“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” - Jim Rohn

Regardless of your political affiliation or where you stand on the debates or where your views are on social values lay, there is one thing everyone seems to be agreeing on these days: there’s a recession going on in the United States and it seems to be affecting nearly everyone.

Gas is expensive, and on the rise. We’ll see it hit an average of $4 a gallon before summer. The real estate market is suffering, especially in places like Florida where the prices were quite inflated and are now extraordinarily deflated. The U.S. dollar isn’t worth what it used to be and people from around the world are taking advantage of this and are buying American properties and businesses for much less than what they were once worth.

So do we sit around and lament the past. “When I was young, you could buy loaf of bread for three dollars. . .” Do we commiserate about how good things used to be? Well, I suggest that these meditations on the good old days, is counterproductive and probably drawing more fear and negativity when what we really need is to not get stuck in these bad thought loops.

I was talking to a student of mine recently on one of our one-on-one calls. She’s a financial adviser and has a piece of property she is selling in Florida through another student of mine who is a real estate agent. Things are not progressing at all and the house has been looked at by one person who never got back to them.

Having recently gone through the process of selling a house, I feel her frustration and yet, as persuaders, we have got to realize that we are absolutely not helping ourselves, our families, our prospects, or our clients by giving into defeatist attitudes.

As persuaders we must be riding the crest of the wave and not flounder behind it. Even in tough times there is money to be made and it is our good fortune that we have been honing our sales skills and our persuasion know-how to stay at the top of our game.

What does this mean? Well, it means we go the extra mile, we do above and beyond what we were doing before while maintaining a positive mental attitude.

Times like these are perfect opportunities to work our “self magic” — going over our universes, for example, and reinforcing our intention on all fronts, working more intimately with our gentle giants/other than conscious minds to resolve to have success no matter what the outside world has to say about it, no matter what the things beyond our control (if there is such a thing) have in store. Get to work on that self persuasion and align yourself in such a way that you are impervious to the weather outside.