Blog – What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard?

During my decades running training programs in companies, I’ve run across a fair share of coaches, consultants, and fields of study that believe the client is responsible for implementing their solution suggestions regardless of whether they’re prepared to execute or not. As a result, clients aren’t always able to apply the solutions offered.

I believe clients pay practitioners to solve a problem, not merely provide the components of a solution. But any solution suggestions have a good chance of being resisted, regardless of how necessary or suitable they are, if clients aren’t change-ready at the start of a project.

In this paper I’ll describe the elements involved in facilitating Change Readiness. For a more detailed discussion, read my book HOW?.

WHAT/WHY CANNOT RESOLVE A PROBLEM

Standard change models are tactical, giving practitioners the job of creating solutions by:

‘understanding’ a problem by gathering ‘good’ data (too often from only a subset of the stakeholders needed to fully represent the problem);
attempting to obtain buy-in (often from folks not involved in goal setting or change management);
developing and delivering a solution (to groups often not change-ready).

But these points face obstacles because…

Questions: Questions are biased by the needs, words, intent, and verbiage of the questioner. As such they may gather specious, incomplete information making ‘understanding’ difficult, risk a possibility, and leading to flawed or incomplete suggestions.
Listening: we can only accurately understand 10-35% of what a speaker is saying due to the way brains delete and distort incoming content. In other words, neither Speaker nor Listener are able to hear each other accurately leading to false assumptions and inaccurate data gathering.
Baseline Assumptions: current models in coaching, leadership, System Dynamics, and sales believe the practitioner is the one that ‘needs to know’. But because of the biases involved, this leads to flawed data gathering, suggestions based on a practitioner’s assumptions, and resistance.

…and make the following assumptions:

The right questions are posed to the right people without bias;
The full set of correct data is extracted and accurately assessed;
Good information will trigger behavior change;
Outsiders (consultants, practitioners, coaches, leaders) are the ones responsible for understanding the facts underlying client change;
The correct assumptions are made and generate the right solutions;
Buy-in can be achieved and resistance can be avoided via ‘good’, ‘rational’ data and leadership;
Clients are change-ready at the start of a project so they can utilize the suggested solutions.

Lots of assumptions and biases, making it difficult, if not impossible, for outsiders to fully understand what’s really going on or generate appropriate solutions. The sticking point is the difficulty for either practitioners or clients to understand or fix a problem given its origination point is largely unconscious and can only be unwrapped at the source.

Permanent change is systemic: trying to fix a problem by focusing on changing behaviors creates resistance because making changes without buy-in; without matching the goals, norms and beliefs of the originating system; and without an execution plan that the full complement of stakeholders have agreed to puts the underlying system at risk.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR LEADING CHANGE?

Given the complexity and unconscious unknowns, a problem is hard for anyone to resolve, certainly an outsider using a content- and problem-focused approach (WHAT/WHY).

Certainly, external practitioners get hired to facilitate problem solving and change. But that doesn’t mean doing it for them or trying to lead them to a solution the practitioner culls from their flawed assumptions and data gathering.

When practitioners (coaches, System Dynamics practitioners, OD consultants, sellers, etc.) try to understand a problem or develop solutions, they’re using their own biases that take away the client’s agency – disrespecting their ability to generate their own solutions based on their own norms. Not to mention, as per Einstein, all change must emanate from the system that generated the problem.

I believe it’s a practitioner’s job to facilitate clients to generate their own solutions. But this requires listening without bias, formulating brain-directional (not information gathering) questions, and a goal to lead clients to where in their unconscious system the problem was generated and maintained.

With the goal to facilitate discovery and congruent systemic change, practitioners can help clients get to the system that expressed the problem, make the appropriate modifications to achieve the outcomes they desire, and become change-ready… not merely do things differently. I call this process Change Facilitation, and it’s a HOW.

Sample

To understand Change Facilitation, it’s necessary to view change as systemic. We forget that problems are merely the expressions of the flawed system that expressed them, not isolated events.

Trying to change just the output – the problematic activity, the behaviors – causes the system to be at risk and will trigger resistance, regardless of the efficacy of the proposed solution.

CHANGE IS A ‘HOW’ DRIVEN BY SYSTEMS

Since you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior, any solution must not only reconfigure the norms, beliefs, and rules of the system that triggered the problem but get buy-in from the stakeholders who will touch the solution and who must understand/accept the risks of change.

In other words, starting by attempting to gather information or ‘understand’ a problem cannot get to the full set of systemic, and largely unconscious, elements that triggered the faulty outputs.

It’s much more successful and congruent to first enable clients to get to their own unconscious triggers and help them generate new outputs that will fit congruently within their system. Unless

a client is set up for change;
a suggested change matches the core beliefs and identity of the prevalent system;
everyone involved has been included in goal setting and change management iterations;
everyone involved understands and agrees to the risks of making changes;

the underlying system will feel violated and resist any change suggestions.

CHANGE READINESS

Before any information gathering or solution design, I suggest practitioners first ascertain the client’s level of Change Readiness. If they’re not change-ready, practitioners must begin a project by facilitating the client to

get agreement from representations of all stakeholders on the goals, rules, beliefs, and values (the structure of the system) before any change practices take place;
understand the risk of change before they agree to it;
identify new goals and underlying values to be met;
develop solutions from ideas and buy-in from all who will touch it;
generate a plan to regularly evaluate the change once implemented with a multidisciplinary team to assess and offer suggestions through time.

This ensures accuracy of problem definition, buy-in, implementation, and avoids resistance. Concurrently all clients/ customers must add ‘Full Implementation’ as deliverables to their contracts.

Facilitating Change Readiness requires different types of questions and unbiased listening. Using systems thinking, Gregory Bateson’s Logical Levels, NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), the System Dynamic work of Dana Meadows’ 1-5 Leverage Points, and systemic tools I’ve spent decades inventing – Facilitative Questions™, Systems Listening, the 13 Steps of Change, Implementation Facilitation, Buying Facilitation® – it’s possible to enable Change Readiness.

KPMG CASE STUDY

When working with KPMG years ago, they received their first RFP from a global multinational who had been known to work with now-defunct consulting group Arthur Anderson (AA). My clients began developing their proposal – in those days a million dollar ‘dog and pony’ show – with excitement. Finally! They were going to get this company’s business. But what’s stopping them from using AA again? I asked.

My client Dave called them and asked. Their response: “We are going to use AA again, but we needed a second bid.” Oops!

When Dave sent me the RFP I noticed none of the HOWs were included – just data points of what they wanted to achieve without including pre-change work, stakeholder buy-in, or risk management. I wrote a letter for KPMG to send to the prospect, explaining that since they were going to use AA anyway they didn’t need a proposal from ‘us’ (KPMG) but we’d offer them points that we found missing in the RFP that had to be included to fully resolve their problem.

I then wrote up two pages of Facilitative Questions™ that would lead them through Change Readiness. Dave sent the packet and heard nothing for 6 weeks. He then got a call from his prospect who said that the Facilitative Questions™ made them realize they had prework to do that AA hadn’t addressed. They hired KPMG for the multimillion dollar job – with no proposal.

CONCLUSION

When the goal of practitioners is to facilitate behavior-based change, and clients aren’t change-ready, suggestions won’t be executed regardless of their efficacy.

For real change, and before trying to understand a problem or design a new solution, help clients facilitate Change Readiness so they’re prepared to implement your solution without resistance.

Once they’ve managed the systems issues – the full set of stakeholders are identified and involved, the risk is agreeable, and they gotten buy-in for change – it’s then time to gather information (it will be accurate!), pitch your ideas (based on what you now know about the client’s needs and ability to accept) and generate a new solution based on their system. Obviously there won’t be any resistance as all will have been included and the system will not be at risk.

If you’re interested in learning Implementation Facilitation to help clients with Change Readiness before you begin your project, please contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen November 3rd, 2025

Posted In: News

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A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help. Here was our conversation:

SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?

Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?

SDM: Nothing.

Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.

SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.

Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.

Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:

entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
only added information specifically where I was missing some;
helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.

My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:

How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?

Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.

WHAT IS CURIOSITY?

Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.

What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?

In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.

Sample

IT’S A BRAIN THING

We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.

Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.

Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.

Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:

How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?

Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?

Part 2 will be published next Monday, 10/27/25. It explains how we’re curious and offers suggestions to enhance our curiosity.

