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What was the first word your mother and father taught you?
The word no, wasn’t it?
And how did they teach you the meaning of no? By inflicting pain on your bottom. Why did our parents do that to us? Was it because they didn’t like us, or because they loved us?
They loved us, of course. And they knew that we’d hurt ourselves unless we were taught to avoid certain things. So, for our own goods, they imprinted the meaning of no on our minds the only way they could — by making us fear no.
Today, what’s the only thing that stands between you and everything you want from your selling career?
The word no.
The problem afflicting most of us here is fundamental: we have the wrong attitude toward that most basic word. This attitude, held since earliest childhood, has long outlived its usefulness in our lives.
Don’t make the mistake of viewing this problem lightly. Solving it will do more for your sales performance than learning a dozen new closes. This is true because you won’t give yourself many chances to use those closes until you update your concept of no.
It’s unlikely that you’ve ever thought about this subject. Few people have. Do that now by reading on in an active, questioning way. I’m going to prove to you that no is good, not bad. I’m going to show you why the fear-ridden response to no that you learned as a child has become your road to nowhere as an adult. I’m going to demonstrate how you can pave over that negative old response. I’m going to present your positive new attitude, an attitude that’ll make no your highway m the everywhere of success.
Think back to when you were a child. Were there times when your mother and father got into their danger zones?
Sure there were. A slight difference of opinion between them became a little spat that grew into a mid-sized dispute that somehow flared into a full-blown shouting match. As we’ve said, when people reach their danger zone, they have only two options: withdraw or get hostile. If it was a workday morning when all this happened between your parents, your father probably left for work. That is, he withdrew.
Mom stays home, so she gets to become hostile. Mom has told you not to touch the saucepan. When she walks into the kitchen, there you are, you little rascal, straining to reach the saucepan. What happens next?
Our mother could’ve said, “Sweetheart, come here and sit on Mommy’s lap. I love you, honey. Because I love you, I don’t want you to hurt your body. If you reach up and pull the saucepan off, you’ll scald yourself. Now, since I haven’t been able to effectively communicate with you, darling, I’ll inflict a degree of pain on your backside to help you understand.
“1 said no.” Slap.
Time and patience being in short supply then as now, our parents usually left off that entire first paragraph and came in only for the “I said no” and slap part.
This happens hundreds of times to everyone. Without such protective discipline, few children would reach adulthood in our mechanized society. So, as we grow out of infancy, we get it pounded into us that no is rejection
— and rejection is painful. No is bad.
Then we go to grammar school. We already know something about peer pressure, and in elementary school it gets fierce. All of us there want to be like everyone else. If everyone’s cuffs are rolled under, we better roll ours under. If it’s time to wear the thin belt, better wear the thin belt. If the group favors a certain brand of shoes, or a specific style of clothes, in grammar school you wear them to be accepted by your peers. Remember?
My mother, and I have a wonderful mother, had a fetish for lunch pails. At elementary school I might not have worn the best clothes, but I carried the best lunch pail. Since we moved a lot in those days, I started fifth grade at a new school. When I walked in there the first day swinging my zippy lunch pail, the kids pointed at me and yelled, “Look at the twit carrying the lunch pail. Ha ha ha.” Pails were out. Brown bags were in.
Of course I wanted to be accepted by my peers, and I wanted to keep my mother happy too. So I’d leave home with my gorgeous lunch pail, hide it in an alley, and walk to school with my lunch in a bag. The scheme worked. No trouble at home and the kids accepted me. I was able to make everyone happy.
This is something we all want to do, isn’t it? But in sales there are going to be times when you can’t make everyone happy. And there are going to be times when your clients and prospects will use you to relieve their anxieties. Someone or something puts one of them in the danger zone before you walk through his door. He’s staying, not leaving. So he gets hostile and dumps his anxieties on you. This is a side of sales work that we don’t hear about very often. It provides opportunities, although the average salesperson doesn’t see one of these situations as an opportunity at all. In fact, it throws the average salesperson right into his own danger zone. Once there, he can only withdraw—and lose the sale, or get hostile—and lose the sale. Either way, the average salesperson’s attitude is destroyed for that day, or longer. Many otherwise capable people have left sales work because they couldn’t meet repeated challenges of this kind.
