Top Sales Mind set Part 2

 Confidence Plus Taking control of the circumstances and situations around you will develop your self-confidence. When you consider the amount of rejection that many sales people encounter, the fact that many salespeople lack self-confidence is not surprising. Top performing people in any industry typically possess a high level of self-confidence. They may not necessarily possessed this confidence all their lives. I have not always have a lot of self-confidence. Outwardly I was Mr. Confident while on the inside I seriously doubted my abilities. I had to wrestle with my own mental baggage for years before I became internally confident. Learning to deal with this begins with letting go of our personal baggage. Here are some methods that can help you develop a higher degree of self-confidence. Affirmations One of the most powerful tools is affirmations. Simply put, affirmations are statements that we repeat to ourselves frequently. Although many people are familiar with this concept, few actually use them on a regular basis. You may remember the Saturday Night Live skit that satirized affirmations. The truth is that affirmations really do work. They are designed to replace feelings of inferiority, doubt, and the lack of self-worth. The way they work is simple; there are only 3 rules that you need to remember; 1 Affirmations must be personal. Only you can develop an affirmation for yourself. When you express it begin with "I". For example, "I earn $35,000 a year." 2 Put affirmations into the present tense. Avoid saying, "I want to quit smoking." Instead, state, "I enjoy the lifestyle of a non-smoker." 3 Affirmations must be positive. Avoid using negative words. For instance, "I don't want to gain more weight" should be phrased as "I look great in a bathing suit." The next important point of affirmations is that you must repeat them aloud and several times a day. Your goal is to drive this new message deep into your subconscious and replace the other thoughts that occupy your brain with it. The most effective way to do this is through repetition. The more often you repeat an affirmation the more your subconscious goes to work to produce it and make it become a reality. Sound too simple? I too was also skeptical when I first heard about affirmations. Then I decided to try them. I was on my way to an interview for a job I was hungry for. I had to drive for forty-five minutes to get there, and during most of it I kept repeating what I wanted the outcome of the interview to be. I envisioned myself in the role I was being interviewed for. I kept that picture focused in my mind and stated my affirmation aloud repeatedly. I told myself this for the next several interviews and a few months later I was hired. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I don't really believe in coincidences. We create our own situations and outcomes. We determine what happens to us. Here is another example. Eighteen months after beginning this new job I decided to quit smoking. I created several affirmations that reflected the outcome I imagined. "I am a non-smoker." "I enjoy a smoke free life." "I live the lifestyle of a non-smoker." "I enjoy living as a non-smoker." I repeated these affirmations several times a day, long before the deadline I had set. A few months later I did quit, almost five months sooner than I had originally intended. I also continued to repeat these affirmations for the first month afterwards to help me get through the withdrawal period. Affirmations helped me picture myself as a non-smoker. They helped my sub-conscious mind make it a reality. For someone who smoked for more than twenty years, this was a challenging picture to create. You can use affirmations easily to develop self-confidence. First, choose an area in which you wish to increase your self-confidence. For example, you might have a hard time talking to people in a social setting. You could create an affirmation that concentrates on this. "I carry on intelligent conversations with everyone I meet" or "I speak confidently to the people I meet." The goal is to repeat it out loud as often as you can prior to the event. I have use similar statements prior to attending networking functions and my confidence has in these situations has improved dramatically. You may not see instant results, which is one of the major reasons why people don't accomplish what they truly could. You have programmed your mind to act and think in a certain manner for years. A few statements repeated once or twice are not enough to overcome that entrenched programming. This will require constant repetition. Day after day, over and over again. In this world of get-richquick, lose-weight-fast and solve-credit-problems-instantly, people are looking for easy immediate results. If they don’t see results right away, they figure the process does not work. In fact, you must be prepared to devote considerable time to replacing years of an engrained thought or habit. After I quit smoking, I craved a cigarette as soon as I got into my car after work, as soon as I finished eating a meal, had a cup of coffee, or drank a beer. I had to get through several months before these cravings subsided. When I felt them coming on, I would think of my affirmation, repeat it, and remind myself that I was not a non-smoker. Years after quitting I have still the occasional craving, but it usually disappears quickly. It just takes time to change a habit. The same thing holds true with affirmations. Allow your subconscious the appropriate amount of time to generate the new thought, to bring into your life events and circumstances consistent with