_________________

Sharon Drew Morgen October 20th, 2025

Posted In: News

Problems are incongruent behaviors that have arisen from the system that triggered them. To solve problems permanently and without resistance it’s necessary to take corrective measures at the source, in the neural circuits where the problem was initiated. Unfortunately, we attempt to solve them by trying to change the incongruent behavior.

Until now, behavior change has been the preferred approach to problem solving. Folks trying to effect change in others – coaches, leaders, managers, sellers, docs – pose the ‘right’ questions and listen attentively to better understand the problem, assuming once they understand they’ll lead the Other to their answers.

But questions aren’t what they seem, and brains cause deficient listening, causing a fail rate for behavior change at over 90%:

Questions: Standard questions are biased by the words, phrasing, goals, assumptions, and needs of the Asker. As such they may not obtain ‘good’ or complete information. This problem is compounded by brains that can’t ‘listen’, making it likely that neither Speaker or Listener accurately understand each other.
Listening: Sadly, there’s only a 10-35% chance we accurately hear each other. The way brains listen is filled with distortions and deletions causing misunderstandings, mistranslations, and false assumptions. (My book WHAT? explains this). I know we all assume that listeners accurately hear what we say. They cannot, even when we attempt to speak in ways we’ll get heard.
Curiosity/understanding: We can only be curious about what we notice or think – both of which are restricted by what we already know. All that we think, hear, see, feel, know is triggered from neural circuits in our brain. There’s no way to notice anything unless it’s already there, making it impossible to be curious about anything that our brains don’t recognize. In other words, even our curiosity is biased.
Risk: for some reason, influencers and change agents forget to factor in risk. If the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the same, no change will take place. Obviously an outsider can never understand another person’s risk.

Since the data we gather is potentially biased by our questions and restricted to what Askers think they need to understand; and what we each hear is potentially inaccurate due to the way brains listen; there’s a high probability that information collected will be biased, insufficient, inaccurate and will lead to potentially flawed suggestions.

ELEMENTS IN PROBLEM SOLVING

Decades ago, when I begin my career, I couldn’t understand why permanent change was so difficult. Surely, with accurate, rational reasons, behaviors should change. But they didn’t. Trying a different approach I began studying brains: where decisions get made within the brain’s neural circuitry; and the interplay between the unconscious electrochemical brain and the conscious, action-oriented mind.

What I discovered goes against standard practice: to generate new, permanent behavior, change must originate at the source, in the neural circuits that triggered the original, problematic behaviors so they can generate new ones. I’ve since developed Change Facilitation models for several industries, trained 100,000 people and written extensively.

Below I offer a primer to my thinking, ideas and skills for those coaches, System Dynamics practitioners, Change Management consultants, OD professionals and leaders willing to work beyond the standard change models to lead clients through to permanent, integrous change – without resistance, and with buy-in.

I’ll begin with the fundamental question: when helping Others make needed changes, why do we need to understand anything? The actual task of facilitating permanent change is a neural circuit/systems issue within the Other’s brain before it’s an understanding or comprehension issue for an influencer.

While the specific act of understanding is a What/Why, change itself is a How issue – How to get to the specific neural circuits where the change is implemented: What/Why is tactical; How is systemic and strategic.

Too often influencers assume their important advice will lead to permanent change and omit this important element. Without knowing how to get to the originating source where the problem was triggered, a client can’t implement the guidance and it will be resisted.

Sample

Different from information gathering or understanding the story and details of a problem, the skills needed to enable clients to get to specific circuits and make necessary changes is a How, and precedes What/Why. Here are the elements involved:

All activity, all behaviors – all that we see, hear, do, think – emerge from neural circuits in our brains that are formed by systems. Any change must include new or reconfigured circuits so new choices will be triggered at the source.
A behavior is merely the expression, the representation, of the system that triggered it. For permanent behavior change, the originating system and the circuits trigger different behaviors.
Our brains have 100+trillion neural pathways, each one expressing a unique system, each one triggering specific activity and behaviors. These are where all behaviors and decisions emerge from and which send signals to the mind to take the action.
Change must not put the system at risk or it will be rejected, made possible when the change emerges directly from the neural circuits.

Current behavior change models focus on the influencer understanding the problem then leading the client to change via the influencer’s assumptions rather than enabling clients to discover their own, and is responsible for the low success rate (97% by some estimates). Turns out this is a systems problem: to better understand change it’s necessary to understand the role systems play in creating a new solution.

SYSTEMS

A system is any group of ‘things’ that agree to the same rules, beliefs, values. You’re a system. Your family is a system. Each country has a system. They are the bedrock of all cultures and create/maintain the status quo, with behaviors the expression. Here are some facts about systems that must be incorporated into any change process:

A solution must embody the underlying system that has dispatched the offending behaviors. The system itself must be changed so it emits different behaviors. Change the system and new behaviors emerge. Gathering data and providing answers does not change a system, merely gets mistranslated and seen as a risk.
The rules of the system must be maintained in any change, or it will be resisted. The rules of the system define the solution. For change, help Others discover the rules, norms, beliefs of their system.
It’s not possible to change a behavior by trying to change a behavior. Behaviors are the expressions, the physical output of a system and as such are meaningless on their own; they don’t arise from the sea like Venus.
Problems are features, not flaws. Because the ‘problematic’ actions are merely expressions of the underlying system, whatever shows up has been triggered by the system it’s expressing. Again, providing ‘good’ information will not change a system.
Change must come from, and follow the norms/rules of, the circuits that initiated the perceived problem.
When influencers try to merely change behaviors, they’re working from their own biased assumptions and potentially discounting the norms and rules of the system. This causes resistance, sabotage and opposition.
If the risk of change is greater than the risk of staying the same, no change will occur. The job of the influencer is to help clients understand their risk of change, and all stakeholders must have a say in any proposed change or they will resist at the point of implementation.
Implementation and execution will be problematic unless

a. All stakeholders who will be involved in the bought into the change;

b. The risk of change is acceptable to the stakeholders;

c. The rules of the system have been maintained.

Without addressing these points, any attempts at change are driven by the biases of the practitioner and may miss the underlying system that generated them. This is especially relevant for System Dynamics, Change Management, Coaching, Leadership, Management, Healthcare, and Sales.

To enable permanent change requires wholly new thinking and new skills based on facilitating folks to the original circuits that expressed the problematic behavior so they can make their own change. No information gathering. No guidelines for change. Just impartial skills that lead Others to the specific neural circuits where the problem was initiated. This includes: Facilitative Questions™, Meta Listening, the 13 Steps of Change. And the biggest one of all: assuming Others have their own answers instead of trying to provide them what you believe to be answers.

I’ve invented change facilitation models that facilitate change at the source and am happy to teach them to you. Visit www.sharon-drew.com to read some of my articles. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

If you had the skills to lead your clients to their own unconscious place to make their own necessary changes, would you be willing to give up the control you think you have?

_____________________________

Sharon Drew Morgen October 6th, 2025

Posted In: News

In 1996 my sister called to say she’d made an online purchase. I was surprised: in those early days it was not only difficult to search for anything on the new internet, there wasn’t much to search for. Certainly, purchasing anything seemed illogical – we had no way of knowing if ‘secure lines’ were, well, secure. Curious, I asked my sister to explain her decision process.

J: I needed a simple Y connector, and decided to see what online purchasing was all about. This was my test case. I found three companies with the exact same product at the same price.

SD: How did you choose which company to buy from?

J: Since the price and products were identical, I decided I’d trust the company with the best customer service so I’d be cared for if I had a problem. Because none of the websites mentioned customer service, I decided to call them and ask. The first company kept me on hold for 23 minutes before I hung up. The second call put me straight through to a voice message. A sales rep answered my call in the third company, asking me if I had questions. So it was an obvious choice. There was only one company that took care of me.

I then realized there were three problems with the current (1996) search capability:

Site visitors had only a haphazard method of finding what they wanted;
People had no way to identify their unconscious criteria for resolving their query, even if they could find what they initially thought they wanted;
Sites could only meet the search criteria imagined by the site designers, sometimes overlooking criteria sought by visitors.

In other words, if people were happy with the information they were able to find on a site, they were satisfied. For those folks not entirely clear what they needed, couldn’t find the page matching their search criteria, or had needs outside the obvious, there was a probability they couldn’t find what they really needed and would leave the site.

MY SEARCH INVENTION DEFIED THE NORM

I decided to create a tool to help site visitors become aware of the unconscious criteria (i.e. not just the information, but the intuitive essential criteria they needed met) they needed and be led directly to the page(s) that offered the exact answers they sought. And in 1996, no one else was thinking this way.