When a prospect or client blows up over a trivial matter or gives you a rough time for no apparent reason, that person has been pushed into his danger zone—but not by you. He needs someone to stand in for the bad guy who isn’t there.
Turn down the bad guy role, and grab the good guy role instead. You can win being a good guy. I’ll tell you how in a moment.
Confronted by a prospect who has suddenly turned hostile, the average salesperson gets anxious about his own dignity. If it requires shouting before withdrawal, he shouts; if his dignity allows a silent stomp out, he silently stomps out—to oblivion with that particular prospect in either case.
The Champion sees the situation in an entirely different light. He knows at once that his prospect is in pain, that countering the prospect’s hostility with more hostility is non-productive, that his own dignity is beside the point. As a human being he wants to help relieve his prospect’s pain; as a business person he wants to move that pain aside so he can get on with business.
Here’s how the Champion wins by casting himself as the good guy: he keeps calm, listens carefully, and speaks to the heart of the matter at the first opportunity.
“Mr. Prospect, I’m getting the feeling that you’re really more troubled by something that has nothing to do with me or my company than you are about what we’ve been discussing. (Don’t pause.) I understand how these things work. Why don’t you lay a little of that burden on my shoulders? I think that’ll make it easier for both of us. Getting things like that off your chest is something you just have to do, and talking to someone not directly involved can be a great way to clarify your thinking about a problem. Would you like to tell me about it?”
Speak clearly as you say those words, and don’t hurry them. The hostile prospect usually waffles at first—denies that he has a problem or pretends to ignore your statement. Then, if you’ve demonstrated genuine empathy, the chances are that he’ll drift into talking about what’s bothering him. Once he gets started, he’ll probably use up the available time telling you all about it. Don’t worry. He’ll invite you back, or he’ll say something like, “Enough of my personal problems. What’re you here to sell me?”
You tell him.
“What would my cost be?”
You tell him.
“Let’s skip the usual blarney. You know what our needs are. Can your machine handle them?”
You tell him it can. That’s true, of course, or you wouldn’t be there.
“All right, I’ll give you a purchase order for it. Stop in and see me the next time you’re out this way—I might have a lead for you.”
A Champion knows when his most effective presentation is not to give one.

Do you know how many people are walking around looking for a place to plug it back in? Think about that. If you can’t handle the fear of insecurity by giving security up, if you can’t overcome the possibility that they might reject you when you go for a close, if you can’t cope with the fact that you have some of these doubts, if you won’t change and develop your technique, then the chances are that you won’t stay in your comfort zone very consistently. Let me give you an example.
I’m your sales manager. You and the rest of the sales staff at our branch are here for that always exciting extravaganza, our weekly meeting. I can handle pain and anxiety up to 700. On that scale, my P and A reading is 50 as I take a shower and think, “I’m all set to give those people a great meeting this morning. I’m really going to motivate ‘em. Production isn’t good—no one’s making much money, but they’re a really good group.”
At the breakfast table I decide to check on my first flyer in the stock market. After being a little leery at first, I finally decided to give it a go. In the morning paper I locate the stock my broker assured me would keep my family cruising in the Caribbean for the rest of our lives. It’s just dropped fifty percent. Suddenly my Pain and Anxiety meter is at 150. My wife figures that something’s down, looks over my shoulder at the paper, and sees the report. She then proceeds to advise me in graphic terms as to just how good my stock-selecting ability is, and also that my brains are composed of a single ingredient that has a short name. My P and A meter hits 300.
When I jump in the car, I know I’m running late. Heavy on the gas. A
policeman pulls me over. I’m so uptight that I don’t use an assumptive close
on him.
