Whether you’re an entrepreneur unsure of your next step or a business professional struggling to negotiate your way, having effective conversations with others and with yourself will drive your success. On today’s show, Blair Dunkley joins Christine McKay to share engaging stories and insights on how understanding language patterns can tell you what people are thinking. There are so many golden nuggets to be gleaned from this conversation – from how to ask questions differently to the difference between clarity and certainty, the importance of being curious, and more. He also takes on the notion that you need to “know your why“ and shares why he thinks it is total BS.
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Wiring Your Mind for Success with Blair Dunkley
I am super excited to have one of my mentors, Mr. Blair Dunkley, as a guest with us today, Blair is the founder of ReWiring The Mind. He is a profiler and a behavioral researcher and a creator of Mind Models. He is a lifelong entrepreneur, and he provides people with the tools needed for rapid change that would empower them in their life and in their businesses. He has devoted over 40 years to researching behavioral patterns. Thirty-seven of those years, he spent developing mind models and was the Head of Behavioral Research for Life Skills College, where he developed a language–based profiling system. As a Certified Master Trainer of Life Skills Coaches, then president and CEO, Blair has worked with people to change their behavior and has done that for decades.
He is amazing, interesting, intriguing and one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. When I first met Blair a few months ago, he profiled me, and he told me something about me that only my husband has ever told me. That was that I’m a very hard person to get to know. It is true. I am. He has blown my mind. In the time that I have been working with Blair, I have been able to have put language things and behaviors and things that I do as a negotiator and as a person and Blair has given me the language to do that.
Because it’s been such an incredible help to me as a negotiator, I wanted to bring Blair on to share with you some of the amazing things that I have learned so that you can apply it to the things that you’re doing in your day to day negotiations. Blair, thank you for being here. I’m super glad to have you. Blair actually has some amazing stories on negotiation that he’s going to share with us because he’s done some really cool stuff. You’re in for a real treat. Blair, thanks for joining me. I’m glad to have you here on the show.
Thank you for inviting me, Christine. It’s awesome. Thanks.
Fill in a little bit more about your background. Tell us how you have gotten to this point and what drew you to working with mind models?
Every utterance out of your mouth is filtered through a question concept. Share on XI found it. I was a co-founder, back in the day, at the ripe old age of 21. I knew I wanted to work with people. My mother and I started a private post-secondary educational institution eventually called Life Skills College. It wound up having 23 campuses and over 1,000 students around the country. Our primary target while it was all government–funded, my mother came in with a view on mental health. Everything had a mental health bent to it. We adapted work that was a research done by the government which they spent $42 million to five years to research and define 362 core competencies. That was primarily for a native population and inner-city individuals, not for mental health.
We had to adjust and make some rather significant adjustments to that. That’s where the Mind Model Research kicked in. It also kicked in when I was trained as a mindset facilitator and I was teaching and incorporating mindset into the whole area of life skills, back in the day. My father wound up going into open–heart surgery and a coma, which two weeks after he got off the operating table, they called us into the hospital to be notified that it was 99% probable that my father would never come out of a coma and he never did. They were right. That’s the coma thing is another story. That evening I went home. I collapsed in the shower and I was crying my eyes out, shaking convulsively and crying and life was not going well for me at that moment.
I worked hard at attempting to get my life back in order. I practice mindset. I practice life skills. Life skills worked a little bit, mindset not at all. I thought I had an unshakable mindset. It got shaken so badly by that one incident that I became pretty much unhinged for a little bit. A few weeks later, I went back to my mindset trainer and she walked me through the same exercises that I attempted to put myself through but to no avail. She wound up telling me quite bluntly that it was because I didn’t believe enough. Working at Life Skills College with 80% of your student population being potentially suicidal, I found that overwhelmingly unconscionable. You can’t tell somebody that your stuff doesn’t work because they don’t believe enough. That’s ludicrous. I gave her the bird, I told her, “FU.” I left and never spoke with her again in my life and probably never will, unless it’s accidentally. I was infuriated by the lack of effectiveness of that.
