Positive, No Matter What

When a tough day of selling makes you feel like you’re at the end of your rope, pilot Charlie Plumb’s motivational advice can help you hang in there. Enemy fire brought Plumb’s plane down over Vietnam in 1967, but even six years in hell couldn’t sink his spirit.

As a prisoner of war for 2,103 days, Plumb learned the hard way how to maintain his pride, dignity and sanity in the face of torture, starvation and degradation at the hands of the enemy. Fortunately, instead of breaking him, the experience helped turn him into a pillar of mental strength. The next time you’re tempted to let rejection or setbacks get you down, remember Plumb’s five lessons to keep your spirits up.

1. You don’t know your own strength.
To illustrate his point that most of us don’t know what we’re made of until we’re put to the test, Plumb tells the story of a conference in the ready room on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk the night before he was shot down. “All the pilots got together and we joked with each other and generally had a good time,” he says. “And that particular night the mood got serious among seven of us who were talking over a cup of coffee. Every one of us macho young guys admitted that if he were shot down, they might as well just send his stuff back to his wife because he wasn’t going to make it. We knew about the torture, disease, starvation and loneliness and we just admitted, ‘Hey, we can’t do it.'”

Of course, Plumb found out later that he had the strength to make it and then some. His own self-talk, he said, was a big help. During torture sessions, for example, Plumb says he told himself that if the pain didn’t get any worse, he’d survive it. Then his captors would tighten the ropes or shackles that bound him, intensifying the agony, and Plumb would “establish the next plateau” and tell himself once again that if the pain didn’t get any more severe, he’d make it. “So you walk up this staircase of difficulty,” he says, “and as you come back down you say, ‘Hey, I beat that. I really know now that I am going to be all right.’ So in the self-talk you start out by saying ‘I’m going to be all right,’ and as the situation changes you continue to look back and say ‘I was right.'” Plumb claims self-talk is his own little coach, and, he says, “this little conversation with my coach is going on all the time in the back of my mind.”

When none of your sales calls is going well or you doubt your ability to close a new customer or set an appointment, remember that feeling weak and being weak are completely different. Use Plumb’s self-talk strategy to help you rise to any challenge.

2. Keep the faith.
Plumb says that when everything is crumbling around you and it seems you have no one and nothing to believe in, faith can pull you through. As he descended into enemy territory in his parachute, Plumb says, he said a little prayer for strength to get him through the trials he knew he’d have to face. “Faith really works,” he affirms. “If you can’t tap into a source of strength greater than yourself, then number one, you’re missing out, and number two, if you ever get caught in a prison camp someday you’re probably not going to make it. When everything is gone, when you have absolutely nothing left to take pride in or to validate yourself – no fancy car, no job title, no nice clothes – you find that your faith makes the things you used to call supernatural very real to you.”

Plumb says one of the things that kept him going while he was imprisoned was his faith that he would eventually go home. That belief gave him a reason to live even when he was consumed by pain, loneliness, hunger and despair.

“There was never a day in that prison camp that I ever thought I was going to die there. I didn’t know when I was going home but I was confident that I would go home some day. Now I was fooling myself, but did it work? Yes, it did. To have admitted that I could have died would have been tantamount to death itself.”

Remember that whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right. The faith you have in yourself will help determine your success. To keep your confidence high, remind yourself of past victories, and remember that rough times won’t last forever.

3. Trust in your team.
As the song says, we all need somebody to lean on – in Plumb’s case, the support and companionship he got from his fellow prisoners helped get him through his ordeal. Even when your teammates don’t seem trustworthy, Plumb says, they’re often all you’ve got to help you get by.

“You have to depend on the team and you have to trust your team,” he says. “Some of these guys I got to know like my own brother even though I never got to see their faces. Not until we came home did we actually get to see each other, yet they had been so close to me and they had nurtured me through the pain, the agony and the sickness and by the same token I had given them encouragement as well. We kept ourselves communicating. We kept ourselves supporting one another as a team. We kept ourselves positive and we kept talking to each other. These were the methods of survival. Don’t ever underestimate the value of teaming up with other people.”

Take advantage of the good advice, sales leads, encouragement and camaraderie your sales teammates can provide. Reduce stress by talking over sales problems with them, and stage friendly sales competitions with them to raise everyone’s performance to a higher level.

4. Know the value of commitment.
In Vietnam Plumb learned that to stand by your principles and get the things you want, you have to make a firm commitment to them. Plumb and his buddies were committed to their goal of staying alive, helping everyone else stay alive and returning to America with honor, and that commitment helped make the dream come true.

“If you’re on the fence about something, then you are probably not making very good decisions,” Plumb says. “If you just waffle through life itself you are probably never going to reach your goal. In the prison camp it was pretty simple: The commitment was to return with honor. The commitment was to stay alive and help your buddies stay alive. And so it was really easy to stay the course of that commitment. Commitments in daily life are not so well-defined – many times our commitment is to do good or to be a better husband or mother. We often don’t have those well-defined commitments in our lives, but I think we need them because commitment does something for other people and it does something for ourselves as well, and that’s how we build self-esteem.”

We all hope to succeed, but only those who’ve made a firm commitment to selling more effectively have the best odds of winning. Ask yourself what measures you’ve taken lately to boost your success, and how much that success really means to you. If you haven’t done it already, make a commitment to make your future as bright as it can be by making a commitment to your success today.

5. Find solace in service.
Plumb says that after the hell of imprisonment in Vietnam, he came home to another devastating blow – the discovery that his young bride had filed for divorce just three months before his return and was engaged to another man. Plumb was contemplating an abrupt departure to a new city and a new life in an effort to forget what had happened to him, when he discovered that while his memories were a source of pain, they were also a priceless asset that showed him that serving others may be the best way to serve oneself.

“I was the first POW back in the Midwest, so I was asked to make an appearance at a press conference. I kept telling my story and I realized that what everyone was listening to wasn’t necessarily a story about the torture or the bad food and all that stuff. They were listening to a story about their own lives. And I found that so many people could identify not with being a POW but with some really bizarre experience they thought they would never overcome and yet they did – and that is still not the most important thing. The most important thing was what was happening in my life. I found that while I was telling my story to people and seeing their positive response to what I had to say, it made my six years in prison valuable. It made allowance for all the pain. In order to find value in life you must serve and get outside yourself and tell your story. You have to get outside yourself and serve your fellow human beings and your God and not ask for any immediate gratification or kudos or accolades. You just need to serve not even for the benefit of those who need serving but for your own mental health and for your own self-esteem.”

Remember that your customers are a blessing – not a burden. Through great service, you have the power to make their lives easier and better. Take pride and satisfaction in going the extra mile for them. Learn to appreciate selling’s little rewards – the smile of a grateful client and the satisfaction of knowing your buyers might rest a little easier at night knowing they can count on you.

Stories like Charlie Plumb’s clearly show that even when our bodies are breaking down, our minds and spirits can carry us through the most horrific ordeals. Fortunately, we don’t always have to endure great suffering to learn from those who have. On days that bring you nothing but hassles and harsh rejection, remember Charlie Plumb’s words: “It’s not really what happens to you in life, it’s how you react to what happens. There’s a lot more strength inside us than we give ourselves credit for, and we all get so afraid of the monsters out there, and then we find out the monster really isn’t a monster at all. The monster is in our minds.”