Dennis Collins:
Welcome to another episode of Connect and Convert, the Sales Accelerator podcast. Small business leaders tune in every week to learn insider tips about how to grow their sales faster than ever. Hello.

Leah Bumphrey:
Hi, Dennis. How are you doing?

Dennis Collins:
I’m doing great. Looking forward to another exciting episode today. Here’s one that can apply not just to sales leaders and small business owners, this can apply to everybody. What are the best times each day for maximum creativity? Isn’t that an interesting topic?

And you might say, it depends. And it could. Leah, you’re one of the most, First of all, I always forget to do this. Let’s talk about our special offer before we get into the material of today. We have a special offer only for listeners and viewers of the Connect and Convert podcast. Could you explain it, Leah? You do it so much better than I do.

Leah Bumphrey:
You know what? I’m actually going to tie it into the podcast because we are offering a free discovery call with our listeners. That means that it’s a chance to go beyond just emailing us a question. It’s arranging a time.

And we’re finding that most of the people that are calling in and asking for this time period with us are calling and wanting it in the morning. And I think that has a little bit to do with just the business mindset, getting it going. But what’s so fun about it is in these calls, it’s a chance to talk about the things that we talk about, Dennis, recruiting, training, sales activation, how should they move forward with just different things going on in a whole variety of businesses.

It’s neat to see how many different businesses are tuning in. And we’re offering that. So please, if you are tuned in, our email addresses make us very accessible. We will arrange a 60 minute no charge discovery call and from there, it might make sense to work more. We’ve had some clients that have reached out to decide to ask what else we can do. But it’s an extension of what we’re doing here.

Dennis Collins:
Indeed. Dennis Collins@WizardOfAds.com

Leah Bumphrey:
And Leah Bumphrey@WizardOfAds.com. You can reach both of us either email.

Dennis Collins:
Indeed. We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Leah Bumphrey:
Send them to me. I prefer to get them.

Dennis Collins:
Oh, this is a contest now. Who’s going to get the most emails? Oh, boy. You’re such a competitive Canadian.

Paul Boomer:
Excuse me. Hold on.

Dennis Collins:
Oh, hey. Boomer. Hold on.

Leah Bumphrey:
Are they going to start sending them to Boomer now?

Dennis Collins:
Are you breaking up this little scuffle here?

Paul Boomer:
Yes, I am. That’s my job.

Dennis Collins:
All right. Leah, you are probably the most, certainly one of the most creative people I’ve ever known. You’re a gifted writer. You’re a great strategist, marketing strategist. What time of day are you the most creative?

Leah Bumphrey
You know, I don’t like to say it depends, but it depends. I really believe in the bookends, early in the morning or late at night. That’s when my creative juices get going.

That’s when these ideas, when things happen. I love writing at night. I love when you just get taken by a project that you’re involved in and then all of a sudden you look at the clock and it’s wow. What I’m finding though is in order to fit everything in, I like knowing what I’m going to do, get started on it at night, go to sleep and let it kind of ruminate a little, and then get up in the morning and then just away we go. And I think that’s why we enjoy doing our discovery calls and our podcasts in the morning.

Dennis Collins:
So morning, yeah?

Leah Bumphrey:
Yep.

Dennis Collins:
Guess what? Mother nature has something to say about this. You know me, I’m always looking behind the curtain. Behind, you know, what’s going on. What does the science say? When I was managing radio stations, I have to identify with what you just said.

There was never a good time when you could just think. There was no thinking time. You were doing, you were performing, you were in action. And so I found it very difficult to think new thoughts, to come up with new ideas, new strategies. But guess what I learned? Mother nature provides two moments to us, to everyone, every day. They occur every day of our lives that are the best times to be creative. It’s a time to make some new connections, to generate some ideas that don’t occur during our normal day.

So let me talk about my old friend, Thomas Edison. Yes. Thomas and I used to experiment in the lab together.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah. You have that picture of the two of you.

Dennis Collins:
Anyway, let me tell you his story. Picture this, it’s bedtime and Thomas waddles up to his bedroom. I think he lived in a two story at that time and he would sit in a chair beside the bed and he would put some marbles in his hand, you know, just some marbles in his hand and close his hand and he would lay down kind of in the chair and he’d fall asleep.

But of course the minute he fell asleep, the marbles, his hand would loosen, his grip would loosen and the marbles would drop on the floor and it would wake him up. Now Thomas told me that was one of his secrets to capturing those fleeting ideas, those creative thoughts that occur.

Leah Bumphrey:
You’re telling me he had to lose his marbles in order to have a creative thought, Dennis?

Dennis Collins:
I knew either you or producer Paul would say that. That’s why I used the word marbles. I knew one of you would pick up on it. Excellent. I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t. Yes, he had to lose his marbles to be creative. He credited this little ritual that he had at night with some of his best creative, most innovative ideas. So what is that all about?

Science. Sorry guys, nerd alert, science alert. The hypnagogic state, yes, the H-Y-P-N-A-G-O-G-I-C, hypnagogic state. That is the scientific term for that transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep.  Individuals report they experience very vivid sensory, visual, and auditory thoughts.

You see and hear images and it’s a heightened state of creativity and suggestibility. Isn’t that interesting? So the fact, Leah, that you said mornings, maybe the bookends or mornings, that makes a lot of sense because we have that in the morning as we awake.

Let me also tell you about another dear friend of mine. He gave me art lessons. I failed the class. He obviously didn’t fail the class, Salvatore Dali.

Leah Bumphrey:
Ah, so not painting with a roller then?

