Should vs Could:  A Small Language Shift That Changed My Consulting Career

I’ve been working as a technical consultant to the paper industry for several decades.

Clients hired me because they saw me as a subject matter expert. They would often ask some version of:

“What should we do?”

And I usually answered exactly as they asked.

I told them what I thought they should do.

At the time, that felt completely appropriate. They were paying for expertise, and I believed expertise meant providing the answer.

But there was a problem.

On a very small number of occasions, clients chose not to follow my recommendations. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I paid close attention. I’ve always had a strong desire to improve what I do, and I wanted to understand why that happened.

Eventually, I realized the issue wasn’t the client.

And it wasn’t the question they were asking.

The issue was that I had long been in the habit of telling people what they should do. Consulting simply gave that habit a professional setting.

Then I was exposed to a very different way of communicating through High Probability Selling.

One idea stood out immediately:

Offer choices. Don’t create pressure. Pressure creates resistance.

That led me to make one very small but very meaningful shift.

Instead of telling clients what they should do, I began laying out several things they could do.

I provided my opinions of the likely outcomes of each option as clearly as I could, based upon my own experience and judgment. I avoided expressing any preference for one option over another.

And then I asked:

“What do you want to do?”

That changed everything.

The client remained responsible for their decision.

I remained responsible for providing clear expertise and honest information.

Neither of us needed to control the other.

That shift from should to could made my consulting work better.

It also aligned perfectly with what both my clients and I actually wanted:

Clear technical advice.
Clear choices.
No unnecessary pressure.

Sometimes the most meaningful changes are remarkably small.

Sometimes it’s just one word.

Earlier today, Paul Bunn shared a short video from Daniel Pink that explores the difference between should and could in a way I found both clear and compelling.

I had already experienced the practical impact of that language shift in my consulting work, but his explanation helped me understand the distinction even more clearly.

If this idea resonates with you, the video is well worth watching.
“One Word that Will Change Your Life” by Daniel Pink

The 90-Day Myth — How HPS Adoption Actually Happens — Forum Conversation on Fri 1 May 2026

This Friday’s Forum:  The 90-Day Myth — How HPS Adoption Actually Happens

There’s a story that has been circulating in the HPS community for at least 30 years.

You’ve heard it. A handful of highly successful practitioners who saw the light, dropped everything, implemented HPS in its entirety, and never looked back. Total transformation. Ninety days. Done.

It’s a great story.

It’s also not how it happened.

What actually happened — almost certainly — is that HPS gave those practitioners language and structure for things they were already doing intuitively. The fit felt immediate because they were already disqualifiers at heart (or at least primed for the shift). The “transformation” was more recognition than revolution. And the messy parts — the backsliding, the hybrid period, the old habits that came roaring back the first time quota and expectations pressure spiked — those got edited out in the retelling, because they don’t make for a clean narrative.

Thirty years later, that edited version has been converted into gospel.

And it does real damage.

Because when your adoption looks nothing like that — when you’re in the messy middle, running two approaches in parallel, defaulting to old patterns under stress — the myth tells you something is wrong with you. That you’re not committed enough. That you don’t get it.

You get it fine. You’re just human. And humans don’t change in 90 days. They change the way they actually change — nonlinearly, imperfectly, and over much longer than anyone’s highlight reel suggests.

This Friday, we’re burning down the origin myth.

We’ll talk about how HPS adoption actually unfolds, why the Hollywood version persists, and what a more honest — and ultimately more useful — story might look like.

This Friday’s Community Forum — “The 90-Day Myth: How HPS Adoption Actually Happens” The truth is less sexy. It’s also a lot more helpful.

Topic:  The 90-Day Myth — How HPS Adoption Actually Happens
Date:  Friday 1 May 2026
Time:  10:00 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Cost:  Your name and email.  No charge.

If you want to join the conversation, please register HERE. 

Zoom instructions will be provided after you register.

The meeting will be recorded.  The video recording will be available for sale on our website a few days later.  People who attend the meeting in person can get the recording for a 100% discount.  Otherwise, the price of the recording is $25 USD. 

Assuming the Sale, The HPS Way – Forum Conversation on Fri 17 Apr 2026

HPS has a long and proud tradition of absolutes.

Never use the word “interested.” Never say “just.” Never assume the sale. Jacques Werth’s poison word list. The rules handed down from on high by white-haired gurus. Stated with authority.  Based on five decades of experience. Accepted almost immediately. Rarely examined. Only challenged in private or in our thoughts.

Here’s the thing about absolutes: they work great in a classroom. The moment you step into an actual conversation with an actual human being, who didn’t attend the same workshop, reality takes over — and absolutes help no one.

So when someone says “assume the sale,” the good HPS practitioner’s knee-jerk response is: never do that. Fair enough. But is it true? Always? In every context? 

Or is the real answer — as it so often is — a matter of degrees, definitions, and the situation you’re actually in?

This Friday, we’re going after the sacred cows.

We’re going to take every absolute HPS proclamation we can think of — including “never assume the sale” — hold it up to the light, and see if it survives contact with reality. Some will. Some won’t. Some will turn out to be right for the wrong reasons.

