Building Confidence

Written by Eric Fry for the Burnside News, published March, 2013

Someone once told me “everything we want is on the other side of fear.” To be a successful businessperson in sales, we need to believe in our products and services, our company and most importantly ourselves.

Our success is largely dependent on our personal self-confidence. Our prospects can sense whether or not we believe in ourselves and, by extension, whether or not we believe in what we’re doing. It’s called the Doberman Principle – the dog will read those that fear them and become very alert to those people.

Our skills and, more importantly, our belief system plays a large part in our customers’ feeling comfortable that we can help them or that they should buy our product or service. Building our self-confidence helps us build our business and achieve our goals.

Do we sometimes believe we aren’t as good as our competition? Or that we may not deserve to work with a certain standard of prospects? How do we build our self-confidence if we recognize these gaps?

One way to move past these self-limiting beliefs is if we “act as if”. To change our belief system and build confidence, start with a new belief and act as if it were already true, until it is true! Your thought process must be in the first person, positive and strong describing the person you want to be to achieve the outcome desired.

Our daily behaviours also play a role in building confidence. When we execute on the prospecting behaviour commitments that we have developed as part of our success plan, we can behave our way toward greater self-confidence.

Thirdly, I firmly believe a life without risk is a life without growth. If we’re afraid to fail, we won’t stretch our comfort zones. If we don’t put ourselves out there, we’ll level off personally and professionally rather quickly. As Michael Jordan states, “I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Confidence is in all of us, we just need to find it and don’t lose sight of it. This positive belief system must be reinforced with strong behaviours, by learning new techniques, by working on getting better and being better with customers. Find the confidence to go out and make mistakes – build your confidence by learning something from them.

©2013 Eric Fry is a Partner with Sandler Training. Sandler Training Inc. (www.atlantic.sandler.com) is an international sales and management training/consulting firm. To sit in a session of President’s Club, call Sandler Training at (902) 446-3302 or e-mail efry@sandler.com.