Understanding the Reticular Activating System can help you get more clients – ideal clients – more easily!
What is it? And how can it do that? The reticular activating system plays a part in your transition from sleep to wakefulness as well as your attention (essentially your mental states of sleep to wakefulness).
This means that it can play a part in your ability to learn, your motivation, self-control, your ability to set goals and your inhibitions.
The reticular activating system helps control the transition from relaxed wakefulness to complete alertness and focused attention.
The Reticular Activating System in Marketing
How can you use the reticular activating system to your benefit? How does the reticular activating system play a part in your marketing strategy? This system not only helps you focus your attention by screening out background noise, you can use it to train your prospects to think of you at precisely the right moments that you want them to.
The reticular activating system sorts out the important information that you need to pay attention to versus the unimportant stuff that can be ignored.
You can program your prospective customers and ideal clients to think of you by setting in their mind the correct trigger words. No, not as a brainwashing trick – just a way to allow you to get their attention above all of the other noise going on in the world.
The best way to utilize this is by applying it to very specific phrases that will trigger them to think of you.
For example, I would say, “if you hear a business owner, CEO, VP of Marketing or VP of Business Development say, ‘I need a logo or marketing materials for my new business.’ ‘I need a website that is custom built for our needs.’ ‘My website is not getting enough traffic.’ ‘People visit my website, but no one stays or interacts on it.’ then please have them talk to Alyssa at Designflair.”
The Reticular Activating System in Every Day Life
Have you ever walked into a store and forgotten if you locked your car? Or suddenly ‘woken up’ (mentally) and realized that you can’t remember the last 5 minutes of your drive? This is an example of when the reticular activating system shuts down.
Daydreaming, or thinking about something other than your current task, shuts down your reticular activating system and this keeps you from remembering.
A large part of learning is about being engaged. If your brain is not engaged, you will fall back into a daydream mode and have difficulty retaining the information. An example of this may be a lecture where the teacher is not engaging you enough and your brain switches into a relaxed mode where it is not actively looking for information. Have you ever been reading a book and thinking about something else so you’re halfway down the page but didn’t comprehend what you read? Again, your daydream mode shut off the reticular activating system.
The reticular activating system sorts out the important information that you need to pay attention to versus the unimportant stuff that can be ignored.
Engaging this part of the brain in teaching and in marketing (where you are teaching your prospects to look for you) is extremely important to helping others retain information and notice you.
Stand out in a world of too much noise and distractions by making it easy for your ideal clients to find you.
Resources
I first heard about the reticular activating system, specifically, from Rick Silva of B2B Gathering before. I’ve heard of and considered this concept before but having a name to connect it to helped in my research of understanding the concept.
Here are some other resources I looked at to expand my understanding:
Reticular Activation System – Follow the Yellow Brick Road (how to use it in dealing with others)
What is the Reticular Activating System? (how to use it in marketing)
The Reticular Activating System – Your Automatic Goal Seeking Mechanism (how to use it in goal setting)
The Reticular Activating System (How it influences your learning ability)
