WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?

PUBLIC SPEAKING, REJECTION OR FAILING?

By far the biggest fear of salespeople is fear of failure. It has a cousin…fear of rejection. Rejection is the pathway to failure — if you fear it. While failure itself is real, the fear of it is a condition of the mind.

Earl Nightingale’s legendary tape “The Strangest Secret” says, “You become what you think about.” If that’s true, why doesn’t everyone think “success?” The answer is a combination of what we expose ourselves to, and how we condition ourselves.

We live in a world of negative conditioning. The three big motivators are… fear, greed and vanity. They drive the American sales process, and they drive the American salesperson.

Our society preys on the fear factor. It’s in 50% of the ads we see (the rest are greed or vanity). Ads about life insurance for death and disability, credit cards stolen, anti-freeze for stalled cars, tires that grip the road in the rain, brakes that stop to avoid hitting a child on a bike, and security systems so your home won’t be robbed. You see that crap enough, you become “fear-conditioned.”

Over the years of my failures, I have developed a great way of looking at it (lots of practice). I learn from it, or I ignore it.

Source: This is an excerpt from an article no longer available online.