An Exchange of Emotion

Before you exchange money for goods and services, a smaller micro-transaction takes place.

An exchange of emotion.

This invisible currency drives every sale, every connection, every moment when someone decides to lean in rather than walk away. It’s one of the earliest lessons people learn when entering sales: facts tell, but feelings sell. I think it’s true in other occupations as well.

Our first example is from Mission Impossible III.

A Living Organism

It had nothing to do with explosions or stunts. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is hosting an engagement party with his fiancé, Julia. He approaches a few of her friends to get acquainted.

Kevin starts the small talk, “Department of Transportation,” he says to Ethan.

“Yeah,” Ethan replies, “I’ve been there over ten years now”—surprising even himself with the decade passed. Of course, we know the truth, Ethan finds ways to spice up his day-to-day with the IMF (Impossible Mission Force).

Kevin asks, “What do you do at the DOT?”

This is the exchange that got me. Ethan’s response is full of passion and intrigue.

“I study traffic patterns. You hit the brakes for a second, just tap them on the freeway, you can literally track the ripple effect of that action across a 200-mile stretch of road. Because traffic has a memory. It’s amazing. It’s like a living organism.”

Ethan could’ve given a flat, “Oh, I push papers,” or a sarcastic, “PowerPoint, mostly PowerPoint.” Instead, he leans in. His eyes light up, his voice hums with fascination. He’s not peddling a product; he’s transferring passion.

The result? As Ethan walks away to freshen their martinis, Annie says, “I’d marry him.”

And her friend agrees, “I would, too.”

Traffic patterns might not turn you on, but what about someone who is truly passionate about traffic patterns?

Enthusiasm knocks into people like dominoes, from one to the next, contagious as brake lights. They don’t buy into his job—they buy into him. It’s a masterclass in emotional contagion. Passion, even about something as mundane as traffic, sells when it’s genuine.

That little scene changed the way I drive. We’ve all seen a car aggressively jabing at their brakes, causing a chain reaction—car after car behind them doing the same, and a traffic jam is created out of thin air. You keep driving, expecting to see an accident ahead, and it never appears. Maybe the first driver dropped a Big Gulp in their lap. Who knows. But small actions travel.

Emotion can travel through time and space like those brake lights. Even faster.

I know it’s just a script, and I realize Ethan has more tantalizing work than studying traffic patterns. But I’m still left wondering:

Does Ethan find traffic patterns fascinating?

I think he does.

Exchange complete.

Have You Ever Cried at A Movie?

One of the most notable figures associated with this idea is Zig Ziglar, a renowned American salesman and motivational speaker. Ziglar famously said, “Selling is essentially a transfer of feelings,” which captures the essence of sales being an emotional exchange rather than just a transactional one. His work, particularly in books like Secrets of Closing the Sale, emphasized that successful selling hinges on connecting with a customer’s emotions and transferring enthusiasm or confidence to them.

In his book Ziglar on Selling, he asks “Have you ever gone to a movie and laughed? Have you ever gone to a movie and cried? The odds are at least four thousand to one that you answered yes to both. Next question: Do you really believe you felt those emotions because of something they put in the seats? Or was it because of something put on the screen that went into your mind and in turn affected your thinking and your emotions?”

The answer is obvious. Emotions transfer. They leap from screen to mind, from person to person, from seller to buyer. It’s not magic—it’s human nature.

“It’s Called the Carousel”

In the Season 1 finale of Mad Men (“The Wheel,” 2007), Don Draper pitches the Kodak Carousel slide projector not as a gadget, but as a time machine fueled by nostalgia.

He flips through personal family photos—his own kids, his wife—and says, “It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels—around and around, and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”

The room’s silent; the execs are visibly moved. He’s not selling features; he’s transferring longing and warmth, tapping into their deepest emotions. The clients buy it because they feel it. It’s a textbook display of emotional contagion—Don’s sentimentality becomes theirs.

“Always Keep A Little Something Sweet in Your Pocket”

Edith Eger’s body was failing her. It was late April 1945, and the Nazis had forced her and thousands of others on a death march away from Auschwitz as the Allies closed in. She’d survived months of starvation, but now, collapsed in a ditch near Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen, her strength was gone. Her sister Magda was beside her, barely clinging to life herself. The air was thick with the stench of decay—bodies littered the ground. Edith shivered uncontrollably; her breaths shallow. She was 17, but her body felt ancient, hollowed out by hunger.

Eventually, the Nazis fled, leaving the survivors to die. She was slipping away, too weak to even cry out as American GIs from the 71st Infantry Division approached, unsure of what they were seeing.

The soldiers called out for survivors amongst the piles of bodies. Edith doesn’t move. She can’t move. She doesn’t have the strength.

They call out again, and Edith is more scared than ever. She is scared they won’t see that she is alive. She wonders if she marched hundreds of miles just to vanish into the mud.

Then, a soldier knelt beside her. He saw her—really saw her—a child that had become invisible to the world had now been found.

Edger said, he reached into his pocket, “‘Food,’ the soldier says. He looks into my eyes. His skin is the darkest I have ever seen, his lips thick, his eyes deep brown. He helps me lift my hand to my mouth. He helps me release the beads onto my dry tongue. Saliva gathers and I taste something sweet. I taste chocolate. I remember the name of this flavor. Always keep a little something sweet in your pocket, my father said.”

“It’s deadly both to sustain and to end a hunger. A blessing, then, that the strength I need to chew returns to me only intermittently. A blessing that the GIs have little food to offer, mostly candy, those little beads of color, M&M’s, we learn.”

M&M Limited Partnership was started in 1941, a joint venture between Bruce Murrie and Forrest Mars, the entrepreneurial sons of William Murrie, president of Hershey Chocolate, and Franklin Mars, founder of Mars, Inc.

Mars shipped millions of M&M’s to GIs throughout the war. It was the right product at the right time, and the military contract was a necessity when commercial supplies of chocolate and sugar were being rationed. The military needed calorie dense foods that would be shelf stable. What better than this new product that melted in your mouth, not in your hand.

In the wildest dreams of Murrie and Mars, I don’t think they could have seen a story like Eger’s coming back after the war.

Have they even heard it? Sure. And sadly, hundreds like it.

But I’ve never heard them discuss it. Never seen an M&M commercial reenact it. They don’t want to commercialize the experience people had in the concentration camps. And that’s the right decision. But when I read that story, I cried. When she described those chocolate morsels in her cold, lifeless hands, I said to myself, Oh my god, it’s M&M’s. And I’ve never looked at an M&M the same way since. In the darkest moment, just before the dawn, that little chocolate—as mundane as it is—was part of a life-changing experience.

Emotion exchanged.