Buoyancy Elements: Interrogative Self-Talk

There are three elements of buoyancy: interrogative self-talk, positivity ratios, and explanatory style.  These three pieces work together to form the “B” of Pink’s “ABC’s.”  Buoyancy means to stay afloat despite rejection, and then handling that rejection effectively.  In sales, there will be much rejection, but this does not speak to oneself internally, but instead it is external and fixable.

First, interrogative self-talk is very different from declarative self-talk.  Declarative self-talk is just simply saying, “I can do this!”.  However, interrogative self-talk is much more meaningful.  This type of self-talk encourages you to ask yourself questions to help prepare you.  Additionally, these questions help to set us up to find real answers and inspire us to look for motivations for real action.  Furthermore, it allows you to work on “selling yourself” and to not be disingenuous.  In high school, I played tennis, but my senior year I had a shoulder injury, so I could not serve overhead.  An underhanded serve is not great in tennis, so I would have to use self-talk.  I had a coach once say this to me, and then made me repeat it: “I am Emily Williams and I can serve in all day long.”  So, every time I was at the baseline ready to serve I would repeat that and it would help me to focus on what I could do (get the ball in and move fast to return my crappy serve).  However, I would say that statement disingenuously.  I would say it because it was part of the routine.  Using interrogative self-talk would have been more beneficial as I could pursue a real solution and not half-heartedly talking to myself.