Search Results for: integrity

November 1, 2014 by Christine

What Integrity Really Means

Integrity.

It’s a missing ingredient of our time. Possibly the missing ingredient.

Let me tell you why.

Definition

But before I do, let me ask what it means to you. It’s one of these words that gets slung around in personal and leadership development circles, especially if you get into a discussion about values. But would you really know integrity if you saw it?

And I think that’s been part of its problem till now. It’s been up there as some high and mighty principle. But few people could describe why it’s relevant on a day-to-day basis.

Which is why I like Michael Jensen and Werner Erhart’s work on integrity. Because their definition cuts to the chase.

For them it’s simple. Integrity talks fundamentally of the wholeness of individuals, relationships or systems. There’s no implied value judgement in their view. Instead, they say, wholeness is an aspect of our being. It’s in our nature to expect things to be whole and complete. So when something lacks integrity, it affects us.

Things don’t jive for us the way they should. They don’t feel right. And whether we’re conscious of it or not, deep down we know.

Having integrity means honouring your word

How do you have integrity?

Well, to have integrity as an individual you must honour your word.

In an ideal world everyone would make commitments only to things they could deliver on. But life’s not like that for most of us.

Recognising that’s so – we’re human and goalposts change – we can nevertheless honour our word. Honouring your word means keeping your word, or whenever you won’t be keeping your word, saying so to everyone impacted:

a) that you won’t be keeping your word
b) that you will keep it in the future and by when, or that you won’t be keeping it at all
c) what you will do regards the impact on others of your failure to keep your word

In a nutshell: own your shit and clean it up.

What that looks like to you or me

I got excited about this as a concept because it made me realise how much better the world would be if we all adopted that philosophy.

Maybe you think you don’t have a problem with integrity. Oh yeah? Check out these scenarios:

You pack your diary full of appointments and then end up late for meeting after meeting. You say “sorry” to the people you keep waiting, but you can’t help feeling that in-the-moment pang of guilt.
You’ve a report you’ve committed to get done by a certain date and you’ve just been unable to get to it, so you say nothing and hope no-one notices. You feel a mixture of relief and disappointment in yourself when you send it off late with an apology note.
You promised yourself to eat healthily and get to the gym three times this week. But it’s been a crappy Monday. Wolfing down that tub of ice-cream in the evening gives only a fleeting sense of comfort, before the self-loathing voices kick in again.

You may think that these things count for nothing. That they’re all part of the human condition and “the way things are” when you work for yourself or do a big job. But the impact on ourselves, and on people around us accumulates as, drip after drip, we create the experience of not having integrity; of not honouring our word.

The bigger integrity challenge

When you start to really understand this, you can begin to see just how integrity is missing from life on a wider scale.

Look at Nick Clegg and his now infamous 2010 election promise to cut student fees, which he reneged on as soon as he got into power with David Cameron.

Or the whole sub-prime crisis of a few years back that was caused by mortgage products that had no integrity, sold to people who would struggle to pay, while a number of derivative traders made billions betting on their failure.

Once the banks had been dug out of their integrity gap, all kind of measures were implemented to ensure “something like this never happens again”. Regulatory frameworks were reviewed. Ethics training and the like was introduced.

I’m not suggesting that these don’t have their place. But isn’t it a little sad that integrity has to be legislated for?

And in any case we’ve subsequently had examples like Tesco, who inflated its prices for a while, only then to drop them back to what they had been charging while claiming to be offering a “Big Price Drop”.

Everything starts with our word

What I’m personally discovering from trying to stay more and more in integrity with myself is that life goes better; I feel better about myself; my relationships are better. And I see the impact it has on my work too.

For example, I recently got the timing wrong of an international coaching call and wrote to my client:

I’m so sorry. This is entirely my mistake. I put our call in my calendar for 2.30 GMT not CET….

Let’s reschedule.

I realise that my error means I’m out of integrity with you and apart from anything would like to ask you how I may meaningfully correct that.

