Contrary

to what most people think, science says that you’re not in control of

all of the decisions that you make each day.

There

are a lot of automatic decision-making processes that go on within

your brain. In this video, you’re going to learn the eight most

impactful of these cognitive biases and how you can use them to your

advantage.

So

if you find that you keep making stupid decisions, seemingly on

autopilot, whether that be in your selling career or just in life in

general, this video is going to explain why that happens and how you

can stop it in its tracks.

Cognitive Biases

Have

you ever wondered why hindsight is such a powerful tool? It’s because

a lot of the decisions we think we make are processed automatically

in our brains. We’re not in control of them.

It’s

only after the decision has been made that we look back with

hindsight and engage the logical part of our brains that we realise

where we went wrong. 

Our

brain does this because it requires less mental energy to make quick,

automatic decisions than it is to ponder every single thing that we

have to do each day. And our brains are as lazy as the average sale

manager. 

No,

but seriously, imagine if you had to think of the pros and cons of

that great big truck, hurtling towards you at 60 miles per hour as

you walk across the street to grab an overpriced latte. 

It’d

mow you down before you even managed to pull out a pen and paper to

think to create the two columns of “benefits of jumping out of

the way”, “benefits of getting flattened and allowing my

wife to cash in on my life insurance”. 

So

with that said, let’s jump into the eight cognitive biases or short

cuts that all of our brains take each day – 

One

– Anchoring

bias

The

first cognitive bias is called the anchoring bias, and it comes about

because humans will always rely more heavily on the first lot of

information that they receive to make decisions over any subsequent

lots of information that comes their way. 

The

issue is, the first lot of information isn’t always going to be most

reliable. 

For

example, if I’m selling a product and I tell you it’s worth £20,000

a month, then two days later I come to you with a credible story that

I can now offer it to you for the low, low price of £10,000 a month,

it seemed like a complete bargain. This is because your judgement on

what pricing is fair is based on the initial information that you

received. 

This

is an example of how “anchoring” is used as a tool of

influence. Many organisations sell their products by anchoring a

fictitious price that the product never actually sells for. Then they

pitch the lower price afterwards to secure a deal.

This

can also be used more subtly too. For example, if I ask you whether

the tallest building on the planet was more or less than a thousand

feet high, I’ve already anchored this number in your brain which can

skew your response.

So

have a guess, pause the video and leave a comment below on how high

you think the worlds tallest building is.

Have