Chapter 9
Expand Your Comfort Zone
For all the talk in negotiations about getting to ‘yes,’ the word ‘no’ may be the most valuable word any salesperson will say in the course of a negotiation.1 This has tactical as well strategic implications. In line with their training, most buyers follow the same general playbook that encourages them to push for more and more concessions – price or otherwise – until they finally hear the salesperson utter the word ‘no’. In their playbook, only the seller's ‘No!’ marks the end of a negotiation.
It would be easy to offer a platitude of ‘just say no’ as a recommendation, but that would be identical to telling a frightened person to simply stop being afraid. Such suggestions are not practical advice, no matter how well intended they may be. If ‘no’ seems to cross your lips with conviction, but your body – through sweat, lack of eye contact, a catch in your voice, or any other subtle gesture – betrays you, then you have probably made matters worse, not better.
Changing a dominant response is a journey of self-improvement. In the world of sales negotiation, our narrow focus is to make ‘no’ your dominant response when a buyer requests a concession, and to ensure that you deliver that ‘no’ comfortably, confidently, and consistently. The process we describe and explain in this chapter applies to any situation when someone would like to change and then reinforce a new dominant response.
There is a lot of truth to the old saying that the only human being that likes change is a baby with a wet nappy. Change is a challenge for the human brain, which thrives on efficiency through the use of routines. The steps in this chapter aim to help you overcome the challenge of change.
Comfort zones are real
Think of your comfort zone as the sum of behaviours that have worked successfully for you in the past. All those experiences provided System 1 with a ready-to-go menu of ways to recognize and respond to standard situations you come across.
The more frequently we encounter standard situations and respond to them, the more likely our own autopilots are to draw on this narrow but deep set of past experiences.
How many times have we all heard or read ‘Leave your comfort zone!’ In our view, that appeal for change is hollow and futile for a couple of reasons. First, the sheer thought of leaving one's comfort zone is outright scary for most people. It stokes fear instead of reducing it. But more importantly, the thought of leaving your comfort zone – both semantically and practically – makes no sense as your comfort zone is built upon a wealth of your past positive experiences. And who would want to leave all that behind and walk into uncertainty?
What you can do, however, is use new input to push the boundaries created by those past learnings and prior experiences. Think of your comfort zone as a kind of software package. You update it regularly rather than discarding or replacing it. If salespeople want to stay ahead in a business world full of constant change, it is vitally important for them to expand their comfort zones constantly through new encounters, new situations, and new ideas.
Plan for premieres
You could think of this as seeking ‘premieres’ in your life, and then following them up with ‘encores’. You do something for the first time ever, starting with something seemingly trivial, but then working your way up to more difficult challenges. Then you repeat the process.
You don't need to start with looking for a new job in Brazil, learning Mandarin, or taking an improvisation class with a professional comedy troupe. Look for adjacent activities first before adding new ones. The process can start with taking a new route to work. More advanced steps can include getting involved in different teams at work, from day-to-day business to new initiatives. You can try out new IT applications you have resisted or ignored, or you can place a phone call to customers you may have resisted or ignored because the chemistry seemed off.
The scientific linchpin in this process is a concept called neuroplasticity, which is ‘a general umbrella term that refers to the brain's ability to modify, change, and adapt both structure and function throughout life and in response to experience’.2 The changes in the brain correlate with the types of experiences. In other words, positive changes in the brain generally reflect positive experiences. Ongoing stresses, in contrast, can inhibit positive changes in the brain or lead to negative ones. One relevant part of the brain in this context is the amygdala, which is one of the regions of the brain that governs how we respond to fearful and stressful situations and how we manage our emotions.
Robert Sapolsky describes this in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Worst and Best: ‘Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behaviour; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it. We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function – working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting – is impaired, and the frontal cortex has less control over the amygdala. And we become less empathic and prosocial. Reducing sustained stress is a win-win for us and those stuck around us.’3
Repeating your premieres with encores helps you create new routines and expand the pool of experiences that System 1 can draw on. As we said in Part I, the food or fuel for System 1 is exposure and experience.
Practice, exposure, practice
Many professionals such as soldiers, athletes, and emergency responders regularly train the intense dominant responses that make them successful in their fields. Their System 1 has been changed permanently, because time and repetition have trained their personal autopilots. System 2 controls whether someone can save a person's life, in terms of understanding the necessity and knowing what steps to take. System 1 controls whether they actually will save a person's life.
