When I’ve taught my “Spirit and Money: Prospering by Doing what you Love” workshop, for two decades, I’m amazed at the high percentage of people in the room who are uncomfortable with marketing, and downright terrified about selling. I remind them that there are several reasons why they fear selling so deeply.
1. They’ve been exposed to the horrors of telemarketers’ phone calls, which shatter the peace of their homes; as a result, they concluded that selling is disrupting and disgusting.
2. They’ve seen salesmen selling things they don’t like or believe in, making their presentation unpleasant, and giving sales a bad name.
3. They’ve seen games that salesmen play, most notably in car showrooms.
4. They’ve seen salespeople, pressured to reach quotas or lose their jobs and livelihoods, resorting to desperation and unethical tactics.
5. They’re afraid of selling themselves.
6. They’re afraid of being personally rejected.
Reframing Sales
I remind them in class that they’re in the fortunate position of selling something they love. (They discovered their passion earlier in class.) They can do all their selling in person, so they don’t have to bother others on the phone, so point number one above doesn’t apply to them. Because they love what they do and sell what they love, they don’t have the same problem as salespeople in point two above. And there’s no need for game playing when they can be authentic, so point three is also irrelevant. As for number four… well, there are no quotas. As for five… slavery has been eliminated for a century and a half.
Number six is really the pivotal issue that needs reframing.
Beyond Personal Rejection
The first thing I tell people who do what they love for a livelihood is that what they’re bringing to the world isn’t about them. When you’re doing something you love, it comes as second nature to you, so it’s not you doing it so much, but rather Nature. When a woman enjoys making pies so much that it’s easy as pie, she’s more of an instrument for the art of piemaking than someone who’s willing pies into the world. When a guy can fix just about any machine or engine, so that it’s as easy as falling off a log for him, he’s an agent for Nature to repair the world.
This idea of doing something that’s second nature underscores the point that it’s really first Nature – the Universe is doing the work. We’re simply instruments, much like Pavarotti was an instrument through which musical heaven could be shared in our world. None other than Larry Bird, a force of Nature himself, called Michael Jordan, “God in gym shorts.”
You’re not likely the greatest at your work the way Pavarotti or Jordan were, but you don’t have to be to succeed. The Universe is making our world better, and it has chosen you to represent it. If you employ the talents It gave you free of charge, you can create a business and career out of that, and you’ll no longer need some bland company to employ your non-second-nature skill set.
When you truly get that you’ve been gifted talents to enrich the world, and you feel great expressing them, you can then allow the world to support you for that service (or product) in the form of fees or sales.
It’s then that you see you’re truly an instrument or rep. Because it’s much easier to rep someone other than yourself, you can enthusiastically talk about it with others. Then you win because you’re on purpose. And if they say yes when you ask if they’d like to have one – whether it’s a massage, a bottle of antioxidants, or your book – you win twice.
If they say no, it’s for now, not forever. Try them on another day, and they might say yes. Remember… they’re not buying your product or your service, they’re not rejecting you. Whether they say yes or no is none of your business. Your business is to do what you love, bring it into the world, communicate it to the world, and sell – sometimes successfully, and sometimes, unsuccessfully. The selling part is out of your control, so just share, communicate, and relax about the results. And if today they’re not buying, just keep doing as Fred Astaire and many others sang in “Pick Yourself Up”:
Nothing’s impossible I have found
For when my chin is on the ground
I pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again.
- Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin