Do You Have It Or Don’t You?
January 19, 2008
(Over the next several days I will write out some questions you can ask yourself to determine whether you have been blocking yourself from being as effective as you can be– and thus preventing yourself from having the financial success and the sense of satisfaction your want for your life.)
Question 1: When you walk into the room with a prospect, client, or person in a senior management position, do you have confidence you are “enough” and that you will say smart things?
If you do, you will be able to take your business to the next level! If you don’t, you are preventing yourself from increasing your monthly earnings and expediting your next level promotion.
If you don’t feel a strong confidence when you meet with high level clients, you are detracting from coming across as smart as you can be. The soundtrack running in the back of your mind wonders whether the client thinks you are ‘smart enough’ or ‘good enough’ to do business with. It siphons away the attention you need to put on helping them to articulate their needs and how you can provide solutions to them. You may feel you need to keep the discussion on certain topics and deflected away from others – your client probably ‘picks this up’ from you on some intuitive level.
When you are in meetings with people in senior positions, you will probably hold back from speaking your good ideas because you will be concerned about “what they think” about you. You will want to earn their respect by making sure to only say comments that are ‘perfect’ (and just as important - making sure not to erode it by saying something you deem ‘dumb’). Note that you are more concerned with managing their perceptions than you are on making a substantive contribution to the meeting. Note the criteria you will use about whether to speak up with your comments or not has more to do with managing how other people think about you than about how much you are contributing to the bottom line results of the organization. (Oh, and of course, don’t forget how mad you get when someone else says what you had on your mind, and people thought it was a reasonable comment when they said it!)
Here are questions to ask yourself:
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What specifically is the doubt(s) I have about myself?
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Is this something to accept and workaround, or can I make a plan to overcome this perceived gap?
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What one change can I make in my approach that will most significantly increase my confidence when I walk into the room with a client that could take me to the ‘next level’?
If you do not feel rock solid in your confidence when you walk into the room with senior management or with clients who you assess are “at the next level” for your business – you are blocking yourself from monetizing your talents. You can move past this lack of confidence in two months by joining my course “From Comfort Zone to Confidence Zone” in NYC starting in early March.
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