Does a Strong Inner Game Begin With Self-Acceptance?
If you have listened to our podcast or read this blog, you realize that the Inner Game (our internal mentality) is a big part of what we teach at Caskey. We believe that if your mind is right, then your strategy and words will be right as well.
And when all that is right, you will experience uncommon sales success.
But often, the inner game shift doesn’t come easy for people. If you’ve grown up in a house full of scarcity and restriction it’s a little bit much to expect that a person will, all at once, see the world as a place of abundance. (Especially only as a result of a trainer/coach showing up in their lives).
Moreover, if your whole life has been focused on getting what YOU want, high intent – where you are interested in getting the customer what he or she wants – is a pipe dream.
So what is it that can bridge the gap and allow you to fully adapt the fundamental shift in thinking required to change and improve the inner game – especially for sales people? It might be self-acceptance.
Self acceptance is your psychological ability to accept yourself, warts and all.
It Begins On The Inside
It is not conditional, based on whether you won last month’s sales contest or secured that million dollar order. It is not based on whether your manager likes you or whether you’re in line for a raise next year. It has nothing to do with what happens on the outside. Only on the inside.
And it also does not preclude you from wanting to improve yourself. There is room for both self-acceptance as you are AND the desire to be better at what you do.
Assumptions & Information Not Always Right
So often we tend to look back at the decisions we make and the results that came from those decisions and beat ourselves up. The fact is that most of the decisions we made were done so with a certain set of assumptions and information that we had at the time we made them.
Sometimes the assumptions and information we had were wrong. But we had to make some decision. Or, how we were thinking about life and ourselves at the time we had to make that decision was off track.
But that doesn’t mean that we were bad for those decisions. In fact, I suggest, that your bad decisions and lessons learned from those are every bit as helpful to moving forward as had you chosen every right move.
In a sick sort of way the acceptance of your mistakes makes you who you are today. There is a certain amount of grit (and guts) in accepting your past foibles. It’s when you delude yourself into blaming other people that you don’t learn those lessons and you don’t accept yourself.
Own More of Your Self
Finally, when you accept yourself sincerely, you will naturally become better at what you do because you accepted more of yourself in the process. If you lose a sale and blame everybody else around you for the loss you own less responsibility to create a different outcome next time. And when you do that, all possible lessons go away.