5 Things You Can Control Working in Sales

Let’s face it, these last 18 months have been a whirlwind of uncertainty. Let’s focus on five things you can control right now working in sales.

Feeling out of control is actually quite normal in uncertain times. What happens when we’re living in the world of the unknown?

I would look at it and say, “There is the low road and then there is the high road.” The low road is that auto-response, the automatic brain. And what’s the number one job of the brain? To keep you alive!

When things are happening that are foreign, strange, or troubling in some way, the automatic brain goes into overdrive. The threat sensitivity is triggered and we start to feel like, “Oh no, we’re out of control.” That’s the low road.

The alternative is the measured response. The thinking part of the brain. The part of our brain that can look at it and say, “We may not know everything, but what can we control?” That’s the high road part of the brain at work.

There’s a lot in the past 18 months that’s been out of our control, but what if we focus instead on what we can control? There’s plenty out there we can, in fact, control.

I want to share with you some very specific ideas on five things people working in sales can control right now:

1. Control your own growth.

The internet is an online university. You can get way more than a college degree just by studying free stuff on the internet. Now, I’m not talking about watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m not talking about hanging out on social media unless of course, it’s Sales365!

There are so many sites where you can educate yourself, whether it’s for your professional career, for your personal life, for your relationships, your health, whatever you choose. This is a great time to grow. Did I mention Sales365 yet?

You can also take advantage of… what are those things called, those…they’re rectangular and they have paper in them? Books, books. You can read books!

2. Control your own effort.

That means you can plan out your day. You can plan out what’s going on in the next week, what you really want to accomplish.

If you’re working in sales, plan out your prospecting calls. Plan out your follow-up strategy. While you’re at it, plan to increase these activities.

3. Control the inputs in your life.

You can decide what goes into your brain. In a time of a lot of upheavals, the first thing we want to do in the morning is pick up our phone to see what happened overnight. I just want to tell you, the world did not stop spinning overnight. If it did, you wouldn’t have the ability to pick up your phone. Instead, do something positive. You can control the inputs.

Yes, I think you should stay informed. But you can do that with quick little hits, rather than camping out and watching the negativity over and over again.

Remember, your customer needs your positive energy. You can only give out that which you have inside.

4. Control your own involvement.

It’s reaching out to neighbors. It’s connecting with people. We all know about social distancing. I understand physical distancing, but it doesn’t mean we have to break down the connections altogether. What can you do?

5. Control your own attitude.

One of my favorite quotes of all time from the psychologist Viktor Frankl, “Everything else can be taken from a man except for one thing, the last of the human freedoms, the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” He called the right to choose our own attitude, “the last of the human freedoms.”

We can choose to be positive. We can choose to be uplifting to the people around us. We can choose to be grateful. You control your attitude.

There are lessons to be learned in times of adversity that you cannot learn in times of prosperity. Kindness acts as its own network. The kindness you pour into the people around you, they end up pouring into people around them.

That kindness gets shared and starts to network around and what a beautiful opportunity to take advantage of that right now.

Until next time, learn more to earn more.