What is Sales, Really?

Thursday, July 1st, 2021 : Read 1,086 Times : 1221 words (Aprox 5 min read)

Somebody posted a question on Facebook that said, "How many days of vacation did you take last year?" And he defined days of vacation as working less than an hour per day.

A few people that put three or four days. A couple of people put four or five weeks. Unfortunately, it made me really sad that many people put zero days. Zero days vacation in a whole year.

I'm thinking back to a time in my life when that was me... when I took very few days of vacation. When I really worked extremely hard and I felt like I was sacrificing for a good cause.

A lot of times we feel like if we give up our own joy, or if we postpone our own joy, or if we take care of other people first, that we're really doing a good thing. And I gotta tell you, in my life, I learned the hard way, that it's not necessarily a good thing to put everyone else first, even as a healer.

I do consider myself a healer. And a lot of times, we healers are the people who put ourselves out there first for everyone else. If you keep doing that you're going to end up drained.

We've all heard the metaphor that if you're in an airplane and there's a drop of cabin pressure, you've got to put the mask on yourself before you can help other people.

But there are a lot of people who think that's selfish. You know, they think, "don't take care of yourself first, you need to take care of other people." And it brings up an issue that we hear a lot in the healing fields, which is what I call the "passion paradox."

The passion paradox is that belief that says, "if you really love what you do, and especially if you're helping people, then you should do it for free, you shouldn't be charging people for it. Or at least not a lot for it."

They almost act like it's insincere for a healer to charge for healing. They act like it's insincere for a coach to charge for coaching. They act like it's insincere for a doctor to charge for doctoring,

And it's this paradox. Because if all people who were good at healing, at mentoring, at coaching, at leading, at doing great things in this world, and if all people who were good at doing great things for the benefit of other people, didn't charge for what they do, then we'd have a world full of leaders who were not leading. They would literally be sleeping on a street or sleeping under a bridge.

So the passion paradox is this guilt that's pushed on us that says, "if you want to help other people you shouldn't be charging and if you want to help other people you certainly shouldn't be wealthy, or finally rewarded for what you do, because then that means you're not coming "from the heart."

And it's BS. It's absolute, total BS.

Of all the careers that I've seen in the world, of all the ways that people have of making money, of building their own fortunes, healing is, I think, one of the finest, one of the best, one of the most well intentioned ways of making that fortune, of building your own success.

And if healers don't deserve to be wealthy than who the heck does?

I personally believe that as a healer – whatever you are, whether you're a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer, a hypnotherapist, a coach, an EFT Practitioner, a Reiki Practitioner, or  any kind of energy worker – if you are out there helping people you deserve to be wealthy. You deserve it.

And I believe not only do you deserve to be wealthy but I believe you deserve to be wealthy easily. Just for doing your craft.

You don't have to necessarily cut your teeth, you don't have to be in the business for a "number of years," you don't have to achieve a certain amount of celebrity status. The fact is I think you deserve to be handsomely rewarded for what you do. And that's one of the things that I love to teach people.

In my life I've gone from struggle to where I am now. My wife Kayla and I spent five years traveling the world full-time, all while changing lives on every continent.

So that question came up and said how many days did you vacation last year and my question in return was, "what if you designed your life to be a vacation?" What if you've actually designed your life, not just let life happen to you.

I drempt my whole life of traveling to far away lands. Then I made it a reality by doing good. We have generated wealth by helping people. We generate wealth by making people's lives better.

We generate wealth by serving people... by finding out what they need and what they want in their life and then helping them get it. The root of the verb "to sell," is the Norwegian word, "Selje," which means, "to serve."

There's a great quote from Zig Ziglar, "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want." And if you're a coach, if you're a practitioner, if you're a healer of any kind, then you have what it takes to live a magnificent life. If you're living a meager life with the intention of thinking, "being humble is something that people will look up to," the answer is: No. They won't.

You know what people really look up to? People look up to you living the fullest, most magnificent life that you can possibly live, right? So if you're a healer, and you're living on bread crumbs, if you're an NLP practitioner and you're charging too little and you're helping too few people, that's not the kind of thing that people look up to.

I've been on both sides of that spectrum by the way, I've been the struggling practitioner trying to get clients. And then I've also come into my own and grown into my deservedness in creating this kind of a life where Kayla and I, for five years, were basically on permanent vacation while helping people.

And when I say permanent vacation I don't mean retired, because we have over 310 coaching clients (as of the writing of this article, and growing) and we train about 10,000 people a year.

And that is something that I know is possible for you, too. I always say, if it's possible for a high school "flunky" like me, who was homeless at 19 years old, to have helped so many people and to achieved what we have, it's possible for you.

Posted by Michael Stevenson in Business, Practice, Sales on What is Sales, Really?