Are you able to distinguish your opinion from reality? In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you rethink the world as he makes the case for questioning your opinions and assumptions if you want to grow your business. Certain beliefs create assumptions. Bill shares three common beliefs that are driving your unconscious behaviors, and that you need to question for yourself and your company. Tune in and learn how you can grow your business by reinventing your opinions.

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Why You Should Question Your Opinions

I’m going to share with you some things that I’m working on. It’s always interesting to get a little behind the scenes when I listened to a speaker, an author or a podcaster and find out what they’re working on. I will share with you something now that I’ve been knee-deep in and it’s going somewhere. It’s not just an exercise in writing, although I enjoy that. This is designed to help you rethink the world. That may sound like a bigger bridge to cross than a guy like me would want to pursue. I have come to the belief and you’ve heard some of it here on the show. We have certain beliefs and these certain beliefs create assumptions the way the world is, “I believe this therefore I assume that.”

A lot of times, I hear that from my clients when I first start working with them. I start to share some of what I will call counterintuitive ideas, things that go against the norm. They will get up in the air, get their back up and say, “That wouldn’t work in our business. My boss would never let me go for that. Our customers would not tolerate that.” That’s all opinion. How we have come to believe dictates the assumptions we have about life and then that creates opinions. Not to get into the psychological makeup of it but I’m going to give you three here now. These three will tee off this idea in your brain about the question that you need to ask yourself, which is, “What else do I assume about the world?” That might just be an opinion and might not be reality. Let’s go with this.

By the way, if you are a high achiever, I want you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the top banner there’s a colored banner there for a waitlist. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a High Achiever’s program. That’s for people who earn $200,000-ish and up and want to level up, pursue, leverage their assets and get to a whole new level. I’m assembling a group of those people. If you’re interested in at least knowing more about it, I’m probably going to be doing a webinar or a little get-together here soon. That’s no obligation. This is not any high-pressure thing. I only want people in this program who are truly committed to growing.

There are no sales at all involved. I’m opening it up first to my blog readers. Nobody even on my email list has heard about this. If you are interested, go to the website. Also, if you are interested in changing the game of selling, there is a document on the website below the banner. It’s called Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game. Download that. It’s a PDF guide. It’s about 10, 12 pages. It’s got some videos with it. It’s good. If you want some free stuff from me that’s more tutorial-focused, that’s a good way to start.

What are these beliefs that we have accumulated? I will consider these erroneous beliefs or industry norms that I’m not sure are even right. Let me go through these. I’ve got 29 of these and I’m only going to go through three. A lot of this comes in my programming and coaching. I believe that I can only teach you so many sales tactics in how to handle it when the customer says X. What happens when the prospect decides not to buy? What happens when you get resistance? I can only teach that for so long. Frankly, I get a little bored with it because at some point that’s not the difference-maker.

The difference-maker is how you think about yourself, company, value, customer, role on the planet and purpose on earth. Those are the big issues. Why would I want to continue to work on the minor issues? It’s called majoring in the minors. Forget about the major issues, which is how one thinks about oneself and identifies in this world. I’m going to share with you three of these that are common beliefs that we have accumulated over the years, maybe or maybe not. Maybe for you, not all of these will apply but we’re on the spectrum at least of having these beliefs drive us and some of our unconscious behaviors.

Number one, your eagerness leads to more sales and to an eager prospect. The more eager you are and we see this a lot of times in hiring salespeople. A sales leader will come to me and say, “I want you to interview this person. We’re thinking about bringing him or her on. We want to make sure it’s the right decision. I want to get your set of eyes on it.” It doesn’t take me long. I don’t even have to do a profile test. It doesn’t take me long to look at that person through the filter of a prospect. If this person is going to be out working with prospects, I put my prospect hat on and ask myself the question, “What do I want this person calling on me?” If they’re too eager, not listening to a word I say, not thoughtful in their responses or too quick on the trigger to say something or answer a question, I know if they’re that way with me, they will be that way with prospects. How you do anything is how you do everything.

Eagerness is not a virtue. I want you to be committed. I want you to be all-in to your job but eagerness is a different animal. I don’t want you to be eager. I don’t want you to appear eager. The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out if the problem the customer has is something we can solve. It’s not eager to sell and it’s certainly not eager to talk about yourself and how great you are. How is that helpful for the prospect? They don’t give a damn about that. This idea of eagerness has been misconstrued and we’ve taken it as a virtue. I don’t see it as a virtue at all.

Question Your Opinions: The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out the problem the customer has.

I see it as something that will get in the way. I would rather have you take measured eagerness, be interested in the prospect, what they have to say, be curious about their pains, problems and circumstances but never be eager either to make the next call, set the next meeting or sell anything. Let that happen organically. There are a lot of things to do right there. If you do things right, your close rate goes way up because you’re not trying to make anything happen. It’s happening because the prospect wants your solution badly.

