How important is your mindset in your sales leadership?

Are successful people more talented than others? Is it talent and skill that are decisive if you are to be successful? Or is it something else?

I have trained over 1000 salespeople and leaders for almost 20 years and a distinguishing feature of the most successful is their mindset . This is supported in the research. According to researcher at Stanford University, Carol Dweck, she sees that the best marker for success in life - is precisely your mindset.

According to Dweck, one can categorize two types of mindset:

- Fixed mindset

- Growth mindset

Depending on the situation, people are more or less in two different mindsets. The goal is to be more in a growth mindset than in a fixed mindset.

People with a fixed mindset view their knowledge, skills and results more statically. A failure today means you are not good enough. You can't. You are inadequate. This affects one's development or rather one's reluctance to develop.

A person with a growth mindset sees everything as a development, a learning journey. If you fail today, it only means that you need to change things in order to succeed tomorrow. You have not yet learned how to succeed. This has a positive effect on one's development.

If you interview successful people, regardless of the field, it is not uncommon for many to describe being good at one or more things. They also describe that they have had good support and the right conditions to succeed.

But the vast majority describe that they worked and fought harder than everyone else. You never give up and you succeed after having tested, practiced and failed countless times. They have a growth mindset that drives them to develop and succeed.

Being successful in your sales leadership requires that you have a growth mindset, i.e. you always want to get better and develop even if it's hard or difficult.

Can you then develop your growth mindset?

- Yes, Dweck, describes that there are a number of steps to learning to see one's skills as a "work in progress."

1. Think of your mindset as a voice

   1. Try to identify how your own inner voice speaks to you. When you are faced with a challenge, what does your inner voice sound like?

   2. Does it say "what if I fail" or "will I really be able to do this"

   3. And when you don't succeed, what does your voice say "you're bad, you have no talent, everyone else can do this, you're not good enough"

   4. If your voice speaks to you like this, you are currently more in a fixed mindset

2. Choose growth mindset & Talk back to your inner voice

   1. Just because your inner voice says something, doesn't mean it's true!

   2. Practice seeing a failure as an attempt that didn't work. Now you need to find new options to try again.

   3. Tell your inner voice that it is wrong. It sees things the wrong way.

   4. Convince yourself that you can if you practice and have other approaches

3. Act in reality

   1. Reframing and persuading your inner voice is difficult but necessary.

   2. However, it is only a first step. You also have to do the things you described. You have to work harder, more intensively, differently or in a new way.

4. Add .. yet... to your sentences

   1. Another way is to constantly use the words...(not) yet.

   2. I'm not good at coaching...yet

   3. My sales leadership isn't good enough...yet

   4. When you add the word...yet...you force yourself away from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

In order to continuously improve your Sales Leadership, you need to have a growth mindset.

Work with your mindset and you have taken the first step towards improving your Sales Leadership.

//Good luck with your growth mindset