Do our inside voices determined our outside choices?
18th June, Father’s Day and I was very emotional. My younger daughter and her friends had given me a surprise gift with confetti and balloons. Older daughter had my photo as her profile pic. The new gen way of “gifting”. I decided to give them a traditional gift. My younger daughter got the special barbie doll she had been begging for months. After first round of discussions, we fixed the budget and decided to get my elder daughter a laptop which was shortlisted couple of months back. I prefer shopping offline. India – Pak champion’s trophy final was going on. Shopping was a good idea on that day, as India was losing the match anyway.
The electronics store was empty (as expected due to the match) around 8 pm. My daughter had jotted down specs for the laptop. In the store, her eyes fell on a laptop with a touch screen and she got hooked. The Laptop was Rs 10,000/- over our budget. Under the normal circumstances (any day) we would have walked away without making eye contact with my daughter. But in the emotional mood I was in, I succumbed. The only reason for a change of mind from there on was the sales person’s shifty demeanour. He made no eye contact and he kept fleeing inside and outside during price negotiations consulting with his boss. I did not know why he was dropping the prices in quick succession. His price drops were faster than the rate at which Indian wickets were falling. I was ready to buy the laptop. But there was a doubt.
Why do we doubt? Even my wife had the same impression.
In 1963, Dr. Joseph Murphy wrote a book called “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind“. This classic Self-Help title explains that the power behind the thought is the subconscious mind. Although we really have only one mind, students of the mind typically separate the mind into two functional aspects (conscious and subconscious), each with its own attributes and powers. It turns out that it’s the thoughts and beliefs held in subconscious mind that creates the bulk of the reality we experience and it is the subconscious that we need to pay attention to if we want to make rapid and lasting change in our lives and reality.
Everything in the subconscious is NOW with no such thing as past or future. Compared to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind has vastly expanded processing capacity, housing our long-term memory, multi-tasking thousands of events at a time and processing at 4 Billion bits per second on average!
So, in that moment between us, our subconscious mind processed 8 billion bits per second. Our subconscious minds picked up lot of external cues and made it difficult for us to move forward with the purchasing decision. The sales person was as convincing as the Indian team that day with bat and ball. Now it was time for us to take the final call. So, when he was struggling with the installation of Windows OS the sub conscious mind was pulling us away from the payment counter. Finally, we decided to leave and asked him to call us once the system is ready. His call never came and I felt that I made the right call (sounds business like)
I kept thinking what is my daughter thinking about my call?
Next day my wife did her research and we went to a new store. It was around 9PM and the sales person showed the systems. He created a likability factor instantly as he made us explore at least 3 options to consider. In selling terms he was qualifying our intent as a buyer. The experience was nice and positive and he was confident and explained each detail with ease. It made me reinforce one important point which is “We need to have other’s interest first” and that came out with the second sales person.
It is said people buy from people and that is what happened in our experience. Our subconscious mind wants us to be safe and second person gave us that safety net with three choices.
On reflection I understood that, our inside voices evaluated those two choices. Father’s Day choice was to move away from the product first and then the person and next day the choice was to move towards the person first and then the product.
Finally, we took the call and bought the laptop with our daughter taking the call, within the original budget, without touch feature.
My daughter’s demeanour (interpreted) gave me the impression that ……
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