I was with a gentlemen the other day and I have known this person for 4 or 5 months. He is one of the most talented sales persons I have ever met. It pains me to say this gentleman lives in a hotel room and lives hand to mouth. To complicate things he also has a drinking problem. Forget the drinking problem and lets focus on mental conditioning. This gentleman is 53 years old and won’t let you forget how great he thinks he is. That’s fair, because it’s true! If he works he is GREAT!

On the highway of life I have literally met thousands of people some in sales, some not who have allowed lack of mental conditioning control their life. It’s funny, we nourish our body two, three and sometimes four or more times a day, yet we nourish our minds almost never! Mental toughness is extremely important in sales and in life. While I was listening to this gentleman describe his failure for the thousandth time, he proceeded to tell me how he kept statistics and he had missed x number of sales in the past six weeks. It was incredible to hear him spout off the exact number of sales he had missed week after week. Not once in our conversation did he tell me how many prospects he SOLD!

There are literally tens of thousands of people who only focus on the negative things in their life. Take it from “The Specialist”, it won’t work. If I thought it was out of your control I wouldn’t be doing this post. I also find it quite amusing that in our social life regarding the opposite sex we manage to keep an amazingly positive outlook. If that was not the case very few people would be married or have girlfriends. Look how much rejection we take before we find the right mate. If it will work in our social life it will work in our business life.

I asked the gentleman, since he had not only kept all these incredible statistics and by writing them down had really reinforced them, what good were they? I challenged him to show me one positive thing that he could derive from that information he had gathered. He had no answer. If he had focused on the 2 sales he DID make each week he have a reference to build from. Not only that he could set goals and maybe over a short period of time move out of that hotel room. I informed him that the bad results had already happened and I couldn’t change them. He might learn something from it, but That’s IT! Move on and focus on the positive.

The longer you focus on your failures the longer your down curve will be. The faster you move on and start focusing on the positive not only will your down curve be shorter but your up curve will last a lot longer. EVERYBODY has ups and downs in life. It’s just how we handle them. Major league baseball players get paid literally millions of dollars if they can get a hit just ONCE in three times at bat. That means they fail 67% of the time. What do you think they focus on? My guest started to tell me that 2 days last week he was positive and nothing happened. SURPRISE! Positive thinking is not a sometimes thing. It is an ALL THE TIME THING! It is not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude in life! Right now that gentleman is just a wandering generality. A person with permanent potential.

“The Specialist” works very consistently, but when things are not going well, as happens to everyone, I work even harder. Consistency and Positive Thinking are a sales professional’s BEST FRIEND!

“The Specialist”