(The next time a policeman pulls you over, before he says a word look
him right in the eye with a big smile and say, “Officer, please forgive me
for bothering you just for a warning.”)
But I’m too far gone even for that. So the traffic ticket pushes my P and A level to 500. When I finally walk into that meeting twenty minutes late, you’re sitting there. The phone rings. You pick it up and tell me, “Torn, it’s for you.”
“I’ll take it in my office and be right back.” It’s the regional manager
calling to tell me how our office is doing and to give me a little motivational
inspiration. It goes like this:
“Hopkins, are you aware that your office’s performance is the lowest in our entire chain? Your people aren’t working, your advertising budget’s out of whack, and in general you look incompetent. If you don’t get those people of yours moving fast, plan on looking for another job.”
I hang up the phone. Through the glass wall of my office I see the sales staff waiting for me to start our weekly meeting. I walk out there with my Pain and Anxiety meter at 750, well into my danger zone. There’s so much adrenaline pounding through my head now that I’m down to just two options: the ancient ones of run or fight. Since we usually don’t literally do either in business anymore, that leaves the modern equivalents: withdraw or get hostile. I’m not leaving, so the meeting will now be different from the one I planned this morning. It goes something like this:
“Good morning. Are you people aware that your production stinks? We’re the lowest in the chain. I warn every one of you—I talked to the regional manager—hear me, and hear me good—if I’m bumped out, I’m taking all of you with me.”
Now, I suddenly feel great. I’ve knocked my P and A reading down to 50 by using hostility to get rid of my excess pain and anxiety. I got rid of mine. Who’d I give it to? You and the other people on the sales staff. I’ve driven all of you up to 750 and put all of you in your danger zones.
It’s vital that you learn how to handle a situation like this. Make no mistake. In every type of selling, you’re going to have a load of pain dumped on you every day, and you’re going to have another load marked anxiety dumped on you too. Every day.
The key to meeting and conquering this situation is to realize that all you have to do is overcome the pain and the anxiety. Do that and you’ll stay in your comfort zone. Why? Because there really are only two zones: danger and comfort. You have to be in one or the other. Pain and anxiety aren’t real until you make them hurt inside your head. If you refuse to do that, they can’t hurt you. Realize that every day there will be painful experiences. These experiences will all have the potential to create anxiety in your mind—if you decide to do that to yourself by concentrating on feeling pain and anxiety and avoiding any further risk of failure. If you decide to concentrate on doing constructive things that’ 11 turn your opportunities into reality, you’ll stay in your comfort zone because your mind is on doing, not on suffering.
You’ve had people upset at you. You’ve had unhappy clients. Every active salesperson has experienced this many times. Let’s not blink at the facts. As long as you stay in sales, you’ll frequently have people get upset with you. No one who sails the seas of success can avoid this. It occurs outside of you and often is beyond your control. Anxiety occurs only within your own skin, and anxieties of this sort are within your control.
You’ve had customers that you’ve given your heart and soul to and they still aren’t happy. They tell you about it bluntly, perhaps rudely. They may go beyond that with a nasty phone call or letter to your boss. That puts you in your danger zone, and many salespeople in this situation start withdrawing or become hostile.
In the next chapter, you’ll find a step-by-step formula. Use it every time someone cancels an appointment, won’t take a delivery date, says they wouldn’t have your product around, every time someone tells you no. Apply this formula to every rejection you get and you’ll start looking forward to rejection instead of hiding from it. That sounds hard to believe, doesn’t it? Turn to the next chapter and see for yourself.

This is true of all changes. Once you’ve done it, the pain is forgotten. A perfect example is the young woman giving birth for the first time. Quite often, while that’s happening, she’s making a firm commitment: NEVER AGAIN. And then the beautiful baby, who is the creation of her and her husband’s love, is brought to the new mother. She holds it and nurses it to life. Sure enough, in two years she’s back in that same delivery room. It’s the same with all positive changes.