your new thoughts. If you are patient and maintain a regular routine of repeating your affirmations, they will happen. The trick, of course, is to convince your conscious mind to believe them. If you are currently earning $25,000 a year and your goal is to earn $100,000, you must break this goal in digestible, bite-sized chunks first. Don’t make that $75,000 leap in one affirmation; your conscious mind will not accept it as being possible. Instead, create several affirmations. Start with the goal of increasing your income to $35,000. Once you achieve this, create a new affirmation with your income at $50,000, and then $75,000. then make the jump to the final figure. You’ll find taking the smaller steps much more effective that trying to make a huge jump at all at once. If you don’t believe that affirmations work, that’s fine. I don’t expect you to accept this concept immediately. But do try using it. Create an affirmation for one small change you would like to make in your life. Repeat it to yourself frequently every day. Be patient. Before long, you will notice the change gradually beginning to happen. Talk to Me Another way to build your self-confidence is to change the information you feed yourself. All of us have a little voice inside our head that provides us with a running commentary on everything we do. This self-talk often does us more harm than good. When we make a mistake it will chastise, berate, and criticize us. When I first heard that roughly eighty percent of our self-talk is negative I was skeptical. Then I began listening to what my own self-talk. Sure enough, most of the reinforcement I was giving myself was negative. I consciously tried to change my internal voice to mostly positive comments. Instead of criticizing myself when I did something wrong, I told myself what I learned from the mistake. I focused on something other than criticizing myself. Before long, I found that my entire personality changed. I became very positive and optimistic. This is not as easy as it sounds. Consider how many negative messages we are exposed to everyday: it is little wonder that our self-talk is not the most positive. What do you read when you open a newspaper? When you watch television? When you listen to the radio? Most of the information we receive daily focuses on negative events. We hear about wars, murders, robberies, deaths, political unrest, scandals, labour disputes, and massive casualties from weather catastrophes such as floods and hurricanes. Where's the positive information in a paper? Usually tucked away on page 24 with twelve lines devoted to it. Consider this: would you eat garbage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Then why would you fill your head with garbage every day? Transforming your self-talk from negative to positive is a difficult process that requires constant effort and attention. Begin by telling yourself that you are going to be positive, that you are going to give yourself positive self-talk. Whenever you catch the voice inside your head feeding you negative dialogue, immediately stop and replace it with something positive instead. As time goes on and you become more adept at this, your self-talk will become more positive automatically. You will continue to have negative. The difference is that when you begin to think them, you will recognize that is happening and will be able stop it and focus on the positive. Once you are able to accomplish this you will face another obstacle – other people – individuals who seem to have been placed on this earth just to make life difficult for us. Some time ago, I worked with a very pessimistic person. Her mission seemed to be to bring me down. In fact, one afternoon she told me that I was not really a positive person. When I asked her what she meant, she answered that no one could be optimistic all the time, so I was just programming myself to be positive. The first words on the tip of my tongue were “Just as you program yourself to be miserable?” Fortunately, I bit back my response and avoided embarking on a major battle. I smiled and said, “What’s wrong with that?” She gave me an evil grin and exclaimed, “Ha! I knew it!” then she walked off, leaving me to figure out exactly what she meant by the last comment. Negative people will challenge people who display positive mental attitudes. They will try to make you one of them – miserable and pessimistic. If you succumb to their efforts you will wind up having the life slowly squeezed out of you. I learned this the hard way. In one of the companies I worked for, one of my coworkers was this type of person. I didn't realize it at the time, but any time I spoke with him, I left feeling miserable, depressed, and discontented with how life at work. Several years later I finally realized what had been going on. He had been trying to recruit me into his club! Now, I socialize only with positive, energetic, enthusiastic people. So what does all of this have to do with sales? So far, we’ve discussed how our personal attitudes can and will affect our actions and results on the floor. We need to prevent our personal baggage from interfering with our decision to try new approaches. We can build up our personal confidence, which will lead to higher sales. We can use affirmations to reinforce specific behaviours we want to develop. We can use positive self-talk to reinforce what we have done well in a sale rather than dwell on what we did wrong. Each of these elements contributes to developing a healthy, positive, powerful attitude, also known as PMA or Positive Mental Attitude – the kind of attitude that will help us become successful on the sales floor.