Not only did he write back and say that my putting it that way had really made him think, but also over the weeks that followed I watched him consciously choose to stay more and more in integrity with himself, in what has been a tough business situation for him.

He came to coaching to smash some of his own glass ceilings. I think his insights on integrity served as a bit of a hammer for him.

Because really, if you have integrity, and you encourage others to live with integrity, you can achieve so much more and feel so much better.

It’s not a nice to have thing. It’s fundamental.

Start with yourself

So, don’t wait for the government to legislate on it, or for your company to write an integrity policy. Start with you and start now.

Where are you keeping your word to yourself? Where not? What are the ways in which you can clean up your act? How will that serve you? And how will it serve others around you?

photo credit: Ding Yuin Shan ???

May 29, 2015 by Christine

Love The Work You Do

Nothing stays the same forever.

That was one of the lessons I didn’t want to learn when I created my own company.

Back then, I had a clear vision that I’d be offering shit-hot HR services: HR strategy reviews; organization designs; performance management systems. Things I loved doing. It had taken a lot of time and effort while I was still an employed consultant to get clear on all of that, allow myself to channel my work that way, and indeed tell people in my networks that that’s what I was going to do.

It didn’t occur to me to consider that I’d get bored and fall out of love with any of it.

Falling out of love with your work

Sure enough, the first five or ten or how many ever projects that involved these kind of things were magical. I felt exhilarated to be out there on my own, selling top-end advice and working with such clever, fun, inspiring people. But there came a point where something that had once been nirvana, started to feel stale.

It was like getting to the end of eating a very large slice of red velvet cake. Before I’d carved myself a wedge, I’d craved it. When I started eating it, I melted in the tongue zinging hit of cacao, buttermilk, vanilla and beetroot flavors. But by the last few mouthfuls I was sated.

I stopped enjoying my work. Which was as worrying as it was confusing.

If you’re in a paid job, it’s easy enough to take this kind of experience as meaning that it’s time to find your next big challenge.

But if it’s your own business, or you’re somehow tenured to the company you’re part of, it’s not quite that straight forward. Often, aside from anything, there’s the challenge of defining what else it is you want to do, let alone thinking about how you’re going to morph what you’re doing in a way that sustains your revenues.

Morphing

That’s how it was for me. At some point, I saw my next horizon appear: I wanted to be to offer executive coaching. And indeed I wanted to sharpen my ability to work with business teams. I could facilitate an arbitrary, externally designed agenda. But I wanted to be able to channel and harness inherent group process far more elegantly.

I figured I had a ton of learning to do before I could legitimately offer these things. So I set out to do both coach and psychotherapy training.

But in the meantime, I was still a business owner not feeling the love.

I remember being very conflicted about that. Never mind my ambivalence; offering services to clients when my passion was in absentia felt like it lacked integrity. I decided to take the counsel of one of my mentors at the time, a full-time, highly successful practicing coach and psychotherapist called David.

He shared with me his own story.

“For years before I began my own training,” he said, “I had a kitchen design and fitting business. When I knew I wanted to become a therapist, and I began my training, I faced a similar dilemma to you. For a long time, far from just being equivocal, I hated my work. Sure, I kept selling people kitchens and arranging for them to be installed. But all I could see was how done I was with it. Especially when confronted with challenges, all I could focus on was a time in the future when I’d be doing something else.

“It was killing me.”

I asked him he’d got past that, and he explained that, one day, he’d had the realization that, for however long he chose to run his kitchen business, he could either keep resenting it, or choose instead to enjoy it.

That was his insight: that he had choice.

Loving The Work You Do

“So, I decided, for so long as I do this, I am going to love it. I am going to stop seeing it as a necessary evil. In fact, I’m going to start loving the shit out of it.”

We laughed.

“Let’s face it,” he said, “we creative and entrepreneurial sorts tend to get bored easily. We live in tomorrow. We’re brilliant at that. But it comes at the expense of our today. And that bears a price in the very heavy feelings associated with waiting and longing. It also has an impact on people around us.

