In “Brutal Honesty: How Self-Reflection is Essential to Becoming a Better Sales Professional,” I shared with you how, as a sales professional, you should consistently reflect back upon your personal performance. What helped you to succeed during the day, week or month? What caused you to lose a deal?
How are you continually evaluating yourself to improve your results and become better at what you do?
Self-reflection allows us to understand what is important, and focus on what can be done differently, in the future.
How well have you been practicing being self-reflective?
Approach each day with clarity and a better mindset to acknowledge where you fell short the prior day so you can improve upon it today.
- Did I do what was required of me?
- What did I learn today that was useful?
Self-Reflection Leads to Self-Awareness
The importance of learning self-awareness and self-reflection can’t be stressed enough as this will help you to become a better person for yourself, your career and, most importantly, for those you love.
I ask you this…as a sales professional, if you don’t know yourself, then how can you help your clients?
How Well Do You Know Your Story
Stories are powerful. They give you a narrative to live by and lessons to pass on that shape the person you are and will become. Your story calls out your best self. It calls upon you to bring your full attention, strength and personality, creating a life of significance and career full of abundance.
This requires that you acknowledge the good and the bad of your story. A big part of this is learning how to let go of past guilt, failure and regret as you start living your life with conviction.
Make a conscious decision today to stop defining yourself by what you are not. Stop beating yourself up (Lord knows I have learned this the hard way). Every day starts a day filled with new opportunities, so start living a better story.
Self-Awareness Means Know Yourself
Quite simple, self-awareness means you know yourself so well that you become amazingly happy, which in turn allows you to live a wonderfully balanced life.
- Are you living as the real you and not someone else?
- Do your thoughts match your actions?
- Does your walk match your talk?
- Are you emphasizing the positive aspects of your personality?
Living a lie comes out sooner or later. Living a sales lies is even worse as this will ultimately screw with your career.
Knowing yourself is the process of understanding you. What makes you tick? Knowing yourself brings you face-to-face with self-doubts and insecurities. Self-reflecting upon this allows you to take a serious look into just how you are living your life and sales life.
Knowing yourself is a conscious effort; you do it with intention and purpose. This is the same approach you must take as a sales professional with your career. You must lead your sales career with intent and purpose.
Self-Improvement is All About Self-Awareness
The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting to the changes that come your way in life. Self-reflect to self-improve. The more you pay close attention to your emotions and how you work, the better you’ll understand why you do the things you do. The more you know about your habits, the easier it is to make improvements.
You can read every sales book out there, you can even adapt to the routines of sales gurus and you can eat for breakfast every piece of self-help that comes your way, but it’s completely pointless if you don’t know yourself well enough to put the correct advice into practice.
Self-Awareness Leads to Success as a Sales Professional
Spend any amount of time in sales and you all will have been bitten by the humble pie and the dose of reality bug. This bite injects salespeople with a dose of humility and awareness of their shortcomings, allowing them to become better sales professionals. If you are willing to set aside your ego, to be humble as you go about your work as sales professional, then you can reflect an attitude of “others interest,” thus creating a true buyer-focused experience.
Great sales professionals are not self-centered! The best of the best incorporate self-reflection and are truly self-aware of who they are. They eat humble pie for breakfast and look forward to a day full of learning as they serve their clients.
A self-aware sales professional reminds themselves on a daily basis…
- I don’t know everything about my client. So, what will I do about it?
- I will stop pretending that I know a great deal about my client’s business issues. I will strive to be authentic in learning about their issues. I won’t fake that I know!
- I am a student of my client’s problems.
- I am an opportunity creator for my clients.
Getting to know yourself allows you to tap into the road of happiness as this is critical to your success as a sales professional. Your beliefs, your attitude and your daily routines are mission critical.
Be brutally honest with yourself…how clearly can you define YOU?
