“If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” Sydney Banks
Being a powerful influencer is a vital aspect of your role with clients and yet it is something that advisers can be uncomfortable with.
In part 1 of this article we looked at the first of 3 common symptoms of feeling under pressure and what is really behind clients having a great experience of you.
2. The second symptom of feeling under pressure is neediness
Jim Camp is known as America’s number one negotiation coach and he wrote a book called ‘Start with NO’. The very first chapter is called ‘Your greatest weakness in negotiation – the dangers of neediness.’
Neediness is an internal feeling of fear, anxiousness or worry that leads to undesirable behaviours.
It can lead to all sorts of thinking running through your mind such as ‘How am I doing?’, ‘Am I going to get the business?’ or ‘Is the meeting going in the right direction?’
It can lead to people pleasing behaviours such as withholding the hard truth from clients through fear of a bad reaction.
It can result in a reluctance to make requests through fear of rejection.
Once again, the problem is that clients will pick up on how you feel, and it will negatively affect the nature of your relationship.
Instead of experiencing you as a powerful person who is worth listening to, they will start to see you as subservient.
3. The third symptom is trying to convince someone
I did a coaching session with a client today and he shared a recent experience of how he wanted one of his clients to take a certain course of action, but they were resisting.
The situation had got personal for him and he was running all sorts of negative scenarios through his mind.
He found that the harder he tried to convince the person, the harder they pushed back.
The fact is that people only ever do things for their own reasons. You can provide all the logical reasons in the world, but humans are not driven by logic and reason.
For example, most people are fully aware that to lose weight you need to eat less and exercise more. But the logic of this does not motivate people, does it? The motivation always has to come from within.
The foundation of performance and results
If we jam up our heads with too much thinking, if we place our sense of well-being on things going a certain way, or if we want the outcome more than our client does, then our results are going to suffer because we have lost perspective.
The ultimate cost is that you will lose trust, credibility and the confidence of people. And experience a great deal of frustration.
The solution is not in techniques, whether this be in sales techniques, influence techniques or mind management techniques because these do not address the under-lying issue – none of these reduce the amount of thinking you do or stop you feeling insecure.
Often, quite the opposite.
The permanent solution is to understand that your feelings come from your thinking. No situation has any inherent pressure in it – any pressure you feel is coming from within you.
Your well-being is not dependent upon what a client decides, whether you win the business or indeed any external factor – life just does not work that way (unless you think it does).
Everyone feels under pressure from time to time and that is perfectly fine, if we understand that it is a product of our thinking and not our circumstances.
Your natural state of mind is one of clarity, confidence, perspective and freedom from fear and pressure. Experiencing this is not about control – it is about understanding.
Successful selling and influence is a natural consequence of understanding the dynamic between our state of mind and the quality of our thinking.
