When a prospect says no, the salesperson’s response – both immediate and long range – foretells a future of coping, or quitting. If, after the immediate anger and frustration wear off, the salesperson is left with a residue of unresolved negative feelings about his or her ability to sell, then it’s time to examine coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s also time to take a look at the salesperson’s feelings of helplessness.

In this exclusive Personal Selling Power (PSP) interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, you will discover how to get off the mental path that leads to helplessness and get on the road to quick recovery from the inevitable setbacks associated with selling.

PSP: What made you decide to study the subject of helplessness?

Dr. Seligman: Well, it was fairly early on when I was thirteen. I had just been sent off to a military school when my father had a series of strokes at age 49. He was entirely helpless for the rest of his life. I think that may have set the interest and it was consolidated when I began my research at the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student 25 years ago.

PSP: How do you see the role of helplessness in our lives in general?

Dr. Seligman: I believe that the basic facts of life are that we are helpless in the great issues like birth and death. However, there is a window of control that we can either choose to open wider or let slam shut.

PSP: And you obviously found many new ways for opening that window.

Dr. Seligman: I know the window can be opened much wider than people normally think.

PSP: How would you define helplessness for the layperson?

Dr. Seligman: It is a response to situations where events are uncontrolled.

PSP: So the opposite of helplessness would be mastery, or control.

Dr. Seligman: Yes.

PSP: So, according to your definition, positive events can also produce helplessness. Correct?

Dr. Seligman: Absolutely. If positive events come to you independent of anything you do, then you get the same kind of helplessness induced by negative events. We call it "Success Depression."

PSP: Have you ever experienced a success depression?

Dr. Seligman: (Chuckles) No. Just the reverse. My successes have come by diligent effort and hard work.

PSP: Can you illustrate the internal process of helplessness in a selling situation?

Dr. Seligman: Let’s take some negative, uncontrollable event like losing an important sale. You may perceive that you are helpless, you are lost, you are defeated. Then you ask what caused it. At this point in the flow of events you can escape mental pain by saying, "My customer doesn’t need this now," and that will take care of it.

PSP: You are opening the window.

Dr. Seligman: Right. However, the poor salesperson closes it by saying, "I am no good at this job. I can’t sell this product." If you interpret it that way, then you become passive, you tend to give up with a large number of customers and you tend to blame yourself and feel bad about yourself.

PSP: I have read your scientific study of life insurance salespeople and I would like to go through a quick checklist of the consequences of helplessness. First, it saps motivation to respond in future situations.

Dr. Seligman: Correct.

PSP: It disrupts the ability to learn from the situation.

Dr. Seligman: I would add that it also inhibits the ability to be creative in the situation.

PSP: It lowers the expectation for future successes.

Dr. Seligman: Right.

PSP: It produces emotional disturbances.

Dr. Seligman: Specifically sadness, anxiety and hostility. It also generates fear and depression.

PSP: It reduces the body’s immune system.

Dr. Seligman: Right.

PSP: And you found that salespeople earn less and their job security decreases.

Dr. Seligman: Both are correct.

PSP: The big question is, what can we do about it? How do we respond to tough situations in a confident, optimistic way? How do we unlearn the helplessness response?

Dr. Seligman: The president of Metropolitan Life asked me the same question. We began our research by developing a questionnaire to predict who was going to react this way. As a result, we immediately lowered turnover by hiring people with what we call "Positive explanatory styles." Next, we developed a training program we call "Optimism Sales Training." Essentially we introduce people to a process for changing their explanatory styles. It is a four day program where people learn how to deal with overwhelming, negative thoughts. They learn to be more active and creative in the face of failure.

PSP: Do you feel that there is a relationship between the way we explain success and failure and our future sales productivity?

Dr. Seligman: I think the relationship is pretty direct. I think that those salespeople who have adopted an optimistic style for dealing with negative events will make the next call faster, they are going to be more creative on the next call and they are going to sell more.

PSP: They learn to recover quicker.

Dr. Seligman: Yes. Selling is a very special profession. We have tested many different groups, from West Point students to Olympic athletes. Selling is unique simply because you are exposed to a lot of nos. Therefore, only a very special group of people is going to do well in it.

PSP: Do you feel that salespeople handicap themselves more through making a mistake, or more through the irrational explanation following the mistake?

Dr. Seligman: I think it is the explanation.

PSP: Have you ever been out on actual sales calls?

Dr. Seligman: Yes. When my father had his stroke, I spent the next five years selling magazines in upstate New York. At age sixteen, I was making more money than I did until I was a full professor. I think there are two aspects to selling. The first are the technical mistakes and your common sales training courses can help you with that. But your training, your experience and your talent can only go so far. Where do you learn to think about the causes of your mistakes? That’s a second, special kind of skill. It is a learnable skill which most people in selling don’t have.

PSP: So you are saying that if you learn that skill, you can increase your sales further.

Dr. Seligman: Yes.

PSP: Do you feel that the skill of explaining failure ultimately determines our chances for achieving success?

Dr. Seligman: It puts the upper limit on your talent and ability. You can have the talent of Mozart, but if you believe that you are no good at composing music, you are not going to do anything.

PSP: What is the difference between positive thinking and learned optimism?

Dr. Seligman: There are two basic differences. When I think of your usual positive thinking or motivation speech, I think of it as a temporary pumping up. It gives you a boost, but you don’t internalize things. You have to come back for another injection. The cognitive therapy techniques involved in learning optimistic explanatory styles represent a new set of skills. They stay with you all the time.

PSP: Dan Oran, the president of your sales selection and training company, Foresight Inc., said that positive thinking is statement based, while cognitive therapy is question based.

Dr. Seligman: That’s a fair assessment. There has been a lot of research to document the effectiveness of Cognitive Therapy. For instance, in the treatment of depression, medication works about 70 to 80 percent of the time. It works pretty well as long as you keep taking it. Once you are off, you run as much risk of relapse as if you never had it. You are going to get depressed again. Cognitive therapy has about the same effect in relieving depression, but once you learn the techniques, you acquire a skill for dealing with failure, defeat and mistakes that you will always carry with you. So when you get defeated again, you don’t have to run off to a doctor to get pumped up again. The basic question you need to ask yourself is, do I want a temporary or a permanent solution?

PSP: Your research shows that our expectations determine our level of success. What contributes to the development of our expectations?

Dr. Seligman: I think that there are two basic constraints on our expectations. The main one is reality. And reality can be either pretty grim or pretty bright. Then, on top of that, we’ve got our explanatory style. In other words, the way we explain an event from the inside determines our expectations. Reality is what constrains us from the outside.

PSP: You are a scientist and you measure things a little bit more carefully than the average person. What is your measure of success?

Dr. Seligman: For me there are two kinds of successes that really matter. One is the "Changing the world" success, the other is finding gratifying successes in everyday life – the small challenges. I have to admit that it appeals to me that you need to be doing something to make the world a better place than the world you entered.

PSP: Thank you.