Self-Injury Awareness Day, an odd holiday celebrated across every border, focuses on responding to someone’s physical self-injury. It’s a real issue and you may want to find out about it. (See note at end of article.) Why not use the seriousness of it as a reminder to ask yourself if as an introvert in sales, could you be harming your own emotional self-esteem? I’ve been there so I know it is possible.
Talk it through in your own head. It’s common that we keep feelings of doubt or low confidence to ourselves. We can put up a steely front to avoid any shallow discussion that won’t help anyway. When you find some kind of doubt moving through your head, tell yourself what you know to be true about your confidence: it’s strong in some areas and lower in others. That is the truth. Now find out how you can borrow from the strong areas into the weaker.
Make demands on yourself. When you down yourself with self-talk, avoid making it a form of negative demands on yourself. Demands to be perfect or better. You already feel bad so making demands of perfect, a giant leap in the other direction, will pull your energy down. Find a way you can demand of yourself, a next step.
Drop the labels. My friend and Procrastivity expert, Kerul Kassel, says we hurt ourselves with labels. Take procrastination with prospect follow-up. Instead of labeling it as bad, ask yourself if there is any good that can come if you put it off for a day? It may occur to you that you did not remember that Tuesdays were stated specifically as bad days by your prospect. Stupid of me. Or you may realize there was one important question to get the answer to that still is unanswered. Silly of me. Drop these labels. You are you and there’s likely either a reason you did what you did, you didn’t know any better, it just happened, but you are none of the labels.
Don’t put your head in the sand that you have some limiting beliefs. Everyone has limiting beliefs. But they can be overcome and replaced with more respectful and uplifting ones. A coach can help get to the root of this quickly. On your own, one of the best things to do is to start with the extreme of the limiting belief, state the total opposite in a positive way and then land on something in between that you can hold on to, believe and act on.
Sales is by far a most unique career. It’s the only career where you get to write the amount of your own paycheck by the effort you put into it. But as relates to those of us who sell, in particular those introverts who sell, with that comes the ultimate responsibility: to maintain your ability to build, not harm, your self-esteem. NOTE: The issue of self-injury is real and you may want to search out the issue in the event someone in your own friend or family circle suffers from it.