Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Tony J. Hughes and featured by LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Sales is a journey of failing forward, even at the most highly compensated levels. You need to make rejection a game and if you’re mistreated, kill them with kindness. People having a bad day may take it out on you but it’s never personal. Your attitude is one of the few things that you can control. As Jack Canfield puts it: “New responses create new outcomes.”

One of the great challenges in a people-oriented profession is cultivating your love of people. When you interact with so many, you’ll often experience the best and worst side of human nature. Seek to love them anyway, always seek to transform their business wholeheartedly. As a sales thought leader recently commented on my post: “Fall in love with your customers.” Strong words, I know. It’s because it’s all about orienting your mind to the positive experiences you’re having throughout your selling day.

The human memory is problematic in that what we tend to dwell-on and remember is predominantly trauma and bad luck; things with high emotional resonance. We all have war stories from the field about when everything went wrong. The time we flew to the client and they canceled last minute, we got sick or had a flat tire, or the slide projector melted down and sparked. Maybe the time we hit the send button too early. Ironically, much of humor and the joy of life owes itself to our negative experiences, the backdrop of pain in contrast to joy in the foreground. The opposite of pleasure is not pain, it’s actually ennui. So a big part of this post is a call to align your professional purpose to your aspirations and goal setting in sales.

It’s a self discipline to focus on the good. I promote that sales people start writing on LinkedIn Publisher and even that’s an experience where your writing and viewpoints can be picked apart, dissected, disagreed with and occasionally subject to being trounced. I say this because it’s a brave new world of self expression as we become micro-marketers who are sharpening our pen, experimenting with SME content and putting ourselves out there. But keep in mind that for years, you’ve been sharing your vision and value propositions directly with clients, writing reams of insightful emails, holding discovery calls and leaving thoughtful messages. All you’re doing here is transitioning these enablement initiatives to a public forum. Yes, that is daunting! The payoff is so worth it because you can concretely move from servicing demand to creating it.

You may be thinking, how can I develop a thicker skin? We weren’t all born at 11, Type A and immune. When management places you under severe revenue pressure, when a key sale in your pipeline goes to a competitor, when a customer doesn’t like us and randomly complains or an outcome is suboptimal; my philosophy is that as long as you gave it your all with integrity as you strived for excellence in execution, you can feel good about yourself and your effort. Sleep well knowing that often, it’s not you.

“Without courage all other virtues lose their meaning,” is how Churchill explained this phenomenon of the valiant living of life to the fullest in all seasons. Maya Angelou explored the concept with: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” And Mandela, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

I chose the proud brave lion, king of the jungle as the photo for this post and also because of all the controversy in the LinkedIn-osphere lately around whether one should be a LinkedIn Open Networker. Love them or hate them, LIONs are a courageous bunch of trailblazers who have been putting themselves out there unabashedly for years in this forum, which I do respect. I have noticed a sea change from five years ago when executives would respond to an invite with “I only connect with people that I know” to the current state of LinkedIn where by dint of my writings, I pull in dozens of new connections every week. It will be interesting to see where these “open profile” trends take us this year and if some new acronym emerges like LAMA – LinkedIn Ambient Marketing Activator. I digress…

Courageousness and overcoming rejection are what being a successful seller is all about. Top sellers develop the strategic chuckle. This comes under the heading of Guy Kawasaki’s “art of beguiling.” They shrug it off with a wry smile because they’re amused inwardly. They respond to harshness with self-deprecating wit and humble acceptance. Like water off a duck, the vibe they put out is that simple.

It’s been said and studied that people buy on emotion and justify with pure logic but it’s critical not to allow your passion to override your good sense. Being overly sensitive to friction and noise from the buyer or buying organization can become a severe impediment to positive momentum. There’s no room for luggage on the sales superhighway so leave it at the door. If you are fully there and concentrating on them, your problems fall away and you will not accumulate psychological debris or jet-lag from the journey.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Tony J. Hughes is a keynote speaker, author, and sales leadership mentor. To check out his other posts, please click here.