Jack Frimston. Thompson. March the seventh. How are you feeling? I'm feeling like there's a spring in my step and spring is around the corner. Well, guess what? Deception isn't always reality. All right. There's a big slap around the face. Wow. Wake up. Yes. Wake up. Do you know our little friend Diogenes? Have you heard about him? Have you me talk about him before? Yeah. In the car earlier. Big, big friend of mine. And he said something interesting I'm going to hit you with. Okay. Heraclitus. Go self-deception.

A terrible illness and a vision, a deceptive sense. The person who lies to himself. What do we think about that? Mm, Heraclitus, great guy. Thank you. guy. Try not to laugh when I say it again. Okay, sorry, apologies. yeah, perception. We talk about perception so, so much. Have I told you about my fruit bowl analogy? No, go on. I'm obsessed with this analogy and there are other variations. You might have heard about one that's to do with an elephant, but maybe I'll save that for another day.

But the fruit bowl analogy is there's a fruit bowl in the middle of a room and they bring in 10 artists, okay? And they say, you've got to draw and paint this fruit bowl. Okay? So they're there, they're doing their bit, they're doing their artwork, they're loving it. At the end, you've got 10 amazing pictures, but they all look different because one of the views that you're seeing is all the bananas, but no apples. But then the other guy on the other side of the room, or it might be a woman, there's artists.

sorry, sorry. on the other side of the room, all you can see a beautiful apples and limes and mangoes. my. And basically what that, what, what that analogy tells is perception is so, so important. The way that you look at things, the way that you frame things, that's all you have. All you have is your perception of the truth. Wow. Okay. I like that. I'm going immediately to.

the sales side of this, right? So I'm thinking about people who are getting on the phones, getting discovery calls, and they're telling themselves things like, it's the product, it's a hard market, there's a recession looming, everyone hates me, whatever it may be, and they're starting to tell themselves a story that's being colored. There's a black and white factual picture of what's happening, but their emotions are coloring the picture, and that's where that self-deception comes in. And...

The Stoics had this great thing. This will be one of those themes that comes up, I'm sure throughout the series, but the Stoics had this great thing where they said, you should only be able to talk in plain language. So when you're relaying information, you should only be able to talk in plain language. And this came up with Marks, Phelous and politics quite a lot, where he would say everyone was talking quite eloquently and poetically, but they were kind of missing the point. So rather than saying it's always like this on a Monday or this terrible thing is happening because of the date or the product or whatever it is, just tell yourself exactly what's happening.

I just had a call. Someone told me to do one. Yeah. I just didn't close a deal that I thought I was going to close. If you take all the color out of it, it's very hard to deceive yourself. And when you start having that inner dialogue with yourself and telling yourself the truth as it actually is, there's suddenly a calm that comes over you because you see things as they actually are, not as you perhaps wish them to be or even shouldn't wish them to be. Yeah, I love that, Zach. I love that. It's about comparing fact.

with feeling. think one of the most powerful questions that you can start to ask yourself is how do I know this is true? And you can really start to understand, if this is the feeling, nobody ever wants to talk to me. Well, how, do you know that's true? Because one person, and then you can start to dissect it. We've been, we've been talking about the Stoics a lot recently. Do you want to give us the CBT that the Stoics used to do that the,

The, that's a great one that I think salespeople should be Yeah. basically have an opinion on something. So you'd have an opinion of, let's say, cold calling is dead on the top of the page and you draw a line at the middle of the page and you'd have true and false next to it. And then have to write down all the reasons cold calling is dead on the false side, all the reasons cold calling is not dead. And what you end up with, if you practice that as a habit, when you suddenly have a strong emotional opinion on something, you'll give yourself a much more well-rounded view of it.

And it reminds me of your friend of mine, Derek Sivers. Derek Sivers, great, great guy, wrote some brilliant books. My personal favorite is a book called Useful, Not True. And there are two questions that I carry through life and their mantras of is this useful and is this true? And then you can take it deeper of how do I know that's true? it starts to, I know that you've probably there as well, but it starts to become a habit.

Even so in like my personal life that I'll be driving with my partner, we'll be talking about somebody and we go, okay, but if we were in their situation, what would we be thinking? So I think that for salespeople, if you come off a bad call, get into that habit of, okay, let me imagine I was in their situation. Let me imagine I'm a HR director. I've got a cold call on a Monday. What could be happening in their life? I'm working from home. There's a baby crying in the background. Of course I was going to be rude because

My life's stressful when I've taken it out on somebody that I don't know. It's not personal. It's not that deep. Nice. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thomson. Remember you'll die. Eh, have a bit more salt please.