Perhaps you have had a day like this.
You arrive at a listing appointment with no particular reason to expect anything unusual. The house is not especially promising. The owners are cautious. Somewhere in the first few minutes they raise an objection you have heard a hundred times before… and yet, on this occasion, you don’t reach for a script or search your memory for the proper answer.
You simply know what to say.
More curious still, you seem to know when not to say it.
You notice the small hesitation that tells you the objection isn’t really the objection. You ask one question you hadn’t planned to ask. The conversation changes. Twenty minutes later, walking back to your car, you have that rare and deeply satisfying feeling that everything happened exactly as it should have.
And perhaps, for a moment, you think…
There I am.
Not a new or improved version of you. Not the person some coach has told you that you ought to become. Just the remarkably capable woman you already know yourself to be when everything inside you seems to be working together.
The interesting question is not why you can perform that way.
After years in real estate, you have accumulated more evidence than you need that you can.
The interesting question is why you cannot always seem to get back to her when you want her.
Because there are other appointments, aren’t there?
Appointments for which you are every bit as prepared, with the same experience, the same knowledge of the market and the same ability to read people… yet this time you find yourself thinking about the conversation while you’re having it. An objection catches you half a beat late. A perfectly ordinary silence suddenly feels as though it needs filling. You hear yourself explaining something you know you should have stopped explaining thirty seconds ago.
The client may never notice.
That is almost beside the point.
You notice.
And if this has happened often enough, you may have acquired a small private ritual that no client, broker or colleague knows anything about.
You sit in the car for another minute before an important appointment.
You look once more at notes you already know.
You rehearse an opening you’ve used dozens of times.
What you’re really waiting for, although you would probably never describe it this way, is some inward indication that today is going to be one of the good days.
That may be one of the strangest frustrations in professional life: to possess an ability you have already proved beyond reasonable doubt, yet not always have access to it when you need it.
Naturally, an entire industry has arisen to help with this problem.
It has given accomplished agents better scripts, better systems, better habits, better goals, better ways to organize a morning and more reasons to believe in themselves. Much of that advice is excellent. You may have profited from some of it.
But there is a peculiar difficulty with telling an experienced woman to believe more strongly in an ability she has already demonstrated hundreds of times.
Her problem isn’t belief.
She has the receipts.
And that distinction — between possessing an ability and being able to call upon the mental state in which that ability seems to come naturally — is what makes a little-known series of experiments begun more than half a century ago so interesting.
The experiments did not begin at Harvard, nor with a famous psychologist, nor with a theory about positive thinking.
They began with a radio repairman in Laredo, Texas.
José Silva spent his working life around frequencies. He knew that several signals could be present at once, yet a receiver would behave very differently depending upon the frequency to which it was tuned. And sometime in the 1940s, he began pursuing a question that would occupy him for the next 22 years:
Could a human being learn to change his own mental operating state deliberately — and remain fully conscious while doing it?
It was an eccentric question in those days.
It is considerably less eccentric now.
Researchers have since established that the electrical activity of the brain changes measurably with different states of attention, relaxation and internal focus. One of the ranges associated with relaxed internal attention is called Alpha. More important for our purposes, research published in Neuropsychologia in 1972 found that Silva-trained subjects could deliberately produce Alpha activity while remaining conscious. Later EEG work reported significant increases in Alpha power during Silva practice.
This does not mean that every good listing appointment is an “Alpha appointment,” or that a brain wave closes a house.
It means something both more modest and, for an experienced professional, potentially much more useful:
Your mental state is not simply something that happens to you. At least some aspects of it can be trained.
And that raises a rather intriguing possibility.
What if the difference between those days when you seem to have all of yourself available — and those days when part of your attention is consumed managing yourself — is not evidence that you need another script, another pep talk, or another attempt to become more confident?
What if you have been trying to improve the instrument… when nobody ever taught you how to tune it?
