In the Marketing Success Mindset video we reviewed some of the positive mindsets that will help you be successful at marketing and sales. But something we all fall victim to from time to time is to allow negative thoughts to creep in and impact our marketing.
You know the ones:
- “I don’t want to bombard them by sending too many emails…”
- “If I ask for a referral they’ll think I’m desperate…”
- “No one will really want to read my article, who really cares about my approach to doing this…”
- “If I try public speaking I’ll make a fool of myself…”
- “I don’t have the time for marketing…”
Left unchecked, what starts out as a tiny little doubt can grow to dominate our thinking and cause us to procrastinate, engage in avoidance behaviour, or skip marketing altogether.
If you find yourself constantly checking email, “marketing” by chatting in Facebook or Linkedin groups, spending prime time on admin or spending all your time researching rather then doing, then you may be a victim of negative thoughts about your marketing.
There’s a simple technique you can use to help you deal with these negative thoughts and emotions “borrowed” from the field of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
The key is to take these internal thoughts and emotions and to write them down so you can properly examine them and challenge them. In your head, these thoughts seem so real and valid, but more often than not when you get them out of your head and onto paper you can easily see that they’re very flawed.
You can use the worksheet below to express your thoughts and ask yourself questions to challenge those thoughts to see how valid they are.
So first of all, notice when you have a negative thought or emotion being triggered and write down what that thought is – so it could be something like “If I ask my client for a referral they’ll think I’m desperate”. Then ask yourself a series of simple questions and write the answers down.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to establish the validity of your negative thought or emotion and to move beyond it:
- What am I reacting to here?
- Is this negative thought a fact? Or is it just opinion?
- How would someone else look at this situation? (Put yourself in the shoes of someone specific you respect and try to think about how they would react to the situation).
- What advice would I give to someone else in this situation?
- How important is this issue really? How big will it look in a years time?
- Is my reaction in proportion to the event itself?
- What evidence is there that this thought is true? What evidence is there that this thought is false?
- What would be a more balanced perspective on this?
- What action can I take to act on this more balanced perspective?
This simple questioning technique can help you address very many issues you have with negative thoughts or emotions about marketing. It’s not infallible, it won’t solve everything if you’ve got some deep psychological issues. But most of us don’t have – we just have natural hangups and insecurities and worries, and this technique will really help with those.
Make sure you actually write this down: don’t try to do it all in your head, it doesn’t work nearly as well. Somehow the act of writing things down helps you see them more clearly and deal with them.