Mindframe

When you look at the selling masters out there, the people who make sales look effortless, are you encouraged? (“Maybe with hard work, that could be me.”) Or does some part of you feel threatened? (“Terry’s a natural at sales; I’ll never be able to close a deal like that.”) The answer is important, because it’s a key window into your selling mindset. Mindset is a term popularized by Stanford professor Carol Dweck. In studying human achievement, she repeatedly found that one of the best predictors of success boiled down to the way people saw the world. In a fixed mindset framework, positive traits—in our case, the ability to sell—are innate, or fixed. It holds that we are all born destined to reach a certain level and then stop. The goal is to hope you turn out to be a member of that race of magic people. If you approach sales with a fixed mindset, you are discouraged by setbacks—dry periods, difficult customers—because it makes you secretly doubt you’ve got that “special sa...

In To Sell is Human , writer Daniel Pink makes a bold declaration: regardless of our official job title, the majority of us are in sales. After all, if you define “selling” as “an act of persuasion,” then don’t we all spend our professional lives pushing products, ideas, or advice on someone? But in addition to rethinking what sales is and who does it, Pink also seeks to overturn our notions of how to do it. In an era of Yelp and ubiquitous online customer reviews, consumers are savvy in ways they’ve never been before. Lies and slick manipulations won’t cut it when all of the information about any given product is only a few clicks away. And that means the aggressive, slicked-back-hair, Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross vision of a sales professional has got to go. In its place, Pink offers a new sales ABC: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Attunement Pink argues that a good salesperson is not just about output, but input as well. He defines attunement as “the abilit...

   When it comes to selling, is it better to present your customers with many options, or just a few? It's a debate that's been brewing since at least 2004, when psychologist Barry Shwartz published The Paradox of Choice , in which he argued that reducing the number of available choices can greatly cut down on that dreaded buyer's remorse, leading to an overall greater degree of personal happiness.   And indeed, grocery stores like Aldi and Trader Joe's seem to thrive in part by slimming their options, offering only one brand or one variety of each item. It's not just about reducing shelf space: the theory goes that curating the available options allows you to avoid overtaxing the customer's brain, kicking them into decision paralysis. On the other hand, superstores like Meijer aren't exactly struggling, despite their brain-blasting array of every conceivable product. What gives?   It seems that a larger array of offerings can lead to choice o...

Apples: they’re full of fiber, antioxidants, and vitamins. And yet, if your young child scored a homemade candy apple while Trick-or-Treating, there’s a chance you’d be telling them to discard that fruit at first opportunity. After all, remember that news story about malevolent weirdos hiding razor blades in their Halloween apples? Surely that’s important to keep in mind here. Salience bias is the human tendency to evaluate situations based on the information available to us, regardless of how relevant that information may or may not be. What is the actual statistical likelihood that somebody in your neighborhood wanted so badly to hurt children that they inserted blades into a bunch of apples? (Keep in mind: basically every reported instance of adulterated Halloween candy has been a hoax, and no serious injuries have ever been reported.) By the numbers, it’s staggeringly more likely that your child would just enjoy a sweet, crunchy snack. But with that razor blade story weighing...

  Read this shopping list, and then cover it with your hand: Bread Milk Oranges Peanut Butter Yogurt Pickles Turkey Folders Tissue Gum Now, how many of the items can you remember without peeking? Give yourself a moment to recall as many of them as you can. (We’ll wait.) If you left out an item (or several), chances are good it wasn’t the bread or the gum, but rather something in the middle. And if that’s the case, congratulations, you have something in common with 19 th century psychologist and memory pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus. At the time, the prevailing thought held that memory was impossible to study in any scientific fashion; it was simply too nebulous, too mysterious. Ebbinghaus disagreed. But since every single mind is different, how in the world would he eliminate confounding variables? His imperfect yet deeply elegant solution: to study only a single experimental subject—himself. To collect his data, Ebbinghaus tested his own ability t...

First things first: despite any cartoons you might’ve seen, ostriches don’t try to hide from danger by burying their heads in the sand. For one thing, they don’t need to: your average ostrich can run forty miles an hour—that’s faster than Usain Bolt (28 mph)—and they don’t use that speed to win footraces. The tall, gangly creatures do sometimes stick their heads in the sand, but that’s not a fear behavior; that’s the bird using its beak to gently rearrange its eggs, tucked away safe in a dug-out nest. Incidentally, did you know that the ostrich’s closest relative, the emu, is so fierce that in 1932, Australian farmers requested military assistance against the local emu population? And that the Australian military sent down troops, armed with machine guns, who were still unable to bring the emus to heel? It’s called the Emu War, and it is an actual thing that happened . Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you knew it once, and then forgot, because we are all bom...

As the first week of the year draws to a close, you may find yourself reassessing those New Year’s resolutions. Is this really the year you write that novel? Will you seriously watch every Oscar nominated movie before Oscar season this time? Here, however, is one resolution that might be both doable and hugely beneficial, if you’re not doing it already: eat more fish. If you follow nutrition news at all, this will likely not be a bombshell. Scientists have long acknowledged that the particular type of fat found in some fish seems to display a number of healthy properties. To be clear, we’re not saying to load up on fish sticks; this is about the cold water seafood that’s naturally high in Omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, sardines, and herring. From decreased risk of heart disease to improved brain development in fetal infants , there’s just something about intaking those Omega-3’s. Now a new survey highlights what may be the fundamental link between fish oil and intellig...