“I asked myself, what message am I conveying to my customers, to my staff, and indeed to the universe, through my dislike of my old business? And it was as simple as that. I thought, until I’m a coach/psychotherapist, and have created my practice in the way I want, I have a kitchen design business and I’m going to bloody love it.

“How did that change things?” I asked him.

“Well, nothing and everything changed,” he said. “The products and services didn’t change, nor did my staff. But I started to see them through different eyes. I became more caring and respectful. I listened more. I tried to be more present. I asked people what they needed of me. I saw opportunities I’d previously missed to do things like deepen staff relationships or to encourage customers to be more imaginative and daring in their designs. I was sad in the end to let it go. But I began to see that presence, loving and serving were fundamental building blocks of being good in my forthcoming incarnation, and had to laugh at myself when I realized that, instead of holding me back from something, my current business could in fact be a conduit to what I now do.”

His story really made me think, and I decided to make the same choice as he had. I decided to love what I was doing for as long as I was doing it. To try to come from a place of serving as much as I could. The whole thing felt way lighter, and I do believe my results improved. For sure I enjoyed it more again.

As an unexpected by-product, I found my heart opening to the warmest sense of gratitude that, however things conspired, I was being able to continue to do important work, making a valuable difference to people and their businesses, at the same time as I was sharpening my saw to move in a different direction again.

I do believe that loving what I did ultimately made it easier to transition. There was no need to feel bad about what I was letting go of, because I’d served it and it me.

Any amount of smart coaches can collude with your desire to do work you love. And, sure, why not head yourself in the direction of doing it? But consider that what you love can, over time, change. And that meantime, there’s strength to be gained from developing your muscle in loving what you do today. No matter what that is.

Image Copyright: siraphol / 123RF Stock Photo

April 17, 2015 by Christine

This Is What Happens When Your Idea of Yourself Starts To Look Important

Let me be honest.

This post is nothing like the one I began to write for you. Nothing at all.

In fact, I’m not sure that I’m going to be writing the same kind of posts again that I’ve been writing over the last few months. I say “not sure” because I don’t ever like to be definitive about these things. All I can tell you right now is that something has changed and that you’re going to notice it.

See, this year, and indeed since I revamped this website and started writing here instead of over on A Different Kind of Work, I’ve been writing articles in quite a logical way. I got the Livingston Consulting creed down and then I thought – great idea – let’s take the creed’s themes and drill into them. One theme a month. I’ve been doing that. And, when I’m not on holiday, writing an article a week which I send out to my list.

As it turns out, I have been on holiday the last few weeks and so there have been no new articles but today was “writing this week’s article day”, and so I dutifully went back to my schedule to see what I’d planned out to write about.

Truth Clarifies

The theme I’d planned was Truth Clarifies. What, I thought, could I tell you about the truth? Spent a couple of hours surfing the internet for some inspiration, but all I could come up with felt somehow hollow.

Unable to come up with any meaningful, pithy content, I was really sweating it.

What would you think of me if I didn’t keep my commitment to post weekly? And post in accordance with how I said at some prior point I would?

Why is that important? Well, so much of it goes to the thing about integrity I keep going on about. It’s important to me that if I’ve said I’ll do something, I honor my commitment to it. I want to be a Servant Leader to the people who read and work with me. I want to serve.

But today, and after a conversation with John El-Mokadem, I’m seeing it a little differently. What’s changing is some greater insight into the nature of what’s going on for me here.

It was kind of funny. Today I turned up for my session with him with a list of things to talk about. It had to be the first, maybe the second time, that I’ve actually had an agenda. Normally I just turn up and we allow the conversation to take its own shape. Those conversations have been immense. Without fail, something important turns up and bites me on the bum in a way I hadn’t expected.

Consistency vs meaningfulness

But today was right down in the dirt of stuff. On the list: consistency versus meaningfulness. I told him of my thing about doing a post a week, and that, when I’d sat down to keep to my schedule today, I couldn’t get the words to flow.