I began researching and one of the pivot points was how to literally pivot my life and I needed to create a mind model. One of the many mind models, over 100 that I’ve generated is called the Pivot Post, because it was about a pivot that I made as a result of my dad going into a coma and everything else. It gave me the ability to change the direction of my life. Almost instantaneously, in less than 24 hours with my father and many years later, I wound up recognizing. I am now separated and about a few months ago, my ex asked me for a divorce.
I left my home. I flew to a job site, a coaching consulting job that I had in Chicago. I was in a hotel in Chicago and walking towards the shower that evening feeling discouraged and like I was going to burst into tears again. I noticed in that heartbeat that I flashed back to my dad and to that whole scenario with the pivot post that I wound up using. I went and used that pivot post mind model again and pivoted my life. I walk back to the desk and started writing out where I was. I got myself back into the present, not in the past, looking towards the future, but definitely in the present and looking at how I can pivot my life. I noticed that I’ve done that many times with helping individuals overcome their processes that they’re stuck in basically indirectly.
It’s not that so indirectly, it’s a lot of negotiation that a person either does with themselves or with their life and their circumstances or with others in their life where they need to change. It was all three of those and that also makes up another part of my mind models. Applying that with the pivot post, all of a sudden, I resolved probably 95% of my marital discourse at that moment with where I was going, what I was going to do and how my life was going to now pivot. I was able to do that and resolve something that could have taken me years in a matter of no more than 90 minutes.
That’s one of the things that I love about the things that you teach and talk about and we were talking about it before we started recording, is that you give intention to things that we may intuitively do or not, but you create this notion of intent. It allows the learner to then make decisions that are intentional so that I’m not letting something happen to me. I’m making conscious decisions and choices about how I’m going to be, behave and say in a certain situation. I have to tell all the audience, the stuff that Blair does is incredibly powerful. It is potent in terms of what it means certainly for me as a student of Blair’s.
Also, my interactions with others and how I’m able to communicate differently, influence others and allow others to influence me, creates an openness. For those of you who know me, negotiation for me is about the relationship. I was talking to a mutual acquaintance of Blair and me. I interviewed him and he’s on a different show, but Kevin Thompson and I were talking. I say often that negotiation and contracts and business relationships are about the hope of a better future that we get to create together. Oftentimes, people forget that negotiation is about the hope of a future based on what we know about things. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for your situation and the emotions that you go through and/or we’re going through. I personally very much appreciate the work that you’ve done over his overtime in the mental health arena. I, thank you, personally.
It’s also so needed. All this COVID stuff that’s out there and the undermining of social norms and values due to circumstances, not necessarily people, COVID being one, the election being another thing, on and on.
I think that anyone who says that this is not a crazy time, you’re probably a little crazy to say it because there’s a lot going on. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the work that you’ve done in negotiation. We had a wonderful conversation. You were telling me this amazing story about a merger that you were working on. I think one of the things that I’ve talked about many times is how when we are negotiating, we often don’t discover the full value of something that’s available to us and to our counterparts. We negotiate for a pen and instead of taking all the pieces of the pen apart and going, do you want this part? Do you want the clip? Do you want the ink? We don’t dissect it enough and you have this great story that you were sharing with me. I have a long history in M&A and divestitures so I love this story. Tell us more about that example that you were sharing.
I had a client that I was consulting with at the time and I was there to help him shift how people think. That’s what I do. I don’t tell people what to do. I show people how they can shift their thinking, how to think differently, basically and not what to think about. He said, “Blair, I’m doing this merger of this company. I’d like to bring you out because we have a very tight budget and I’m concerned with this whole thing.” We flew out and met the company president and the ownership and whatnot, and walking around and seeing how everything played out. All of a sudden, I realized that in here, even though the owner was attempting to up our price and get it beyond what we could afford, I heard in his language pattern, how he was thinking and he was thinking about how he could get the best price for a single sale.
Shortly after we left that meeting, I told my client, “You got to make this guy your best friend because I’m profiling that the other people are after something else that’s different than what we were after. You’ve got great skills in creating relationships and buddying up with people. You’ll get them to spill the beans. I know it. Go there, talk to him, make them your best friend and find out what the other company wants.” As it turned out, the other company wanted only one thing. They were prepared to pay millions for the customer list. That was it. Everything else would have been dismantled and blown out. The only thing that Ray didn’t need was the customer list.
