What I want to discuss is the one characteristic you will find in all successful people, let alone successful sales people: a positive mindset. I especially want to look at why a positive mindset leads to success, and how you can train your mind to be positive.

So, here’s how a positive mindset leads to success:

• Overcoming fear: I find in my discussions with people about building their career or starting out in sales, that the biggest obstacle to progress is fear. Positivity increases your ability to overcome that fear, not necessarily banishing fear, but developing the mindset that lets you ignore it.
• Eliciting positive responses: A positive attitude often elicits positive responses from other people which will help you in any business, or career interaction.
• Motivating yourself: A positive attitude increases your feeling of self-belief and this in turn motivates you. If you fail at a task at your first attempt, it is your positive attitude that will motivate you towards success in your second try!
• Reducing stress: A positive attitude helps you to reduce the amount of stress in your life and deal more successfully with that stress when it does come your way.
• It’s good for your health: Psychologists Segerstrom & Sephton, when testing the correlation between positivity and the immune system, found that a positive mindset seemed to boost the immune system. So positivity might really be good for your health!

Now, it’s all very well to say that a positive mindset leads to success, but how can you develop this mindset for yourself? Perhaps the first thing to say is that positivity is a conscious choice, and as with all choices, it can take effort to build a positive attitude. So here’s how to start:

• Set goals: Setting goals can give you motivation and foster self-belief when you achieve these goals. These goals have to be measurable, achievable, and challenging. What works for me is to set three goals of varying difficulty, so that I will achieve at least one of them, and this motivates me to keep going and achieve the other two.
• Learn from past experiences: The best experiences to learn from here are the ones that didn’t go your way. Instead of focussing on what went wrong, focus on what you did right, and on fixing what went wrong in the future.
• Making lists: A tried and tested way of improving your positivity is to write a list of three positive things that happened to you per day. These can be things that you are grateful for, things that you are proud of, or any other list of things that make you feel positive.
• Scheduling positivity: Another thing that I do is to schedule positive things into your life. When you’re planning your day, make sure you have included scheduled events that make you feel more positive. For me, this often means scheduling a daily walk which helps me relax.
• Socialising: Humans need social interaction, so ensure you are making time for this every day.
• Cut negativity loose: The last tip is to cut people or things that make you feel negative out of your life. This may not be 100% achievable, but it goes some way towards helping you see what makes you happy.

So, try and put a few tips from today into practice over the coming week. Next time I will be looking at sales techniques that you can use in your day-to-day life.

If you have any questions I am positively looking forward to hearing them!