The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible pdfdrive com

Reset Your Financial “Thermostat”
You can never earn more on the outside than you can on the inside. It is
almost as if you have an “income thermostat” that determines your financial
temperature. As you know, when a thermostat is set at a certain temperature, it
will continually adjust the heating and cooling to keep the room at that
temperature. In the same way, if you see yourself as a $50,000-a-year person,
you will continually engage in behaviors that keep your income at $50,000.
You can never earn more on the outside than you can on the inside. It is almost as if you
have an “income thermostat” that determines your financial temperature.
In my seminars and in my work for corporations, I constantly run into this
strange phenomenon. A salesperson will set a goal to earn $50,000 or $60,000 in
the course of the year. But then he has a great year and hits the $50,000 mark by
the end of September. Suddenly, for some reason, the sales dry up. He stops
selling for the rest of the year. He cannot seem to get himself motivated, no
matter how good the market is for his product. He spins his wheels until
December 31. Then, on January 1, he is out of the gate like a horse at a horse
race, and selling again. In every case, it is his self-concept.
Sometimes people set a goal to earn a certain amount in a particular month.
But if they have a great month and they earn their self-concept amount by the
middle of the month, they stop selling for the next two weeks. They can hardly

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middle of the month, they stop selling for the next two weeks. They can hardly
wait until the first of the month so they can psychologically get themselves back
into selling. This is quite common.

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Break Free of the Past
Many people hold themselves back because they think that it is not right for
them to earn more than their fathers. Time and time again, I have seen
salespeople who plateau at a certain income level because that is the highest
amount that their fathers ever earned. At an unconscious level they have decided
that they do not earn more than that amount. And this becomes true for them.
In an extreme case I saw, a young man moved from the farm into the city and
got a job selling satellite dishes to farmers. This salesman came from a poor
background and had never earned very much money. But the harvest was good
that year, and the farmers were buying $5,000 satellite dishes with both hands.
He began making money faster than he had ever dreamed in his life.
But the experience of making so much money so quickly was so traumatic for
him that after a couple of sales at the beginning of the week, he would actually
go home, turn off all the lights in his small apartment, crawl under the covers in
his bed, and lie there in the dark with his heart pounding. He was so far out of
his self-concept range of income that the stress was overwhelming him.

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