No Garbage In, No Garbage Out

Nothing has a greater impact on your sales results—or your results in life in general—than your beliefs. Your belief system is your blueprint of how you believe the world works. It is your personal psychology.

A poor psychology equals poor results and a life that is less than it might be. A healthy personal psychology delivers better results and a life that is what it might be.

You have to protect your personal psychology from external threats.

What You Put In

As difficult as this is to believe, even with an overwhelming culture like ours in the United States, you can control what you put into your brain. You can control what you allow into your mind and what you allow to affect your belief system. It’s difficult, but you can—and you should—exercise control over what you allow in.

First, and probably most important, you control the people with who you spend your time. Negativity is the only cancer that spreads by contact, and you can protect yourself by avoiding negative people. Their negativity is the expression of a poor personal psychology.

You can also avoid people who have a too small vision of them self. Because they can’t see the possibilities that are available to them, they will insist that you not see what is possible for you.

Salespeople with poor personal psychologies complain about their territory, complain about the compensation structure, complain about their competition, and believe that external forces over which they have no control cause their lack of success. Their words carry a disease that can enter through your ears and infect your personal psychology. Avoid them.

Second, you have to protect yourself from a society and a culture bent on negativity and quick fixes. Today’s politics are as divisive and vitriolic as ever, each sideattributing evil intentions to the other. Today’s news is a parade of negativity, most of it exaggerated in order to sell. And the culture is coarser when it comes to television, movies, music, and much of might have been at one time called literature. Allowing this into your mind shapes your view of the world as a horrible, hostile, and hopeless place (The truth is, it’s getting better all of the time).

You also have to avoid those who sell you the idea that there is a quick fix or an easy answer. Seductive lies, they are.

You make the choices as to what you allow into your brain through your eyes and ears. You choose what you watch on television, what you see when you go to the movies, and what you listen to on your Internet radio.

If garbage comes in, it is because you are allowing it to come in. What would you expect to be the result of taking all of this negative external images and ideas into your mind? The result for most of us is that the garbage that comes in is the garbage that starts coming out.

The garbage you put manifests itself in a poor personal psychology, and then the garbage comes out.

Instead of Garbage

There are people that you can choose to spend time with who haven’t allowed other people or external forces as overwhelming as our culture to impact their personal psychology. Some seem to be immune, some avoid the things that should be avoided, and some have such a strong positive personal psychology that nothing external can affect it. You can choose to surround yourself with these people.

Some salespeople find that their territory is just about what they make of it, that the compensation plan is gamed for those who take initiative and prospect, and that even though they may work for a smaller firm, they can still fight and win above their weight class. You can find salespeople like this on your sales force (provided the culture hasn’t been infected with some sales-zombie plague).

You can choose to put in positive messages that inspire you. Instead of sitting in front of hourly reruns of the world’s most recent bad news, you can choose to read books and blogs that provide you with positive ideas—ideas that can help you be more effective in your life and in your job. You can choose to turn off the radio and listen to audio books or tapes that fill your mind with positive psychology, interesting ideas, and thoughtful commentary on the world in which we live.

As a salesperson or a businessperson, you can listen to educational and inspirational messages that help you to learn your trade. You can take in positive ideas, and you can find lessons in just about anything you see or hear—if you choose to look for them.

The result of taking in so much that is positive is that, eventually, the positive starts coming back out. You change your blueprint. Your view of the world improves, and you see more clearly what is possible.