I got with that negotiation. I was able to get it so that the acquiring president was able to sell his company once and strike a deal. I taught Ray exactly how to structure this. This was that Ray makes sure that that guy sells the company as the list, not everything else. He guarantees that he’ll divest himself and change the market in which that company was built. It’s a non-competitive scenario. insist on that because you want to buy everything else but the value of everything else plummeted from millions down to literally $400,000. He was able to scoop it up for pennies on the dollar. The guy made his millions plus an extra $400,000, for himself. It‘s a great win-win for that scenario.
We were talking about how at Harvard, they talk about win-win and I love my Harvard professors. It was an honor to be able to learn from those professors because they are masters of their craft. I used to get into huge debates about the whole concept of win-win. I always use the story of an egg and it’s like you’ve got three people who want the egg and how do you separate it? You can’t take a raw and separate it in thirds very easily. Most people are like, “Only one person’s going to get the egg.” Somebody usually says, “I can boil the egg and then we can divide it into thirds.”
We all each get an equal third of the egg or then you have somebody who’s thinking as a negotiator and says, “What if I take a pen and poke a hole on the egg, drain the yolk and the whites, separate the yolk from the white?” Now, I have an empty eggshell that I can use to either compost or art. I have an egg white that I can use to make a souffle. I have an egg yolk that I can use to glaze a pie or whatever. It’s that concept of being able to divide something. When you can separate and you can see that interconnectivity among different things, that’s when negotiation gets super exciting, because you’re able to then find additional ways of creating value that you didn’t think existed in the first place. To do that, you had to ask them good questions because one of the lessons I’ve learned from Blair is how to ask questions in a different way. Can you talk a little bit about that? Learn from what Blair says, because this is something that will revolutionize how you ask for things and whether or not you get success in getting the things that you’ve asked for.
First of all, I needed to do fundamental research on an area that I eventually named question concepts. I’m going to give you an overview, not an in–depth piece because the in–depth piece takes a minimum of three hours to train. Think about this. Every utterance out of your mouth is filtered through a question concept. Those questions, the names are who, what, when, why, where and how. Those six and that’s it. First of all, I want to point out to people who are studying artificial intelligence and mostly language–based intelligence, like a computer talking, how they’ve got something fundamentally screwed up.
I’ve become relaxed around this, but I didn’t want to share it, but I think I will. I’m not going to give you the details but they think that there are eight fundamental questions. Who, what, when, where, why and how plus which and unspecified. Which if they bothered to get a good dictionary, the which terminology is a grammatical correction for what. What would you prefer? Which one do you prefer? Every iteration of that can sometimes clunky or clumsily, but the meaning is captured by what, because it’s a grammatical correction. Next is unspecified.
What does that mean?
Do you like that?
No.
It’s unspecified. There is no who, what, when, where, why and how in that. “Do you like that?” You go, “No.” It’s a question, but what did the question generate? It generated an answer as all questions must, but the type of answer is to a what? One of the areas is the function of one of the columns in the question concepts is the function of it. What does it do? What always generates a list of one or more things or events.
I like that because that creates options.
It does but, “Do you like that?” The option here is yes or no. It’s an event in your mind that is externally verifiable. It’s based on your future behavior. Verifiability is critical to be able to figure out the effectiveness of questions. Why questions? Why do you do that? When I said that, it scrambled your brain. First of all, it’s out of context, which helps for the scrambling effect. The second thing is, why don’t you like the why question? Everybody loves the why question.
I don’t think anyone likes the why question.
Do you notice how you had to get a pleasant yet? Defensive response to that?
That’s the thing about why and it was because of our conversation around it. How many parents out there ask their children, “Why did you do that? Why did you not do that?” The first time you did that why question to me, all I could hear was my mother in the back of my head and I don’t like how I feel. I don’t like that because it raises negative emotions around, “Is my way of doing it the wrong way? Is there a right way? Is that it? Is there a better way?”
Every one of those ways that you’re talking about is all judgmentally based.
That’s how I feel about why now is that it has this emotive thing to it.
Many people are stuck in their why. Share on XIt’s not a thing. It’s a requirement. This thing that you’re saying, this motive thing, I’ve never taught you the question concepts. It is in the deeper learning and training that I do. It is fundamental to how all whys are. It’s crazy because Simon Sinek, his work on the why, you need to know your why it is bullshit.
