Overcoming the fears and getting to business

What's your reaction when I suggest cooking a hamburger in your exhaust pipe? If you're like most, you have an immediate negative reaction. It's a natural response to something that hasn't been tried before. The human brain is the guilty party; it's just protecting us through an ancient process called "danger surfing." If you understand this concept, you can change the way you do business during "unsafe" times.

Danger surfing takes place when someone is met with the unknown. It's how we survived from the cave until now. As cave people, our brains constantly scanned the environment for things like the saber-tooth tiger. Now we're wired to danger surf just about every new idea that comes our way, and it makes it frustrating when we're trying to introduce a new concept that will actually help a client. Our brains are hard-wired to look for the negative. In fact, there are many more negative receptors in our brains than positive ones. We have to deliberately override negative thoughts with positive ones.

Your clients are danger surfing, especially if they're stressed out about the market and their portfolios. They're in a protective mode so any idea that doesn't fit what they think is safe will be met with a lot of suspicion that is difficult to overcome. If you do a few things, you can get through the fears (call them objections if you like) and move on to doing business.