The Result of Creating Patterns of Success

Confidence - the result of creating patterns of success over time.

Confidence is the state of mind necessary for effective action, courage, and execution. The degree of confidence someone has is directly proportional to the sum of successes one has had. The more successes the more confidence. Recency also plays a role; if we've had great success recently our immediate confidence skews high. If we've had recent failures our confidence skews low. Though we tend to let personal experiences and random circumstances decide our confidence, we must realize that confidence is a variable under our direct control.

I've seen first hand what the damage in personal confidence can do to individuals. I've witnessed top sales performers flipped into vulnerable incompetents because of the inability to properly refine their confidence. In relationships loss of confidence tends to lead us backwards and we may seek to rekindle half-hearted romances that were never really what we wanted. Confidence is a very real and very powerful quality that must be managed and developed as much as other crucial faculties for personal, business, and social efficacy.

There is a huge tool at our disposal that we rarely make use of. That tool is our minds. More accurately, our ability to experience a scenario in our minds. Countless studies, and anecdotal reports from high performers, has confirmed that actively experiencing a success in our minds is almost equivalent to actually having the experience. Neurological studies have confirmed that through active imagination the same areas of the brain become active that become active during a real experience.

The thing to realize is that we all have different ways of visualizing. Some of us "feel" experiences. Others "hear" or "see" experience. Usually it's a mixture of all three. To properly calibrate your most effective form of visualizing you can simply recall, as vividly as possible, a time when you experienced supreme confidence. Analyze the way your recall this experience, and re-experience it in detail. Use that template to craft new experiences of success in your mind.

Napoleon Bonaparte for example, visualized his goals in intense details. In the beginning of the campaign he could see its last battle clearly in his mind. He would point out the exact spot it would end, his predictions proved uncannily correct on an ongoing basis.

Create the patterns of success in your mind, repeat it, and perfect it in your mind as well as in reality.

Angel Armendariz

How To Get The Response You Want

How To Get The Response You Want
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Personality assessments are used today in almost all social settings. Whether it be used for employer screening, military recruitment, or any other interpersonal environment, personality assessments attempt to give a behavioral understanding of how we interact. Two popular assessments are DISC, developed in the early 1900's by a Harvard psychologist; and Myers-Briggs, developed by two females two help women during WWII who were entering the industrial workforce.

While these two systems have there uses and critics; there is another model that has been somewhat dusted under the rug. Timothy Leary, a Harvard educated psychologist who become an infamous promoter of psychedelic drugs; notably introduced a personality assessment based on interpersonal behaviors; i.e., how we react to others behaviors, and how they react to us.

According to Leary's work we respond involuntarily in a reflex like fashion to someone else's behavior. This reflex serves to enhance our ego's and to diminish anxiety. So it follows that a persons most favored behavioral pattern is set in accordance to which types of behaviors have produced the least amount of anxiety.

Leary categorizes the major behavioral patterns along sixteen personalities. Each personality provokes a certain response. For example the "docile-dependent" provokes advice/help. Whereas a "managerial-autocratic" type provokes obedience/respect. Further along Leary's grid we find that a confident/independent "narcissist" provokes inferiority; and a "cooperative-over-conventional" type provokes tenderness & love.

The just of the interpersonal matrix is that if you want a certain response, you can provoke it by adjusting your behavioral signals to provoke the appropriate response. This provides a wealth of information to all of us who wish to have a better understanding of our personal, business, and political relationships. Many of the popular assessments tell us "how we are", and where we fit in. The beauty of Leary's model, is that it tells us "how we can be" to create the relationship we seek to build or sabotage. By focusing on how we can behave to change conditions, Leary's Interpersonal model puts the power back in our hands and allows us to develop a more flexible approach to our social behavior. In my next blog I will give a more detailed example of how to use multiple behavioral patterns at certain points along an initial meeting with a person to maximize rapport...

Further reading: "Self-Determinations" by Timothy Leary; "Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality" by Timothy Leary

Angel Armendariz

Happiness Rules - You're All Set

I Seek Happiness -

"I want Happiness..." the repetitive lyrics of a favorite song of mine. "Pursuit of Happyness" title of a recent favorite movie of mine. Happiness is sought by all. At an early age I figured out that happiness depended to a large degree on myself. Kind of like a game you play. In the game of happiness you choose the rules.

You choose "what" has to happen to be happy. Some of us make it to hard to win. Some of us require a so much to happen before we can feel happy, that we rarely feel it. I've seen some people have rules set up like this: to be happy this has to happen...

1)lots of money, 2)no problems, 3) no hard work, 4) perfect lover, 5)complaint coworkers, 6)everything goes according to plan....

No wonder some people are never happy. On the flip side here are some of my rules for happiness:

1)being alive, 2) awareness of infinite possibilities in the present, 3) self improvement, 4) deep breathing, 5)learning something new...

In my world happiness is easy...because I make it like that. Unfortunately many of us accept rules from friends, tv, movies, parents, etc., instead of choosing our own. Some of us have become experts at consciously diverting our attention from all the good and all the potential and finding or making up dramatically tragic sorrows.