Enter Hobbes. With a few sequenced Facilitated Questions (a new form of question I invented that helps people find their unconscious criteria where they make decisions), a simple backend tree, and carefully culled choices of criteria-based options, my search tool Hobbes would help site visitors discover their real decision making criteria and lead them directly to the one or two site pages that met their needs.

For those who chose to use Hobbes, this would keep them on the site and help them become buyers or satisfied visitors. It would also cause companies to do their homework to learn what visitors truly needed and add those responses to their sites.

Of course, this was way outside of conventional practice, especially almost 30 years ago – 3 years before Google search came out. Yet 54% of site visitors on my site used it.

I tried to get funding for it and was offered $15,000,000 by the only woman VC in Silicon Valley IF I could find $1,000,000 from someone else (a man). Nope. Only 0.25% of women were receiving funding in those days. (Today, 30 years later, it’s ballooned up to 2% but who’s counting.)

Sadly, I kept hearing that no one needed a search tool for ‘criteria’. Silly idea, I was told countless times, no one makes decisions from criteria. And yet, as we now know, we all do. In fact, the time it takes us all to discover our criteria is the length time it takes to make a decision.

The concept died. No one wanted a search capability that enabled a site visitor to directly find what they needed on a site.

PERCEIVED WISDOM REIGNS

You all know what happened next. Google search entered and the rest is history. But in 2010 one of the leaders at Bing called saying they’d heard about Hobbes and could they buy it. I shared the original site design. Yay! ‘Love it. We could start using this immediately! What a great idea to help people uncover their unconscious criteria and help them find what they need quicker.’

But he called back the next day: the team hated the concept. ‘Why would anyone want to use a search tool that doesn’t seek out information like Google does?’ It was the accepted norm and ‘no one would want to do anything different’.

And so the perceived wisdom has prevailed through decades. Imagine if we had choices.

WHO AM I? AND WHY DOES CRITERIA MATTER?

I invent systemic brain change models that enable people to get to the specific circuits in their brain that holds their decision making criteria, used to help people buy(Buying Facilitation®), learn (Learning Facilitation), Change (Change Facilitation), etc. And as with Hobbes, because they go against perceived wisdom, most folks are unwilling to adopt them even when they prove, in controlled studies with major corporations, in following the 100,000 folks I’ve trained them to, to be more successful than the standard models.

Success, it seems, is not the criteria. Innovations – as wonderful as they’re made out to be – are not accepted readily: they buck the system, go against the norm.

WHAT IS PERCEIVED WISDOM AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

My Hobbes story provides a background for my grumble about innovation: normalized thinking limits our worlds, rules our assumptions and restricts creativity.

I’ll begin with my definition of perceived wisdom (PW). PW is another way of saying ‘the norm’, the accepted myths, practices, ideas that constitute the immediate assumptions we make without questioning them. It’s the accepted convention, the ideas we’ve used to set up our lives, our thinking, our work environment and expected behaviors.

PW is perpetuated in every sphere of our lives; it permeates our education, cultures, religions, what we buy and wear, who we marry and where we live.

Our thinking, our behaviors are often based on accepted norms that have become ubiquitous: * Do you avoid white after Labor Day? (Silly) * Do you feed a cold and starve a fever? (Wrong) * Calories-in determines weight (proven false). * Behavior Modification works to help you lose weight, exercise, change habits, yadayada. (There’s no scientific evidence anywhere that it does, it has a 97% fail rate, and you can’t change a behavior by trying to change a behavior). I once asked my mother if she nursed me. ‘I would have, but everyone said it would harm you. And now I’m sad about it.’

PW meets our foundational criteria of belonging: it offers comfort, safety, absence of uncertainty, and no risk of encountering scorn or derision. And because PW is aimed toward the middle of the road (where, according to the late, great, Molly Ivins, only yellow stripes and dead armadillos exist), we spend our lives unwittingly maintaining and recreating a specious status quo that causes us to lose our uniqueness. Our language, our conventional assumptions, keep us like gerbils, going round and round the same ideas and conventions regardless of their success or failure. So

in sales, a 5% success rate is acceptable, and the matching 95% failure rate is not even mentioned – folded in to the costs as a ‘given’ because the model itself is flawed and hasn’t been reconceived in a century;
in leadership and coaching, the assumption that the person ‘in charge’ has the knowledge that Others must conform to, and their resistance is something to be managed, resulting in a 97% failure rate;
in training, the information-in approach doesn’t integrate with brains and causes a 90% fail-to-retain rate (here’s my Learning Facilitation model that enables permanent retention).

Even great Harvard thinkers like Chris Argyris and Howard Gardner have written books on managing resistance, using the baseline PW assumption that all change involves resistance. Nonsense. Another faulty fact we’ve normalized and have cost us dearly. It’s certainly possible to enable people to change from their core criteria instead of the biased questions and rules created by leadership.

While we think our personal beliefs are specific to us, they are invaded by the PW in the customs we live in. It’s where we get our racial biases, our assumptions about education, class, age, history. We’re so hamstrung by PW we’ve become tribes, where our politics and beliefs keep our ‘team’ on the good side and we hate everyone else, like sports fans.

And since it’s endemic we find no reason to reject it, even going so far as passing down these baseless concepts through generations and unquestioningly resisting anything that’s different.

But worst of all, it restricts our creativity. Indeed, from health, to sex, to climate change and politics and relationships, almost every area of life is circumscribed by PW. It’s pernicious.

THE PERCEIVED WISDOM OF CURRENT SEARCH CAPABILITY

How PW restricts our worlds is a huge topic, involving our health and healthcare system, our financial system, the environment, education, privacy – the list goes on. But because the topic is so important, I’m going to show you how limited we are in one sector – internet search – and how our worlds get shoved into tiny vessels of biased, restricted information as a result.

It didn’t start out that way, but we don’t even notice. Most of our online interactions are now suspect: even simple searches lead us to knowledge selected by algorithms that restrict us to the demographic we’ve been thrust into, causing facts to seem like fake news.

Our use of Google as a search engine is ubiquitous. This company determines what we read and the information we have access to. Even scientific facts are suspect as they’re fed to us according to where we live, who we vote for, what we read.

And here’s the worst part. Google’s standard monetizing procedures, as to all search capabilities, tag us into a demographic and sells our personal data to thousands of advertisers who spam us. Rarely do we find the full range of possible solutions, answers, or ideas. I recently was led to a site that seemingly had the data I needed only to receive a phone call WHILE I WAS STILL LOOKING AT THE SITE from a sales person FROM THAT SITE who wanted to sell me something!

Surely we should care about accurately nourishing our curiosity without fear of spam and Robo calls.

THE MISSING VOICE ON THE INTERNET

One other aspect of PW bugs the hell out of me, and that might supply answers to my ‘whys’: Have you realized that men – the male human of our species – designed, developed, and generated the internet and social media – and continue to do so? The PW is the male view of the internet; we use it (and it abuses us) by the requirements, the criteria, of men. And we all buy into it.

How different would it be if women’s voices and ideas – currently a tiny fraction of the design of the internet – had been involved in the creation of our technology? Has the male viewpoint become so much a part of our culture that we all just assume that’s the way it is and should be (PW), and never stop to consider the results if women played their representative percentage in designing it?

Seriously: how would the internet or social media be different if it had been designed by women? Or designed by 50% women? Or designed in equal measure by people of color, people from different cultures, people of different levels of education. We’ll never know. What we do know is that the internet is the Perceived Wisdom of White Men in Silicon Valley. And we’ve normalized it as being The Way It Is.

WHY GO BEYOND PERCEIVED WISDOM?

Of course, going outside the box is hazardous. But disputing PW is vital:

Obviously, there’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos. Who would want to be there anyway?
New ideas can’t come from the middle. New ideas always come from the ends.
There’s no debate, curiosity, creativity, free expression in Perceived Wisdom.
Things change. Time, ideas, technology culture. Wisdom must change too or we stagnate.
Perceived wisdom is linear. Real life occurs in systems.
Perceived wisdom is what u get when everything is thrown into the middle and becomes moderate enough to please most. Vanilla.

New ideas come from that small percent outside the mainstream, with innovative ideas that are loud enough, insistent enough, and interesting enough to push into the middle, eventually change, and become part of, the PW. But getting there – the journey – is the creative part. And those of us willing to take on the job must have very tough skins. Instead of our criteria being comfort, we must shift our criteria to truth and integrity, collaboration and serving.