I remember when I was prospecting day and night. I didn’t like prospecting any better than the next salesperson does—until after I’d done it and the money started pouring in.
The pain of change is forgotten once you do what you commit to do. And, besides that, there’s such an excitement to taking command of your life in positive and effective ways. But now, watch this ever so carefully. Look how we begin our conflict. We all Want the motivators, but we can’t overcome the de-motivators.
“1 want to make a lot of money so that I can have security, acquire a feeling of achievement, collect some recognition, and be accepted by the people I come in contact with. And when I have all that, I know I’ll accept and feel good about myself. But I’m not giving up the security I have now. I don’t feel good—but I’m not miserable. So I’m not going to call those people back —
— “If they don’t want our stereo system in their home, that’s tough.”
— “If they can’t see that our cars are the best on the road, that’s their problem.”
— “If they’re incapable of grasping that our in-house telephone system will be more convenient and save them money, that’s just too bad. They’ve got the problem, not me.”
“And, if I don’t call them back, they can’t bang a no on my head.”
So it’s easier not to pick up the phone than to put up with the fear of failure, the fear of taking a no on the chin.
“So I better not call. Besides, I’ve told just about everyone I know that I shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. My mother keeps asking me why I don’t take it easier. And my father always says, ‘Why do you work so hard? It’s not expected of you.’ Of course, he never amounted to anything, but he’s happy—well, sort of. So I won’t call them back just this one time.”
When the next opportunity to follow up with a prospect comes along, this whole song is sung again. It always ends with “So I won’t call them back just this one time.”
“Anyway, the buyers we have to do business with in this company are impossible—a bunch of 6-volt minds trying to fake their way through 110-volt jobs. I’ve got twelve years of college and a doctorate, but this yo-yo I should call back right now can’t grasp that I’m the whiz-kid with the expertise, and he’s the dummy with the wool blanket for brains. He acts like he invented the silicon chip, but without his purchasing authority he’d be nothing. This is the kind of guy I’m supposed to change for? No way.”
And who loses?
I do. Because of my inability to handle the pain that change involves, I lost not only this one order but a host of similar orders by cutting a pattern of self-imposed defeat. Every time I scratch myself from a race instead of running and risking that I won’t win, I cut this defeat pattern deeper. When the opposition between the motivators and the de-motivators becomes a conflict in your mind, the result is the transitional stage called frustration.
“I’m so frustrated. I want to make more money, but I’m not leaving this place for anything.”
“I’m so frustrated, but I’m not going through the files again. If they don’t call me, that’s their cold buns.”
Once you get frustrated, the next stage is the interesting one called anxiety. That’s a fancy name for emotional pain. Some people voice their anxiety with such words as “1 just can’t stand this pressure anymore.” Others silently let the pain boil inside them.
The next stage you reach is your danger zone. Many of us go in and out of our danger zone every day.
When in your entire life were you the most comfortable?
In the womb.
Now that’s security. Your own pool, all the food you could possibly want, and no taxes. Then all of a sudden comes the day when you enter this world. What are you greeted with after you come through the door? A nice slap—your first rejection.
Then they cut your umbilical cord.

My purpose isn’t to ask you to change, it’s to ask you to be happy. If you’re unhappy, put up with the temporary pain that’s involved in changing. However, if you won’t put up with the necessary pain of change then just stay happy. Or, if you can’t do that because your happiness is slipping away from you, recognize that you’re starting to feel the pain of changes thrust on you by others. That situation is all too common in life. The best—and perhaps the only—way to beat it is to take command of your future and start changing things yourself.
There’s going to be some pain involved in putting the ideas in these pages to work for you. Face it. I’m going to ask you to learn things you’re not doing now. I’m going to ask you to do things you’ve never done before— such as ask for the order.