Number two, pressure is good. The more pressure you feel, the more likely you are to excel. Pressure is an interesting animal. I do think there are times when the need to get things done is there. You do what needs to be done. If you are out talking to a prospect and they have an interest and part of your process is putting together a proposal framework. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do that. It just has to be done. If it’s part of your process, it works, it’s going to help the prospect make a decision and help you decide if they’re the right people then you do it. You don’t feel pressured to do it. Most of the pressure that we feel comes from self-imposed sources. We put pressure on ourselves to be perfect, to be the ideal soldier, to be effervescent and magnanimous. We feel pressured to have people like us and take us seriously. That kind of pressure is a losing game because you’re pressuring yourself based on someone else’s opinion of you. It’s hard enough to influence let alone control it. Pressure is going to be a losing battle there.

Another thing about pressure is when you feel it, you exert it. When someone is putting pressure on you, you will put pressure on someone else. It’s a pass-through. You’re the pass-through mechanism. If your manager is putting pressure on you to make more sales, where do you think that pressure is going to go? It’s going to store it inside, a little bit of it if you will. A lot of it, you will pass it onto the prospect and they won’t even see it. It’s not like you’re saying, “I got to make a sale this month or I’m going to get fired. My boss is on my backside. Can you please help me?” You’re not saying that but it’s the small vibes that you give off that the prospect feels even subconsciously. They decide not to do business with you because they say, “This is about them, not about me. I think I’ll find another supplier.”

Pressure is not good. Getting things done is but when it turns into pressure, you’re not free to be at your best. I see this a lot in a business where a business owner has been working in his or her business for twenty years and they’re tired of it. They’re burnt out and they want to do something else but they’ve built this machine that they can’t get away from. Every day they feel pressure to do something that they don’t love. That is a recipe for illness and disaster. If you have a little bit of that, you don’t need to be a business owner to experience that. If you find yourself, “I’m not into what I’m doing now as I was several years ago.” The pandemic and disruption of 2020 spurred that on for a lot of us. It accelerated some insecurities and might even accelerate some skills and competencies but it changed things. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Do I love what I do?” When I get up in the morning every day, “Have I fallen in love with what I do with my customers, audience, market and whatever?”

Number three is one of my favorites. That is the idea, “I need to do more of what I’ve always done to get to the next level.” I’m putting this High Achiever’s program together. It’s a personal coaching group and that’s a lot of that group. What we’re going to do there is focus on, “What got you here may not get you to the next place.” In fact, it’s almost assured not to get you to the next place because things have changed. The world, market, internet, digital communications and a lot of things have changed. A lot of us are hanging on. I put myself here, too. Even though I talk about this a lot and consult with the client’s coach, there’s still a little bit of this that I am holding onto the old way. I remember we used to fax out invitations. We’d fax them out and 25 people would show up. I’d love to have that now with my knowledge. I would close twenty of them but that is not the way anymore.

There’s not a lot of fax machines hanging around waiting for my fax. I can wish and hope all I want that things go back to normal or the way they were or whatever normal is. The fact is that what got you to where you are now is probably not going to get you to 2X where you are now. If you’re a high achiever, I don’t care what kind of achiever you are. It doesn’t matter. There’s got to be a realization on your part and maybe now is it. It sounds like I’m preaching, “Come up to the front afterward.” At some point, there’s got to be a realization. There’s got to be an awakening inside of you that says, “I can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and expect to get massively different results or expect to get the same results and work less.” This is not only always about 2X-ing everything. Your income and revenue are not always about that. I want you 2X your quality of life, your sense of fulfillment and what you do. Often, what got us here won’t get us there.

The questions for you are, “What is there? What does there look like? What will get me there? Where am I going? How am I going to get there?” Those are the questions that will allow you to get out of this old mindset of, “I just do more of what got me here.” I’ve witnessed people who have changed and reinvented themselves. They have new energy and inspiration. They reignited the fire underneath them. It was like, “I used to do it this way. We’re not going to do it that way anymore. We’re going to do it this way.” There are tweaks along the way. A lot of times, there are infused energy in the psyche when you change things and say, “We’re going to get to a new goal but we’re not going to do the same things that got us here.” Take a look at those three things. As I talk about them, hopefully they resonated with you to the point where you start to examine, “What are some new beliefs?” New beliefs are awesome if you can start to believe something new.

I was listening to a psychologist talk about the disruption of fundamental axioms. In other words, it’s just disruption of things that you’ve come to believe are true. These three things are part of that. When we disrupt those and start to look at them, we can go in 1 of 2 directions. We can either go in awe and say, “If I could get out of this whole belief, look at the future that could be created for me. That’s awesome and awe-inspiring,” or we say, “That’ll trigger us, that shock. There’s no way. I think it won’t happen. It isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. There’s no way that would work on my world.” You go into a runaway from mode.

When I introduce things to you, I probably will lose readers because some of you will say, “Enough, Caskey. You’re crazy. You’re on crack. You’re doing something weird behind the scenes. You’re talking about stuff that I don’t even want to talk about.” We need to talk about it because if you’re like me, you have quite a few years of productive life left and you don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes. Anyway, I hope that helps you. Go to BillCaskey.com. There are lots of free stuff there. Get on the waitlist for the High Achiever’s program if you’re not on it already. Also, the PDF guide, Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game is on the website. See you next time. Bye.