Selling Boldly

3The Antidote to Fear: The New Science of Positive Psychology

Here is a summary of this book in one sentence: selling more, quickly, is a function of thinking the right way—confidently, boldly, optimistically—and then communicating your optimism systematically to your customers and prospects. To explain why this approach is true and powerful, I need to tell you a little about a relatively new field in psychology that has changed the discipline over the past 20 years. It's called “positive psychology” and it is the study of what makes us happy, as opposed to the rest of psychology, which is the study of our depression, anxiety, and other problems.

Positive psychology examines the thinking that leads to success and happiness and joy. Positive psychology seeks to explain what gives us energy, gratitude, and optimism, and, more importantly, how to take control of our thinking to manufacture it ourselves. Meanwhile, the rest of psychology is about the biology, neurology, and the treatment of the things that make us crazy.

In simple terms, then, positive psychology focuses on the proactive pursuit of joy (just as strategic sales growth requires proactive communications), and personal and professional success, while much of the rest of psychology examines how we react to stimulus (just as most sales work is conducted reactively, in response to incoming inquiries), often driven by our internal biology. Positive psychology puts our success in our own hands and brains—we can create it, ...