Selling Success is not only determined by your knowledge of the sales cycle, selling strategies, sales secrets, or even your people skills. As important as these things are, your personal emotions will often determine your level of attainment and financial success in your selling career and in other areas of your life. Regrettably, many sales training books and courses ignore this area completely.
“Change your emotions, when needed, in order to alter your subsequent actions.”
Feelings and emotions that produce happiness and a positive attitude are great. They will propel you forward. When these do occur, you usually need to change nothing!
On the other hand, there are feelings that create emotions that produce sadness or anger that are not so great, because they weigh you down and drain your energy and creativity in all aspects of your life. There is a simple two-part strategy that can enable you to remove these bad (negative, angry, destructive or unproductive) emotions from your life.
Understand that feelings just happen in response to a situation, any situation. You can’t prevent experiencing those feelings in any way. The emotions that arise out of those feelings are also, by and large, not preventable either. However, the actions that they can produce are absolutely controllable, as are the lingering negative feelings and emotions. When you have mindful conscious awareness of your feelings, and subsequent emotions, you develop the power to choose your future actions along with your future thoughts.
There is a moment, for some a very brief moment, between the experience of feelings and emotions before actual action is taken. What you choose to do then in this moment is critical to the action you will take and the results that you will obtain (understand that for every action there is always a consequence).
1. Stretch Out the Moment
The first key here is to stretch out that moment for a second or two, longer if needed, so that you can analyze it, then consciously choose your action rather than just reacting to something and making the inappropriate choice of actions.
Most reactive actions are in response to programming built into our DNA that relates to our fight or flight mechanism. It is there to protect us in life threatening situations. But let’s face it, most of the situations we encounter on a daily basis are not life threatening and therefore don’t demand a reactionary action. Slow it down, think it out and only then take action. Take the positive action that will serve you or someone else. The old wisdom to count to 10 when something disturbs you is actually very powerful advice, as it helps you not make a rash decision that you’ll regret later.
2. Replace Your Negative Thoughts With Positive Ones
The second key is to replace your negative thoughts with positive ones. Because what you think about the most will grow. It is actually impossible to have a positive and negative thought in your mind at precisely the same time. Therefore, work to displace the negative thoughts with positive ones and your feelings will change. Continue this process as much as needed.
Here is a simple example of this. Perhaps you see a car accident unfold in front of you as you are on your way to work one morning. You call 911 and stop to lend as much assistance as you can. There are seriously injured people and you feel upset, sad, and perhaps angry, because people are hurting. These are all perfectly natural feelings and emotions. However, if they are not put aside and replaced with positive thoughts, you will likely be unable to do anything of value for the rest of the day.
Once the paramedics arrive and you can be on your way, you will now be in a position to pause and choose your ongoing thoughts. You can allow thoughts of that accident and injured people to linger in your mind all day which will weigh you down and distract or even depress you. This is not a good thing at all.
Or, you can replace those thoughts with ones where you have helped these people the best you could and they are now in the hands of professionals.
A much better thought process, don’t you think? You can be grateful that more cars were not involved. you can be grateful no one died. It doesn’t matter which positive thoughts you choose to use. These new thoughts will allow you to put the incident behind you so you can get on with your day.
3. Avoid Situations That Negatively Affect Your Emotions
Just one final thought here.
Do your best to avoid situations that consistently lead to your feeling bad. For example, if watching the news every night after dinner upsets you, quit watching the news and watch something else. The truly important stuff will find you eventually.
