If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will buy anything from you, so I’ll show you how to build confidence in sales.

The first step in building confidence is stopping your monkey mind. If you give it something to do, it will stop.

5 Tips on How to Build Confidence in Sales

Positive psychology expert professor Martin Seligman, in his book Learned Optimism, suggests two methods to adopt when you’re aware of negative thoughts.

1. Challenge the monkey

Challenge what the monkey is saying. There are 4 ways to do this:

1. Evidence: show your thoughts are factually incorrect by thinking of times you’ve achieved goals
2. Alternative: ask yourself “is there a less destructive way to look at this?” Focus on changeable, specific and the non personal causes outside of your control.
3. Implications: ask yourself, “how likely are the implications?” And “are they really that awful?”
4. Usefulness: ask yourself, “how useful is it for me to think about this right now?”

When you dispute negative beliefs, they are less likely to recur.

2. Throw the monkey a banana

Distract yourself by thinking of something else. Here are 3 distraction techniques:

1. Say out loud “stop” while clicking fingers. The action interrupts your pattern.
2. Write thought down and allocate time to think about it.
3. Pick up an object and study it intently using all your senses.

You can only think of one thing at a time, so if you feed your mind thoughts to think, it can’t go down that negative spiral.

3. Ask different questions

Business and personal development legend Tony Robbins suggests asking yourself these empowering questions:

1. What’s good about the situation?
2. How can this be better?
3. What can I do right now to improve the situation?

This has worked wonders for me. (Also read Power of Gratitude in Sales and The Forces that Shape Us).

4. Develop skills

Read more books, take courses, build your competence. Simply set aside 30 minutes a day to work on new skills. Improving my writing was a big one for me. I took an online course, studied 30 minutes daily for 21 days. And I always spend 40 minutes a day reading personal development material.

Great competence leads to greater confidence. (How to Find a Personal Development Book that’s right for you, 10 Favourite Sales Books to Grow Sales).

5. Achieve milestones, build momentum

The first thing I used to do when waking up was check email and social media. By 11am I hadn’t done anything. So the rest of the day I was in a state of catch-up trying to make up for a crappy morning.

Now, I do my most important task, first. I move on to do the second and the third most important tasks.

Achieving these small milestones builds momentum. By 10am I feel unstoppable. (Start Your Morning off Well).

Pick one from this lists and start today. Do it daily, taking one day at a time. Come back and tell me how you get on. Would love to know.