Do you know that there are salespeople everywhere who have never asked one of their prospects to buy? Never. Not one time. Don’t look around in your next sales meeting for such a salesperson. Check your mirror first.
We all have certain ideas and values. We are us, and we’re not going to change. Let me give you an example. Hypothetically, let’s say that for health reasons it’s a wise decision for you to lose weight at this time. Let’s suppose that you’re 50 pounds overweight. If you’re happy being 50 pounds overweight, then you should just stay that way and never think about dieting. However, if you’re unhappy with the extra weight, then you’d be wise to do something about it, don’t you agree?
‘[he day you commit to a diet, you’re going to go through some pain. You’re going to feel pain until you lose that 50 pounds. Then, as you slither down the street, and everyone asks how you did it, you’ll smile and say, “Nothing to It.’’

The fourth de-motivator is the pain of change. This is the toughest and most challenging de-motivator for my seminar groups to learn how to cope
with. It’s also one of the most harmful de-motivators. I hope you’ll make a special effort to conquer it.
Why does change always seem to involve pain? We resist change because it means that part of our old self must die, and that an unknown new self will be born. We grieve the loss of the familiar as we labor through the painful birth of the strange. It’s all very primitive.
Some of us resist change because we’ve suffered sudden, painful events in the past, perhaps in childhood. In adulthood, this finds its echo in statements such as, “I don’t like surprises,” and the tendency to defend against disaster by striking at change.
And we resist change because we almost instinctively believe that changing and aging are somehow linked. “If we could just stop change, we could stay young,” runs this desperate and touchingly human hope. You see this futile hope in people young and old who wear the styles of five or twenty-five years ago, who hold onto the manners and viewpoints of yesteryear, who stubbornly cling to methods that were effective in a time gone by. There’s a place for nostalgia in our lives. It can be comforting and fun. But even antique dealers have to keep up with the times to stay in business.
Individuals aren’t the only ones to fight change. Companies do it— nations.do it. But the world changes anyway.
We’ve all heard this dull-witted comment many times, “That’s how it is;” this pointless reason, “We’ve always done it that way;” this pure unreason, “I’m not changing.” Meanwhile, the inevitable forces of change are modifying how it is by making that way unprofitable and phasing out the person who’s not changing. We can fight the forces of change and win some temporary victories against it—but we can’t win the war. In the end, we change or we lose.
Success avoids fights it can’t win. Instead of fighting an unbeatable force, success uses it to win victories. Success adores change.
So don’t fight change, make it work for you. That’s easier said than done because we all tend to fight change with strong emotions, and to use change for less potent intellectual reasons. Here’s how to break that pattern. Here’s how to make change a powerful and positive force in your upward drive:
1. Face the issue squarely by thinking through your emotional fear of change. Then consciously separate your feelings about intensifying your work methods from your feelings about losing the familiar, about the passing years, and about coping with the strange and new.
2. Keep the best of the old in your life so that you’ll have a strong emotional foundation on which to build helpful change.
3. Make a habit of trying new things when you don’t have to.
4. Every day, tell someone that you’re quick to adopt new ideas, that you like sampling new things, that you’re always learning, changing, and growing. Keep saying that and you’ll believe it, act on it, and make it true.
5. While there’s an element of pain in all changes, those that are thrust on you by other people hurt far more than the change you put in motion yourself. Instead of sitting back and limply waiting for the next axe of change to fall on your life, be the cutting edge of positive change and improve your life.

The third de-motivator is self-doubt. This one holds special interest for
all of us in sales. Before you entered this field, you probably mentioned that
you might to your friends and relatives. Then what did you hear?
“Selling? You’re thinking about selling? For a living? Know what that means? Fast or famine. Chicken dinner one night, feathers the next. What are you, crazy?”
Listening to that refrain a few times can plant the seeds of self-doubt in your brain, and stain your enthusiasm with fear before you begin. That fear can spur you to greater effort—or it can cause you to look for a soft spot to fall. “Okay, I’ll just give selling a try,” you tell your friends and relatives. “I’ll give it a chance. If I like it, fine. If not, big deal—I’ll give something else a shot.”
