Every customer conversation and every coaching conversation carries the same hidden risk: hitting orange barrels you never saw coming. The question is whether you prepared a detour in advance, or you're scrambling to read a paper map on the shoulder of the road.
The Lesson from a Long Drive Home
Years ago, driving home to Ohio after a vacation in Hilton Head, SC, the music was playing, the windows were down, and everyone had a nice bronze tan. Then the orange barrels appeared. We went from 70 mph to a crawl in seconds. No warning. No plan. My wife reached into the glove box for a paper map, and we ended up detoured through Gatlinburg, TN, adding hours and strong emotions to what had been a perfect trip.
Looking back, it wasn't the detour that aggravated me. It was being caught unaware and having no control over the outcome.
When Customer Conversations Hit Traffic
How many times have you been in a conversation with a customer and everything feels like it's going well, when all of a sudden emotions take over and things go off course? That's the same experience: the orange barrels show up mid-conversation, and suddenly you're navigating blind.
If that drive happened today, Waze would have given us options before we ever reached the construction zone. Wouldn't it be powerful if we were wired the same way in our customer conversations, able to anticipate the barrier before it stops us cold? Waze says it right in their tagline: "Outsmarting Traffic, Together." That's the goal here too.
The NeuroSelling Framework for Change Barriers
In his book NeuroSelling, Jeff Bloomfield reminds us that customer objections are rooted in emotion, specifically in the emotions tied to their problems and their historical anchor points. To reduce change barriers, professional communicators need to work three critical levers.
- Reset the Anchor Points — address the past experiences shaping how they see risk today
- Reduce the Risk — lower the perceived cost of trying something new
- Reestablish the Value — make the reward of change feel more real and tangible than the comfort of staying put
Removing change barriers isn't about overwhelming someone with logic. It's about reducing the emotion that's driving the resistance in the first place.
The Formula Behind Every Barrier
Jeff captures the dynamic in two simple equations that explain nearly every stuck conversation:
When your customers are sitting in traffic, they follow the crowd because: they're already in it and eventually it'll get them where they want to go (they hope); they aren't sure they have other options; and the risk of an unfamiliar route doesn't feel worth it based on past experience.
Your customers feel exactly that way about the problems they're facing. In our conversations, we are the Waze application. There's no technology that replaces the work of building an alternate route that gets them where they want to go while removing risk and amplifying the reward. For a deeper look at the full framework, pick up a copy of NeuroSelling, available on Amazon.
Mastering the Coaching Conversation
Coaches, this same dynamic plays out every day inside your teams. How do you support your people in removing the barriers, those orange barrels, that stand in front of them on a daily basis?
The formula is the same. It's our job as coaches and leaders to help remove some of the emotion behind barriers to change. But here's the honest question: how often in our conversations with team members do we actually add emotion to the situation, or try to force a solution before our person is ready for it?
Just like customers, our team members are processing risk and value. If the risk of trying something new feels higher than the value of the outcome, they won't move. That's not resistance. That's the brain doing its job.
A Four-Step Framework for Team Barriers
Next time a team member hits a barrier, walk them through these four steps before you offer a solution:
- Identify the barrier — name it clearly, without judgment
- Identify the emotion — what feeling is driving the resistance?
- Identify the perception of risk vs. perception of value — where does the math currently sit for them?
- Use information from prior conversations to alleviate concerns — anchor points only shift when they're met with evidence from the relationship you've already built
Barriers aren't roadblocks. They're information. The best coaches treat them as a signal to slow down, recalibrate, and find the alternate route together.
If you're thinking about how this applies to your leadership bench or your sales team, let's have a conversation about what NeuroCoaching looks like in practice.
