By Jeff Shore
In sales, you can observe or you can dive in. You can get your share or you can also grab someone else’s share. You can shake hands or you can embrace. I am not recommending that you embrace all of your clients! Handshakes are good. Keep shaking hands. What you need to embrace is your own discomfort. Don’t nod your head in acknowledgement of discomfort and don’t merely shake hands – embrace it.
When I talk about being bold, I do not mean that we should simply dig deep, rally our courage, psyche ourselves up, knuckle down, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and keep on keeping on at the tough stuff of life. That is all well and good, but it is not the kind of boldness I’m talking about.
Being bold means embracing discomfort because you recognize that when you feel discomfort, you are being given an opportunity to grow. Being bold doesn’t mean that we merely handle hard things well, it means that we welcome hard things!
If building boldness is the goal, then, as with every goal, there will be obstacles along the way. When you think about your own discomforts, do they seem daunting? Do you find yourself thinking things like, “I have never been able to conquer my discomforts and fears before, why should I believe I can now?” If these are the kinds of thoughts you have, you are on the right track!
If the obstacles on the way to a goal are small, the goal itself is likely small and not worth reaching. If overcoming your fears seems just as daunting and impossible as increasing your sales, then you have a good match—you have something to embrace and a goal worth working towards! A goal that doesn’t make you uncomfortable is goal not worth achieving!
The key to embracing boldness is retraining our minds. We have well-worn ruts in our brains when it comes to our discomforts. It’s as if the Lost in Space robot lives inside each of our heads, automatically blurting out “DANGER!” whenever we feel any discomfort coming on. But, the good news is that our brains are flexible. We can retrain them to recognize discomfort as an opportunity and the feelings we have in a moment of discomfort can become the trigger for boldness! This is an awesome reality of being human. The “danger” signal will still go off, but if we’ve retrained ourselves, instead of it causing us to be fearful and wanting to flee, we can actually learn to feel glad about these so-called danger alerts.
“I eat danger for breakfast” isn’t just a movie line…it can be your reality.
Success is the goal and overcoming discomfort with boldness is the way to get there. Every time you are uncomfortable, it is an opportunity to grow, to shine, to do what the rare minority of sales people do: Be Bold!
About the Author:
Jeff Shore is a highly sought-after sales expert, speaker, author and executive coach whose innovative BE BOLD methodology teaches you how to change your mindset and change your world. His latest book, Be Bold and Win the Sale: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone and Boost Your Performance, is forthcoming from McGraw-Hill in January 2014. Learn more at jeffshore.com or follow Jeff on Twitter @jeffshore.
More About Jeff Shore:
For more than three decades, Jeff has guided executives and sales teams in large and small companies across the globe to embrace their discomforts and deliver BOLD sales results. In a crowded field of sales experts and training programs, Jeff Shore stands out with his research-based BE BOLD methodology. Combining his extensive front-line sales experience with the latest Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research, Jeff has created a highly effective, personalized way to reset sales paradigms and deliver industry-leading results. Jeff doesn’t just teach you how to sell, he shows you how to change your mindset and change your world.