What, exactly, is so powerful about perceived wisdom that whole industries (healthcare, sales, coaching, leadership) prefer to suffer failed strategies rather than add anything new to ensure success? What would we need to believe differently to be willing to question our long held assumptions? How can we tell if a long held assumption is wrong, or incomplete, or could be expanded, or worth thinking of something different? And how would each of us need to be different to be willing to hear fresh ideas and new voices that seemingly conflict with all we think we hold dear?

The good bit is that going against the norm is fabulous. As an inventor of systemic change models that work with criteria instead of information, I’ve been doing it for many decades, and the rewards make up for the pitfalls. I urge anyone with original ideas, passion for truth, and a hunger for diversity, creativity, and integrity, to shout that the perceived wisdom is wrong, and put forth

Diversity of ideas,
Fresh ideas from different cultures, ethnicity, countries, educational backgrounds,
True creative thinking that pushes industries (sales, coaching, leadership, listening, change) to new vocabulary and (slowly slowly) new thinking,
Expanded possibilities for innovation,
Ideas that inspire other ideas that wouldn’t have otherwise been stimulated.

If our criteria is for better, more authentic ideas, for equality and integrity, we must go outside PW where innovation comes from. PW is merely the group/tribe acceptance of the status quo that has been standardized by the masses. Let’s all be innovators; let’s all shout out new truths and challenge the norm. And let’s all listen to the dissenters because they may be shedding light on new truths.

Our perceived wisdom is faulty. And until we begin thinking differently and stop acting as if PW is true, it cannot change and we will not readily accept innovation.

Let’s discuss this. I’m happy to discuss should anyone want to contact me. Sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 771 1117.

______________________________________

Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 29th, 2025

Posted In: Communication, News

In 1979, with a toddler to feed on a social worker’s salary of $19,500 annually, I decided to ‘go into business’ (whatever that meant) to earn more money. I went to Goodwill, bought a ‘business’ dress for $12.00 and took myself to Wall Street, thinking that was where I would find ‘business’.

Not knowing the protocol I walked into Merrill Lynch, White Weld International on 1 Wall Street. ‘Who’s in charge of hiring people?’ I naively asked a receptionist. ‘You need the CEO. Go up to the 50^th floor,’ she said and pointed to a tiny (four person) elevator.

On the 50^th floor I was greeted by a secretary who asked who I was there to see. ‘The CEO’. She smiled, then walked me into his office. The CEO of Merrill Lynch got up from his enormous desk in a windows-filled, corner office overlooking Battery Park and walked over to greet me. ‘How can I help?’ he asked this brazen young woman who’d just pranced in unannounced in a cheap dress. ‘I want you to hire me.’ He laughed.

CEO: What can I hire you as?

SD: A trainer.

CEO: Let’s make you a stockbroker.

SD: But I know nothing about stocks or bonds. (How I thought I was going to train anything is a mystery!)

CEO: If you could do what you just did, I’ll not only hire you, I’ll train you myself.

And he did.

It was a bear market. The Dow was 777 (Really!) and the brokers were suffering. But once I got trained, I was closing new clients daily. I would cold call people by saying: “Hi. My name is Sharon-Drew Morgen. I’m a broker at Merrill Lynch. This is a cold call. I want to be your broker, and I will most likely lose your money, but I’ll sure try not to.” ‘Oh!’ said the prospects. ‘An honest broker! Everyone else is losing me money and lying to me about it!’ I closed almost every prospect I called and became the rookie of the year.

Looking back, I unwittingly used unconventional standards to get my first job in business. I didn’t know any better: I have Asperger’s Syndrome, on the Autism Spectrum. As a social worker before that, I had no way of knowing I wasn’t supposed to walk into someone’s office (especially the CEO of Merrill Lynch!) and tell them to hire me; I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to tell people I would lose their money. As an Aspie I’m honest and direct. And very authentic. I was just telling people the truth. I ended up making a ton of money as a result. And yes, I lost everyone’s money.

No one knew what a neurodiverse person was in those days, nor did they care. My invisible ‘disability’ gave me the precise skills I needed to be a successful sales professional: relentlessness, hyperfocus, trustworthiness and authenticity, attention to detail, creativity, loyalty, and honesty. My most relevant skill for the job was my comfort with being rejected. With Asperger’s, I was accustomed to navigating adversity. Being neurodivergent made me successful.

NEURODIVERSITY IN SALES

Twenty percent of the workforce, and 50% of sales professionals are neurodivergent. In other words, of the 40,000,000 sales professionals worldwide, 20,000,000 are neurodivergent. And 75% of these people are undisclosed due to their fear of facing discrimination.

For some reason, while hiring folks of different races and gender orientations are standard, many companies avoid hiring neurodivergent (ND) people. But why? Sure, we’re different. Aren’t we all? What is it about neurodivergence that causes neurotypicals (NTs) to avoid us?

Thankfully, undisclosed ND people who can cope with standard hiring practices are being hired. But certainly, we’re not being interviewed in a way that makes getting a job easier and, once hired, we receive no services that help us flourish.

As a result, we face discrimination, get relegated to jobs well below our intelligence, and get shunned by colleagues and at meetings. I personally found myself in trouble often for doing things I didn’t know I shouldn’t do. Having a mentor or manager who could help me navigate NT standards would have made my job so much easier and helped me be even more successful. Instead of the stress of fitting in falling on my shoulders, I could have had an easier path to acceptance and acculturation.

CULTURE OF INCLUSION

Creating a culture in which ND employees not only fit in but are active, accepted members of the community, takes work. It’s not merely doing a few things differently but having a commitment to an inclusive workplace where everyone thrives, welcomes diversity, and collaborates. It means a culture change.

Company culture

Having a culture of inclusivity makes it easier to hire and retain ND sales folks. When you advertise your company as a culture of inclusion, the people who get hired are expected to respect and include everyone, regardless of race, gender, or neurodiversity. This gives ND folks the green light to apply for a job.

Since the focus of this article is on hiring and retention practices (below), I’ll just mention a few areas to address to make sure you’ve got an inclusive culture;

Publish corporate guidelines on inclusion in all written communiques so both the public and current employees are aware.
Rethink hiring practices to provide interviewing choices that help NDs interview comfortably.
Discover the barriers to inclusion within the company and begin the process of unblocking them.
Provide management training to give managers specific skills for communicating with, and helping NDs fit in.

Once the company culture is set up for inclusion, you’ll need to know the specifics for hiring and retaining ND employees.

Hiring practices

Neurodivergent salespeople are wonderful, loyal, successful employees who can give you a competitive advantage, but require different competencies to hire: We don’t make small talk and prefer plain-spoken questions; may not make direct eye contact; and may not answer typical interviewing questions in ways the interviewer is familiar with. Obviously not great for door-to-door sales but terrific for technical sales, e-commerce sales, cold calls, and business development research. We also make great account managers: our long term clients love us because of our truth telling, attention to detail, and loyalty.

Our different competences require a different interview process than hiring NT employees and may be best served with either email or zoom interviews. With a job spec that includes a sentence like Those applicants who need specific hiring accommodations, please tell us what you need, the applicant will provide the interviewer the specifics of an interview format to get the best interview possible. Remember: we’re different; standard norms will need to shift.

Retaining neurodiverse salespeople

Here are some ideas for managing and retaining neurodiverse sellers:

For ND sellers working in a corporate building (and many work best from a home office) offer them a workspace situated away from lights or noise. Having a ‘quiet room’ on the premises helps.
Make sure necessary information is in visual and written formats.
Make sure we know how and when to use the appropriate technology. A ND techie (50% of tech folks are neurodivergent.) makes a great mentor!
Managers must have appropriate communication skills as communication is quite different with ND folks. We may understand differently but are delighted to be told we’re doing something wrong and shown the right way. And note: consider bringing in an outside company to help here, like Ochtivate.
Send out general questionnaires (no names required) that seek data from all sales folks with a specific note for undisclosed NDs to make requests, complain, etc. There’s no other way to get to the undisclosed ND population to provide any help they might need.

These are a few of the things that will help retain the ND sales professional; there are many books on the market that go into detail.

