When it comes to handling selling setbacks, is your mind working for you, or against you? To sell better, consider what six famous achievers from history can teach us about the proper mind-set for overcoming adversity.

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." G. K. Chesterson

   Is selling an adventure for you? Is adversity in your selling helping you or hurting you? Making you grow or keeping you down? An annoyance or a teacher? What you receive from adversity is all in how you view it. Top sales pros use adversity as a laboratory for personal growth. They intentionally seek wisdom from it, so they can get to the next level of performance.

"A wounded dear leaps highest." Emily Dickinson

   Have you done some of your best selling under time pressure? Extreme competition? Limited resources? If so, you leapt to greater heights from that pressure. If you believe that pressure and adversity brings out your greatness, so it will. If you bow to the difficulties in business, you will be left with the results that are given to the defeated.

"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge." Igor Stravinsky

   We hear people say. "This experience is a complete waste of time!" But is it? What if you could learn something from every experience, and learn the most from your failures?
   If you aim your mind at learning the maximum from your selling difficulties, would that make you jump ahead of your competition? While they would be complaining, you would be learning. And making sales.

"Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong" Longfellow

   No one wants to suffer for pain's sake. But in reaching a goal, into every life some trouble must fall. You can take solace in the resolution you have when you resist and overcome the obstacles in your path to success. Pain is just a transitory step on that ladder to achievement. "A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner." English Proverb It is a paradox that often, the more trouble we have, the stronger we become. So it is with selling. The best salespeople expect trouble, plan for it, accept it and find a way through it. Don't hope for trouble, but at the minimum, accept it when it comes and vow to use it or defeat it.

"Adversity is the midwife of genius." Napoleon

   If you want success stories to tell, create new levels of selling performance by adapting to trouble and forming new solutions for your customers. Believe that adversity will launch you into new ways of helping your customer, and yourself. The bigger the obstacle, the greater the pleasure in building the strategy to overcome it.

   Consistently strong achievers in the sales game ask themselves these four critical questions every time they sell:

• Am I ready to at least accept, if not embrace, the adversity that comes my way today?
• Am I committed to learning the maximum from every so-called trouble today?
• Am I prepared to use the energy of adversity to create new solutions in my selling?
• Is my mind-set ready to see the adventure that is set in front of me as I go through my day?

   Your choice now is a simple one. Will your selling path be one of adventure, full of exciting personal and professional discoveries? Or will it be one tortuous obstacle after the next? You have the power in your mind now to make your selling life the adventurous one it should be, and to reach the potential as a person you were meant to enjoy.