It’s interesting that even though you are a smart and savvy person, the emotional instincts of attachment, assumption, and irrational optimism kick in. I see so many instances when people get excited and optimistic, and then the big deal doesn’t come through. He got seduced and did not dig deeper to get the full truth. I refrained from saying “I told you so.” This is a smart guy, yet he was blinded by the prospect’s Fortune 500 name and a couple of nice people who told him what he wanted to hear. Is there medication for that? When the prospect went dark and then put everything on hold, the producer confessed that he might have made some assumptions. I was pretty sure he missed a number of questions and cues and was falling into the realm of sales-related delusion. I didn’t want to burst his bubble, but it seemed to be moving too fast and sounded too good to be true. He told me that he had asked all the hard qualifying questions and was certain his firm was going to win the business. I recently reviewed a big potential deal with a producer. The second is our fear of the outsider and our need for community. The first is our fear of insignificance and our need for respect. This fills the void for two of our universal fears and corresponding needs, as noted by researcher and author Donald Brown. It’s exciting and seductive when someone wants to meet with us and shows an interest in who we are and what we do. Why do we do this? Much of it has to do with how we are wired. Yet even the most successful sales professionals are vulnerable to the optimism trap, thinking and talking too much about a promising opportunity before it really deserves such energy and attention. You have taught yourself to be disciplined about your approach to the reality of a new opportunity that is not yet closed. When there’s not enough business on the books or hot leads in the pipeline, it can be difficult to maintain healthy skepticism about a new business opportunity. Getting excited about an opportunity is normal. So why do you sometimes become delusional about the opportunities in your pipeline? In sales there is a fine line between optimism, which the dictionary defines as a “tendency to look on the more favorable side of events and to expect the most favorable outcome,” and delusion, which is described as “a false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.” I trust that you’re a psychologically stable human being. Furthermore, since we've already seen positive behaviors from a person, it can be tough to believe that they may not be acting in a trustworthy manner at any given point.The Fine Line Between Optimism & Delusion That's largely because we already made up our minds about who we think they are when we decided that they could be trusted. Then, once trust is already built in a relationship, when the person begins to display characteristics with which we do not align and show themselves to be manipulative, abusive, or otherwise disrespectful, we may be more prone to defend them and their behavior or give them chances at redemption. People who display manipulative behaviors can be quite charming, which can lure others to trust them. Once trust is already built in a relationship, we may be more prone to defend bad behavior or give chances at redemption. That safety-whether false or not-is connected to trust. Let’s first unpack how trust is built: When we meet people whose behaviors, values, and beliefs align with our own, we tend to find a sense of safety with that person. How does a person become too trusting of others or delusionally optimistic? When we build someone up in our mind to be one thing, we want to remain hopeful that version of the person will become reality if it's not-and often that doesn't happen. That is, we may cling to visions of a positive person and disregard reality, facts, and other clear evidence that point to who a person really is. There are times when optimism can shift into delusional optimism, and this can lead people to be too trusting of others.
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