Consider these wise old sayings:
Giving in to fear makes you timid, while acting boldly makes you courageous.
[quotes]Your thoughts create your visions, your visions create your feelings, your feelings create your action, and your action creates your realities.[/quotes]
Each time you feel afraid or nervous for any reason, [quotesright]the only solution is to, “Do the thing you fear.” [/quotesright] An old man, a grandfather, once advised his grandson with this wonderful phrase: “Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid.” This is where courage thrives and truer words have never been spoken.
Most salespeople are underperforming and earning much less than their potential. They have an overblown fear of rejection. Even though they have never met the prospective client or customer, [quotesright]they have an irrational fear of that person and worry[/quotesright] whether that prospect will like them or approve of them. When you take a step back and dispassionately evaluate the fear of rejection by prospects or strangers, it seems kind of silly.
But for salespeople faced with the need to develop new prospects, [quotes]it can – and often does – freeze them in their tracks. [/quotes] The activities that need doing don’t get done and these hold them back. They creatively avoid doing the work that would change their lives and those that they serve.
One of the very best ways to develop the ability to take intelligent risks is to consciously and [quotesright]deliberately do the things you fear, one step at a time, [/quotesright] making small strategic changes in your mindset. Taking a leap out of an airplane without a parachute isn’t a small step – that is not risk taking, that is simply crazy.
What you have to do is [quotes]resist your natural tendency to slip into a comfort zone of complacency and low performance, [/quotes] that’s the creative avoidance kicking in.
What if you were to take any fear that you are experiencing and look at it as a challenge or as an opportunity to grow and to increase your efficacy? In other words, consider your fear a causative power and live your life on purpose rather than on regret.
[quotesright]Face your fear by moving toward it, [/quotesright] control the fear thoughts, the self-talk that’s going on, master the fear, and continue to move forward regardless of the fear. [/quotes] This is the mark of the superior person.
Many of our fears of taking risks are false, [quotesright]F.E.A.R. = False Expectations Appearing Real! [/quotesright] They have no basis in reality. When you test them, you find that they don’t even exist.
- by Coach Phil Gilkes