Everyone talks about needing to know your why. Robbins, Dean Graziosi and everyone talks, “You’ve got to know your why.”
It is the worst thing that you can possibly focus on simply because your why will load emotions first and force you to go into reasons, excuses, rationalizations and justifications plus other things that are all ineffective. That is number one. Number two, the cool thing about this is nobody’s bothered to do the fricking research on the fact that I can use a different question, concept, title or word of who, what, when why or how and you will likely know instantly which actual question concept I used. I’m going to yell at you and the audience here. “What did you do that for? Tell me right now.” Which question concept did I actually use?
It sounded like you’re using a what, but it felt like it was a why.
Which one is it, what or why?
It’s a why question.
You’re right, it is.
Why did you do that?
Over 90% of the people will agree with you. I’ve tested these thousands of times. We intuitively know, even though I used the what word.
It was very judgmental.
The emotion first to put you into a stuck state of having to be defensive. If you look back at me yelling at you briefly, you knew that I was going to bed. In spite of that, you had a little slight flush to your face.
Paul Ekman is one of my heroes of psychology on the planet. For those of you who don’t know, if you’ve never watched the TV show Lie To Me, Paul Ekman is all about micro-expressions and how micro-expressions are universal to every human being on the planet, no matter where they are, no matter what their culture is and everything. I could feel my face react to you because it’s automatic. You can’t think about your micro-expressions. That’s what’s so incredible about him. Paul Ekman’s work is phenomenal. I want to get Paul Ekman in the show someday too because his work is amazing.
It is and I align his work. All I do is use language patterns to do similar kinds of work, not the same. It gives you subliminal clues because people will actually tell you how they’re thinking by understanding the question concepts, but pairing that and stacking those with other mind models. When we start stacking, we can get to a form of clarity at the moment, as opposed to always being certain. Everybody is going after certainty. Certainty has been around for over a hundred years as being a psychological necessity, which is no longer true.
This Blair is one of the things that you’ve talked to me about that resonates so much with me. To our audience, this is a huge thing. This notion of clarity versus certainty, it’s applicable in every aspect of your life, but absolutely, as you are negotiating this clarity, certainty concept is huge. Keep going Blair, because this one’s a big deal.
First of all, it’s a mind model that I had to figure out years ago because so many people are stuck. They’re stuck in their why. How come they’re in their stuck state? There are two major types of stuck States. Why being one of those two. How do people stay stuck in something that they inherently feel stuck in and can’t seem to escape from? They have supporting information, evidence, they call it, but it’s all internally verifiable only. It’s not externally verifiable. When it’s internally verifiable, you feel it to be true for you, but it’s not true for anybody else and you can’t prove it to anybody else.
Unless you indoctrinate them in your model of the world, they come into your stuck state, which you can have mass movements that are in the stuck state can all be indoctrinated. People want to believe because it’s less work to believe the belief than it is to test the belief to figure out if it works. If somebody else behaves in a way that is in accordance with the belief, you go, “Beliefs are the only way.” It’s not the only way. In fact, behaviors create beliefs, not beliefs create behaviors.
You guys are learning a lot. Blair is not holding back.
I am, but I’m not diving into deep depth. If you believe me, then believe this to be true because it’s tested. It’s externally verifiable and everything that I’m saying about this stuff is 100% externally verifiable. I can give you the thought experiments or real-life tests that you can run to make a clear determination that if you don’t trust and don’t believe me, test me. That’s the whole thing with mind models. Mind models are always identifiable, repeatable and duplicatable. They have to meet that standard and they can’t be my opinion because my opinion isn’t worth squat. My opinion is my opinion, but my observable behaviors are worth everything because that’s how I can shift myself or others. I can control myself, shift myself or influence others. I can’t control them, but I can influence them.
This whole thing here about going back to clarity versus certainty, if you give somebody a simple model that they’re certain about and they don’t have to think about anything else, what is the whole thing about developing your brain over time? Your brain always doesn’t like a vacuum, but it doesn’t like spending more energy than it has to. If somebody can give you a belief that it apparently was behaved by somebody else.
