Change Your Thinking, Change Your Results

I make no secret of the fact that this blog is only indirectly about business and sales.  While you’ll see the occasional post about a particular sales skill or business task, what you’ll usually find is something about how to think differently: about yourself, about your life, about your business.  My primary purpose is to get you thinking about your thinking.

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the challenges that so many are facing in their lives and in their businesses, and wondering if there isn’t something more we can all do about improving the situation.  Of course, being an optimist, I always believed that there is, and I got what I was looking for: gratitude.

For so many of us, gratitude is the missing link in our happiness, and a lack of gratitude for the good in our lives makes a bad situation seem even worse.  And while I know and understand completely that many people are facing challenging, sometimes overwhelming, circumstances in their lives, there are still things, a lot of things, to be grateful for.  Like what, you ask?  Well, it’s going to be different for each of us.  I know what I’m grateful for, but it’s up to you to decide what you’re grateful for.

And yes, you read that right: I said you have to decide what to be grateful for.  Gratitude, like any other feeling, is something we have to choose.  Especially if you’re experiencing difficulty in your life, it can be a difficult choice to make; after all, it’s so much easier just to see the bad and to wallow in it.  Finding something to be grateful for in a bad situation takes a lot of effort, but it gets easier with practice.  Here’s a shortcut: write down five things you’re grateful for on a 3 x 5 card and carry it around in your pocket.  That way, when a challenge comes up, you can pull out your card, read it, and get right back on track.

Why choose gratitude, though?  Can it really have an impact, other than just making us feel good when things are bad?  Absolutely!  Think about it for a minute: if you’re miserable and wallowing in the despair of your bad circumstances, how motivated are you going to be to go out and find new customers for your business?  If you’re giving in to the belief that nothing is working and that the world and the economy are falling apart, why wake up early and stay up late working on that new project?  What’s the point, right?

On the other hand, if you consciously choose to find something to be grateful for, you’re more likely to be moved to take some kind of action, aren’t you?  If you wake up in the morning, thrilled to alive and grateful that you’re healthy enough to get through another day, doesn’t that make you want to spend that day in a worthwhile way?  If, even though you may not really like your job, you’re grateful for having it, won’t you do better work than if you choose to focus on how much you hate it?  I think you get the point.

Gratitude isn’t a sales skill, it’s a life skill.  And, like so many of the life skills we choose to ignore in our pursuit of the perfect “closing technique” or “objection-handling response”, it’s something we can practice that will have an incredible impact, not only on our lives, but on our businesses as well.

If you really want to start changing the results you’re getting, start looking at the way you’re thinking.  If you’re not choosing to be grateful, positive, optimistic and happy, you might want to reconsider your strategy.  Yes, these are challenging times we live in.  That said, what are you choosing to think, feel and do about it?  I recommend that you think of something to be grateful for, feel that gratitude in your heart, then go out and demonstrate that you truly are grateful by working on creating solutions instead of focusing on problems!