As I end this article, I’ll share something I do that works well most of the time to inoculate me from my communication partner’s assumptions of how I communicate. Indeed, I have found grace and kindness when I tell prospects/clients:

“I have Asperger’s. That means I’m a bit loquacious, obnoxious, and annoying. But I’m also committed to using my knowledge, creativity, commitment, and integrity to serve you. So if you can put up with the annoying stuff, I am here for you.”

This has gotten me more business than any pitch or price reduction could have. And it’s absolutely honest.

Net net: the neurodiverse sales professional is eager to work hard, and can be your most loyal, successful seller. But make sure they have the right tools, in an accepting environment, with appropriate managers and mentors. We’re just different. But aren’t we all?

If you’d like some coaching to set up a culture of inclusion, or facilitate hiring and success practices for neurodiverse sales professionals, call me and we can discuss. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

_______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 22nd, 2025

Posted In: Sales

As influencers we aim to help Others achieve their own brand of excellence, using their own unique values and standards. Sadly, too many of us – coaches, leaders, sellers, consultants, doctors, parents – try to get Others to accede to our viewpoints and suggestions, believing we have information or solutions that offer ‘better’ choices than the ones they’ve made. We’re telling them, net, net, that we’re smarter, that we think our ideas are better than their own.

It’s not our intent, but due to the way we engage with others, and the way brains work, we inadvertently end up restricting possibility and creating resistance, conflict, antagonism, or disregard, regardless of the efficacy of what we have to offer.

In this article I’ll explain how we end up creating the very resistance we prefer to avoid, and introduce new skills to enable us to truly serve.

WE CONNECT THROUGH OUR OWN SUBJECTIVITY

Regardless of the situation, when we try to effect change using our own viewpoint or beliefs (even if they are valid), our unconscious biases and expectations cause us to inadvertently alienate those who might need us. As a result, we ultimately influence only a percentage of those who need our help – those who already basically agree with us.

I’ll explain, below, how we restrict our interactions and then offer new ways to approach influencing to enable others to find their own best solutions:

Biased listening: We each listen to Others unconsciously, through our brain’s unique and subjective filters (biases, triggers, assumptions, habitual neural pathways, memory channels), regardless of our concerted attempts to accurately hear what’s intended. As a result, what we think we hear is often an inaccurate translation of what was meant and not what the speaker intended.

So our Communication Partner (CP) might say ABC but we actually ‘hear’ ABD (And yes, we often hear something quite different than what was said although it shows up as ‘real’. Read my article on how this happens.) and our brains don’t tell us we’re misunderstanding. Unfortunately, it works both ways and Others also wittingly misconstrue what we’ve said.

I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of this until I researched my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? on how to hear others without bias. With the best will in the world we end up only accurately hearing, and thereby responding to, some percentage of the message our CPs intend. It’s outside of our conscious awareness. But it’s possible to remedy by listening with a different part of our brain. More on this later.

Sample

Fact #1. We hear Others through our subjective biases, assumptions, triggers, habituated neural pathways, and beliefs, causing us to unintentionally misinterpret the message intended, with no knowledge that what we think we’ve heard is mistaken. Obviously this effects both sides of a communication (i.e. Speakers and Listeners).

Subjective expectations: We enter into each conversation with expectations or goals (conscious or unconscious), often missing avenues of further exploration.

Fact #2. Entering conversations with very specific and self-oriented goals or expectations (conscious or unconscious) unwittingly limits the outcome and full range of possibility, and impedes discovery, data gathering, and creativity.

Restricted curiosity: Curiosity is both triggered and restricted by what we already know, i.e. you can’t ask or be curious about something you have no familiarity with to begin with. Using our own goals to pose questions that are often biased, assumptive, leading, etc. we inadvertently reduce outcomes to the biases we entered the conversation with; our subjective associations, experiences, and internal references restrict our ability to recognize accurate fact patterns during data gathering or analysis.

Fact #3: We enable Others’ excellence, and our own needs for accurate data, to the extent we can overcome our own unconscious biases that restrict the range and focus of our curiosity.

Cognitive dissonance: When the content we share – ideas, information, advice, written material – goes against our CPs conscious or unconscious beliefs, we cause resistance regardless of the efficacy of the information. This is why relevant solutions in sales, marketing, coaching, implementations, doctor’s recommendations etc. often fall on deaf ears. We sometimes unwittingly cause the very resistance we seek to avoid when we attempt to place perfectly good data into someone’s idiosyncratic, habituated belief system that runs different to our own.

Fact #4. Information doesn’t teach Others how to change behaviors; behavior change must first be initiated from beliefs, which in turn initiates buy-in.

Systems congruence: Individuals and groups think, behave, and decide from a habitual system of unconscious beliefs and rules, history and experience, that creates and maintains their status quo. We know from Systems Theory that it’s impossible to change only one piece of a system without effecting the whole. When we attempt to offer suggestions that run counter to the Other’s normalized system, we cause Others to risk incongruence and internal disruption. Hence, resistance.

Unfortunately for those of us trying to effect change in Others, it’s important to remember we’re outsiders: as such, we can never fully comprehend the ramifications of adding our new ideas, especially when every group, every person, believes it’s functioning well and their choices are normalized and habituated.

Just because it seems right to us doesn’t mean it’s right for another. Sometimes maintaining the status quo is the right thing to do for reasons we can’t understand; sometimes change can occur only when internal things need to shift in ways we cannot assist with.

Net net, we pose questions biased by our own need to know, offer information and solutions that we want to be adopted/accepted, and focus on reaching a goal we want to reach, all of which cause resistance: without buy-in and a clear route to manage any fallout from the potential change that a new element would cause (regardless of the outsider’s belief that change is necessary), congruent change can’t occur. When the ‘cost’ of the change is more than the ‘cost’ of the status quo, people will maintain the status quo.

Fact #5: Change cannot happen until there appropriate buy-in from all elements that will be touched by the change and there is a defined route to manage any disruption the change would entail.

Due to our standard questions and listening skills and assumptions that our terrific information will help, we end up helping only those few whose brains are set up to change (the low hanging fruit) and failing with those who might need us but aren’t quite ready.

INFORMATION DOESN’T FACILITATE CHANGE

We can, however, shift from having the answers to helping others achieve their own type of excellence (regardless of whether or not it shows up looking like we envisioned). In other words, we can help our CPs change themselves. Indeed, by thinking we have the answers, by driving our own outcomes, we lose the opportunity to serve, enable real change, and make a difference.

Don’t take the need to maintain the status quo lightly. Even patients who sign up for prevention programs have a history of non-compliance: with new food plans, or recommendations of exercise programs that challenge the behaviors they have habituated and normalized (for good or bad), they don’t know how to remain congruent if they were to change. (Note: as long as healthcare professionals continue to push behavior change rather than facilitate belief change first, non-compliance will continue.)

It’s possible to facilitate the journey through our CPs own hierarchy of values and rules, enable buy-in and agreeable change, and avoid resistance – but not by using conventional information gathering/sharing, or listening practices as they all entail bias that will touch only those with the same biases.

To enable expanded and managed choice and to avoid resistance, we must first help Others recognize how to congruently change their own status quo. They may have buy-in issues or resource issues; maybe their hierarchy of values or goals would need to shift, or their rules.

By focusing on facilitating choice/change first we can teach Others to achieve their own congruent change and then tailor our solutions and presentations to fit. Otherwise, our great content will only connect with those folks who already mirror the incoming data and overlook those who might have been able to change if they had known how to do so congruently.

THE SKILLS OF CHANGE

I’ve developed a generic Change Facilitation model, often used in sales (Buying Facilitation®) and coaching, that offers the ability to facilitate change at the core of where our status quo originates – our internal, idiosyncratic, and habituated rules and beliefs.

Developed over 50 years, I’ve coded my own Asperger’s systemizing brain, refitted some of the constructs of NLP, coded the system and sequence of change, and applied some of the research in brain sciences to determine where, if, and how new choices fit.

Using it, Others can consciously self-cue – normally an unconscious process – to enable them to discover their own needs for change in the area I can serve, and in a way that’s congruent with the rules and beliefs that keep their status quo in place.

I’ve trained the model globally over the past 30 years in sales, negotiation, marketing, patient relationships, leadership, coaching, etc. Below I introduce the main skills I’ve developed to enable change and choice – for me, the real kindness and integrity we have to offer.

It’s possible to lead Others through

an examination of their unconscious beliefs and established systems
to discover blocks, incongruences, and endemic obstructions
to examine how, if, why, when they might need to change, and then
help them set up the steps and means (tactically) to make those changes
in a way that avoids system’s dysfunction
with buy-in, consensus, and no resistance.

