Joey DeMicco

Just ImagineDoes this sound familiar? There is a wonderful selling opportunity on your schedule today. You know you should be excited — but you’re not. Maybe you were up all night with a sick child or maybe you heard some bad news recently that has affected you in a negative way. Whatever the reason, you need to SNAP OUT OF IT! This is your business and your livelihood. It’s next to impossible to get potential customers excited about you and your product when your attitude is less than enthusiastic. You need to be able to improve your own attitude at times like this, and it’s not as difficult as you may think.

What is Attitude?

Think of your attitude as a situation microscope. You can choose to focus in on the good stuff, and filter out the bad, or vice versa. If you prefer to center on the bad parts, then your entire day will be dismal and discouraging. If, however, you concentrate on the positives, now you’re upbeat and optimistic. The best part is that it is entirely your choice.

Attitude was once described to me as an “inner dialogue.” Inner dialogue is that little verbal exchange everybody has going on in their head, every waking moment. You stare at the person talking to you, listening to his every word, but deep inside your head, you’re thinking about a car payment, how messy the speaker’s hair is, or whether that pretty girl you met this morning at the coffee shop will go out with you. If you’re not aware that it is there, pay attention! It’s there all the time. Many people also refer to this as Intrapersonal communication.

Don’t worry, you’re not odd, it’s perfectly normal to have this inner dialogue and everybody has it. Not everybody, however, knows how to unleash its influence over their life. Once you realize you have this constant dialogue going on in your head, now realize that you control it. That’s right, good or bad, it’s your very own conversation with yourself.

Your Inner Dialogue

Imagine that you had a friend that drove around with you all day — every day — constantly whispering negative comments in your ear! Telling you how bad you looked. Telling you how you can’t succeed. How would you feel at the end of the month, a week, or even a single day of such pessimistic propaganda? You’d be kicking this friend to the curb!

We all remember the children’s cartoon where a little devil sat on the subject’s shoulder whispering bad advice opposite the little angel’s good advice. Our negative inner dialogue is the little devil, and because we are so used to it we don’t consciously pay attention to it and therefore do not challenge it. It goes on and on in the background and the effect is that we are giving ourselves powerful hypnotic suggestions to feel bad!

Now, what do you think would happen if we replaced the negative thoughts with uplifting, invigorating, positively complimentary comments? What would happen is that you would feel better about yourself. Best of all, it really works!

Try to pay attention to it. Your inner dialogue is slippery and you may lose track of it here and there, but it’s still always there. Remember, no matter what you’re doing, it’s there. Watching TV, typing a paper, reading this article, it’s there. Once you recognize it, you’ve taken the first step to controlling it. Once you start taking charge of it you’ll be surprised how much improvement you’ll see in your attitude.

Now … Say Cheese

Do you know that you can cheer yourself up simply by smiling? It’s true! Take a second and smile. Appear to be the happiest person on the planet. Give a good solid smile and hold it. If you smiled for just one minute, you’ll find that for no apparent reason at all, you feel better. Instead of smiling because you’re happy, you are happy because you are smiling. It may sound strange, but it works.

The scientific name for this is Facial Feedback Hypothesis and was first discovered in 1872 by Charles Darwin who learned that the tightening of the facial muscles as in a smile can alter the way we feel. Your brain has a direct link to every part of your body, including your mouth. When you’re happy, you smile automatically. The trick here is that it’s a two-way street. If you smile because you’re happy, why is it so unbelievable that you can be happy simply because you’re smiling.

To prove my point, try this experiment: Visualize yourself cutting a big grapefruit into quarters. Now, imagine yourself grabbing one of those quarters and taking a huge bite out of it. Pause for a moment. If you find yourself salivating, then the same concept is at work. The brain cannot distinguish between the grapefruit you’ve imagined biting and a real grapefruit. Therefore, when you imagine biting into that fruit, a series of things happen. You salivate. Your lips pucker. You can almost taste it.

Be careful, though, as Darwin found out. It also works in reverse with frowning. (Don’t try this at home, just keep smiling). A person might have just won a sales award, but if they decided to frown for one minute, they’d find themselves sad or low for no apparent reason. Now, take this idea and run with it. Take some time out of each day to visualize yourself at the top of the sales board. There is great power in this form of visualization. Now, this is not exactly self-hypnosis, but it’s close. Let’s call it the happy face of your inner dialogue.

Visualization

Now that you’ve smiled your way to the next sales appointment while all the way, your inner dialogue has been reminding you that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, now is the time to actually see yourself making the sale.

Did you know that Tiger Woods swings the club a dozen times in his mind before actually striking the ball? Now, unless you’re a better sales person than Tiger is a golfer, this may become your strongest sales practice.

As you drive through the neighborhood of your next appointment, try to remember a dazzling sale you’ve recently made in that area. Or as you pass their home, recall a house just like it, where you made a grand sale. Remember that feeling of accomplishment. How good it felt when everything fell just right and they signed the first night. Bask in that feeling and bring it into the house with you. You’ll be surprised at the difference it makes in your attitude.

Sir Edmund Hillary, who led the first exploration to scale the heights of Mount Everest, was asked by an individual how it felt to be the first man to touch the peak. Hillary responded that it felt exactly the same as each of the many times he had done it before. What the confused person failed to see is that Sir Edmond had already successfully scaled the mountain many times through visualization.

Perception is Reality! Everybody has heard this expression but very few understand how powerful it can be. Examine the case of Roger Bannister. Bannister was the first human to run a mile in less than four minutes. The key point is that running the mile in less than four minutes was considered ridiculous, so therefore, nobody tried to break the record–until Bannister did it. Once he accomplished what was considered by everyone else as unachievable, the new record was broken six weeks later by two seconds. Today the record is 3:43!

Olympic competitors have been using this procedure for years with great success, as have professional athletes. The key is believing in your self and your God-given abilities. My mother always told me I could accomplish anything if I put my mind to it. Think of these ideas as shortcuts to “putting your mind to it.” As with any new concept, it won’t hurt you to try, and it just may surprise you in ways you have yet to imagine.