The Curious Difference Between Knowing What To Do… and Being Able To Do What You Know
There is a simple reason this question matters so much to someone who has been in real estate for a number of years.
A beginner usually has an information problem.
She really does need to learn what to say when a seller objects to the commission. She needs to understand how to price a difficult property, how to recognize a weak offer, how to conduct a listing presentation without sounding as though she memorized it in the parking lot.
Experience solves a great many of these problems.
But experience eventually creates a rather different one.
After eight or ten years, you can know exactly what to do… and still discover, to your considerable annoyance, that knowing is not always the same thing as having that knowledge available at the instant you need it.
Athletes know this phenomenon well.
A golfer may have made the same putt a thousand times and suddenly become acutely conscious of his hands when the tournament depends upon it. A pianist who could play a passage while thinking about dinner can become painfully aware of every note when an audience is listening.
The skill has not disappeared.
If anything, the person may possess more skill than ever.
What has changed is her relationship to the skill.
Instead of simply using it, she has begun watching herself use it.
And that distinction may explain something experienced salespeople have noticed without necessarily having a name for it.
Some of your finest professional moments seem to occur when there is remarkably little conversation going on inside your own head.
You aren’t telling yourself to be confident.
You aren’t reminding yourself to listen carefully.
You aren’t consciously searching through seven possible responses to find the correct one.
You’re listening to the client.
Which sounds almost absurdly simple until you’ve experienced the opposite.
Then you know how expensive a few square inches of divided attention can become.
A portion of your mind is listening to the person across the table. Another portion is monitoring how you’re doing. Another has noticed that you are monitoring how you’re doing and is now helpfully wondering why you aren’t performing as naturally as you did last Thursday.
All of this can happen in seconds.
And no amount of additional information necessarily solves it.
You can give a woman another script, but if she already knows the script, you’ve increased the contents of the filing cabinet without improving her ability to open the right drawer under pressure.
You can tell her to think positively, but now she has two thoughts to manage instead of one.
You can tell her to relax.
That instruction has probably never relaxed anyone in the history of the English language.
This is why José Silva’s original question was more interesting than it may first appear.
He wasn’t principally asking…
What should a person think?
He was asking…
Is there a different condition of mind from which thinking itself works differently?
The Radio Repairman Who Became Interested in the Human Receiver
Silva was an unlikely person to spend 22 years investigating such a question.
He wasn’t a psychiatrist.
He wasn’t a professor.
He was an electronics technician in Laredo, Texas, who repaired radios for a living and had served as an electronics instructor in the United States Army Signal Corps.
That background gave him a peculiar way of looking at the problem.
A radio technician knows that when reception is poor, shouting at the speaker does not improve the program.
You examine the receiver.
You reduce interference.
You tune more accurately to the signal you want.
Silva began wondering whether something analogous might be possible with the human mind.
The analogy should not be mistaken for neuroscience. A brain is not literally a radio receiver. But it led Silva toward something that could be measured.
The changing electrical rhythms of the brain.
Ordinary waking activity is commonly associated with faster Beta rhythms. As the mind becomes more relaxed and internally focused, Alpha activity becomes more prominent. Slower Theta rhythms are associated with still deeper states.
None of that was Silva’s discovery.
What interested him was a much more practical question…
Could an ordinary person learn to enter a relaxed, internally focused state deliberately, remain awake and aware — and then do something useful there?
That last phrase is important.
Because it separates what Silva eventually developed from the experience many people now associate with meditation.
If you have used a meditation app, you may already know that deliberately quieting yourself can be pleasant and useful. There is good independent evidence that meditation and related relaxation practices can reduce anxiety and stress.
Silva’s question began where that experience often ends.
Once the mind becomes quiet, what can you train it to do?
Could you rehearse an important performance before performing it?
Could you attach a simple physical cue to a practiced state and learn to retrieve that state later?
Could you notice an automatic pattern of self-talk before it commandeered your attention?