For those interested in learning more, I’m happy to chat, train, and share. Or feel free to use my thoughts to inspire your own model.

Listening for Systems: from birth we’re taught to carefully listen for content and try to understand the Other’s meaning (exemplified by Active Listening) which, because of our listening filters, often misses the underlying, unspoken Metamessage the speaker intends. By teaching the brain to disassociate and listen broadly rather than specifically, Systems Listening enables hearing the intended message at the root of the message being sent and supersedes all bias on either end. For those interested, read my article on how our listening restricts our worlds.

Facilitative Questions: conventional questions, used to gather data, are biased by the Speaker and interpreted in a biased way by the Responder. The intent of Facilitative Questions (FQ) is to lead listeners through a sequential discovery process through their own (often unconscious) status quo; not information focused and not biased, they are directive, and enable our CPs to discover for themselves the full range of elements they must address to achieve excellence. Here is a simple (out of sequence) example of the differences between conventional questions and FQs. Note how the FQ teaches the Other how to think:

Conventional Question: Why do you wear your hair like that? This question, meant to extract data for the Speaker’s use, is biased by the Speaker and limits choices within the Responder. Bias/Bias
Facilitative Question: How would you know if it were time to reconsider your hairstyle? While conventional questions ask/pull biased data, this question sequentially leads the Other through focused scans of unconscious beliefs in the status quo. Formulating them requires Listening for Systems.

Using specific words, in a specific order, to stimulate specific thought categories, FQs lead Others down their steps of congruent change, with no bias. Now we can be part of the process with them much earlier and use our desire to influence change to positive effect. We can actually help Others help themselves.

Steps of change: There is a habituated, idiosyncratic hierarchy of people, rules, values, systems, and history within each status quo. By helping our CPs navigate down their hierarchy they can discover and manage each point necessary to change without disruption or resistance. Until they know how to do this – and note, as outsiders we can NEVER understand this – they can take no action as their habitual functioning (their status quo) is at risk. Offering them our information is the final thing they’ll need when all of the change elements are recognized.

To me, being kind, ethical and true servants, being influencers who can make a difference, means helping Others be all they can be THEIR way, not OUR way. As true servant leaders and change agents we can facilitate real, lasting change and then, when Others know how to change congruently, our important solutions will be heard.

____________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 15th, 2025

Posted In: Communication, Listening

I recently got a call from a noted venture capitalist of healthcare apps.

DH: I heard you have a model that facilitates permanent behavior change. I wonder if it would work with any of the 15 healthcare apps I’ve invested in.

SD: I do have a model that does that. And it certainly could be used as a front end to conventional behavior change apps to enable users to develop permanent habits by developing neural circuits. What are you using now to help folks change behaviors permanently?

DH. Behavior Modification, but it doesn’t work. There’s no scientific evidence that it works and our analysis concurs. But there’s nothing else to use. Can you help?

It’s a known fact that Behavior Modification has a 3% success rate over time. Sure, people initially lose weight with a behavior-based plan to eat differently. Certainly people stop smoking or get to the gym for a few weeks. But because these new behaviors haven’t been accepted by, or made permanent in, the brain, they cannot succeed over time. And repeating the new in hopes that THIS time it will stick obviously doesn’t work.

Stay tuned for my new book: HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change, and decision making.

Sample

Permanent change is a very achievable goal. But we’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle. In this essay I will explain what a behavior is, what change is, how our brain governs them both, and introduce the steps needed to form habits. Believe it or not, it’s mechanical.

THE PROBLEM WITH BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION

Lately I’ve heard several Behavioral Scientists on the radio, all offering Behavior Modification techniques to habituate new behaviors by, well, habituating new behaviors. They ‘remove barriers’, suggest ‘momentum’, offer ‘promoting forces/restraining forces’, and propose ‘behavioral interventions’ such as keeping weights at your desk so you can ‘lift’ during Zoom calls. All meant to motivate behavior change – through behavior change. I suspect Einstein might have something to say about that.

The problem is the premise. Behavior Mod’s core assumptions are actually contrary to brain science. It assumes that by merely repeating (and repeating and repeating) new ways to accomplish something that’s been problematic, permanent change will result that can be maintained over time. But it doesn’t. And it can’t.

Certainly we’ve all tried. We’ve learned the hard way that we can’t lose weight permanently by trying to lose weight. Or stop smoking by trying to stop smoking. We promise ourselves we’ll be disciplined ‘this time’. But our discipline isn’t the problem. We have no circuits to translate our wishes into actions automatically. Our brain makes us fail.

DIFFERENT THINKING REQUIRED

The reason we fail is simple: we’re not making the necessary adjustments to the neural pathways that prompt behaviors to begin with.

I’ll start with an analogy. Let’s say you purchase a forward-moving robot, use it for a while, then decide you want it to move backward. You tell it why a ‘backwards’ functionality would enhance it, show it slides and presentations of other robots that move backwards, and attempt to push, cajole, and offer rewards. Nope. It won’t move backward. But if you program it differently, it will.

What about changing a chair into a table. You put red plastic into a machine that is programmed to spit out a red plastic chair. Once the chair is produced, you can’t make it a table. But you can create a table if you program the machine appropriately at the start.

Changing habits by trying to change habits is merely attempting to change the outcome – the output, the habit, the behavior, the robot, the chair – but failing to reprogram the brain with different instructions to create something new.

Sounds obvious. But that’s not what behaviorists do: the Behavior Mod approach suggests we get the robot to move backward by pushing it (and pushing it and pushing it) assuming the repetition will cause permanent change. As you know, it doesn’t work.

WHAT IS A BEHAVIOR?

To understand the full scope of the problem it’s helpful to understand what, exactly, a behavior is. They don’t just arise because we want them to. Behaviors are the output of our brain’s signaling system, the response to input instructions that travel as electrochemical signals down a fixed neural pathway and hook up with a set of circuits that translates the signals into something tangible.

Where do behaviors originate? Behaviors are Beliefs in action, physical representations of our core identity factors. Our politics represent our Beliefs. The way we dress, talk; the professions we choose; where we travel and who we marry. Everything we do represents who we are.

As the foundational factor in what we do and think, Beliefs must be factored in when considering change or forming a new habit. Current Behavior Mod approaches circumvent Beliefs and therein lie the problem.

There is actual science on how behaviors get generated and why we automatically repeat behaviors even when we don’t want to. Here’s a quote from noted Harvard neuroscientist Richard Masland in We Know It When We See It to set the stage:

Our brain has trillions of cell assemblies that fire together automatically. When anything incoming bears even some of the characteristics [of operational circuits], the brain automatically fires the same set of synapses [triggering the same behavior]. (pg 143).

Here’s a simplified version of how to convince the brain to make the changes that lead to new habits. It explains how behaviors occur and where change comes from. For a more complete explanation and tools to actually create new brain circuitry for change, watch for my new book HOW? coming out soon.

NEUROLOGICAL PATHWAY FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT

Generally, each behavior starts off as an input – an idea or command, thought or story – that enters our brain as a meaningless puff of air, an electrochemical vibration (a ‘message’). To keep us congruent, the input gets evaluated against our Mental Models and Beliefs before going further. Is this input a risk? Is it congruent with our values?

If the idea goes against who we are, it gets rejected or resisted. If the vibration is accepted, it gets turned into signals that then seek out (among our 100 trillion synapses) similar-enough circuits that translate them into action or output – a behavior. Specifically, our brains:

1. receive input vibrations (from conversations, thoughts, reading, ideas, internal commands) and
2. compare/test these against foundational Beliefs, norms, and history, after which they
3. get turned into signals that get
4. matched with the closest, ‘similar enough’ neural circuits
5. that translate them into output/action/behavior.

As you can see, whichever neural circuits receive the signals are the translators that determine what we hear, see, know, and do. Simply stated it looks like this:

Input -> Risk check -> Signal creation and Dispatch -> Output

The time it takes a message to go from an input to an output takes 5 one-hundredths of a second. It’s pretty automatic. And obviously, once an output, it can’t be changed. Change begins when initiated from the input.

THE NEED FOR VALUES-BASED CONGRUENCY

The next important piece is why repetition won’t cause new (permanent) habits. When a wholly new input enters, it requires a new relevancy check. Sadly – and the reason new activity fails when Behavior Mod is attempted – if anything tries to change the status quo without being checked for relevance, our brain discards the new input because it may carry risk! The new isn’t sustainable without new circuitry.

