Your Brain Is Innately Sabotaging Your Conversation Performance

Welcome back to the 53rd issue of Disrupting Conversations!

What do you do when a prospect tells you no? When they push back on your ideas? When they say something that catches you completely off guard?

If you're like most sales professionals, your brain immediately fast-forwards. Suddenly, you're not in the conversation anymore—you're in your head, writing the story about how this will impact you - your commission, goals, and maybe even job security.  

In that moment - the cost is immediate: You become a lesser version of yourself, right when you need to be at your best.

As humans, we’re hardwired for this response. When we experience a conversation setback, our cognitive function takes a hit. Our memory weakens. Our thinking gets muddy. We lose our verbal sharpness, and our ability to ask powerful questions evaporates. We're no longer objectively evaluating what's happening in front of us.

Even top performers aren’t immune to this reaction. They’ve just developed something most people haven't: conversation resilience, the ability to stay calm, convicted, and objective when the innate human response is to feel anxiety, frustration, and hesitancy knocking at the door. Even when they hear something they don’t want to hear, they maintain their poise.  

The good news: You can develop this skill, but it starts with strengthening your self-awareness

– Dan

Breaking Sales is my podcast to connect with those who are ready to break free from the chains of old sales methodologies that don’t work.

Title of Episode: Say Less To Get More: Embracing The Power Of Silence in Conversation

🎙️ When a prospect goes quiet after you ask a question, what goes through your mind? For many of us, that silence triggers the same panic response as hearing "no"—an immediate urge to fill the void, to explain, to solve, to make the discomfort stop. But silence isn't bad. It's just information. It's a sign that someone is thinking. The problem is that we label that pause as threatening, and then suddenly we're talking when we should be listening. 

In this episode, Pam and I explore why your impulse to rescue uncomfortable pauses actually sabotages the depth of information you could be getting—and what happens when you learn to sit with that silence instead.

When I was early into running my business, I walked into what I thought was a done deal. The president and CFO of a company were ready to hire me to coach their sales teams—or so I thought. Instead, they told me no, they didn’t have the budget. 

I could have panicked. Instead, I got curious. 

I knew their sales had been flat for over a year, so I started asking about their growth strategy. Their answers: More CRM tracking. Tighter accountability. Better pipeline reviews. All things they were already doing, without results.

I was hungry for that business—frankly, a bit desperate. But in that moment, I set those feelings aside and instead of trying to emphasis how my expertise would help them - I focused my questions on how and if their strategy would work. That shift freed me to ask uncomfortable questions they needed to think through: “Those three things are outputs - what inputs will you change? Those three focus areas haven’t moved the needle yet - how will this next time be different? What do you risk?” 

A month later, they signed on.

Most sales professionals hear something they don’t want to hear and label it as “bad,” but that judgment and label pulls you out of being objective and triggers your innate negative emotion. You stop listening to what's actually being said and start listening through the filter of what it means for you. The conversation continues, but you're somewhere else—calculating, catastrophizing, scrambling.

Conversation resilience is what breaks this pattern—but developing it requires self-awareness and discipline. It means catching yourself when you feel that urge to fast-forward into an imagined future. It means asking yourself: “What can I ask in this moment that will help the other person objectively think through the cause and effect of their pending decision or action?” Not what helps save the deal. 

When you stop jumping ahead to how their decision impacts your future outcomes, your listening sharpens. You’re able to objectively explore the other person’s reasoning—and ask questions that help them see the gaps—because you're genuinely curious about their constraints, challenges, and outcomes. And the deal you thought was dead thirty seconds ago? Might be revived or even still very much alive, because you kept yourself in the game long enough to shift from “oh crap” to curiosity. 

Does this guarantee you'll close every sale? Absolutely not. But it does guarantee you'll perform as a better version of yourself. Where instead of feeling helpless and defeated - you’ll feel a strong sense of fulfillment because you helped someone get to the truth and make a better decision. 

What changes in your world if you can learn more conversation resilience - how to bend but don’t break?

QUOTE

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

– Attributed to Viktor Frankl, neurologist and Holocaust survivor

Thanks for reading!

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