The trouble is, you hear your own words when you hedge your commitment to sales that way. Elsewhere in this book an effective method of convincing people is stated in these words: “If they say it, it’s true.” That method also works for us—for us or against us. You can’t go into sales with a give-it-a-whack, see-how-it-goes attitude without weakening your resolve to do the difficult things (like facing rejection) that must be done if you are to succeed.
Tell people you’ve decided on a career in sales. No ifs or buts. Commit yourself to success in sales. Don’t brag about all you’re going to do, but don’t excuse yourself from all-out effort either. Don’t predict your own failure and then float out to prove how good you are at making predictions.
And don’t set your sights on being average. If you do, that’s what you’ll be. When you’re new, with few or no sales yet, being average might seem like a safe and successful place to be. It isn’t. Here’s why: In most companies, one-third of the salespeople do two-thirds of the business. (Obviously, the exact figures will vary from year to year and from firm to firm—though not by much.) That’s neat for the top third, but the bottom two-thirds of every sales force must live on the income generated by one- third of that company’s sales.
That’s twice the people splitting half the money. Every time a bottom- grouper gets one dollar, a top-grouper gets four dollars. Unless you’re on the right end of this split, it’s tempting to blame company policy for this huge difference. Resist that temptation. Yielding to it blinds you to three truths that all great salespeople know: (1) management hates depending on so few of its salespeople for so much of its sales; (2) management can’t put you into the top group, only you can put you into the top group; (3) if you’re only average, you’re only making a fourth of what the top-groupers have proved can be earned in your job.
You stop being average the day you decide to become a Champion, because the average person won’t make that decision. You stop being average the day you commit to an all-out effort to win the level of success you want, because the average person never makes that commitment. After you’ve made that decision and that commitment, you’ll start handling rejection differently. When you fail to get the appointment, you don’t ask what the average sales person asks: “What did I do wrong?”
When people who refuse to talk to you come into your showroom or display area and then walk out, you don’t ask “What did I do WRONG?”
When you demonstrate or present with eloquence and verve until the prospect warmly and with love throws you out the door, you don’t ask yourself “WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”
You don’t ask that because doing so reinforces self-doubt. With enough reinforcement, self-doubt becomes negative conviction.
When you’re gripped by negative conviction, you believe that everything you do will be wrong; being wrong, everything you do will fail; therefore, you will fail. That’s negative conviction, and every sales position provides ample opportunities to catch it if you expose yourself to the virus. Negative conviction is especially dangerous to new people in sales. If they take every opportunity to ask themselves what they did wrong, they’ll repent that question an enormous number of times during their first few rnc n t h s.
What does the Champion ask whenever he or she fails?
“What did I do RIGHT?”
The Champion keeps on doing what he did right, keeps his up-attitude, overcomes the rejection, keeps on trying, and starts to win. The wins pile up until they smother any sneaky self-doubt under a pyramid of positive conviction. Most people don’t move because they are de-motivated by their self doubts, which they turn into negative convictions. From here on out, ask not, “What did I do wrong?” Dwell on “What did I do RIGHT?”
“Wait a minute,” you say. “I’m standing by the showroom window, getting a face-tan and feeling good, when this non-buyer comes in, proceeds to give me a hard time, and then walks out. Until he came in, I was feeling good. Now I’m feeling rotten. Naturally I’m going to ask, ‘What did I do wrong?’ Any fool can see that.”
Any fool can ask that question, but the Champion, the top-grouper, doesn’t leave his or her self-esteem and up-attitude lying around where any stray hard nose can stomp on it.

