Are You a Soldier or a Scout? – How to Make Your Business Profit from Reality

In this fascinating video, Julia Galef challenges us to look again at how we view life especially the way we come to conclusions about things. This is particularly relevant to business in general and sales in particular.

First watch Julia Galef’s talk “Why You Think You’re Right – Even If You’re Wrong” below.

The soldier mind-set is geared to protecting yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy, while the scout wants to know what’s really out there, as accurately as possible.

While you need both mind-sets in business, making good and profitable judgements ultimately depends upon you developing and using the scout mind-set as often as possible.

Advantages of the scout mind-set include:

• You are keenly interested in accurately establishing your customers’ needs and preferences. The most practical way of doing this is to communicate better and more readily with them through the prism of their values. The amount of sales and therefore profits your company makes will depend squarely on how effective your communication with customers is.
• Your customers are more likely to see you as someone looking to serve their needs rather than yours, helping to build and sustain trust quickly.
• You dramatically lower your risk of becoming blinkered and perhaps even “believing your own propaganda”.

Effectively communicating with your customers involves the two steps of decoding their values and then using the triggers applicable to those values while avoiding the tripwires, as much as possible. See our blog for a really good practical overview of this customer-centric approach: Customers + Products + Love (Real Love): Pipe Dream Or Reality?.

This is a learned skill, but one that you can master in due course, and we’re ready to give you the right help and support to achieve that objective.

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