Your guide to a healthier perspective of life
Good salespeople have good answers. Great salespeople ask great questions. Ask open-ended questions and then repeat their answer back to them to get your prospect to feel understood. This also helps because it allows the prospect to clarify something you may have misunderstood or assumed incorrectly.
If you are confident in your abilities and are a good communicator (i.e., you listen well and know how to encourage others to give you more relevant information), you will do well in sales.
Don’t hold other people to your standards. It’s their life, not yours. Be happy for them if they’re happy with the decisions they’ve made.
When you judge others based on their decisions, it is often coming from a place of resentment. Whether you resent them for doing something you wish you could do or whether you disagree with their lifestyle, either way, judging them won’t make them change and only presents downside to you. Judging others never brings you joy. Eliminate judging and complaining for a better day.
What would you do if you knew that you only had five years to live? You‘re not sick. But you will die and you know the date. In this made up scenario, you’re not allowed to accumulate any additional debt (you can’t just put everything on credit and live it up).
Would you live a lifestyle similar to what you’re living now? What would you change? Would you act differently? Would you work at the same job? Would you work less so you can spend more time with your friends and family?
The point of this thought exercise is to get you to think about the actions you’re taking on a daily basis. Often, we waste too much of our lives because we think we have such a long time on this planet. We lose days, which turn into months, and those months turn into years. Next thing we know, five years have gone by and we’re still doing the same thing, complaining about the same thing, and not doing anything to improve our lives.
So what answers did you come up with to the above questions? What is stopping you from doing those things? Is it fear or a limiting belief? Or did you just not realize that you’ve been wasting time and that we are all dying (only some more quickly than others)? We all have a finite amount of time on this planet. We might as well make the most of it.
So much of your happiness in life is about how you frame the events around you. Jon Gordon talks about the power of positive thinking through mindset shifts. By telling yourself that you get to do something, not that you have to do it, you are reframing the same event by thinking of it as a positive experience instead of a negative one. It’s how you choose to think about it.
For example, say you just had a great weekend with your family and friends. But here comes Monday morning. You don’t want to go to work. But instead of thinking, “I have to go to work today and I don’t want to,” reframe it to think how you get to go to work and make a living, when others are physically or mentally unable to do so.
Or say you are thinking about skipping the gym. You hate having to work out. Once again, that’s the wrong attitude. Instead, choose to think about how you get to work out so you can live a longer, healthier life.
You get to give your kids a bath, when some people want kids of their own but can’t have them…
You get to go to your parents house for dinner, when other people have lost one or both parents…
The examples are never ending, but no matter the circumstances, it always comes down to how you think about the event/task/situation. It is always a choice for you to make – to be content/grateful or to be upset.
Next time you find yourself thinking that you have to do something, stop and say, “no, I get to do this.” Retrain you’re thought process. Start thinking about how lucky you are. Don’t take things for granted and the happiness you experience in life will improve.
“Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?” – T.S. Elliot
We are so inundated with information, most of which is irrelevant, that we lose the part that is actually important – the applicable knowledge.
Don’t confuse the two. Start/continue to listen to audiobooks and podcasts, to read articles and books, and to try to learn as much as possible, but make sure you occasionally take a step back and figure out if you’re just consuming noise (information), or if what you’re letting in will help you. Then apply what you’ve learned. The best teacher is experience. You can read as much as you want, but you need to actually start “doing” to gain a complete knowledge of a subject.