Dennis Collins:
This is not about roller painting, clearly. And Dali was clearly one of the greats. Here’s his secret, very similar to Edison, isn’t it interesting? He would sit in a chair before going to bed and he put a big, heavy key in his hand, you know, those big old keys they used to have, and he put a plate on the floor below where he was holding this key.

So as his hand would relax, as he fell off to sleep, the key would drop and would wake him up. The sound of that key would be his cue that he was in the hypnagogic state. So that brief moment there between wakefulness and sleep, that’s the time when you get your best ideas.

So he would use fragments of the imagery that he got as inspiration for his paintings, elaborating on them, interpreting them. He said the hypnagogic state was one of the reasons he was so creative.

Leah Bumphrey:
It’s pretty fascinating because these are two very different people, just like you and I are very different. We have one here, the science, the data at Edison. Ten we have the artist. I don’t know who that might remind anyone else of, but you know, someone a little more creative.

Dennis Collins:
That might be you.

Leah Bumphrey:
I don’t know, maybe. But yet, they’re using the same process.

Dennis Collins:
As I look back, someone used to tell me always put a journal next to your bed, on your bed table. I said, well, why? It finally dawned on me when I learned about the hypnagogic state. How many times did I have a great idea in that zone and lost it?

Could not remember it the next morning, of course. Wow. So I have a journal. It’s an electronic journal now, you know, we’re all electronic now. It’s not handwritten, but I have it and I use it, and it is amazing how it works. If you want a little bit more science about this, I’ll give you just a little more. That state is between when you’re awake, you’re in beta wave, brain is in beta, alpha waves are when you relax.  So you go from beta to relax to alpha, and sleep is called beta.  So we have, we go from beta to alpha to theta. The transition between those states changes the thalamus and the cortical regions.

That allows you to blend conscious and subconscious thoughts. That’s about the only time of day that happens. You can actually blend the thoughts. So go with the science.

Paul Boomer:
When in doubt, follow the science.

Dennis Collins:
Oh, there’s the nerd alert. I knew producer Paul would nail me on that.

Sorry, guys, but I always like you to know that these aren’t just things that Leah and I dreamed up. These are real.

Leah Bumphrey:
It’s true, but I mean, we can even take it outside of the world of business to when kids are going to school, when are they the strongest for writing exams? My boys always wanted to write their exams first thing in the morning. They’re clearer, right?

As you get into the middle of your day, there’s just so much stuff going on. This brings me to our question from one of our viewers. The question was specific to role playing. Now, role playing, you and I both believe very passionately in role playing situations.

This particular business owner is having trouble getting his salespeople to participate. They think that it’s not a real situation, and they feel uncomfortable in front of their peers, and they just don’t want to do it. How hard should he push them to do it in their training?

Dennis Collins:
Honestly, I think he should fire them. I mean, that would be the best way to handle it now. Sorry, sorry. A little levity there.

I don’t know anyone who loves to do role play.  I can’t tell you how many hundreds of people that I’ve done role plays with, and I don’t think one of them wanted to do it.  So it’s like any other activity. What’s the payoff? We do things because of positive consequences. We do things that are going to bring us good stuff. We avoid things that are not. We think that role play is going to bring us pain, embarrassment, hurt.

But I would tell stories about successful salespeople who hated, hated role play and turned out to be some of the best salespeople on the staff, and they attributed it. Thank you, boss, for making me do role plays. That was the practice I needed, and I always tell trainees, do not practice in front of the customer.

That is not the place to practice. Not good. You’ve got to practice in front of your peers, and there has to be a sense of psychological safety. There has to be a sense that it’s okay to fail. In fact, let me put it to you this way. What I tell people in role plays is if you’re not failing, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not practicing right.

You’re just doing the stuff that you already know. Real deliberate practice is making mistakes and correcting them one by one, not all at once, one by one until you have it done perfectly. The best way I’ve learned is, again, like we teach salespeople. If you have a reluctant customer, tell them a story about someone who was also reluctant. Hey, let me tell you about it. I’ll tell them about the people that I’ve trained over the years that hated it and grew to love it. Not only love it, but they ended up leading.

The more successful ones, I asked them to lead role play scenarios because they were very good at both ends, the customer and the salesperson. Does that make sense?

Leah Bumphrey:
It does. To me, role playing is the practice. You know what? If you’re going to play any kind of sport, if you’re not going to practice, you’re just going to play the games. How do you learn? How do you get better? How do you improve?

Dennis Collins:
I often use the analogy, a football analogy, you know, NFL here in the States is a big deal. It starts up this week, by the way, I can’t wait.

Leah Bumphrey:
I’ve heard.

Dennis Collins:
You heard, right? Every one of those people on a 54-person squad is a professional and an expert at football. They’ve been playing football since five years of age. They’ve been coached. They’ve been evaluated. They’ve been trained. They’ve practiced. They’ve had films shot, video, game films. They have been through that process by the time they get to the NFL for probably 10 or 15 years.

You could argue, and they are paid at some of the highest levels of any sport. You could say that these people don’t need practice, right? They are the best of the best. They are highly trained. They are highly coached. And yet, every week, this week, as we sit here now recording this, in preparation for this Sunday’s games in the NFL, every team is practicing on the field today, watching game films, and dissecting what went right and what went wrong.

You know what? If it’s good enough for the best of the best, it’s good enough for me.

Leah Bumphrey:
You got me revved up. I’m going to go throw some balls.

Dennis Collins:
Absolutely. Leah, We now know how to access our most creative times of the day. Let’s go forward and create, okay? And I’ll see you all next week on another episode of Connect and Convert.

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