The second thing I mentioned regarding possiblities of the present is probably the biggest deal for me. Something I adopted from Einstein. Its the awareness of expectation. Of embracing the unknown with optimism. Instead of repelling the unknown with pessimism. Its true that any little occurence in your life can transform everything instantly. Its been true for many individuals. Mark Cuban, said in an interview in Selling Power, that he would read everything he could get his hands on. To him he justified doing so because he realized that any minute distinction made in the knowledge he encountered could mean the difference between him "making it" or not. This is the type of expectation that enchants any ordinary moment with potential, expectation, or excitement.

Think about it. You can meet someone in 1hr. that completely changes your life. You can pick up a book right now that opens a new dimension of possibilities for you. You can listen to a song that inspires a dormant passion in your heart. Every moment erupts with potential to transform your life. If you think about it like that then how can anyone ever be bored? How can you be sad? Its almost impossible.

Happiness is not a quantity. Its not limited, or scarce. Its infinite and available to appease your whims at any moment. Enjoy your happiness...

Angel Armendariz

7 Answers To a Highly Effective Question

"What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your personal, professional, or work life?"

7 Common Answers:
- Improving communication with people
- Better preparation
- Better planning and organizing
- Taking better care of self
- Seizing new opportunities
- Personal development
- Empowerment

That is a question Stephen R. Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People asks at his seminars. What a powerful question. The usual responses are fascinating; how many of you would answer in a similar manner?

If you think about the most valuable resource you can have; it would almost certainly be "improved communication with people" (sales ability). Want improved relationships? How about more friends? I know, we all want more money. Some parents might want a resource to help with their kids. There are also some of us who are depressed. Some of us lack motivation. A group of us just doesn't believe in ourselves....Do any of these sound like you?

If so, then you must agree that improved communication would be the one ability you would like to do superbly well and consistently, to have a significant positive impact in your life. With all the power promised by communication...you would think that we would all be flocking to resources via books, training, coaching, etc.
Do you?

It amazes me that with all the value in communication we are so atrophied in that arena. A colleague of mine once commented, "Angel serenades his clients over the phone with his voice..." I took this as a complement, however; I couldn't say the same thing for him. Truth be told, I have worked on my voice...and I still do. If how well I live my life has to do with how I communicate with people then I'll definitely work the probabilities in my favor and work on all channels of communication consistently.

Now here's something few people ever think about. You communicate with yourself all day long. You talk to yourself, you convince yourself, you insult, provoke, congratulate, sell,... You are both the buyer and the seller. You try to sell yourself on working out, or the new diet, or taking care of important things. How good are you at selling yourself? Unfortunately, I've met few individuals who are aware, much less competent, at being able to make themselves do the things that they "know" they should do. Why is that? Again, because we have not consistently worked on our communication and selling skills. We don't know how to sell ourselves on anything...thus we are sold anything being peddled in our environment.
As you can see...I'm passionate about communication and its effect on every aspect of our lives.

-Angel Armendariz

Communication Universe - Are there Absolute Laws?

"Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance."
- Wallace D. Wattles

In quantum physics scientists are in a race to find the "absolute" laws of existence. The presupposition is that "absolute" laws actually exist. We generally assume that there have to be absolute laws or ultimate truth. But, why do we think that? Maybe its a desire for a sense of certainty of some permanence to our lives. Nonetheless

I now ask the same question of Communication. In the broad category of Communication lets include all interpersonal forms of communication. Sales, marketing, casual persuasion, pick up strategies, essays, and public speaking. Would we be able to assume that these communication modes abide by "absolute" or "universal" laws? We would of course use something more fundamental to communication to describe this underlying template we suspect. Principles, are generally the equivalent to the quantum physicists "absolute" laws.

Acting is Sales?

Lets look at some principles. We'll first venture into Acting. Acting is all about communication...
James R. Alburger, acting and voice-over coach, gives this as the recipe for Selling the audience:

-Interrupt
-Engage
-educate
-offer

James, gives his students those for "principles" for capturing listeners attention. Hmmm...If i didn't know any better I'd say that those principles look eerily familiar to a sales pitch process. Or even a marketing pitch. Lets look at a famous sales pitch process. This is Neil Rackhams's Spin Selling formula:

-Situation
-Problem
-Implications
-Needs-Payoff

Courtship Ritual

Interesting...Could this apply online? Maria Veloso, a web copyrighting master, says yes. In Mitch Meyerson's book, Success Secrets of The Online Marketing Superstars, Maria Veloso describes a sales script meticulously made to move in the same linear format as the two examples above. She obviously gets the fact that the process is not about a "quickie"...she describes it quite intimately however, courtship like -"Seducing your Web visitor is like a dance, wherein you lead and they follow. You make a move, they respond accordingly, you take another step and they follow your lead in a seamless relay that ultimately leads to the sale." How's that for using the courtship analogy...

-Angel Armendariz