As John said, “In the moment, the feeling was off.”

I think “off” was the polite way to put it!

Anyway, the way John helped me see it, at some point in time Thought took form – and if you don’t know what I mean by this, go check out this post here – and what that looked like was the idea that I should write weekly; that that was somehow “good”. I’d imagined that I was doing that from a clear, insightful place. And maybe I was. But come earlier today, I was caught up in figuring that getting that post written would somehow make me “okay”.

“If I can get this post out – oh, and let’s make sure it’s a wow post – it’ll mean something amazing about me. And then I can be happy.”

We had some conversation too today about structure generally. What it means if you have to turn up and operate within a structure. I had been holding onto some thinking that structure somehow suffocates me. And sometimes it does. But then it would if I have that belief since life only ever works inside-out.

What happens if I choose not to buy into the “structure suffocates” belief – what happens if I can see that’s just an “off” piece of thought form? Can I write here weekly? Not in some preconceived way, but in a more creative, in the moment way?

If I don’t need my turning up – or not – to mean anything, can I turn up and flow?

I don’t know.

Whatever, what’s clear is that my idea of myself has been looking important. I’d been looking at things in quite an egotistical way and putting shape around some concept of “Christine” believing that I am Christine and that I could self-invent. In fact, I’m not Christine.

Sure, you may think I’m Christine (actually, if you don’t quite get what I’m saying on this, you may also think I’m smoking!), and we may talk of one another as if personality is fixed and our lives very self-determining.

But it’s really not fixed. And we’re really not self-determining. Oh, sure, we can set ourselves what appear to be very me-centred goals – and maybe we’ll achieve them too if we push hard enough. But if we’re not allowing of something bigger of ourselves in the process, we’re going to feel exhausted. And produce little of any enduring value.

What has this got to do with you, your life, your business?

Well, everything.

I’ve been out of it for a couple of weeks and coming back in I see it more clearly. So, so much of our lives – whether work or play, and even if we run our own businesses or have quite autonomous leadership roles – is about fitting into some pre-agreed plan. It may or may not look that way. But so much of the time we’re trying to squeeze ourselves into some mold of our own or someone else’s making.

Sometimes that can feel suffocating. We can believe that we have to turn up in a certain way. That only one way of turning up will be acceptable.

We kick against the context but it’s not the context that truly constrains us. It’s our own thinking about our context.

Honestly, when I couldn’t find the words earlier to write, I thought I was going to have to mail my readers and tell them I was having an off day. Or share something I’d written before. Or make some excuse. But when I popped the Thought-bubble that had me in its grip I saw the best place to act from was truth.

Which reminds me of some other words I found recently care of Michael Neill:

“Before learning the truth, the mountains appear as mountain. When one begins to study truth, the mountains seem to disappear. After accepting the truth, the mountains again appear as mountains.”
– Zen proverb

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

March 30, 2015 by Christine

How To Create Daily Habits in a Way That Transforms Your Life

About two years ago I began something of a personal experiment.

It was just something I did to try and give myself a bit of momentum when I thought that’s what I needed. But it developed a life of its own, opening my eyes to things I hadn’t seen before. Changing my life in the process.

In the beginning…

The catalyst was pulling away from a business relationship that had absorbed me for a very long time. Suddenly, when I was no longer spending at least an hour a day on the phone with this person, meeting potential joint clients, delivering work with them and turning up for monthly meetings that involved a bigger group of people again, I noticed I had a lot of white space to play with.

At first that was somewhat scary. I had my personal OD and coaching clients of course, and so it wasn’t that getting business per se was an issue. But the whole split opened up what, in the beginning, felt like an open wound.

What was I going to do to fix it?

Habits as an alternative to goals

My knee jerk response was to think that I needed to logic out a new direction for myself, create a list of new goals, develop a project plan, and manage the shit out of it. I’ve been masterful at that. Something gets on one of my To Do lists and I have the appetite for it, it’ll get done alright.