The emphasis on active practice and on pre-programming their automated behaviours is particularly important for salespeople, because they tend to get much less ‘real-life’ exposure than buyers do. The average industrial buyer has more suppliers to manage than the average salesperson has customers. This gives buyers more exposure to a greater range of products, arguments, personalities, and reference points. As a result, they have more opportunities to expand their comfort zone naturally in the course of day-to-day business.
Salespeople need to try to replicate this breadth and depth by intentionally and purposefully seeking exposure to new experiences. Similar to physical strength training, autopiloted behaviours require active training, so that you can form a highly adaptable personal comfort zone that allows you to respond to any new challenge with agility.
How to make ‘No!’ your dominant response
The more we hear ourselves say ‘no’ in different situations, the less stressful that act becomes and the less sensitive we become to both the act (saying ‘no’) and its feared consequences, such as being disliked or ostracized.
To expand your comfort zone, think of comfort – the obvious antidote to discomfort – in terms of three dimensions:
- The number of stresses – defined as situations, patterns, conflicts, or outcomes – you have exposed yourself to.
- The number of contexts in which you are exposed to for each source of stress.
- The number of times you are exposed to them.
The more you can expose yourself to a particular source of stress, especially in different contexts, the more you can instil a better – and more powerful – dominant response. In short, you can't say ‘no’ in a stressful situation if you have never said ‘no’ in a similar situation, or at least in one that your System 1 will view as similar.
John Bargh, a social psychologist from Yale University, refers to the human autopilot as ‘automated will’ and wrote: ‘To shift the regulation of goal pursuit from conscious control to automatic control can be an adaptive way of ensuring goal pursuit, even under new, complex, or difficult circumstances.’4
Can salespeople cultivate the kind of automatic control or automated will that Bargh referred to? Gaby is living proof that they can. As a long-time professional B2B salesperson, she knows the temptations of the inner voice very well, the one that wants to say ‘yes’ and get the deal done. To change her dominant response, she needed to find an easier way to say ‘no’ instead of sticking with the conventional solutions designed to make ‘yes’ harder. The breakthroughs for her came from several sources, including a methodology called ZRM (Zuercher Ressourcen Modell, or Zurich Resource Model), which was developed by self-management trainers Maja Storch and Frank Krause of the University of Zurich.
ZRM and similar approaches have worked very well at changing behaviours in many other areas where stress levels are high and where self-management can lead to significant improvement. For example, several studies have demonstrated that these techniques can help people manage eating disorders more effectively and generally do a better job of managing (lowering) levels of the stress hormone cortisol.5,6 Another meta-study concluded that, ‘[g]oal-setting based intervention appeared to improve symptom control, quality of life and self-efficacy in adult patients with asthma.’7
We believe this publication marks the first time someone has applied these approaches to changing behaviours in professional sales situations. The three steps in Figure 9.1 represent a well-grounded fusion of science and practice.
Figure 9.1 The three steps to expanding your comfort zone and making changes to your dominant responses
Step 1: Intention keeps you looking forward, not backward
It is tempting to formulate a goal as a rejection of a previous mode of behaviour. We are all familiar with typical examples, such as: ‘I will no longer be afraid of that situation’ or ‘I want to lose weight.’ Even detailed goals take on that form, such as: ‘I will not stress-eat when work gets tough.’ A similar phrasing for a salesperson would be: ‘I will not give in the next time they ask for a lower price.’
Each of those statements has one thing in common. They all have a double-negative construction, with the undesired state combined with another negative word like ‘not’ or ‘lose’. That is a lot of negativity!
The ZRM approach recommends that you frame goals in a positive way. The difference is a matter of science, not merely semantics. You resolve to move toward a new behaviour rather than away from a previous behaviour. In the context of changing the dominant response, it means visualizing the goal positively and affirmatively (‘I want to look fit’ or ‘I will say “no”’) rather than placing a negative focus on the old behaviour (‘I will not give in’).
One rationale for using positive language to express the goal is the effect that negative language has on achievement. A study by two Canadian researchers revealed that ‘negative goal framing predicted poorer future performance independent of goal level, expectancy, and earlier performance.’8 In other words, framing your goal in negative terms directly affects your chances of achieving it. The negative formulation is also open-ended, because it begs the ‘how?’ question. What behaviour or actions will you undertake to avoid giving in? Positive framing is more specific, and that works well with System 1, which responds more readily to clear, positive direction.
Positive formulations are not only unambiguous. They also change how you measure progress and success. The metric for measuring progress is not defined by the distance from the positioning you are leaving, but rather in terms of the remaining progress you need to reach your goal.