Think about this in terms of every religion in the world. Some Messiah or person out there who is heading up that religion behaved something. A story around that behavior was then stated and repeated for everybody to believe in to find the evidence for the belief in the behavior 100% of the time. It doesn’t have to be poor behavior. It has to behave. The belief can be generated and passed generation to generation, person to person or to parishioner to parishioner. It doesn’t matter. It all comes into alignment. There’s a president right now that’s got a lot of ability to say things that people what to align to so they can stay where they are.
He says things so that he had to try to align people but it is interesting with him because I find his behaviors and the words he says oftentimes to be inconsistent and incongruous yet people follow the belief and not the behavior in some regards.
How come?
It’s because it’s easier.
What he espouses is he talks to the lowest common denominator and he tells each subgroup whatever they want to hear. They align with him, the person that is perceived as the person and he does not have to keep the alignments the same when he talks to different groups.
That’s the beauty of that as the model. If you are that person or somebody like that person, you can tell somebody, you have 15 different people, 15 different things and as long as they’ll believe you, then it doesn’t matter that any of those things are aligned or not aligned.
What is the commonality? I’ve stated it and this is for everybody out there that’s reading this. This comes down to deep listening. What’s the commonality?
He speaks to them at where they’re at.
No, not necessarily. He does, but that’s all different speaking.
Enlighten me.
I can rephrase and go, “Who’s the commonality? Who’s the focal point?” Does it matter if people see him from different directions?
No. As long as they’re seeing him.
It doesn’t matter because when you focus on something that somebody chooses to believe, they have to believe. If that person says, “You’re right,” and another person gives a different version of a belief that’s maybe even somewhat opposite or different, but he then goes, “You’re right, too.” Both those groups focus on him and go, “We’re right.”
We’ve never talked about this before, but this is a fascinating concept because one of the things that I see in negotiation all the time.
This is something that I’ve noticed. When I have to go in to negotiate at different levels, I have to see where these connections are and who’s aligning with who and how do those structures operate.
I talk about the difference between faith–based and fact-based negotiation. I may simplify it more than it is. To me, I can’t negotiate faith. Faith is an internalized thing. It isn’t about logic. It’s not about reason. It’s a feeling. That belief factor that you talked about, it’s hard to negotiate with belief with that faith. Whoever has ever negotiated with me, all you have to do to with this program and you’re going to learn a lot about how to negotiate with me. I’m a very fact-driven negotiator. I am heavily researched. I dig into the details. I learn about the person or the people that I’m negotiating with. I learn about their business. I learn how they make money. I learn about what drives profit. I learn about what’s going on in the market and who is their competition is. I get heavily researched.
For me, when I’m negotiating with somebody who has 100% faith–based and no logic comes into play at all, that is a very challenging negotiation for me because reason doesn’t come to play. That’s a hard thing for me because my faith is based on the reason I find in my logic and theirs is based on a belief that’s only internally verifiable, not externally verifiable, but my fact-based stuff is externally verifiable. It creates a really interesting tension in how you overcome that in a negotiation is. This is why a lot of people see negotiation as combative because when you’re in that fact versus faith–based negotiation, it sometimes can devolve into a combative situation. Pulling out of that and finding ways to pull out of that is the only way you’re going to be able to come to an agreement as to where were you going.
What I was going to do was I was going to point out to you that there are some tools and mind models that help you shift and help influence somebody to potentially shift their belief, to open a crack, not into facts, but into an alternative belief. They’re already belief–based, which is emotion. I don’t do it this way, but to explain it and simplify it, “Where’s the chink in their belief,” because everybody has one. In that doubt, there’s an opening for an alternative belief, which can be supported by the belief part of the facts. The facts move people because the facts could be viewed as behaviors. They almost are always generated by some form of behavior.
If that’s generated by behavior, then what does that behavior generate as a belief? Frequently, people are into certainty around their belief, but they are uncertain about how this negotiation is going to fall out. They don’t know how it is. They say that they are, but they don’t look at what are there. There’s a level of uncertainty but if I go, “Do you mind if I ask you a question about how clear you are around your desired result?” They generally say, yes, and they give me an argument that is certain but clarity in the world. Certainty means that it’s stuck.