Could mental rehearsal be practiced systematically rather than merely hoping that “visualizing success” somehow did something useful?
In other words, Silva was not especially interested in relaxation as a destination.
He wanted to use it as a workroom.
And here the history becomes considerably more interesting.
Because some of the ideas that must have sounded decidedly unconventional when Silva began experimenting with them no longer sound particularly unconventional at all.
Which brings us back to the woman sitting in her car before a listing appointment.
She does not need to imagine that she knows how to sell real estate.
She already knows how.
She does not need to manufacture a more impressive personality.
She has already met the woman she wants to be — many times.
What she lacks is a dependable way of reaching the mental conditions in which her experience becomes available without so much interference.
And this is where Silva’s old experiment becomes unexpectedly relevant to a modern real estate agent.
Because over those 22 years, he did not end up with a philosophy.
He ended up with a series of procedures.
One teaches you how to enter the state deliberately.
Another deals with the automatic language that follows you into it.
Another uses structured mental rehearsal to work with a problem before you encounter it in the world.
And one rather odd little technique uses three fingers as a physical cue for retrieving a state you have previously practiced.
The names are almost quaint.
The underlying idea is not.
Instead of waiting for the right state of mind to arrive, you practice entering it until access itself becomes a skill.
Which raises the question Sandra would be entirely justified in asking at this point:
Does learning to do this in a quiet room have any value whatsoever when a seller is staring at you across a kitchen table?
There is a surprisingly good reason to think it can.
The Test Is Not What Happens With Your Eyes Closed
There is a mildly amusing misunderstanding about mental training that has probably done more than anything else to make sensible businesspeople suspicious of it.
It is the picture of someone sitting peacefully in a chair, eyes closed, becoming very good at being peaceful in a chair.
Useful, perhaps. Pleasant, certainly. But the average real estate agent would be justified in asking what any of this has to do with the moment a seller looks across the kitchen table and says, “We were thinking of listing with someone else.”
The answer comes from an area of research that has almost nothing to do with meditation.
For decades, psychologists and performance researchers have studied mental rehearsal.
The deliberate practice of an action in the mind before performing it in the world. Across many studies, the conclusion has been remarkably durable. Mental practice can improve actual performance, particularly where judgment, timing and other cognitive elements matter. And when mental rehearsal is combined with physical practice, the combination can outperform physical practice alone.
An athlete still has to play the game.
A pianist still has to touch the keys.
And a real estate agent still has to sit across from the seller.
The rehearsal does not replace experience. It helps experience become more available when it is wanted.
That distinction would have pleased José Silva, because it was precisely what he was trying to accomplish.
He was not attempting to make people unusually proficient at relaxing.
He wanted them to be able to use a practiced mental state later, with their eyes open, when something was at stake.
Which is why one of the smallest techniques in his system may be among the easiest to understand.
Three Fingers… and a Rather Large Idea
The technique sounds almost disappointingly simple.
While in the relaxed state they have learned to enter, students bring three fingers together and associate that physical gesture with the state they are practicing. With repetition, the gesture becomes a cue intended to help retrieve the practiced condition later.
If you’ve ever felt your stomach tighten at the sound of a particular ringtone before you’ve even looked at the screen, you already understand the underlying idea.
Human beings acquire associations between physical cues and internal responses all the time.
The interesting possibility is that we needn’t leave all of those associations to accident.
One Silva study conducted with students at the University of Tasmania applied the Three Fingers Technique to academic performance. The students using the technique improved their test scores by approximately nine percentage points from one term to the next; a comparison group declined by one point.
It is an intriguing result, though one study should not be made to carry more weight than it deserves. The larger independent literature on mental rehearsal is more important because it points in the same practical direction: what is practiced internally can influence what becomes available externally.
And now we arrive at the reason this matters to Sandra.
Not because she wants to become better at touching three fingers together.
Because she already has cues.
