+1: #422 Levity + Gravity = Buoyancy

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. Dan Pink tells us that to sell is human. Although only one in nine Americans is technically in sales, he says that the other eight in nine spend a ton of their time in non sales selling. In fact, the research he commissioned shows that we spend around 40% of our time or 24 minutes out of every working hour trying to move people to do things. Whether that's pitching an idea to colleagues or trying to change someone's behavior. That's obviously a lot. And being good at that is obviously important to our professional and personal success. Then there's the personal time we spend selling or moving others from selling our kids on a philosophical idea mistakes are awesome or your spouse on how to optimize your nutrition sugar isn't awesome. In that context, he tells us we need some new ABCs of selling. As you may know, the ABCs of the old school hardcore sales approach are always be closing. That, to say the least, is not where it's at now. Now Dan says it's all about attunement, buoyancy and clarity. A B C Check out our notes we have on this book for more. Here's the jumbo quick look. Attunement is basically the ability to connect with others. We get there via three things. Humility, trying to figure out what the other person is thinking. Parenthetical aside, this is more effective by the way, than trying to figure out what they're feeling. You want to get into their heads, into what they're thinking, and then the third thing is strategically mimicking their movements and words, but doing it subtly and acting like a human being without being weird about it. Longer chat there. Next thing is buoyancy, which is actually what I want to focus on today. So more on that in a moment. Then we have the C for clarity. We need to be able to concisely communicate the essence of our offer, finding the 1% of what really matters while asking good questions, etc. So all of that to arrive at buoyancy. Buoyancy is how we stay afloat in the ocean of rejection we all feel when we try to sell people on our ideas and or products, etc. Dan offers us tips to stay buoyant before, during and after our pitch. Before we want to make sure our self talk is empowering. He offers a fascinating twist here that we'll talk about in our next plus one during we want to keep our positivity ratios optimized. One to one isn't going to do it, nor will two to one. Research shows that three to one, positive to negative, is the sweet spot. But note 11, one isn't going to work either. And then after we want to make sure our explanatory styles are rocking, check out the plus one on how to learn optimism, featuring Martin Seligman's three Ps for more. Now we're ready for the point of today's plus one. You know that positivity ratio we want to target three to one. Too little positivity isn't going to work, and very important and too much positive positivity isn't gonna work either. And I love the way Dan frames Barbara Fredrickson's wisdom on this. She's the leading researcher. He says, and I quote, frederickson sees the healthy positivity ratios as a calibration between competing poles, levity and gravity. Levity is that unseen force that lifts you skyward, whereas gravity is the opposing force that that pulls you earthward. Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery. A heap of misery, she writes. Yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant. So we have levity plus gravity equals buoyancy. I love that. The question for today is, how's your levity? How's your gravity? Fantastic. Here's to your buoyancy.