Is the Not In Your Thinking Your Obstacle to Sales Success?

To increase sales begins with about your thoughts and your overall thinking process about selling to yourself. In The Strangest Secret: How To Live the Life Your Desire, Earl Nightingale quoted Dr. Albert Schweitzer who answered the question: "What is wrong with men today?" with this simple response "Men simply don't think"

Thinking for many in sales has become an obstacle for success. Napoleon Hill saw that in his book Think and Grow Rich. Society has become even a greater abyss of non-thinkers, conformists, who take the thoughts of others for truth. For example, if you hear that the economy is bad, will you go with the flow or believe something else?

There is a video traveling cyberspace about the forthcoming union of Mexico, U.S. and Canada to form North American Union complete with supporting facts (?). And people actually believe this to be true. What is difference between this video and the current belief about the economy?

Speaking about the economy, drive by any mall and see of the cars not in the lots. Travel through the many subdivisions and see only one car in the driveway. Of course, you are going to see malls full of cars, usually 2 cars in the driveways and people still going to work.

What we think we can achieve or cannot achieve in sales is where sales success begins. For example, if you are realtor, real estate agent or mortgage broker by all accounts you should have had a terrible year. I just read that 2007 was the worst year for the housing and real estate industry since the depression.

Yet, one of my clients who is a mortgage broker increased business 33% in 2007 over 2006 in spite of all the doom and gloom in the housing industry. We achieved the sales goal for 2007, but fell a little short of the BHAG (big, hairy audacious goal). And through all this, she delivered her third child in early September and has been working from home since that time.

Plans have been established for 2008 goals where we are using 33% as the increase. And here is where it gets interesting. When we started working together she told me that "I do not think I can achieve this sales goal." She was very nervous. And goal setting does make a lot of people uncomfortable because it makes you think. Now with that goal achieved, she once again said "I do not think I can achieve this goal." Her not thinking is her obstacle to selling more not It is the economy stupid.

By not thinking, we become what we think about, nothing, a shadow of someone else, a non-entity, a whisp in the wind. No wonder many people in sales never realize the success that they are seeking not to mention people in general who want business or personal success.

Not thinking has been a continual challenge for man. The Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, saw that when he said: "A man's life is what his thoughts make of it." Fifteen hundred years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed Aurelius when he said: "A man is what he thinks about all day long."