subject: The Amazing Power Of Persistent Thought [print this page] If someone consistently hold the thought in their mind that they are not good at sales and clients are not willing to do business from him, this very thought will eventually become a belief. This belief will flash through his mind before he pick up the phone and make a sales call to a prospective client. He will expect the worst and this will automatically affect his confidence. The prospective client will pick up on the lack of confidence during the conversation and will be hesitant to do business. This then reinforces the belief in the mind of the salesperson that he is indeed a poor salesperson, thus creating a vicious cycle of frustration and disappointment. I know this first hand because my first job was in sales and at the time I truly believed I was the worst salesperson in the company.
Consistently holding this negative belief in my subconscious resulted in me experiencing results that further reinforced this belief in my mind. Eventually I came to the point were I was faced with a crisis - losing my job. I had one of two choices quit my job and look for another or become better at my job. The former was not much of a choice given that most of the jobs available in my field at the time were sales jobs. Besides, if any prospective employer had taken a look at my sales figures, I doubt if they would have warmed up to the idea of hiring me. The latter however required that for me to get better at my job, something I to change. I had to change. My thinking had to change. My beliefs in myself and my ability had to change.
I changed gears and began to implement Empowered Thinking. Empowered thinking or the ability to always think in the possible is a primary differentiator between success and failure. The more of these empowering behaviour and thinking patterns we consistently access, the more hard-wired they become in our minds until they eventually become habit and manifest in our behaviour.
Unlike habits that run us on autopilot and often times produce adverse effects, consistently accessing empowering thinking and behaviour patterns requires conscious effort on our part. It requires commitment and a serious desire to turn our lives around and achieve our goals.
How do you know if a thought or behaviour pattern is toxic or empowering? Just ask yourself the following question and be honest with yourself. What emotions do you feel whenever you think this thought of behave this way? If it makes feel great, positive and that anything is possible, stay with it. If it makes you feel negative, frustrated, disappointed and angry, dump it.
Our thinking has a direct correlation with how those around us respond to us and as a result influencing the degree of the successes or failures we may experience.
How we think about ourselves, a situation or others stirs up emotion within us in relation to the person or situation. This then affects our behaviour, body language and mannerisms often times without even us realising.
Those around us pick up on these signals and respond accordingly. This is the simple reason that confident people are generally more successful and respected. Those around them pick up on the confidence signal and translate it as this person knows what they are talking about, this person knows what his doing, this person is efficient etc.
As a result customers and colleagues will feel more at ease dealing with them or doing business with them.
In practising Empowered Thinking, I began telling myself that I was a great sales person, I began to listen to how the heavy-hitters made their sales calls, I began making more calls than usual (after all it was numbers game), began to find out more ways to add value to clients by doing more market research, began to make my presentations more visually appealing, began writing magazine and newspaper articles which I forwarded to my clients, I began to dress more smartly, began doing more prospecting and asking for more referrals etc. Suffice to say that the story ended well and not only did my sales improve drastically, but within a year, I was promoted to a management position with all the bells and whistles. I refused to allow my circumstances determine what I was capable of, even though things seemed pretty grim back them.
The morale of the story is simply this - our own minds, if properly harnessed can do our bidding and give us whatever we desire; if left to their own devices, our own minds can become our worst enemies. Given how the mind operates, it becomes imperative that we develop habits and behaviour patterns that will empower us and propel us closer to our goals and ambitions. It becomes imperative that we choose thoughts that empower us and stir in us the belief that we can achieve whatever we set our minds upon.
