If you ask the average person how they feel they can give you an answer but not too many can tell you how they got there. Some people believe that they feel a certain way because of whatever the weather happens to be outside or because they “woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
When you consider that so much of what we do or don’t do comes from these feelings, also known as emotions, that is a dangerous reality for most sales people. The reality that you don’t know how to better manage something that can have such a profound effect on what you accomplish and how productive you are for a given day.
I am a huge believer that emotions are one of, if not the most powerful force in our lives that have the ability to move us closer to or hold us back from our daily potentials. So much so that I posted this picture and wrote the caption above it to my facebook profile recently.
Most people will agree with me that their emotions play a big role in everything they do but few understand the power that their tongue has in creating emotions that either push you forward or hold you back. You cannot shape your world until you understand how to. Too many of us choose complacency because that is how we feel at the moment.
Here is how it works – your thoughts control your emotions but your words control your thoughts. Whatever you say with your mouth or think in your head is usually a good indicator of what emotional state you are heading towards.
For example, if you are someone who says to yourself when your husband goes to play golf or your kids don’t clean up after themselves, “Nobody appreciates me. He is going to play golf while I am left here to take care of the house. My kids make a mess and then I clean it up only so that they can come home and make a mess all over again,” then I can promise you that you are headed towards a frustrating emotional state that does not lend itself to functioning at your peak performance.
At the same time if you walk around all day and purposely say positive things about yourself, spouse, children, life in general and your business, it is amazing how your outlook and mood fall in line with what you have been meditating on. I can remember being a child and having my mother have to tell me now and again to watch my mouth if I said something that wasn’t positive at the moment. Sometimes I think many of us could still use this kind of reinforcement.
This is a difficult task though when you figure that our greatest addiction is the addiction to our own problems above anything else. We love to dwell on things that don’t lift us up and instead take us down. That is why if you ask the average person about their personal life story they immediately go to bad things that happened to them and the effect it had on them or how they overcame them. The news has figured this out and that is why they have a saying, “If it bleeds it leads.” Let me know the next time that the lead story of your local news is about the charitable work someone is doing. You may be waiting for a while.
I am not saying that you have to walk around all day lying to yourself but you will become the emotional state of whatever you dwell on and talk about. If I tell you to find something red, or even if I tell you to not find something red, the way our brain works you will find something red and quickly. In fact, you will actually find something not completely red and call it red because that is how we are wired.
This past weekend I had an experience with my son where someone told my son not to walk under ladders because it is bad luck. He asked me later if that was true and I told him we don’t believe in that kind of stuff. He responded by telling me that the lady who told him this said that she had done it before and within a day something bad happened.
Here is the truth of it though: As soon as you believe that doing something will bring you bad luck, you start looking for and focusing on something that could be considered bad luck. Even though this lady probably had many good things happen to her during her day she didn’t see them because she wasn’t looking for them. As soon as something bad happened she said to herself, “See. There it is. Bad luck. I knew it was coming!”
I can remember reading an article a couple of years ago where they polled the top 100 sales people in the world because they wanted to know the common denominator that they all shared. What was the #1 reason for their success? They were expecting to hear things like good systems and customer service, or something like this. These were important, but the number one reason for their success was something called “the ability to control or the ability to manage their own state of mind.”
Basically no matter what the weather was or how their clients were acting they made a decision to take control over their own emotions. You can do this by first starting to take control over your tongue and what you say. If you don’t believe this I challenge you to try and not talk for 24 hours and see the kinds of things that you want to say all throughout the day.
I actually did this about a month ago and I consider myself to be a pretty positive person who has relatively great control over my emotions. However, once I was forced to take every thought captive, since I had made a vow to not speak for a whole day, I was amazed at how many negative statements I still wanted to make.
Haven’t you ever felt fully motivated where you were operating in a state where nobody could stop you and you were ready to take the world by storm? How did you feel at that time and what were you focusing on? Can you imagine what would happen if you didn’t complain and speak negative thoughts for a whole day? Can you imagine how productive you would be if you were operating at peak performance and feeling great more than you felt defeated, complacent and ready to go to sleep mid-way through the day? I challenge you to give it a try. In the words of mothers all over the world “watch your mouth” and see what a difference it makes on your thought life, and in turn, on your emotional state, which will lead to a better looking bottom line.
Jared James is the CEO and Founder of Jared James Enterprises, an internationally sought-after speaker and trainer. James built one of the fastest-growing real estate teams in the country, was inducted into the International Hall of Fame for one of the world’s largest real estate companies and wrote a best-selling book—all before the age of 28. As an acclaimed speaker, James keynotes events for major real estate organizations and conducts regular webinars and training for nationally known organizations like NAR, CRS, Yahoo Real Estate,Trulia and Zillow Academy and blogs regularly for RISMedia.
To stay in touch with Jared James, visit www.facebook.com/jaredjamestoday and www.twitter.com/jaredjamestoday or visit his website at www.jaredjamestoday.com.