What are your personal and professional limitations? What are you truly capable of if you just stretch a bit further?
The sad reality for most of us is that the majority of our limitations are self-imposed. Our true limits are almost always FAR beyond where we think they are.
The reason for this is what we call “head trash” and, trust me, we ALL have some. Our head trash is usually the result of self-limiting beliefs that, in many cases, have been in place since early childhood.
A couple of examples of head trash that I frequently hear are:
“I can’t say that to a prospect, I don’t want to sound pushy”.
Most of us have had experiences with truly pushy sellers that cause us to stay so far inside the actual line of being pushy that we are afraid to be assertive. There is a HUGE difference between being assertive and being aggressive (pushy) but our head trash of being perceived as pushy doesn’t even allow us to be assertive or “stand our ground”.
“I can’t tell a prospect that I am okay with no because I worked too hard to get that prospect”
First of all, do you really think they thought they had to say “yes” before you told them that “no” was okay? Of course not, you would have just settled for some squishy answer like “sounds good, call me back next week after I think about it.” The head trash that drives our fear of disqualifying a prospect is usually the result of a weak pipeline and our fear of prospecting hard enough to keep it full.
It is a fresh start to a brand new year, and we are in control of what we do with it. We can yield to our “Head Trash” and be governed by our self-limiting beliefs or empty the “Head Trash Can” and push beyond those beliefs.
The secret to eliminating most head trash is really quite simple. We need to identify the behavioral habits associated with the self-limiting belief and replace them with habits tied to our new belief system.
I said it was simple, but I didn’t say it was easy. The reason over 80 % of New Year’s resolutions fail is that we never work hard enough to replace our old habits with new habits supporting the change we wish to make. It takes 61 days to make a new behavioral habit and that requires a real commitment.
If you would like some help or suggestions on how you can deal with your own head trash, please feel free to reach out.
Sandler Training in Denver provides sales training, management and leadership training, and professional development for individuals and organizations. Let us know how we can help your team.
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