When we try to create new habits by merely ‘doing’ new behaviors without sending new and different input instructions we cannot generate permanent change because there are no new circuits to administer it!

The good news is that the brain is always willing to create new circuits for new behaviors. It’s called Neurogenesis.

CREATING NEW PROGRAMMING, NEW SIGNALS, NEW BEHAVIORS

To change behaviors permanently, start with new input messages:

1. - create a new belief-based input/message that
  - generates new signals which
  - create or discover a different arrangement of circuits
  - which translate them into new/different behaviors.

I’ll explain with a story. A friend said, “I’ve been telling myself I’m a Fat Cow recently. That means it’s time for me to go on another diet.” Obviously this input would lead her to the same circuits (and results) that it used for past diets that she failed at. But if she changed her input signal and told herself instead:

‘I am a healthy person who will research best nutrition choices for my body type and lifestyle and have the discipline to eat the best foods for the rest of my life.’

she would end up with a different set of circuits and different output/behaviors.

Our outputs, our behaviors, are merely responses to inputs that our brain has checked out as congruent with who we are. So one way to change a behavior is to change the incoming messaging to one that is Belief-based and takes into account all the elements (Mental Models, history, norms, experience) that might cause risk to the system. Once it’s approved, it will automatically generate new circuits and new, habituated, behaviors.

My new book How? Generating new neural pathways for learning, behavior change, and decision making, will teach you several models to formulate the neural circuits you need to help you change habits permanently.

I am passionately interested in enabling people to consciously design new signaling instructions for their brains to output any new habits they seek. My wish is to work with healthcare providers and apps for exercise, healthy eating, meditation and decision making to aid folks seeking to achieve greater health and success.

If you want to collaborate, or have questions, contact me to discuss ways we can engage those seeking permanent change. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

_______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 8th, 2025

Posted In: Change Management, Communication

I’ve trained about 100,000 sales professionals globally. Before we begin, I ask them what training they receive as their sales job begins. They all say ‘Product knowledge.’ When I ask them if they know how their buyers are buying, they don’t even understand the question.

In my 40 years of teaching Buying Facilitation®, I’ve never met a sales person who knows their buyer’s buying decision process. And yet this is where, how, and why buyers eventually buy. By ignoring this, sellers reduce their close rate dramatically.

SALES STARTS TOO SOON

Sales and marketing direct their efforts on placing solutions, offering prospects great content, engaging graphics, and loyal customer reviews. And it works – 5% of the time.

What’s going on the other 95%? Well, those folks don’t need your solution details. Not at first anyway.

Before people self-identify as buyers, they have work to do: they try workarounds, manage their risk of change and get buy-in to do anything differently. Until then they have no interest in the information you offer.

In other words, your pitches, illustrations, and reviews will only be beneficial for people at the very end of their buying decision path. And that’s where you’re starting!

WHEN DO PEOPLE BUY?

People only buy when:

There are no available workarounds;
The risk of change is less than their risk of staying the same;
The folks who will use the new solution agree to the change and have comfort learning how to use the new solution.

Buying is a change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue. Until people understand their risk of change, and until users buy-in to doing anything different, they will not buy regardless of what you’re selling or what they need.

Before people are ready to buy they must have these questions answered: How can they resolve their problem with the least disruption? Can a new solution fit with existing software and minimal training? How can the group generate buy-in so there’s no resistance? Who will supervise the implementation of the new solution over time?

In other words, until they have all their ducks in a row, people cannot self-identify as buyers and will ignore and rebuff your efforts.

I’m sure you know this. Hundreds of articles have been written on the 70% that goes on behind the scenes. So why aren’t you addressing this portion of the buying decision journey?

Even people who theoretically are great prospects can’t consider buying if the risk to their system, their culture, is too high, or if users won’t use it. They certainly cannot define their need until they do so.

I would think the low close rate would tell you there’s a problem with what you’re doing. My goodness, you wouldn’t even go to a hairdresser with a 5% success rate. You certainly wouldn’t get on a plane. Yet you continue to assume your solution will rule the day and base your entire approach on placing your solution. Facts tell you otherwise, and yet you ignore them.

Your solution is the last thing people need. Why not first help them with the backend work they must do anyway? Why not add some new tools and begin with a Change Management, or a Risk Management focus and help them first – and then they’ll already be working with you when they’re ready to buy? To do this, you’ll need to stop selling until they’re ready.

SELLING DOESN’T CAUSE BUYING

The question becomes: would you rather sell or have someone buy? You know the answer – but you’re acting as if the only process you need is selling….which ignores all but 5% of those those folks who will buy but aren’t ready. BTW these folks can easily be made ready! You can help them, decrease your sales cycle by one half, and close 40% from first call. But it requires a wholly different toolkit.

Sales is a Stage 2 model. First, Stage 1: facilitate buying (check out my Buying Facilitation® model). Then Stage 2: sell. To facilitate buying, you must:

change your outreach to seek folks in the process of solving a problem your solution can fix. You’ll need to ask different questions to find folks on their problem-solving journey; listen differently to hear where they are in their journey, then help them through their change process. With a ‘need’ focus you’re merely posing biased questions and listening for an opening to pitch into. How many thousands of names have you thrown away – real prospects! – because they were still in their problem-solving phase and not yet ready?

o Rule: until people have gone through their entire risk- and change management process, they don’t even have a complete understanding of their need!

o Rule: don’t begin by seeking folks with need. Begin by seeking people on route to fixing a problem your solution can resolve and help them manage their change.

put your solution knowledge on the back burner until you’ve helped people figure out their risk and change issues.

o Rule: you need a wholly different skill set to facilitate buying. Currently you’re only listening and posing questions so you can hear an opening to pitch into.

seek people who WILL become prospects/buyers once they’ve got all their ducks in a row. Now you’re merely guessing who is a prospect (i.e. the 5% close rate should make that obvious).

o Rule: People cannot buy until they’ve figured out how to solve a problem with minimal disruption. Help them do this first.

facilitate prospective buyers through their change/risk management before trying to sell. They’re doing it without you as you wait.

o Rule: People are now abusing your time to pull knowledge they can use to solve their own problem without you. Provide product information AFTER they’ve clearly defined their need.

There are 13 steps to any change process. Sales enters at the last 3 steps and seeks that small percentage of people who have completed their change process. This ignores the bulk of the buying decision journey – real prospects who you could quickly facilitate through their decisions to a close – to find those at the end.

Why not put on a Buying Facilitation® hat first, seek folks during their change and risk management processes; facilitate them through their change decisions, buy-in, and risk management; and then you’ll find real prospects on the first call and stop wasting time trying to convince people who just aren’t ready yet.

For those sellers interested in closing more and willing to learn new skills, I’d love to teach you Buying Facilitation®. Contact me: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

________________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen September 1st, 2025

Posted In: Sales

I used to assume that what I hear someone say is an accurate interpretation of what they mean. My assumption was wrong; what I think I hear has a good chance of being inaccurate, regardless of how intently I listen. But it’s not my fault.

During the years I spent reading, thinking, and researching for my book (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?) on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, I was quite surprised to learn how little of what I think I hear is unbiased, or even accurate. Listening, it turns out, is a brain thing and has little to do with words or intent.

Link to Purchase and Sample

HOW BRAIN’S ‘LISTEN’

When we listen to others, we’re not directly hearing their words or intent but an interpretation of a set of meaningless, automatic neurological activities in our brain that have little-to-no relationship with what’s been said.

What we think we hear is wholly determined by our historic life experiences (education, family, values, Beliefs, mental models) that have been stored in our brain and filter all incoming words:what we hear someone say has been translated by what we’ve heard before, creating biases and assumptions that keep us from translating incoming messages accurately.

Generally speaking, our brain determines what we hear. And it’s not objective. Here’s what happens:

- Words are merely puffs of air that emerge from our lungs, formed by our mouth and tongue – meaningless sound vibrations – that enter a Listener’s brain and get made into signals that get sent to ‘similar-enough’, existing brain circuits for translation. In other words, there’s a high probability Listeners can’t accurately understand what’s been said because their brain has translated what’s been said by what they’ve heard before.
- A Listener’s ears

– capture some portion of incoming sound vibrations,

– conducts them through historic filters (Beliefs, mental models, etc.)

– translate the remaining vibrations into signals that get sent to

– match ‘similar-enough’ existing circuits, which

– discard what doesn’t match.

