Public speaking may be the most feared human activity, but I bet selling is in the top ten! Freeing ourselves from selling fear and negative thinking is the foundation of learning to enjoy and succeed at selling.
THE BIG 5
Last week I posted the only 5 things we need to be happy and successful sellers:
- Free yourself from fear and negative thinking.
- Tap into your personal passion.
- Create your Speaking Bank.
- Make sales promises you can guarantee.
- Master the 10-point Honoring Sales Conversation.
This week, we focus on #1.
FREEDOM FROM WHAT?
Fear and negative thinking about selling takes many forms. The voices can be shouts or whispers, angry or shameful, covert or overt. Negativity has a million ways of expressing itself. Here are just a few of the most common:
- Selling is sleazy and manipulative.
- I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t even want to know.
- I shouldn’t have to do it. People should come to me.
- Nobody is going to want what I offer.
- I don’t want to be rejected.
- I’ll make a fool of myself.
When we talk to potential buyers with all this rattling around in our minds, selling rarely ends well. We feel squirrely, so they feel squirrely and are less likely to buy. We have a bad time, and so don’t look forward to the next selling conversation. We may even try to avoid that next conversation.
HOW TO GET FREE
The best way to liberate ourselves from these fearful and negative thoughts is to get them outside of ourselves. If we’re looking at them, they aren’t us. If we can see them, we don’t have to be them. How to do that? There are many methods, which can be used alone or together.
- Write them down.
- Talk about them to someone.
- Read them aloud.
- Draw pictures of them.
The point is to bring them up to the conscious level. When they are operating beneath the surface, festering away in our unconscious minds, there’s not much we can do about them. When we bring them up into the light of day, we gain mastery. The Soul of Selling is packed full of exercises to bring these fears and negative thoughts to the surface, where we can deal effectively with them.
TWO STEPS FORWARD
Do all these negative thoughts dissolve immediately when you write them down or speak them? Not always. Sometimes they drift back from force of habit. When that happens, just write them down again. Look them in the eye, and consciously choose a more positive attitude. (Next week we’ll discuss #2 Tap into your personal passion.)
Sometimes it’s two steps forward, one step back. Remember that this is still forward progress, and keep taking those two steps forward!
Experiment with these solutions, and see which work best for you. What do you discover when you do this?
