I get it. The title of this post doesn’t immediately connect to Due Diligence. But trust me when I say the connection is clear, distinct and extremely significant for your business.
Things they are a-changing. If you don’t see this in your particular business sector, look again. Since the onslaught of social media, peer review sites, internet marketing and the global village, business-as-usual ceased to exist. The statement, “The only constant is change,” has never been more true. And it’s affecting your bottom line.
Everyone knows this. And everyone’s scrambling trying to provide THE solution to riding these waves of change. But the one topic I hear discussed only in backrooms and mastermind circles is Enlightenment. Call it what you will: awareness, consciousness, intuition, energy, super-hero powers, whatever; it all results in the same thing. Your clients, customers, industry partners, competition, vendors, and team members are tuning in and turning it up a notch. This is the single most powerful force pushing change in business today.
That’s a bold statement. But let’s explore it from our vantage point. We don’t claim to be business experts. We claim to be people experts. We understand nuances of human behavior most people never think about. The spy game is one of the biggest chess-like, out-maneuvering-your-opponent arenas ever created. (And it’s been around a LONG time…the second oldest profession??) It persists solely because humans have the ability to continually up-the-ante and take knowledge of self and knowledge of others to a whole new level. Sound familiar in this emerging marketplace?
Business is nothing without people. And at the heart of every successful business is the ability to portend human behavior. That’s where we come in. If you choose to ignore that your market is smarter, more informed, and – yes – more aware/enlightened/intuitive than ever before…you will lose.
Let’s face it, in any room or group you find yourself, there’s a good chance someone else is more tapped-in to a level of understanding about how energy operates than you. This changes everything. Old tactics of coercion, smarminess, snake-oil sales methods, etc. have an underlying energy that’s incongruent. Note: I did not say dishonest. Despite people’s fascination with lie-detection, it is not a science. We get asked how to detect lies all the time, like it’s a magical method of due diligence. It is not. The various theories and techniques of lie detection are just that, theories and techniques. Some people implement them well with a degree of success but most people don’t. If you truly want to use your super-hero powers to assess the veracity of what someone is saying, the best you can hope for is to discern congruency.
You see, we communicate simultaneously on three levels: mind, body and energy. We’ve learned to lie with our minds and bodies (yes, even non-verbal communication can be manipulated – think about how many times Hanson beat the polygraph), but it’s very difficult to lie energetically. When someone tells you something they don’t believe cognitively, physically and energetically, they “feel” incongruent. This happens when you’re talking with someone and despite the fact that they appear calm and confident and the words they use sound good, you instantly don’t like something about them. You don’t know why, you just “feel” kind of icky around them. This is you energetically picking up on the fact that they aren’t being congruent. Pretty simple, right?
The problem is we’ve been taught not to trust that feeling. We want proof. So we immediately go to a process of analysis to figure out why. But, alas, your mind can’t provide you with the proof it’s seeking because your mind interprets the words, not the energy. So we ignore what we “know” to be true. More often than not, we talk with people who got duped or coerced into some service or product and they usually end up admitting that they “knew” something wasn’t quite right but they didn’t follow their hunch. This is when we train them about the difference between intuitive due diligence and mechanical due diligence. Then we impress upon them the importance of doing both.
As more and more people tune into and trust this energetic sensor, the world of sales and marketing must adapt…or die. If any part of your business model from branding to marketing to sales to the product/service itself is not in integrity with who you are and what you can do, people will know. Perhaps not everyone, not right away, but change is brewing.
Our advice? Assess your own congruency. Make sure you believe in what you offer and how you offer it. If a particular marketing strategy feels icky to you, trust me it feels icky to your customers. If you make claims about what you can do and you’re not confident you can, no one will believe you. Develop a business model and strategy you believe in mind, body and soul. This creates an energetic congruency more powerful than any marketing campaign.