Step 2: Exposure means practising in a structured, progressive way
To provide structure and a clear path to progress, the ZRM method defines A, B, and C situations for practising the new intentional behaviours you want to programme. To avoid confusion with business uses of A-B-C, such as for customer segmentations, we will describe these situations instead as low risk, medium risk, and high risk.
In Figure 9.2 we look at the Dominant Response Matrix again, but from the perspective of your personal challenges and their impact on you personally. What are some events or situations that you would imagine taking place in the lower left?
These low-risk situations are simple, low stress, and low stakes opportunities for you to practise a new intentional behaviour, such as the act of saying ‘no’. One common low-risk situation for many people is routine shopping. The next time you go to a new shop and the person at the counter asks you to join their loyalty programme or sign up for their store credit card, you decline – with a clear ‘No, thank you.’ It is important that you hear yourself utter the word and offer no embellishment, excuses, or apologies for your ‘No!’ The ‘no’ needs to stand on its own, without qualification.
Medium-risk situations warrant more preparation because they should take place in a business context rather than a private one. In the Dominant Response Matrix, these situations are in the middle band, where the stress, scrutiny, complexity, and/or impact have increased. Offer a ‘no’ in a somewhat more complex situation, but where the stakes are still not overwhelming or threatening. Then allow your System 2 to take over and view the issue at hand logically, critically, and systematically. You may find yourself declining a customer request in an area not directly related to price. You might turn down a request for special services, shorter delivery time, additional free samples, or the waiving of delivery fees or other surcharges.
Figure 9.2 The Dominant Response Matrix, revisited for personal challenge and impact
Social facilitation can also play a role here. Recall from the cockroach study that if a crowd watches you do a simple, habitual, or routine task, the chances are that you will perform better than if you did the task in isolation.
This means that as you advance, you should let people observe you in the act of saying ‘no’ in an effort to reinforce the new dominant response. Letting others observe you saying ‘no’ also starts to establish a new sense of accountability. A study from Dominion University in California concluded that accountability – in the form of sharing goals and progress with others – correlated with better success in goal achievement.9 A meta-study published in the bulletin of the American Psychological Association came to a similar conclusion. It noted that, ‘progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded. Taken together, the findings suggest that monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy, and that interventions that increase the frequency of progress monitoring are likely to promote behavior change.’10
High-risk situations are masterclass situations, the hardest ones to tackle. They represent high stress and high stakes. Often, just thinking about them makes you sweat. They could also represent business situations where you have fallen short of success. Within the Dominant Response Matrix, such situations would be in the upper outer band.
These situations require special thought and preparation. Remember to avoid negativity in your goal setting. It is your journey towards a new behaviour, not getting away from what might have happened in the past. Set a new positive and affirmative goal for yourself to decline a customer request that you have previously considered difficult to decline. This could be a pricing concession or any other unwarranted demand. Think of a specific customer and their typical request. Visualize the situation and make a conscious decision that the next time that the customer asks you for a concession, your answer will be ‘no, we cannot do that’ together with no more than three reasons. Offering these reasons together with the ‘no’ is an important step toward one of the objectives we laid out in Part I, namely, that the ideal mode of operation for a salesperson is the optimal combination of System 1 and System 2.
Once you have a specific situation identified, it is very important to note your intended new behaviour as succinctly and unequivocally as possible: ‘When/if the customer asks for… ., I will reply with… .’ Such prepared statements – examples of System 1 and System 2 working together – are important, because you can access them in high-stress situations.
Success rates in high-risk situations will not be 100%. But each ‘no’ means progress in expanding your comfort zone.
Step 3: Use prompts and other aids for encouragement
People often desire to follow through with their plans, yet frequently fail to do so. Some of these plans are singular and ambitious, such as reaching a goal weight. Others have more regular rhythms, such as conducting overdue business calls when driving to work or changing the air filter in the kitchen hood every six months.
An electronic reminder can be very effective for some of these tasks. But electronic devices do not sense the moment in a Zoom call when your pulse goes up, you experience enhanced microsweating, and your old dominant responses risk steering you back to old behavioural patterns.
To find ways for people to overcome these chronic follow-through failures, Harvard's Todd Rogers and Wharton's Katy Milkman conducted a study in which they ran six experiments: some online and some offline.11 They tested various reminders and discovered that prompts help participants remember a specific task when those prompts, or reminders, are particularly distinctive.
In one experiment, they handed out a discount voucher to each visitor to a coffee shop. As many of us have experienced, people often forget to redeem these vouchers and get frustrated. What can improve redemption?
Half of the visitors in the experiment received a plain paper voucher, while the other half received the same voucher but with a picture of stuffed toy alien and the additional reference: ‘To remind you Thursday, this will be on the cash register.’
