The Sales Experiment

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What One Ingredient Would Bring the Most Change?

For those of you who don’t share a faith perspective, I hope you can find a nugget or two in this post.

In my podcast listening today, I heard the last half of Steven Neff’s sermon The Indispensable Word at College Wesleyan Church.

He talked about what happens when someone comes to faith. It’s not a mental decision. It’s not a moment of emotional ecstasy. It’s a moment where the stuff of God – the Word of God – transforms the human heart into something completely different.

He’s an extremely good communicator. While I’m sure he could care less how well known he is, I believe his voice should be one in that is heard in the evangelical community… but I digress.

My point is not to talk theology.

It’s to talk about how any of us come to a point of change. While a ton of self-help and personal growth literature would tell us that we have all we need inside us to make the changes we need to make, I don’t know if I buy that.

I think we need input. We need influences. We need others who can drop knowledge, perspective, and new ideas on us so we can change in areas where we need to change.

Right now, I’m working on a bathroom project. I’m not a construction guy, but the job requires some complicated (to me) steps.

I can stare all day at the bathtub surround, at a loss on how to prepare the walls for tile. Yet it only takes 5 minutes for someone who has done this work before to walk in and know exactly what to do and coach me up.

In a lot of areas of our lives, that’s exactly what we need. We can stare down the barrel of a problem that we don’t quite get. The right person with the right experience and knowledge can walk along and completely change our perspectives or abilities to get things done.

First, you have to identify the area in your life where you want to see change happen.

Second, you need to be open for input.

Third, you need to find the person who has just the right stuff to help push you through the change that needs to happen.

We can’t always get it done by ourselves. We all have blind spots and areas where we’re ignorant.

But if we’re open to it. If we don’t feel the need to be the smartest person in the room, then we just might receive that one thing, that one ingredient, that could revolutionize our lives or our work or any area where we need to see change happen.

Until tomorrow…

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Reading & Listening Today

What story are you telling? – 48 Days Online Radio Show, 11/14/14

This was a great little podcast. Dan reminded us to get the goals done for 2015. I’m needing to set some time aside to work on this.

Jaime Tardy’s Webinar on Networking and Creating a Mastermind

This webinar convinced me to make good on what I promised myself for the conference I’m currently attending: find people to interview. It will, at this point, be for blog posts, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

 

 

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Why Not You?

This week, I busted out some classic sales and motivational literature. I’m reading See You at the Top, by Zig Ziglar. The fun thing about reading his book is that you can virtually hear him in the pages.  He writes just like he speaks.

In the opening two segments of the book, Ziglar deals with mindset and the issue of self-image.

He confronts our tendency to come up with reasons why we can’t do certain things and the reasons why we tell ourselves we won’t ever be successful.

If we don’t think we will accomplish much, we won’t. If we don’t believe we have enough talent, wisdom, knowledge, or worth, then we’ll act accordingly.

You will rise to the occasion if you feel like you can or feel like you deserve to succeed. You’ll come up short if you feel like you don’t deserve to experience success or feel like you don’t have what it takes.

You cannot consistently perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.

It’s a simple concept.

We tell ourselves, “Why should I get such and such?” “Why do I deserve this relationship or that job?”

Consequently, we don’t get those things.

Now I’m not saying that just changing our self-talk from “Why I can’t..” to “Why not me?” will completely do the trick.

But I do think that there’s a much greater chance of success if we we switch to “Why not me?”

So… why not you?

Is there, truly, a reason why you can’t accomplish certain goals?

Do you think you empower yourself when you assume you can’t, but hope somehow things will still fall into place?

Or do you think you have a greater chance if you remind yourself that you’re just as worthy of achieving certain things as anybody else is. Doesn’t make you the best person in the world. It just puts you on equal ground. It just puts you in the game so that you can give it a shot.

So… why not you?

Seriously. Why not?

Why can’t you change, improve, grow a pair, and step out in faith? Why can’t you learn a new skill? Why can’t you make the sale, meet the girl, be a good dad?

You can. Just decide you can and get to work.

Until tomorrow…

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Reading and Listening….

See You at the Top, Zig Ziglar

Since I’ve written, I’ve logged a few pages in Zig’s book. He’s really banging on some basic self-image concepts. Why do we have low self-images? How can we recognize it? It’s great, wonderful basic stuff, as true now as it was when he penned the words back in 1974

The Tim Ferriss Show – Parts 1 and 2 of his interview with Tony Robbins

I recommend listening to these two interviews. Each part is a solid hour, but they’re very, very interesting. I love listening to Tony talk about learning how to take ‘massive action’ and developing the skills to put ourselves into more productive and effective ‘states’.

Matthew Paulson Interview – The Eventual Millionaire Podcast with Jaime Tardy

Paulson shares tips, tricks, and strategies for building a massive email list. I love his story because he sounds very relatable. Besides the fact that he has a computer science background, he makes it sound like anybody could eventually figure out how to build a list because it takes work. The fact that it takes work, iteration, and testing means that there’s no secret decoder ring for success.

This is Your Life, episodes 99, 100, and Season 1, episode 11 – with Michael Hyatt

I won’t summarize each of these episodes, but I will recommend episode 11 if you’re working on putting together a personal brand.

Whether you work by yourself or are simply trying to leverage everything you have to brand yourself in your organization or as a salesperson, this episode gives 5 immensely practical suggestions.

 

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