She simply didn’t choose most of them.
There is the sight of a name on her phone that can alter her state before she answers it.
The calendar notification for a listing she badly wants.
The particular expression on a seller’s face that tells her resistance is coming.
The first uncomfortable silence after she states her commission.
Life has been installing buttons in her for years.
Some produce tension. Some produce hesitation. Some summon a startling degree of competence.
Silva’s proposition is that you can begin installing a few of your own.
And for a professional whose livelihood depends not merely on what she knows, but on what she can summon at 3:17 on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, that is not a small idea at all.
Frank Golley · 35 years in real estate
“I also usually ‘know’ the price that a house will sell for and what we can negotiate to. Knowing when to push and when not to, is second nature.”
Frank Golley has used Silva techniques for approximately 20 of his 35 years in real estate.
“Knowing When to Push And When Not to is Second Nature.”
What is interesting about the way Golley describes their value is what he does not say.
He doesn’t talk about becoming more positive.
He doesn’t talk about feeling inspired.
He doesn’t even talk much about relaxation.
He says “second nature.”
“Second nature” is a revealing phrase.
Ask a veteran agent how she knows a seller isn’t really objecting to the commission and she may not be able to give you a satisfying answer. She has heard the words, noticed the face, caught something in the timing and compared it — without consciously trying — to hundreds of conversations accumulated over the years.
Then she knows.
This is not magic.
It is one of the rewards of experience.
And perhaps the most attractive promise of mental training for an experienced professional isn’t that it puts something exotic into her mind.
It is that it may help her make better use of what years of living and working have already put there.
That is why the real test of this training does not occur in the classroom.
It occurs later.
In the car.
On the telephone.
Across the kitchen table.
At precisely the moment when the old machinery would ordinarily begin running by itself.
An ordinary Thursday
Imagine, For A Moment, An Entirely Ordinary Thursday.
Not the best month of your career.
Not a stage, an award or a photograph of you holding an enormous commission check.
Thursday.
You have a listing appointment at eleven.
At 10:47 you pull into the street and park a few houses away. You know the property. You know the numbers. You also know, from the conversation yesterday, that the husband is likely to challenge the commission.
Ordinarily, this would be the moment when the meeting begins before the meeting begins.
You would rehearse his objection.
Then your answer.
Then his possible answer to your answer.
By the time you reach the front door, you’ve already conducted a negotiation with a man who hasn’t said anything yet.
But this morning you do something different.
You use the sequence you’ve practiced.
It takes less time than checking your email.
The objection may still come.
The little voice may still have opinions about it.
But for once, you don’t have to devote half your attention to managing the woman who’s supposed to be managing the appointment.
You listen.
And because you’re listening, you notice something.
The husband isn’t really worried about the commission.
He’s worried about choosing the wrong agent and having to explain to his wife, three months from now, why the house is still sitting there.
So you stop defending your fee.
And talk about that.
Perhaps you get the listing.
Perhaps you don’t.
That is not the promise.
The difference is subtler — and ultimately more valuable.
You leave knowing that you were there for the whole conversation.
No four-second disappearance.
No replay in the driveway.
No moment halfway home when the answer you needed finally arrives.
Just the quiet satisfaction of having had access to your own experience when you needed it.
And if that began happening more often, something else might change that has nothing whatever to do with real estate.
The drive home.
There are drives home after a difficult appointment that continue long after the car has reached the driveway.
You know the kind.
The conversation comes into the kitchen with you. It sits through dinner. It occupies a small corner of your attention while your husband tells you something you will later realize you barely heard.
Imagine not winning every appointment, but losing the ones you lose only once.
Imagine being able to say, “It didn’t go my way,” without spending the rest of the evening conducting the appeal.
That is a different kind of professional success.
And perhaps a more grown-up one.
What Happens During the Four Days?
At this point, it is reasonable to ask what you would actually be doing.
Not philosophically.