The stuffed toy alien that appeared at the cash register on Thursday served as an effective prompt. More visitors who received the alien on their voucher redeemed their coupons than those who received the voucher with no image. Rogers and Milkman's other five experiments, all making a similar point, allowed them to present a strong case for the use of distinctive prompts. Independently, an elaborate brain scan study established that graspable items in a person's lower right visual field attract particular attention.12
Based on that study and the insights from Rogers and Milkman, it makes sense for people to choose small tangible items as distinctive reminders or prompts to repeat and reinforce a certain behaviour. In practice, this means you can set up your own prompts for the Invisible Game, such as a little toy anchor next to your phone.
The ZRM approach recommends such prompts. Specifically, the approach suggests that people ‘systematically set up and equip their environments with reminders to ensure that the new neural pathway is always activated, even when their attention is caught up in other matters’.13 This means that such objects can have the desired effect even when the causal link is not consciously perceived.14
Prompts are personal and private. Unless you let someone in on the secret, no one else knows that a particular object or image serves as your prompt. You have free latitude to select the object or image that will embody a learned association for you. Think of the object as a ‘mental fuelling station.’ In online meetings, it is easy to place these prompts within your line of sight. You can set them on the desk or wall behind your computer, outside the visual field of the participants onscreen. At other meeting occasions, you could choose an object that is already in the conference room, such as a chair or a flip chart, or you bring a special pen that you associate with your new intended behaviour. In each case, you choose a prompt according to your personal preferences.
At some point the behaviour that you are trying to reinforce – in this case, saying ‘no’ in a negotiation – becomes a dominant response that works independently of the presence of the prompt. When that time comes, you need to let go of that specific prompt and not use that object again. Developing the next new behaviour requires a completely different object. In other words, you can't recycle a prompt.
In the final chapter of Part II, we will explore some of the common tactics that buyers have in their playbook. They can use them to heighten the stress level in a negotiation artificially in an effort to trigger a response that works to the salesperson's detriment.
Notes
- 1. See for example: Fisher, Roger and Ury, William. (1991). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In. New York: Penguin.
- 2. Voss, P. (2017). Dynamic brains and the changing rules of neuroplasticity: implications for learning and recovery. Frontiers. Retrieved May 28, 2022, from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01657/full (accessed 28 May 2022).
- 3. Sapolsky, R.M. (2018). Behave. Kindle edition. London: Penguin Publishing Group, 136.
- 4. Bargh, J.A., Gollwitzer, P.M., Lee-Chai, A. et al. (2001). The automated will: nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (6): 1014–1027.
- 5. Storch, M., Gaab, J., Küttel, Y. et al. (2007). Psychoneuroendocrine effects of resource-activating stress management training. Health Psychology 26 (4): 456–463.
- 6. Storch, M., Keller, F., Weber, J. et al. (2011). Psychoeducation in affect regulation for patients with eating disorders: a randomized controlled feasibility study. American Journal of Psychotherapy 65 (1): 81–93.
- 7. Liao, Y., Gao, G., and Peng, Y. (2019). The effect of goal setting in asthma self-management education: a systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Sciences 6 (3): 334–342.
- 8. Roney, C.J. and Lehman, D.R. (2008). Self-regulation in goal striving: individual differences and situational moderators of the goal-framing/performance link. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 38 (11): 2691–2709.
- 9. Matthews, G. (2007). The Impact of Commitment, Accountability, and Written Goals on Goal Achievement. Psychology: Faculty Presentations. 3. https://scholar.dominican.edu/psychology-faculty-conference-presentations/3 (accessed 5 August 2022).
- 10. Harkin, B., Webb, T.L., Chang, B.P.I. et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin: 142 (2): 198–229.
- 11. Rogers, T. and Milkman, K.L. (2016). Reminders through association. Psychological Science 27 (7): 973–986.
- 12. Handy, T.C., Grafton, S.T., Shroff, N.M. et al. (2003). Graspable objects grab attention when the potential for action is recognized. Nature Neuroscience 6 (4): 421–427.
- 13. Storch, M. (2004). Resource activating self-management with the Zurich Resource Method. European Psychotherapy 5 (1): 27–64, 44.
- 14. In the original ZRM literature those permanent props are referred to as ‘Chronic Primes’. The term ‘priming’ implies a pre-conscious mechanism. While we have a good empirical basis to believe that the props/primes work as intended, it is beyond the topic of this book to discuss whether those mechanisms are based on conscious, pre-conscious, or both kinds of processes.