The world is changing very quickly and you can almost always use that as the wedge in somebody who’s in a certainty position. How do we manage? Fill me in, again, with a question. You said you wanted to do this. I want to make it an action question and force them to give me action. How do we reconcile the rapid pace of change so that we can optimize your outcome? Their brain gets fried and they have to go to clarity. I didn’t say word clarity, but how do you get them to optimize without clarity?
I want to say to the audience because I can envision. If I close my eyes, I can see the faces of some of you who are reading who might be saying, “This feels a little manipulative,” but here’s the thing, I don’t personally feel it’s manipulative. Negotiation is all about finding common ground. You can’t resolve a problem, you can’t move forward as two individuals or two companies, two entities if you haven’t found common ground. In a negotiation, if you’re sitting with a counterpart, there’s already at that moment, when you engaged with a counterpart, you already believe that there is a reason to have some level of common ground. What Blair’s talking about is not about manipulating it’s about how do you take and peel back the conversation in a way that gets to where that common ground. It’s is like that V on our logo of Venn Negotiation, which is all about the cradling of that common ground. What you’re describing Blair is how to get to that. How do you take that faith–based component and peel it back so that it becomes that area where you can find those pieces that work together for both of you?
It’s true and it is also inherently non-manipulative because there are ways of making it more manipulative or making it manipulative. Ways of making it more based on curiosity. When it comes from a curious standpoint and you’re sincerely curious as I was and would be again, if I use that, I’d want to know how they’re thinking about it. Not what they’re thinking about but how are they taking look at it and are they actually being fair to themselves, their position? Occasionally, I’ve found so much value in their position that I’m prepared to pay them more than what they were asking because it seems completely unfair and unifiable to me to give somebody what they asked for because it’s unconscionable once I learned what the actual value is.
What you’re talking about here reinforces something that I say all the time. Price is not always an input and should not always be input into a negotiation. Price should be considered an output of a negotiation. It is an output of a series of conversations that happens so that you are developing a price based on what is fair. You don’t know that if you go in starting with price, as many of us, especially in the Western hemisphere do. We go in and we lead with price, but what’s all the other stuff that matters. How did you get to price? What are all those assumptions? What are those questions that you didn’t ask that would let you know whether or not the price you’re asking for or offering is a fair price for what you’re getting?
People want to believe because it's less work to believe the belief than it is to test the belief and figure out if it actually works. Share on XOne of my more critical mind models is curiosity. This goes into other states. When people are into fully internalizing themselves and that they are emotively connected to their certainty and they’re in their why the state, “This was why,” and they’re easily argumentative, from a neurological point of view, their limbic system will take over and there’ll be in fight or flight and they will opt-in for fight. The only way and this comes from doing a lot of work in suicide prevention, in getting people out of depression and getting people out of all kinds of stuck states. That was early in my career, then transitioning into corporate work and recognizing how simple it is to take curiosity when somebody is stuck and rigidly focused in certainty about how things should be and must be for everything to work out.
If people don’t get in line, then get them out of the way because I’m going through. They lose their companies, not infrequently, over that. It causes everything to go on a handbasket and blow upon them because they’re way too rigid in their whole methodology. They’re stuck in their belief and their limbic system and creating a limbic loop stuck state. When you’re in a limbic loop stuck state, you can literally physiologically get a brownout in your prefrontal cortex, which is your executive part of your brain, where you do all of your serious thinking. How do you get somebody from their limbic system into their prefrontal cortex?
Only one behavior is linked to one word that is both emotional and fires off in the prefrontal cortex. The emotion that we get is primary. In other words, an infant in the Apgar scale, when you have a baby, you have nine things that you look for. One of them is the test to see if a baby can root around and latch on and suckle at that point and feed. If a baby is crying hunger and is put to the mother’s breast and does not suck, rejects the breast or the food, they know that that baby, that brain development has not been sufficient enough to cause that baby to become curious. I use it all the time. That’s a big tip.
When people come up to me when I’m speaking, they’ll talk to me about how they hate negotiating. They hate the topic. They think it’s combative and aggressive. What you’ve shared is that if you can take that combative counterpart and you can use curiosity and ask questions that reinforce your sincere curiosity because I do not believe curiosity can be faked. You cannot fake curiosity.
