Why Positivity is Crucial to Your Customer in a World of Bad News

I received my bachelor’s degree in management but, in retrospect, a psychology degree would have been far more appropriate for my line of work.

And if you make a living in the field of sales, I suspect you might say the same thing. Understanding how the human mind works is paramount to understanding the world of sales.

Those of you who earned that coveted psych degree might recall an entire semester spent studying the topic of cognitive errors, a field of study dealing with common mental mistakes.

One such error in thinking is the “availability bias,” suggesting that we have stronger connections to things we are constantly exposed to.

For example, why do you suppose so many people are afraid to fly? We have all heard the statistics that flying is far safer than driving, so why do people struggle?

The availability bias suggests that since every plane crash makes the evening news, we simply hear more about this tragedy than we hear about fatalities from car crashes.

But imagine if the evening news ran stories of every automobile fatality in the world each and every day — we would never want to travel in a car again.

To make things worse, our brains are actually hard-wired toward negative news.

Here’s why: An almond-sized portion of the brain at the base of the skull called the amygdala does something really important: it keeps us alive by alerting us to threats.

Now, that was all well and good when we had to flee from mastodons, but in modern times this over-inflated threat sensitivity works against our best interests.

The number one job of the brain is to keep us alive — just plain basic survival. Because of that wiring, we tend to pay more attention to negative news because we see it as a threat.

In his book Abundance, Peter Diamandis quotes Oxford psychologist Matt Ridley:

“It’s incredible. This moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.”

I travel 100+ days a year and I am constantly bombarded in airports by CNN reporting a new crisis and a story about how we shall surely die very soon! (For the record, I stay away from Fox News as well, and MSNBC, and anything local.)

Is the world perfect? Of course not — far from it, actually. But it’s still a pretty dang cool place when you think about.

Medical advances keep us healthier. Access to information brings new opportunities. Our quality of life continues to rise. And many of us live in free and democratic societies.

So what exactly sucks about that? If you ask the news, apparently everything.

Now, what does this have to with sales?

You need to understand that your sales prospect lives amid a sea of negativity, and those negative biases change their thinking.

What do they need? Positive energy. Specifically, YOUR positive energy.

They actually want you to bring good news into their life – that’s why they’re talking to you in the first place!

So get your mind right. Stay away from the negative. Spread the positive. Change the world.