The remainder – with an undetermined relationship to what was intended is – what we think we ‘hear’.

- Listeners have no idea what has been discarded in the process of hearing/translating what’s been said. Statistically, we accurately hear no more than 35% of what’s been said.
- Both Speakers and Listeners have no idea how a Listener’s brain has interpreted or biased what been said or how close to accurate it’s been received. We all assume what we think we hear is accurate, although it rarely is.
- We speak in run-on sentences, not individual words, and a Listener’s brain must make sense of the variations in vibrations of each word.
- People speak for approximately 600 milliseconds; Listeners begin formulating their response in 200 milliseconds. Approximately two thirds of what’s been said is not even heard.

What we think we hear is some version of our history of hearing something similar. With people we’re in regular contact with and already have circuits to translate, it can be pretty accurate. With others not so much.

DIAGRAM OF HOW BRAINS ‘LISTEN’

Herein lie the gap between what’s said and what’s heard: we all make inaccurate assumptions of what we think we hear, causing us to respond and choose actions from a restricted or flawed knowledge base. Of course, it’s not done purposefully, but it sure plays havoc with communication and relationships.

I once lost a business partner because he misinterpreted something he thought I said, even though his wife told him he had misheard. His comment: “I heard it with my own ears! Are you both telling me I’m crazy??” and stormed out, never to speak to me again.

Unfortunately, and different from perceived wisdom, brains don’t allow us to ‘actively listen’ to accurately understand what’s been said. Sure, Active Listening allows us to ‘hear’ the words spoken but doesn’t capture the intent, the underlying meaning. And given our neurological hearing processes are automatic, mechanical, and thoughtless, we’re stuck with what we think we hear. Here’s a simplified diagram of the process of listening:

Incoming sound vibrations as electrochemical signals get distorted and deleted through the brain’s filtering and transmission processes, eventually getting translated by ‘similar-enough’ existing neural circuits causing us to hear some rendition of what we’ve heard historically. There’s little chance any of us can understand a Speaker’s intended meaning accurately.

GUIDELINES TO MAXIMIZE UNDERSTANDING IN DIALOGUE

Given how vital listening is to our lives, for those times we want to make sure we understand and get on the same page with a Communication Partner (CP) to reach consensus, here are some guidelines:

Get agreement for a dialogue: Often, Communication Partners have different life experiences and, potentially different goals – many of which might be unconscious. Begin by agreeing to find common ground.

“I’d like to have a dialogue that might lead to us to a path that meets both of our goals. If you agree, do you have thoughts on where you’d like to begin?”

“I wonder if we can find common goals so we might find agreement to work from. I’m happy to share my goals with you; I’d like to hear yours as well.”

Link to Purchase and Sample

Set the frame for common values: At a global level, we all have similar foundational values, hopes and fears – for family, food, shelter, health. Start by ‘chunking up’ to find areas of agreement.

“I’d like to find a way to communicate that might help us find a common values so we can begin determining if we share areas of agreement. Any thoughts on how you’d like to proceed?”

“It seems we’re in opposite mind-sets. How do you recommend we go about finding if there’s any agreement we can start from?”
Get agreement on the topics in the conversation: One step at a time; make sure CPs agree to each item and skip the ones (for now) where there’s no agreement. (Put them in a Parking Lot for your next conversation.) Work with ‘what is’ instead of ‘what should be.’

Enter without bias: Unintentionally our historic, unconscious beliefs restrict our search for commonality. Replace emotions and blame with a new bias for this conversation: the ‘bias’ of collaboration.

“I’m willing to find common ground and would like to put aside my normal reactions for this hour but it will be a challenge since my feelings are so strong. Do you also have strong feelings that also might bias our communication? I wonder if we could share our most cherished beliefs and then discuss how we can move forward without bias.”

Get into Observer: To help overcome unconscious biases and filters, here are a few mind hacks that will supersede automatic brain processing: in your mind’s eye, see yourself on the ceiling looking down on yourself and your CP. I call this the Observer (witness, coach) position. It will provide a different viewpoint for your brain, replacing the emotional, automatic response with a broader, far less biased, view of your interaction. Another way is to walk around during the conversation, or sit way, way back in a chair. Sitting forward keeps you in your biases. (Chapter 6 in What? teaches how to stay in Observer and reduce bias.). From your Observer place, notice elements of the communication of both you and your CP:

- - Notice body language/words: Similar to how your brain filters incoming words, your CP is speaking/listening from their filters and assumptions, which will be exhibited in their body language and eye contact. From Observer notice how their physical stance matches their words, the level of passion, feelings, and emotion. Now look down and notice how you look and sound in relation to your CP. Just notice. Read Carol Goman’s excellent book on the subject.
  - Notice triggers: Emphasized words hold beliefs and biases. You may also hear absolutes: Always, Never; lots of You’s may be the vocabulary of blame. Silence, folded arms, a stick-straight torso may show distrust. Just notice where/when it happens for you both. If your CPs words trigger you into your own subjective viewpoints, you’ve gotten out of Observer and must get back onto the ceiling where you have choice. But just in case:

“I’m going to try very hard to speak/listen without my historic biases. If you find me getting heated, or feel blame, I apologize as that’s not my intent. If this should happen, please tell me you’re not feeling heard and I’ll do my best to work from a place of compassion and empathy.”

Summarize regularly: Because the odds are bad that you’ll accurately hear what your CP means to convey, summarize what you think you heard after every exchange:

“Sounds to me like you said, “XX”. Is that correct? What would you like me to understand that I didn’t understand or that I misheard?”

“I’ statements: Stay away from ‘You’ if possible. Try to work from the understanding that you’re standing in different shoes and there is no way either of you can see the other’s landscape.

“When I hear you say X it sounds to me like you are telling me that YY. Is that true?”

“When I hear you mention Y, I feel like Z and it makes me want to get up from the table as I feel you really aren’t willing to hear me. How can we handle this so we can move forward together?”

Get buy-in each step of the way: keep checking in, even if it seems obvious that you’re on the same page. It’s really easy to mistranslate what’s been said when the listening filters are different.

“Seems to me like we’re on the same page here. I think we’re both saying X. Is that true? What am I missing?”

“What should I add to my thinking that I’m avoiding or not understanding the same way you are? Is there a way you want me to experience what it looks like from your shoes that I don’t currently know how to experience? Can you help me understand?”

Check your gut: Notice when/if your stomach gets tight, or your throat hurts. These are sure signs that your beliefs are being stepped on and you’re out of Observer. Get back up to the ceiling and then tell your CP:

“I’m experiencing some annoyance/anger/fear/blame. That means something we’re discussing is going against one of my beliefs or values. Can we stop a moment and check in with each other so we don’t go off the rails?”

Get agreement on action items: Simple steps for forward actions will become obvious; make sure you both work on action items together.

Get a time on the calendar for the next meeting: Make sure you discuss who else needs to be brought into the conversation, end up with goals you can all agree on and walk away with an accurate understanding of what’s been said and what’s expected.

COMPASSION, EMPATHY, AND RESPECT

Until or unless we all hold the belief that none of us matter if some of us don’t; until or unless we’re all willing to take the responsibility for each (inadvertent)act of harm; until or unless we’re each willing to put aside our very real grievances to seek a higher good, we’ll never heal.

It’s not easy. But by learning how to hear each other with compassion and empathy, by closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, our conversations can begin. We must be willing to start sharing our Truth and our hearts and find a way to join with another’s Truth and heart. By hearing each other accurately, it’s the best start we can make.

______________________

Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen August 25th, 2025

Posted In: Listening

Change Readiness: helping clients prepare for change and implementation is systemic, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sadly, We’re Not As Curious As We’d Like To Be, Part 2 by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Sadly, We’re Not As Curious As We’d Like To Be, Part 1 by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Solving a Problem is Systemic: avoiding resistance and ensuring permanent change is more complex than changing behaviors, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

The Cost of Perceived Wisdom: why we really don’t like innovation

50% of Sales Professionals are Neurodiverse: An introduction to finding, hiring and retaining them, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Influencing Congruent, Unbiased Change: serving with integrity, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

You Can’t Change a Behavior by Trying to Change a Behavior, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Don’t Start Selling with Sales: facilitate back-end buying decisions first for a higher close rate, by Sharon-Drew Morgen

Bridging the Gap between What’s Said and What’s Heard, by Sharon-Drew Morgen