Hey, Sales Person...Is Nothing Wrong With You?
Sales people, especially at the beginning, obsess about failure. They take a lost deal very personally. They get hurt. They get depressed. They get angry and start hating their profession.
But soon they see that failure is just a result. It is not bad or good, just neutral. It can be turned into something good if it's studied for the wisdom to be gained from it. And it can be turned into something bad if it is made into something personal.
The great professor of linguistics S.I. Hayakawa used to say that there were basically two kinds of people. The kind of person who failed at something and said "I failed at that" and the kind of person who failed at something and said, "I'm a failure."
The first person is telling the truth, and the second person is not. "I'm a failure!"
That claim doesn't always appear to the outsider to be a lie. It can look like a sad form of self-acceptance. In fact, we can even associate such globalizing, such exaggerating, with truthful confession: "Why not admit it? I'm a failure."
However, it is a lie, and the lie is intentional. The payoff to this lie is: If I am already a failure, how can I be criticized for not doing something great?
The consequences of this self-deception are huge. The psychiatrist Aaron Beck illuminates the consequences this way:
His wife was upset because the children were slow in getting dressed. He thought, "I'm a poor father because the children are not better disciplined." He noticed that this showed he was a poor husband. While driving to work, he thought, "I must be a poor driver or other cars would not be passing me." As he arrived at work, he noticed some other personnel had already arrived. He thought, "I can't be very dedicated or I would have come earlier." When he noticed folders and papers piled up on his desk, he concluded, "I'm a poor organizer because I have so much work to do."
You can see what this man is doing to himself. He is taking innocent, meaningless situations and adding his own devastating meaning. He is turning them into indictments of himself. And because the sum total of these unnecessary indictments is to cause him to believe that he is defective, he is killing his own spirit.
I used to do the same thing. All the time. I used to tell myself that there was something wrong with me deep down inside. This kind of self-talk always kept me out of action. It removed all sense of purpose. (That's what a lie to the soul is unconsciously designed to do.)
There is some kind of voice in us, always in us, that says it's not safe to live on purpose. It's not safe to express yourself completely in the living of your true life. It's not safe to go for it and really prosper. That's too big an adventure for someone who has something wrong with them.
That's too big a risk for a defective person to take, the voice says. But the voice is the voice of a liar. It's the part of all of us that tries to lead us astray. That part that caused Scott Peck to say, in The Road Less Traveled, that laziness is how the devil manifests himself.
In psychological terms, the liar within is the voice of fear and passivity. The opposite of a soul's purpose: a soul surrender. Not to be confused with an external spanking: a defeat on the game board of life. But rather that internal defeat: quitting before I begin.
(Defeat and failure in the external world can actually be refreshing and rejuvenating. The great football coach Woody Hayes used to say, "Nothing cleanses the soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.")
But to claim defeat in the internal world of self-concept is to betray myself. And it begins by pretending that something is wrong with me.
As you sell today, always keep in mind this one true fact: There is nothing wrong with you. You have it inside yourself to prosper in sales beyond your wildest imagining. Get connected to that truth and leave all the "failure" thoughts in the trash where they belong.
________________
Steve Chandler is the author of The Joy Of Selling.
