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“I’m not afraid of anything,” goes the boast so often heard from sellers who are trying to impress their manager.
The idea that a top seller is so confident, so cool, so well prepared that they’re not afraid of anyone or anything, including failure, seems to be more prevalent now than in the past. Maybe I’m just more attuned to it now than I had been.
Whichever it is, I’m hearing it more and more often and most of the time it seems to be coming from young sellers who grew up being told that they not only could do anything they put their minds to but they deserve success because they are the most educated and admirable generation ever.
It seems that the coddling has bleached out all sense of fear and anxiety—and a great deal of hardness and determination—from the up and coming generation of sellers.
And although this isn’t universal, of course, it seems we’ve done them a mighty disservice.
To pervert one of Gordon Gekko’s quotes, “Fear is good.” Fear is, in fact, the stuff that success is made of. Fear of failure. Fear of losing one’s job or status or position or respect. Fear of disappointing oneself and others. Fear of not achieving. Fear of not living out one’s dream.
Fear is more powerful than the lure of success. It puts more demands on you than the want of things. Fear is a motivator like no other. For most of us it isn’t the carrot as much as the stick that is the base motivating factor.
And we have a generation that has been force fed unwarranted success through the elimination of the potential for failure and, thus, the purging of the sense of fear of failure.
I’ve yet to find a highly successful person who doesn’t respect fear—and if you haven’t had the opportunity to taste it in big chunks you can’t respect it. It is so simple and terrible, yet so powerful. Don’t allow yourself or your sales team to live with the illusion that success can be acquired without the help of fear.
If you’re a sales leader who has sellers who voice a lack of fear, encourage them to go out and get a really good taste of failure.