Changing a belief is a hard thing to do. After all you didn’t decide to have the belief you have, you came to it gradually through training, education, parental programming, societal norms, etc. I have written many times about the dramatic effects that changing a self-limiting belief can have on your sales career. Here is some practical advice on how to actually go about changing a belief that is getting in your way. All you have to do is pretend you have the empowering belief instead of the self-limiting one. For example, if you believe that you can’t get to the CEO on a sales call and you have to go through purchasing to get an order, then all you have to do to begin the process of changing that belief is to pretend to have the opposite belief. That belief might be that “my product solves a problem only the president can appreciate”. Or maybe the empowering belief is “people like me should be talking to the president”. Once you adopt the mindset (even if only temporarily) that you should be talking to the president, then say to yourself “if I had this belief what would I do” or “what would I say” or, “How would I act”. Then go and do that while trying to maintain the proper belief or mindset. I Grant that you will be outside your comfort zone, but doing the same things over and over will not get you a different result. And if you do bypass purchasing and get in front of the president, you will have a new experience, you will learn something new (probably that it wasn’t as scary as you thought), and you will have something to build on. At first you will most likely fail. But didn’t you fail the first time you made a sales call? Didn’t it get better as time went on and you got more experience? Didn’t the same thing happen when you were learning to walk? You probably fell at least 100 times before you could successfully walk across the room without help. That didn’t stop you from learning to walk. So why are you afraid to fail now? Pretend to have the empowering belief, then ask yourself “what would I do if I had that belief”, then go do that.
