There's a strange paradox at the heart of every great sales relationship: the harder you push to close, the further the close recedes. William James, the American Pragmatist, argued that consciousness works the same way — try to observe your own attention directly and it vanishes, like trying to see your own eye. The Bhagavad Gita makes a structurally identical point in Chapter 2: Arjuna's fixation on outcomes is precisely what paralyzes him. Krishna's remedy isn't detachment from results in a passive sense — it's redirecting energy entirely into the quality of the action itself, the conversation, the diagnosis of the client's actual problem. In finance and insurance especially, where trust is the real product, the advisor who enters a meeting genuinely curious about what the client needs — rather than rehearsing the close — tends to leave with both the relationship and the business. Today, before one client interaction, try setting aside any outcome goal and replacing it with a single question you're genuinely trying to answer about them.

In your last significant client conversation, were you primarily listening to understand — or listening to respond?

Drawing from Indian Philosophy (Bhagavad Gita) combined with American Pragmatism — Krishna / Vyasa (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, on nishkama karma) & William James (The Principles of Psychology, on the 'effort of attention')