“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

No matter what your political affiliation or who you support for next president or where you stand on social issues or whether you believe in global warming or not, there’s one thing that everyone seems to be agreeing on these days and it’s this: there’s a recession going on and it seems to be affecting 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.

We can sit around and lament the past, starting sentences with ‘Well, when I was young. . .’ or ‘It used to be that you could buy a loaf of bread for three dollars’. But these meditations on ‘how good things used to be’ are absolutely counterproductive and while momentary nostalgia for a $3 gallon of gas is probably inevitable, we need not get stuck in these fearful thought loops.

I was talking to a student of mine on one of our one-on-one calls. This student owns a piece of property which she is trying to sell in Florida through another student of mine who is a real estate agent. Unfortunately, the house is priced higher than what the market will bear at this point.

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.

Instead, as persuaders, we must be riding the crest of the wave, so to speak, 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 ride the wave.

This means that we go the extra mile, we go above and beyond what we were previously doing while maintaining a positive mental attitude.

This is a perfect opportunity 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.