How Paying Attention to Your Intention Can Impact Your Success

At the risk of sounding "Oprah," I am writing today about intention. I have made it a habit over the past several years to set my intention before facilitating a webinar, beginning a sales conversation, or even writing an article like this one.  This practice has had a profound impact on my success.

Through this discipline, I have learned that a conscious intention can impact outcome. When I enter a situation without a clearly set intention, I risk allowing my subconscious to dictate the result. I have found it enlightening and even somewhat concerning that it often takes some thought to determine what my exact intention is. Does this mean that before starting this practice  I was roaming around the planet like a leaf in the wind?

I most dramatically witnessed the power of intention many years ago when I was coaching a large deal for a Fortune 100 company.  I asked the team to think about what they wanted the buying committee’s reaction to be to their presentation.  After some brainstorming, the team settled on "We should have done this years ago" (meaning the client should have looked for other alternatives to their current provider years ago). I wrote it out on a flip chart, and for two days of dry-runs and rehearsals, it held prominent real-estate on the meeting room wall.

A day after the presentation, I got a call from the salesperson leading the deal saying "You are not going to believe this. The consultant advising the committee just called me and said as soon as you guys left there was a big discussion centered around the fact that they should have done this this years ago! Can you believe it? Can you believe, he actually said the words that we put on the flipchart?" she asked.

Every deal that I coached thereafter; I ran the team through a similar exercise.  In almost every case, the feedback mirrored the team’s intention.  For example, one team’s intention was to have the client’s reaction be “they are worth it” - as the team knew they were priced higher than their competitors.  The feedback received included almost those exact same words.

So, what exactly is happening here?  Perhaps there is some “woo” involved, but I believe that clearly stating our intentions impacts our behaviors both consciously and unconsciously.  It could be that in the examples outlined above the words on the flipchart hanging on the wall influenced the way the team talked about the value of their offer.  It could be that they were more focused than they otherwise would have been.

I have also used the power of intention when coaching people to overcome their nervousness when delivering a presentation.  When I asked one woman to share with me what her intention was for her presentation – she half-jokingly responded “to get through it without making a fool out of myself.”  

I have noticed that intentions seem to fall into two categories. They can be about the person setting the intention, or they can be about others. I believe that people are more successful when they are focused on others.  For this reason, I asked her to set an intention centered on her audience rather than herself.  Her response was that she wanted to connect with each person in the room and help them to develop a deeper understanding of her subject.  When she shifted her intention from herself to her audience her fear lessened significantly.

We have heard time and time again from women entrepreneurs that they don’t like selling because they don’t want to be “salesy”, or “pushy”.  When we coach them to set an intention before their sales calls, amazing things happen. 

In a sales conversation, our subconscious intention could be to close the sale, be successful without being salesy, or achieve a certain goal for the month – or a myriad of other things. When we set a clear and conscious intention that is about the person to whom we are speaking – instead of ourselves - it takes away those uncomfortable “salesy” feelings for you and the prospect.

For every sales call I have, I set my intention as:

“To learn as much as I can about this person’s situation, so that I can determine if our program can help them or not, and if not to provide some value in some way.”

This keeps the other person’s interest front and center and reminds me that the goal is to learn rather than assume our program is right for them.  

I challenge you to be conscious of your intention over the next several days and see how it impacts your business. I’d love to hear about your experience!  

Dorothy Didn't Do It Alone...Neither Should You

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