How We Think; How We Feel

Sixty-odd years ago a young insurance salesman in Minneapolis named Larry Wilson was miserable. Every time he was rejected by a prospective customer he felt like a terrible failure, an anxious loser unwilling to make the next phone call. You might say he had a fixed mindset: Why bother to make a call if he was only going to fail again? He was ready to quit his job. But then his boss taught him a simple trick: he could change how he thought about those rejections. Because it took a beginning salesperson about twenty calls before making one sale and the average commission was $500, that meant on average a call was worth $25. Now, whenever Larry was told no, he forced himself to cheerfully think. "Thanks for the twenty-five dollars." This simple change not only made him feel better, it also allowed him to do his job better because he could focus on customers instead of on how miserable he felt. Soon, he was averaging ten calls for each commission of $1,000, and whenever he was rejected, he would think, "Thanks for the one hundred dollars." Essentially, he had reframed his thinking about failure. Larry became so successful as a life insurance agent that he became the youngest member at the time (at age twenty-nine) of the industry's Million Dollar Round Table. Then he began designing training programs. Larry was a voracious reader of philosophy and psychology and an irrepressible student of the human condition.

Stop. Challenge. Choose

Larry Wilson put it simply: Are you playing to win? Or playing not to lose? Playing to win meant a willingness to take risks in pursuit of challenging goals and satisfying relationships. Playing not to lose, which most of us do most of the time, meant avoiding situations where failure was possible. Playing to win, Larry maintained, was the stuff of great advances and great joy alike but necessarily brought setbacks along the way. Playing not to lose meant playing it safe, settling for activities, jobs, or relationships where you feel in control. The decision, Larry would be quick to explain, was essentially cognitive. You could make up your mind to play to win and thus start on the path to changing your thinking.

Ever skilled at simplification, Larry boiled Maultsby's multistep practice of rational self-counseling down to this: Stop-Challenge-Choose. Stop means pause. Breathe. Get yourself ready to challenge your spontaneous, usually unhelpful, thinking. Is it rational? Is it promoting your health and helping you achieve your goals? If the answer is no, this is a signal to choose what Maxie would call a more rational response - a response that works better in helping you achieve your goals. It is not about right or wrong. It's about what helps you move forward.

This article on "How we Think; How we Feel" is excerpted from Amy Edmondson's book.