Friday, September 10, 2010

Every selling career faces challenges

Tom Hopkins says stay positive and stay focused.

Every selling career faces challenges. When you hit a challenging cycle in business, there are two keys to moving forward: staying positive and staying focused.

It is critical to keep your attitude positive.

When you’re down, you’re more likely to find reasons not to do the important things—things that make money. Why? When you’re feeling down, your threshold for handling rejection tends to be low as well. In other words, if you allow your spirits to sink, your sales performance will, too.

Your positive attitude is a precious asset—protects it. Work on getting everyone you can to be proactive about being positive. Ask your family or roommates to look for good news to share. Post positive quotes or sayings around the house. You may not be able to have a major influence on what happens outside your home, but you certainly can set the tone for what happens inside it.

In addition to controlling your attitude, you must stay focused. Over the years, I’ve noticed that successful people—those who lead companies, build estates and fulfill their highest potentials—have the ability to get more productivity out of every hour. How do they do it? Their method is amazingly simple. The whole idea centers on not trying to do too much.

It’s an established fact that the average person cannot successfully handle more than six or seven things in their minds at one time. Yet, we try to do it all the time—at least until we learn the simple method of writing them down. Don’t leave me here because you think I’m just telling you to keep a to-do list. This strategy goes deeper than that. Keeping a short list means that you narrow down what’s truly important to do each day. And writing these things down helps you summarize the details and envision the tasks already done.

The next step of this simple strategy is to rank those six items in the order of their importance. In his program Lead the Field, Earl Nightingale talks about using this strategy. Once a friend commented to Nightingale that he never seemed rushed or anxious, and so he must be a very well-organized person. He replied that anxiety is caused by having too many things on your mind and that he kept only one thing in the forefront of his mind—the task at hand. The power of focus that Nightingale harnessed by using this simple strategy allowed him to achieve a level of greatness few ever do.

Another benefit of using this strategy is that if you create your list at the end of each day, you’ll sleep better. Your subconscious mind will work on preparing you for the tasks of the next day while you sleep. You’ll find yourself waking not only refreshed from a good night’s sleep, but also with great ideas for accomplishing the day’s tasks.

One word of caution: Don’t assume this list will allow you to accomplish 12 hours of work in an eight-hour day. Know your limitations. The goal is to have a smooth-flowing, productive day, not a day crammed with so much activity that you have nothing left to give to your personal life. Be certain to include some sort of activity in each day that benefits your physical health. If you’re going to play at the top of your game, your body needs to be healthy. After all, why work hard to earn an incredible income if your health will be too poor to enjoy it?

Posted via email from Duane's Proposterous Posterous

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