Help Ossified Prospects Break Their Hardened Shell

This ear-perking phrase came courtesy of an interview I caught with Professor Vincent Deary. He’s written a trilogy entitled How To Live. Quite a bold move you might think. He claims it isn’t meant to tell you, merely let you ask yourself the right questions.

The first tome appears to help people embrace change. As any solution seller will attest, this is often as hard as it can get.

A quote and précis from the author to get us nodding along here;

“transition is inevitable but difficult”

we are “habit machines”, with habituation built into us to make life a little easier to live in any one moment

Then he happily informs us that the only way to live is to embrace change;

we should look at habits with a view to which might be holding us back

identify and break “character-sclerosis”; when we’re “ossified in hardened shell of habit”

a fundamental premise is that “risk and change is healthy”

reflect on habit and see how change is in fact for the better

change can be at once both exhilarating and scary, yet putting something at risk can be invigorating

These further fistful of quotes suggest that habit is bad, change good.

I think back to many a prospect “ossified in the hardened shell” of their present predicament. A delightful turn of words.

Although I would not use this in the field. I still remember twenty years ago a rep I was on a bigtime call with who, after a prospect described where they were at, summed up with the phrase, “you’re really between a rock and a hard place, aren’t you”. The look on the prospect was total thunder. The deal instantly stalled.

I can though, hear myself talking about ‘breaking the hardened shell’ around a prospect’s ambitions in the sense of a chick (ie, idea) hatching.

The author prefers us to buy his book rather than offer a quick-launch roadmap. Still. You can infer that getting someone to state what is ‘at risk’ by dint of proposed change, then comparing that with the possible ‘invigoration’ felt from doing something different, can truly help them ‘break the hardened shell’. For it is fact; “risk and change is healthy”.