One of the most impactful Ted Talks I have ever seen was a presentation called "The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance" by Shawn Achor.
The presentation is about 6 years old but it is just as relevant today as when it was originally recorded. Check out the link above to judge for yourself.
One of the reason I love the talk is because of a key point Shawn makes which is especially true for folks in the selling profession. We are often conditioned to associate the achievement of sales goals and targets with the attainment of happiness.
What is the problem with that you might ask? Every time we achieve a goal, we reset the target, so our happiness always ends up somewhere over the cognitive horizon.
We have it backwards, happiness should come BEFORE we start chasing our goals and dreams. In fact, according to research cited in the talk, happy salespeople achieve 37% better results. That is a huge advantage.
Watch your local news tonight and try to calculate how much of the broadcast is devoted to negative news versus positive news. Our brains have been conditioned to believe that the actual mix of negative versus positive in the world is at least an 80/20 split to the negative side. Pretty tough to walk around smiling with that paradigm!
So how do we "re-wire" our brains to be happy before we attain our goals? It starts with writing down 3 things a day, every day, that we are grateful for. Our brains can be re-trained to a happiness mindset and keeping a daily journal is a key part of the equation.
If you want to learn more about how to be happy and THEN sell, watch the video above and then, if you are interested in learning how we bake this into our work with sales teams, drop me a line.
Sandler Training in Denver provides sales training, management and leadership training, and professional development for individuals and organizations. Let us know how we can help your team.
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