Read those words every chance you get. One day, when you’re ready to act and eager to conquer your fear, those words will suddenly grab you. Then you’ll be done with this sad truth: If you don’t cont rol fear, fear controls you. Then you’ll prepare carefully, challenge your fear, and conquer that fear for all time. Looking back, it’ll seem easy. And, every time you conquer one fear, you’ll find it easier to take on and beat your next fear. But you don’t always win the first time out. Be prepared for that. The important thing is to jump on that fear for the first time. After that, it’s not an uphill road anymore.
l3ut you have to get past that first time. After I thought about controlling fear by doing what I feared most, I had to agree that I was allowing a fear to control my life. So I called the company that had invited me to speak. I said I’d do it.
That was about a month before the date of my speech. I served those thirty days on death row, wishing every hour that I hadn’t done it. The nearer the time for my speech came, the more panicky I got. “What am I going to say?” I kept asking myself. “Why did I do this to myself?”
At night, after writing out what I was going to say, I’d read what I’d written out loud. Then I’d tear it up and start over. Finally someone told me to put it all on 3 x 5 cards. So I wrote it all out on 3 x 5-inch cards.
The night before my first speech, I didn’t sleep at all. The next morning! walked into a huge auditorium. Three thousand people were seated there. I stood off in the wings as they started my introduction. And what did I start re-living? My fiasco in the second grade. They introduced me. I walked
out—
By the way, if you’re not a professional speaker, have them provide a podium. That gives you something to hang onto. And the audience can’t see your knees banging together.
Well, I looked down at my notes and just let ‘er rip. I never looked at the audience, I just kept on talking. I was scheduled to speak for forty-five minutes. In eight minutes I’d covered every point.
That first time was awful. The second time was terrible. The third time was yuk. The fourth time they clapped a little. The fifth time they stayed. Now, after speaking day after day after day with the finest group I know, salespeople, I wake in the morning with anticipation. Excitement. All this for overcoming the fear of failure in the beginning.
How many people do you know who won’t try because they’re afraid they may fail? Isn’t it sad how many of us consign ourselves to the junkyard of mediocrity rather than accept the momentary rejections that success demands? If you take just one idea from this book, make this one yours and it’ll repay your reading cost ten-thousand-fold: “I’m too proud of my future to beat myself out of it.”
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The sixth motivator is self-acceptance. I hope you get this one because you can’t realize your fullest potential without this achievement.
We all hunger for it. Self-acceptance is calcium for the bones of our personalities. Many of us keep those bones weak by making our self- acceptance dependent on the approval of others. Weak bones make for a hard life. Confusing self-acceptance with acceptance by others makes for a hard life.
You may have trouble thinking about self-acceptance in any way that doesn’t involve acceptance by others. Many of us simply aren’t in the business of accepting ourselves, although few of us ever get out of the business of rejecting ourselves. Positive input depends on others, negative input we provide ourselves. This is a no-win system.
The harder we work at trying to succeed this way, the more vulnerable we make ourselves. People sense our need, play our weakness to their own advantage, and decide for themselves whether we fail or succeed. Watch carefully where you seek approval. If you drift into seeking it from someone who’d be threatened by your succeess, you’re in heavy trouble.
Self-acceptance is the state of being your own person. You have arrived. Not where somebody else sent you, you have arrived exactly where you want to be. Self-acceptance marks the day when the opinions of other people don’t control you anymore. It’s the day you start making yourself heard when you don’t agree. It’s the night you suddenly jump a jet to Europe for a vacation; it’s the morning you stay in bed because you want to. It’s the hour when you’re all through with the games you don’t want to play, through with the roles you don’t want to live. It’s the minute you finally unlock your potential, become you, know that you’ve become you, and know that you are completely and gloriously your own person. Doesn’t that sound exciting?
Very few people get there.
Why do so many of us fail to attain self-acceptance?
Because we don’t limit the number of people that we must have approval from.
Because we demand more approval from the world than the world is willing to give us—and weaken our action in a vain attempt to get it.
Because we don’t grasp how important it is to truly accept ourselves. Some of us dimly see what’s lacking, and try to force self-acceptance on ourselves.
