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.
“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.
“Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.” – Tim Ferriss
Embrace being different. Everyone is different in their own ways, but don’t be different just to get attention. Be different because you actually believe in what you’re doing and saying. Be different because that’s the real you and you are enjoying being yourself. Do things differently than the majority because you are striving to improve your life in some sense. Why would you try to be the same as everyone else? Why blend in with the crowd to the point where you’re completely unnoticed?
I love one quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said, “The worst thing I could be is the same as everyone else.” I believe that. Let’s look at some stats to see what “everyone else” is doing and why it’s better for your health to do the opposite…
The United States has an obesity rate of about ~35% and has an additional ~35% of the population is considered overweight. So you are considered to be overweight if you’re the “average” U.S. citizen. Why are we getting so big? If you listen to what everyone usually says, it’s because they have no time to work out or that eating healthy is too expensive.
Well, according to a Nielsen report, in 2017, the average citizen watched about 4 hours of tv per day! Yet somehow they have “no time” to work out, to cook a healthy meal, or to work on our physical fitness in a meaningful way.
Why would you want to follow the herd in this case? Why be “normal?” People will think that you’re weird if you work out daily, if you order a salad when going out to eat, or if you’re not up to speed on the latest Netflix series. You need to be ok with that. Because you aren’t being different just to be “weird.” You’re being different because you have found a better way to improve your life…a way that is more effective AND more fun.
People will call you crazy (sometimes to your face, other times behind your back). But who cares what other people think about YOUR life? Who should care the most about the quality of your life? You. And who can influence the outcome of your life the most? You. Don’t live your life only seeking the approval of others, otherwise you’ll never be happy.