HOW TO TOUGHEN
UP COLIN WOODFINDEN provides some tips for building your resilience
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n the last edition I discussed the importance of resilience in sales and looked at why having a positive mindset is so difficult to maintain: our “inner caveman” makes us naturally designed to seek out the negatives in any new situation because of our survival instinct. Here, I want to follow up by providing some tips to help build resilience. As I mentioned in Part 1, however, I firmly believe that resilience cannot be taught, but is built through the accumulation of life’s experiences and learning from them – from knowing that you have faced a similar situation in the past and survived. What can be taught, however, are the skills of mindfulness and self-awareness, giving you the ability to put things into perspective and break through all of the noise of a situation and focus on what it important. To start doing this, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself: “On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being death), how bad is this problem?” BEGIN ‘ACTIVE THINKING’ Once you begin to look at the challenge you face in those terms you can start to look for solutions. In order to get yourself out of a negative situation you need to take action. As I mentioned in Part 1, one of the biggest causes of stress is the feeling of being powerless. Take control. In order to shift your mindset into active thinking, ask yourself questions such as: l How can I contain the problem so that it doesn’t get worse? l What can I do to limit the problem’s scope or duration? l How can I reduce the downside of this adverse event? l How can I increase the potential upside of this event? l What aspects can I control? l How can I best respond? 42 WINNING EDGE
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l Where are the opportunities in this l But what if things work out well?
situation?
FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN INFLUENCE In his best-selling book, The 7 habits of highly effective people, Stephen Covey talks about only focusing on the things you can influence. We spend a lot of our time and energy focusing on things we have no influence over and cannot change, and the more you focus on ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
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