way I have ever had much luck with, and the only way I have ever been able to teach to others, is self-hypnosis. So Dad was right. I did reach a point where I could name my own hours. And I certainly raked in the dough. But later I changed my mind about wanting that. Remember the old admonition, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it"? I think that is what happened to me. I got what I had wished for, but I did not like the person I had become. I never tired of the money but the decadent, eristic quality of my days did bother me. I was not the adult I had intended to become when I was a kid. I had become a successful salesman, yes. But somewhere along the line I had lost my way, become confused. For one thing, at some point I had stopped being as fair and honest as I knew I should be with other people. In addition, I was not being a positive force for good; it was a painful realization one day that the world would be no worse off without me, maybe better. I was not contributing to the well-being of the planet and to other human beings. I had become an unthinking person who was spiritually impoverished and intellectually boring. So I quit. Changed directions. It might not have been necessary for me to get out of sales in order to become the person I wanted to be. But that's the way I chose to do it. But you know what? I don't think it is possible to stop being a salesman. In everything I've done over the years, I've been selling. As a psychologist I was selling therapy and mental health. As a teacher I was selling education and intellect. And when I conducted self hypnosis seminars I was also making a big sales presentation, often to hundreds of people, to sell them on the idea of making self hypnosis part of their lives. I commend sales skills to you. Persuasive communication is helpful, sometimes necessary, for success in almost any field. You certainly need to develop your sales ability if you are in or plan to go into sales work. And even if you are not a salesperson per se, you will be more successful at anything you do if you have the ability to persuade others. If you'd like to know more about using self-hypnosis to develop your persuasive abilities, and things like subliminal influence over others, please take a look at my latest book. Back to where you left off in "Good Things to Know about Hypnosis"

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