Come ready to challenge. Come ready to be challenged.

This Friday’s Community Forum — “Assuming the Sale the HPS Way”
Bring your absolutes. We’ll bring the grill.

The video recording of this conversation is available here for $25 USD.  Transcript and chat are included.

MPPs and Sasquatch – Do They Exist? HPS Forum Conversation on Fri 10 Apr 2026

Let’s talk about something that seems reasonable…
but quietly creates confusion in sales.

What if someone is not clearly a Low Probability Prospect…
and not clearly a High Probability Prospect?

What are they?

  • Medium Probability?
  • Medium-Low?
  • “Somewhere in between”?

After all…
it’s a common belief that the world isn’t binary.

That people can’t be placed into categories like:

  • High Probability
  • Low Probability

Because that would mean we’re judging people.
Treating them like objects.

And High Probability Selling doesn’t do that.

So what actually happens?

In practice…

When we try to measure or define:

  • “medium probability”
  • “kind of interested”
  • “not a no, but not a yes”

We introduce something subtle:

Fog.

Not complexity.
Fog.

And once the fog rolls in:

  • Decision-making slows down
  • Conversations lose clarity
  • CRM pipelines freeze
  • “Interested” starts to look like progress

But nothing actually moves.

Here’s the real question

How do we measure:

  • Inside the sales role?
  • Outside the sales role?
    (marketing, service, fulfillment…)

If we’re trying to align an entire business
with HPS principles?

What we’ll explore in this Forum

  • Why “Medium Probability Prospects” appear to exist
  • Why they don’t actually exist (for measurement)
  • How this confusion shows up in:
    • inbound
    • outbound
    • email / DM
    • CRM pipelines
  • The mindset shift that removes the fog
  • What to do instead — in real conversations

A simple idea… that gets complicated

This is actually simple.

But for all the human effort to simplify things…
we tend to complicate them.

Sometimes so much that:

The simplicity itself becomes hard to see.

Who this is for

  • People using HPS
  • People exploring HPS
  • People trying to align sales with the rest of the business
  • Anyone noticing their pipeline feels… unclear

We talked about this during a Zoom conversation on Friday 10 April 2026. The meeting was well attended.

The meeting was recorded.  The video recording is available for sale on our website for $25 USD. 

What Makes High Probability Selling So Uncomfortable?

What makes (or has made) HPS uncomfortable for you?

When you encountered High Probability Selling — learning about it or trying to apply it — what did you experience?  Did anything make you uncomfortable?  What was that?  Why did it make you feel that way?

We talked about it in a live forum meeting on Zoom.

Topic:  What Makes HPS So Uncomfortable?
Date:  Thursday 26 March 2026
Time:  1:00 PM (USA Eastern Time)
Cost:  Your name and email. No charge to attend.

The meeting was recorded.  The video recording is now available for sale on our website (here) for $25 USD.

The Most Expensive Lie in Sales: Selling the Outcome Without the Get

Most prospects will say they want the outcome.

Better results. More security. Increased revenue.

That’s easy.

What’s not easy — and almost never clarified — is whether they’re willing to do what it takes to produce that outcome.

In High Probability Selling, that’s the Get. What it takes to get the outcome.

And when the Get is unclear or avoided:

  • Prospects say yes too quickly
  • Pipelines fill with non-buyers
  • Deals fall apart late

Not because they didn’t want the result…
but because they were never willing to do the Get.

We took a direct look at that gap in a recent HPS Community Forum meeting.

When:  Thursday 19 March 2026
Format: Live Zoom Forum (discussion-based)
Video Recording: Available here for $25 USD

Do You Have Undiagnosed Hopiumitis?

A year or so ago, one of our HPS Forum participants introduced a word that perfectly describes a common challenge in selling. He called it Hopium.

Hopium is an odorless, colorless, tasteless gas that tends to affect salespeople more than most. Its symptoms are subtle. Its impact is predictable.

Hopium is what keeps us pursuing prospects who ghost us.
It leads us to “add value” excessively in the hope that someone will buy.
It convinces us that because someone needs what we offer, they must therefore want it — and will eventually do business.

Under the influence of Hopium, we:

  • Set appointments with people who have shown no intention of keeping them.
  • Refer to prospects as “clients” or “customers” before they have ever bought.
  • Continue conversations long after intention has failed to appear.

Hopium replaces clarity with optimism.

You arrive at an appointment. The prospect says, “You’ve got 10 minutes to pitch me,” even though they previously agreed to 30 minutes of uninterrupted time.

Instead of disqualifying, Hopium whispers: Maybe I can still make this work.

So we compress, persuade, and perform — abandoning process in favor of possibility.

Hopiumitis often goes undiagnosed.
Some label it “attachment” and attempt to appear detached.
Some fill their calendars with low-probability appointments under the belief that more activity will produce more results.
Others experience it intermittently — especially when pipeline anxiety rises.

A colleague once described regularly driving up to two hours for appointments without first asking the Conditional Commitment Question. The outcome was predictable: four-hour round trips and no business. Nothing unethical. Nothing aggressive. Just an unexamined assumption that interest might convert to intention.

