The Case for Optimism
“I’ve always been an optimist. Frankly, I never saw much use in being anything else.” Winston Churchill
Psychologist Martin Sigelman discovered a strong link between optimism and results in a detailed study with sales professionals at Met Life Insurance. The study concluded that those who ranked in the top 10% of the organization when it came to optimism outsold by 88% those in the bottom 10% of the company.
That statistic may not surprise you, but think through the underlying aspects of the study. These were salespeople, and they were hired because they were optimistic people in the first place. Those in the bottom 10% still would have considered themselves to be optimists, and compared to a lot of other professions they probably were.
What does this mean for the top 10% of the salespeople in the organization? It means they were more than optimists – they were super-optimists. These were people who did more than pretend. They were optimists in their core, and they carried that optimistic purpose into every sales encounter.
