Month: April 2026

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.

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

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.