Last week’s post on faking it less reminded me of a phenomenon I once read about called “Athlete Talk.” Not sports talk; this is different. I find myself guilty of it sometimes, and wonder if you do too.

I caught myself faking it last week. She who prides herself on “getting real.”

It was—what shall I call it—an unexpected kind of morning on the heels of very little sleep for a lot of people (myself included) as a result of watching U.S. election returns until the wee hours.

Last week’s tip about untrustworthy sales language got me thinking about another problem with conventional sales/influence training: a plethora of bad advice about how to “overcome objections.”

I’ve borrowed the headline for this week’s tip (“How (NOT) to turn ‘suspects’ into ‘prospects’”) from the title of a recent article shared by a well-respected sales training organization. I added the “NOT” and some choicely-placed quotation marks as an act of rebellion against the words they chose. Why the fervor?

Astronaut Chris Hadfield opens his TED Talk with this question: “What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?” He then recounts being outside on his first spacewalk—i.e. floating around in the vacuum of space—when his left eye went blind, immediately followed by his right eye.