But that whole approach didn’t feel right for some reason. Not any more. In fact it felt it was time to see things a new way.

By a series of magical coincidences, I came across Jamie Smart and the stuff I was writing about last week on The Three Principles. From reading his book and then doing his training, I had some massive insights about myself, two of which were:

That, even though in that moment I felt quite directionless and exposed, I was okay. Nothing about the circumstances of my life or work could change that.

Then, clarity can’t be forced. It’s something that comes in its own time.

I began to see that this gap was actually an incredibly creative space, and decided to play in to it.

Still, I’m not really one for sitting around doing nothing, and it occurred to me that, while I continued to work with my existing clients, I would also use some of the spare time I had to do some of the things that were important to me but that had till then perhaps been relegated to the fag ends of my busy work days. Things like exercise, creative writing, healthy eating…

Next it occurred to me that I was going to upturn the applecart of my life entirely and, instead of putting work first as I have done over the years, I was going to put wellbeing first. And dare to see what happened as a result.

But what might putting wellbeing first look like?

Habits emerging from wisdom

That’s when the idea of creating daily habits emerged. I could – and did at the time – put logical reasons round why it made sense to direct my energies into habits. But in truth I just went with a feeling.

So, in the beginning, I went with things that resonated with me. Not things that I had to discipline or somehow force myself to do, that were punishing in any way, or that would be very hard to instill. Things that were simple. Easy.

The first ones were immediately clear:

Daily writing (I wanted to be a writer, yet wasn’t till then allowing myself to write creatively on a regular basis)
Maximum two cups of coffee a day (I love coffee. But more than 2 cups a day knocks my whole energy off)
Maximum two glasses of wine a day (ditto)
Drink two litres of water a day (since I feel so much better when I’m well hydrated)
Bed before 10pm (I am a sleep monster, and even on days when I’m up at 6am, this gives me 8 hours sleep a night)

On the writing front, I struggled to begin with. What to write? Where? Another person I admire, Steve Chandler, has this ethos that if you don’t know where to start, “start anywhere”. I decided that it was less important whether I wrote here or elsewhere, or what I wrote, than that I wrote at all. And so I started a private journal. Wrote there daily, if I wrote nowhere else. Sheer top of the head stuff, which in turn prompted unexpected thoughts and ideas of their own to come forward.

Just keeping with these simple things over the course of those first few months was energizing in a way that I hadn’t expected. Keeping with them brought some truly unexpected shifts.

Unexpected insight

One thing I hadn’t anticipated was a huge insight around integrity. It simply came to me that, the more I kept my commitment to myself to honor my habits, the more I was in integrity with myself. The more my actions and my intentions were lined up, the truer to myself I felt myself becoming, and the better connected to myself I felt.

I began to feel like I was taking myself seriously in a way I never had before.

Not that I have become a slave to my habits. They’ve kind of become like my best wishes for myself. Love for myself in action.

It occurred to me early on that there was no room here for any judgment of success or failure. There’s just noticing. Some days I can tick the box on all my habits. Others I can’t. But every day is its own day.

As I’ve changed and learned, I’ve had new and fresh insights about what I needed to do:

Exercise three times a week (I feel better when I exercise and when my body starts to feel well and strong)
Eat protein at breakfast (I can maintain my energy so much better if I pay attention to what I eat for breakfast and make sure I get a big dose of protein: quinoa, yogurt, eggs…)
Meditate 20 minutes daily

Benefits

The benefits to me have been immense. First, I feel really well and my energy is good, my thinking feels much sharper. I dropped a lot of my need to strive for stuff; I came to really value simplicity.

On the health front, I upped the anti big time on nutrition and sorted some long-standing problems I’d been having with IBS and energy.