Thursday morning at nine o’clock. What happens?
You won’t be asked to stand in a circle and explain your childhood.
You won’t be asked to adopt anyone’s religion.
And you certainly won’t be asked to believe that something happened simply because an instructor tells you it did.
The training is experiential.
You learn the procedure for entering the relaxed, internally focused state Silva spent those 22 years developing. You practice it until the experience is no longer an abstraction you’ve read about.
From there, you begin learning what to do with it.
01
Habitual language
The almost invisible sentences we repeat so often that we stop hearing them as statements and begin experiencing them as facts.
02
Mirror of the Mind
Mental rehearsal with a structure: the problem as it exists, the desired outcome, and a deliberate movement from one to the other.
03
Three Fingers
The portable cue for precisely this reason: the useful state is of limited value if you can only find it in a quiet room.
The point of four days is not to accumulate four days’ worth of information.
You could acquire information much more cheaply.
The point is repetition under guidance.
There is an enormous difference between understanding how to serve a tennis ball and having served enough of them that the body begins to know what the explanation meant.
By Sunday, the question is no longer…
Do I believe this?
It is…
Can I do it?
That is a much fairer question.
Particularly for a skeptic.
In fact, skepticism may be one of the better reasons to attend.
A believer can be impressed by a claim.
A skeptic has to experience a result.
The Woman Who Leaves On Sunday is Not Supposed To Be A Different Woman
This may be the most important distinction of all.
There is a great deal of money made in the personal-development business promising people a new self.
A bolder self.
A richer self.
A fearless self.
You don’t particularly need another self.
You’ve already met the one you want.
You have met her at closing tables.
In negotiations.
On those mornings when the phone rings and she answers without first preparing herself to answer it.
On the peculiar days when work seems to come through her instead of having to be dragged out of her.
What she has never been given is reliable access.
So perhaps the fairest way to judge these four days isn’t to ask whether they transform you.
It is to ask a quieter question.
Three months from now, are your good days still surprises?
Because there may come a Monday when you leave an appointment, get into the car and begin driving home before something occurs to you.
You didn’t prepare yourself in the parking lot for twenty minutes.
You didn’t monitor your confidence.
You didn’t wonder which version of you was going to show up.
You simply went in and did your work.
And for the first time in a very long while, what once qualified as a “good day” doesn’t feel especially remarkable.
It just feels like Monday.
There Is One Sensible Way to Find Out
If you’ve read this far, you may have noticed that I have not asked you to believe that the Silva Method will make you a better real estate agent.
Richard Siena won’t ask you to believe that, either.
You already know how to sell real estate.
The question that brought us here was a different one…
Why is the woman who knows how to do it so completely available to you on some days… and so much harder to find on others?
Perhaps the explanation you’ve just read makes sense to you.
Perhaps it doesn’t.
But if it has explained something about your own experience that all the familiar talk about confidence, discipline and “mindset” never quite explained, there is a very easy next step.
Talk to Richard.
Not to enroll.
Not to be persuaded.
To ask him the questions that are probably forming in your mind now.
Richard Siena has been teaching the Silva Method since 1982. He knows the difference between someone who is curious about unusual ideas and someone who has a practical reason for wanting greater command of her own mental state.
And he knows that four days is too much time — and $1,597 is too much money — to spend on a program simply because an advertisement made it sound interesting.
So before you make that decision, give him fifteen minutes.
Tell him what happens to you before the appointments that matter.
Tell him what you’ve already tried, if you like.
Ask him exactly what happens during the four days. Ask him what part of the training applies when the pressure is real and your eyes are very much open.
Ask him the skeptical question. In fact, ask him the question you suspect he would rather you didn’t ask.
Then listen to his answer.
You have spent years learning to read people.
Use that ability here.
At the end of fifteen minutes, you will know considerably more than you know now… not merely about the Silva Method, but about the man who would be teaching it to you.
And then you can decide.
