What Are You Afraid Of?
Over the seven-plus years that I’ve had my consulting business, I’ve become much more interested in what holds salespeople back than what moves them forward. The problems themselves are more interesting than the fixes, and the fun is in the application.
What’s holding sellers back is not a lack of knowledge or laziness. It’s fear. Fear they’re not good enough. Fear they’ll say the wrong thing. Fear they’ll screw up a good customer relationship. Fear of being judged by their customers, or worse, their peers.
Fear is bigger in theory than it is in practice. That’s one of the reasons why you don’t fix fear with training. The monster in the closet is terrifying until you look at it and realize it’s Sully or Mike Wazowski.
The key to understanding your sales fears is mindfulness. Since there’s nothing tangible about it, and you can’t see it, you have to allow yourself to sit still and feel it. You need to dig into it. Examine it, name it, seek to understand it, and talk about it. The closer you look at fear, the less significant it gets.
I was in Austin last month for Scott Ingram’s Sales Success Summit. I was taking notes on each presenter for a special series of podcasts I help Scott with, so I knew I’d be sitting still for two days.
On a separate page (and occasionally in the margins), I wrote down the negative emotions that I felt; my fears and limiting beliefs. Sometimes it would be a word or two, other times, I would expound a bit. These were just stream-of-consciousness thoughts that I captured, and they were very real at the moment.
A funny thing happened when I went back to look at them. Things that almost felt paralyzing at the moment I was writing them were laughable in a different light. When I could be objective and unemotional, my own fears appeared to me to be ridiculous. There was no way these were passing the say-it-out-loud test.
Perspective means everything.
When something scares you, don’t take it for granted. It’s not helpful to dismiss it, and trying to cover it up doesn’t make it go away. You owe it to that fear to examine it and see it for what it is. It’s either something very legitimate that you need to address, or it’s an otherwise friendly reminder that you’re better at this than you think you are, and maybe you don’t need to be so afraid.
But until you investigate, you’ll never know the difference, and that’s what’s really holding you back.
What are you afraid of? Sit for 15 minutes and think about it. Write it all down, then come back to it tomorrow with a clearer head. Do these fears need your attention or were they a momentary lapse of reason?