But I guess I couldn’t have anticipated where all of this would take my work. I’d had visions at one point of developing a huge social media presence off the back of which I’d develop a whole series of coaching type products. And I’d had a site which for a long time had good traffic and was quite high on the Alexa rankings. But it began to feel like a burden. The more I turned up for my existing clients, the more I really valued the work I already had and instead of trying to create something different around all of that, decided to hone in on what was most working there and articulate that as my offering. You can read more about that here.

Getting that clear allowed me the discernment to ditch the darling that had been my old website, and recreate this site. It’s audience? Primarily the people I currently work with, have worked with in the past, or may work with directly in the future. And, if you’re reading and you’re not yet one of these, then that’s cool – it’s good to have you and if you like this make sure you don’t miss out on future posts by giving us your details here.

Oh, and last summer I started putting some of my more creative writing stuff online too, over on my own name domain site. It was in the process of doing that that I had the discover that I want to do memoir writing.

Why?

Well, again, I could come up with a smart, logical answer. But the truth is it makes me feel good to write. I write it well. I enjoy writing from feeling.

That spills over into how I feel about life in general. How I turn up in relationship to Steve, my family and friends.

Which in turn spills over into how I turn up for my clients. I think the best coaching and consulting work is done, not through technique, but through a heart connection. It’s so easy, I believe, in the business world to forget about that.

Habits as a way of creating inside-out change

Who would have thought that all of this would have come from following some simple daily habits?

Certainly not me. But now, with the proviso that you allow the habits to choose you, my big sense is that they can be a powerful way to boost your wellbeing and indeed to change your life.

So, over to you. What resonates for you in all of this? What wellbeing habits have you tried to instill? With what results?

Photo attribution: Copyright: / 123RF Stock Photo

January 16, 2015 by Christine

3 Secrets of Selling High Value Services That Won’t Leave You Feeling Naked

Admit it.

As professionals, if we think about selling at all, we think of it with distaste.

Most of our development has been focused on our craft. We may be masterful coaches or consultants. We may be great at accounting or lawyering. We may excel at design or product development. But we see business development and selling as a whole area of activity that we’re neither skilled in, nor hungry to do.

And yet once the early euphoria of setting up our own business wears off, we sooner or later face a choice: we can either get our heads round the whole sales and marketing thing, or we’re going to be at the mercy of whatever work comes along.

Entrepreneur or freelancer?

Now, don’t get me wrong – a good many of my consulting and coaching colleagues operate that way. While they have limited companies, they’re really well-paid jobbers or freelancers. And I can’t pretend that for some it’s not lucrative. At least while there’s a steady trickle of clients finding their way to their door.

But if one of your reasons for deciding to lead your own business was a burning desire to get your thing out there more clearly, leaving your business development effectively in the hands of the gods ain’t necessarily going to help you achieve that.

I know because this is my own story.

See, I spent the first years of my professional life being a rockstar HR person, crafting a name for myself as someone who could make big change happen. Then I joined a big consulting company where I went and did similar work with cross-functional consulting teams.

When I set out on my own, my original intention was just to do more of the same. I was known as a go-to person for stuff like business transformation, HR strategy development, organization design, and the first few years in were good as I got called in to do that kind of work under my own steam or by drafting in associates.

And that worked for a while, until I began to see that the kind of work I did best, and wanted more to do of was more focused on leaders and their development.

I got at a level that to create more of what I wanted I’d have to be more proactive. But I was really reticent about the prospect of having to open up new doors for myself. That was selling and I was no sales person. Indeed had you asked me, I’d have said till even a few years ago that sales and marketing was not my forte. I had a major limiting belief about it. It was something I really felt I just couldn’t do.

So I avoided the issue until I could no longer deny the lack of integrity in myself between wanting to do work in a certain way, yet taking whatever work came along.

Deciding to learn to love selling

We grow, we change. The more experience we have in running our own show, the clearer and clearer we get about what jives for us and what doesn’t. And more daring about what we’re prepared to take risks on in service of our true genius. And if we want to feel joined up within ourselves and enjoy what we do for a living, we need to morph our businesses so that they keep on aligning with our personal change.