You can’t feign curiosity. You can’t fake it. You can pretend to be, but you aren’t really and everybody knows it.
I feel that it’s easy to detect if somebody’s asking you. If you show sincere curiosity through the questions that you’re asking, you can convert that combative person to the other side and you can soften them in a way that allows you to discover.
I want to give you a more precise language of understanding that. It does do that eventually. What it does do is it takes your limbic loop because of the emotion of curiosity, if it’s faked, it’s not the emotion. It’s a trick.
I hate it when people talk negotiation and use tricks. You can see through it.
When you get people out of their limbic system, you’re behaving with curiosity and that person’s limbic brain can sense, hear and feel, especially curiosity because the limbic brain is all about emotion. It’s fight or flight. How do you get that person curious? They have to be curious and you can use the word. Are you curious enough to find a solution here? Are you curious to find common ground? Putting that word in, plugging that into their head can breakthrough so that their brain now fires from the limbic into the prefrontal cortex, but it must be done through a question.
That’s powerful in your business relationships and imagine what that can do to your relationships. That’s massive right there.
It’s also massive in the area of suicide prevention because people go very dark and we had 800 people potentially suicidal every night. I had to figure out things that worked and not theories. I didn’t have time for month-long counseling sessions. I need to shift people now.
I knew this was going to be amazing. I knew that I was going to learn a lot. I knew that you were going to deliver in spades for the audience. This has been phenomenal. How can people find you? The things that you teach and the things you talk about are revolutionary in many regards. I want to make sure people know how to find you. I hope that you guys go find Blair.
ReWiringTheMind.com is one of my websites that you can jump on and take a look at it. If you are interested in tracking me down personally, then BlairDunkley.com is also up. If you’re interested, the way I met Christine was she signed up for a profiling session. I do profiling. For your people, I will make that available again.
Thank you very much. I have to tell you, the profiling session with Blair was life-changing. I learned so much about myself and how I interact with people. It was mind–blowing and Blair has a bunch of programs, Rewiring Your Mind for Wealth. I strongly encourage you to check out those websites. If you have the opportunity to work with Blair, I cannot recommend him enough. Blair, thank you so much for being on the show. I look forward to continuing our work together and to have you back again as a guest at a future date. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. By that time, when you have me back, I’ll have my book ready too.
I am so excited about your book.
It will be available at UltimateMindHacking.com because I’ve already got that one up there too.
If you have a chance to work with Blair, please take that opportunity. It will take you to a different level. Thank you, Blair. We’ll talk to you soon.
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About Blair Dunkley
Profiler, Behavioral Researcher and Creator of Mind Models. Lifelong entrepreneur and CEO of Rewiring The Mind, Blair Dunkley provides the tools for rapid change and empowerment in life and business. He has devoted over 40 years to researching behavioral patterns, 37 of which he spent developing Mind Models and as head of behavioral research for Life Skills College, he developed a language-based profiling system. As a certified Master Trainer of Life Skills Coaches, then President & CEO, Blair has worked with people to change behavior for over 40 years.
Blair has created a completely different way to approach sales and sales training. It’s called, Igniting the Buying Conversation, IBC. Since almost nobody wants to be sold anymore, yet almost everybody loves or likes to buy… Maybe it’s time to change the model. Blair did just that… the result was more people buying… these attests to the effectiveness of IBC. Blair also created 3 counselling methodologies, Operant Effectual Counselling, OEC, being the major one, plus programs that include Mind Model Method Coach training and more.
His methodologies how people break through barriers, blocks and beliefs, get unstuck, and change their lives.
In a ten-year period, Blair, through training as clients in the use of Mind Models, lifted the top line of his client companies by $757 million in his international consulting, coaching and training practice.
A popular, passionate and inspiring guest lecturer and keynote speaker, he has presented to a wide range of groups encompassing online and off-line entrepreneurs, CEOs, Sales Teams, and working professionals to undergraduate and postgraduate students. He has trained individuals and corporations from a wide range of industries, from Network Marketing to construction and staffing companies, email marketing companies, to oil and gas, as well as internationally recognized museums and scientific research organizations, colleges and universities. Currently, he runs the training firm ReWiring The Mind where he passionately help clients achieve new heights in business and life.
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