That is Hopiumitis.

The challenge with Hopiumitis is that it feels productive. It feels positive. It feels like perseverance.

But in High Probability Selling, clarity replaces hope.
Intention replaces assumption.
Commitment replaces optimism.

The remedy for Hopiumitis is not force or effort. It is awareness — and adherence to principle.

The symptoms may appear externally, but the cure is internal.

Every moment presents the choice:
Proceed on hope — or proceed on probability.

We discussed the ghosting problem and how it is related to Hopiumitis in a HPS Community Forum conversation on Zoom. The video recording of that meeting will be available starting 6 Mar 2026 on our online store for $25 USD. 

Open vs. Closed Questions – What They Do to a Conversation

An open question is one that gives the other person the greatest latitude in how they can respond.  It leaves room for choice.  A closed question narrows that latitude and places more control with the person asking the question.  In selling, the difference matters because questions do more than gather information — they shape the emotional and decision-making space of the conversation.

A simple rule is to treat any yes/no question as a closed question, and any question that begins with how, why, what, or when as an open question. That’s ok as a general guideline, but there are very important exceptions.

For instance, “Is that something you want?” sounds like a closed question, but it leaves the other person entirely free.  There is no implied preference, no momentum to maintain, and no penalty for saying no.

“How’s that working for you?” sounds like an open question, but is most commonly used as criticism, pretending to be an invitation to reflect.  While many answers are technically possible, only a few feel safe.  In that way, the question reduces choice even as it appears to expand it.

What matters is not whether a question is technically open or closed, but where control resides.  Some questions give control to the other person.  Others quietly pull it back to the person asking.

So why does that happen?  Why do we sometimes try to narrow the other person’s choices, even when we know that pressure creates resistance and makes conversations feel unsafe?  In many cases, it has more to do with habit than with intent.

Restrictive questions often feel efficient.  They can seem like a way to move the conversation along or arrive at an answer more quickly.  The cost is that they also reduce the other person’s freedom to respond — sometimes without our realizing it.  We may also end up getting answers to the wrong questions, while a more open question could have led to something deeper and more useful.

Once you begin to notice what questions do to a conversation, you start hearing them differently — including your own.  The distinction becomes less about choosing the right kind of question and more about noticing where control is showing up.  Over time, that awareness changes the conversation on its own.  Questions begin to open because there is less need to manage the answer.  And the conversation becomes a place where clearer, more useful answers can emerge — naturally, and without force.

We explored this subject more deeply Thursday 22 January 2026 in a live and interactive conversation on Zoom.  The video recording of that conversation is available here ($25 USD).

What do I do when unexpected events screw up my well planned HPS sales process? – Forum Discussion 8 Jan 2026

Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963, was once asked the question, “Considering all of your experience and preparation, what is most likely to blow a government off course?”

His famous reply was, “Events, my good man, events.”  Or as Frederick the Great 18th century soldier’s warning, “All is for naught if an angel pisses on your flintlock.”

No matter what you are selling, products, services, software, advice or ideas, sales is a people business. People, language, and perspective often matter more than product or service or price.

And people have a tendency to move in unpredictable ways and say unpredictable things, often at very unexpected moments.

HPS has been, since the writing of the book, first considered to be a linear process that will produce high probability sales.  And most of the time, with the right implementation and mindset, HPS works reliably well.

However, as a process alone, as our wise old Prime Minister says above, sometimes, sometimes seemingly often, “events, my good man, events” or unpredictable external events occur and we get ourselves lost as to what to do or where to go next.

The next HPS Community Forum will discuss common ways that our best laid HPS intentions can go awry, our prospects can go in completely unexpected directions.

AND, we will provide strategies and ideas on how to get your sales process back on track, both from a one-on-one sales situation, as well as a holistic perspective on the business in which sales take place.

It is essential that one’s own HPS Principles, Values, Standards, and experience are considered in the sales recovery process and we will cover those as well.

High Probability Selling Community Forum Discussion

Live and Interactive Video Discussion on Zoom,
led by Paul Bunn and Carl Ingalls

Thursday 8 January 2026
9:30 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Supported by Voluntary Donation

If you want to attend this Live Forum event, please register here. 

If you want the recording for this Forum event, please wait until the following day (Fri 9 Jan) and then order the recording from the HPS Online Store. 

We Are Suckers for the Appearance of Simplicity

Modern systems promise simplicity everywhere we look.
Fewer buttons.  Fewer choices.  Smarter defaults.
“Don’t worry — we know what you want.”

And we fall for it.

But what’s often called simple isn’t simpler.
It’s just less visible.

Instead of asking, systems decide.
Things happen that we didn’t choose.
Nothing feels complicated — until something goes wrong.

Then the work returns to us and becomes our problem:
figuring out what happened
and how to stop it from happening again.

The complexity never disappeared.
It just moved out of sight.

We accept this because we’re busy.  Overloaded.
Anything that promises to “just work” feels like relief.

But there’s a cost.

When understanding is removed along with effort,
control fades.
predictability fades.
trust fades.

Real simplicity doesn’t hide decisions.
It makes them clear.

Once you see the difference,
you see it everywhere.