I saw that and I decided that I was going to crack the whole sales thing. I was going to go from being someone who cringed at the prospect of sales conversations to one who was confident of running sales processes end to end.

Over a number of years, I’ve invested tens of thousands of pounds teaching myself a new craft. And I laughed recently when a new assessment questionnaire I did said I was a natural marketer!

It’s a huge area and indeed it’s something that I’m going to be writing and talking about in coming months with Steve. I first met Steve some years back when he was Sales and Marketing Director of the Entrepreneurial Services Practice of EY. Now, he’s someone for whom strategic, high-value selling comes very naturally and from whom I’ve learned an immense amount.

But for now, here are my three biggest insights about selling high value services.

1.There’s no one-size-fits all way to do it

When you start to put a toe into the vast waters of sales and marketing, you’ll quickly find that there’s a ton of “how to” advice out there.

Identify your niche. Have a website with a client magnet. Go to networking events.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that some of the advice doesn’t work, and you can follow it all you want, but its value to you depends on a number of things:

Fear or confidence?

First, from where in yourself are you looking at the advice?

If you look at it from a place of fear, all it does is feed your insecure thinking around selling, and lead you to believe that there’s some silver bullet, some trick you need to learn or technique you need for apply, in order to finally make you feel okay about it. There’s never an end to the things you can try in order to identify prospects or win sales.

If on the other hand you look at all the advice and techniques from a place of confidence, you put yourself in the driving seat of discerning what works for you and your business and what doesn’t.

Your personal sweet spot

Maybe even before that, look at what comes most naturally to you. What gives you your biggest buzz?

Some people write better than others. Some people are naturals when it comes to chatting to others. Some folks love the internet. Others detest it. The point is, if you play to your natural communication advantages, you’re more likely to discover for yourself what your best ways to get yourself and your business out there are.

Need and budget

Cut through all the noise and it comes down to two things: Who needs what you’re offering? And do they have a budget for it.

You know, if you’re running a consulting firm that does some snazzy analytics about your clients’ web visitors, you can identify niches and market segments and all that stuff, but unless the Marketing Director sat in front of you perceives that she has a need for your service, and the budget to come to some agreement with you on fees, you don’t have a sale.

Now, the big trap I see some folks fall into (and, yes, I’ve been in the trenches on this one big time myself), is to take the inevitable “no” that comes from this kind of interaction as some kind of judgement about your product or service. You can spend weeks and months going back to basics on your offering when the real issue was just that, while there may have been interest, there was no need or budget.

2. Selling is about listening

The other thing that can get in the way of selling is to get so wrapped up in thinking about getting a sale that you don’t actually take the time to be present with and listen to the person in front of you.

Meaning that, if they indeed have a need for your product or service, you’re not really hearing what that is.

A lot of this comes back to the fear point above. If you’re sitting there believing that you have to get a sale in order to tick some box and feel good about yourself, there’s going to be so much noise happening in your own head that you’re drowning the other person out.

Imperceptibly, they pick that up from you.

So get out of your own way. Know that you have the knowledge, leadership and expertise around your thing to deal with whatever comes up in the moment and pay attention.

3. It’s all about the conversation

See, it’s all about the conversation. All about the energy in the dialogue you establish with someone; the fundamental rapport you create. That’s what leads them to judge whether you’re someone they can trust or not.

Business is built in and through relationship. And, to quote Susan Scott “the conversation is the relationship”.

Indeed, stop even thinking of people as prospects or clients. Drop the illusion that they’re somehow different from or separate to you. Think of them as people. Business can look like it’s such a rational, intellectual thing. But it’s more about the feeling content than most folks give credit for.

So, drop any illusion you’re holding that you can’t sell and experiment with the possibility that you can; play to your own strengths in building a process that works for you; remember needs and budgets. And listen, listen, listen.

What trips you up when it comes to selling? What works for you and what doesn’t? Share your thoughts and comments below!

Photography credit: www.stevendurbinphotography.com