But those little voices inside our heads keep on cutting us down to size no matter how loud and aggressive and stubborn we act.
Yes, it is difficult to become yourself until you’ve learned to be comfortable with an attainable amount of acceptance from other people. Until you can stop worrying about this, you can’t become you.
And you’ll never reach self-acceptance, the state where you can function best and be happiest, until you get some recognition and enhance your self-image. You won’t get recognition until you have some achievement. You’ll never have achievement until you develop a feeling of security. And you won’t have a feeling of security until you start making some money.
You can get money, security, achievement, recognition, acceptance of others—and still not have self-acceptance. You probably know successful people who have all these things except self-acceptance.
We’ve all read about entertainers who reach stardom and then commit suicide. They had money; they had security; stardom is defined as recognition and acceptance by others—but they failed to achieve self-acceptance. Everybody liked them. That is, everybody liked each of them except one person. That one person hated what they’d become to get what they thought they wanted. The most sincere form of self-criticism is suicide.
The next most sincere form is the living suicide that so many people inflict on themselves when their cravings for the satisfactions of the six motivators far outrun what they can attain. Those who feel they’re entitled to these things as gifts react the same way when the world refuses to hand them all they desire. They retreat into destructive habits and attitudes, and rob their lives of productivity, joy, and meaning. Don’t defeat yourself before you begin to fight: don’t demand immediate satisfactions far greater than those you can immediately obtain.
Those are the six basic motivators—powerful, gut-level emotions that drive us all. Untamed, they drown us; harnessed, they supply unlimited energy. Study them.
They affect you in many ways: on the surface, in the shallows, and in the depths of your ego. You can’t learn too much about them and about how you can control their enormous forces.
As a starting point, look at your past. Feel your past. Your past has determined where you are at this moment; your immediate future will soon be the past that will determine your more distant future. As we get further into these pages, please realize that I’m writing to you about your life. Time passes at the same speed for everyone — it just seems to pass more slowly in slums than in Monte Carlo. Where will you be in five years? Develop a plan, and then activate that plan to put yourself where you want to be in five years. And be sure to update your five-year-plan at least annually.

one.
Do you know how many people strive every day to be accepted by everyone else? With many people, including many in sales, that’s their greatest motivation—and their greatest weakness. But we all want to be liked, don’t we?
Now here’s an interesting thing that happens to every new salesperson regardless of the product or service. When you’re brand new to your company (and maybe you’re also new to the profession of selling) and first go into your new sales job all loaded with enthusiasm, who’s sitting there waiting to accept or reject you?
Is it the achievers or the non-achievers who’re parked there? Is it the Five Percent or the Ninety-Five Percent?
Which group lives in the office? Which group is out running for more business?
The chances are good that someone will say, “Now let me tell you how things really stand around here.” When that happens, you’d think there’s one chance in twenty of that someone being an achiever, but you may not even see the achievers for weeks. They’re busy doing the things that make them great. When you’re finally introduced to one of the Five Percent, they’ll say something like this and not much more: “Glad to have you with us. This is a terrific company, and you’re going to do great here. Nice meeting you. See you later.”
Some people in your company will tell you that this training won’t help you. Without giving these concepts and techniques a fair trial, they’ll say that. After merely skimming these pages looking for something to ridicule or twist, some of them will say that. Without eveji cracking this book open, a few will say that. These people are the losers, and they want you to join them. The last thing they want you to do is join the winners. To show why this is so important to them, let’s get on the case of Jack Bumyears.
Jack’s been in the sales department of your new firm for almost eleven years now—and he hasn’t learned a new sales technique in 120 months. When you start, everyone from the company president on down wants you to succeed—except Jack and his friends. Every time someone new comes whistling in from nowhere and makes good, Jack is faced with a hard question: “This new jerk did it. Why can’t I?”
Bumyears knows the answer to that question as well as anyone does:
Jack is a non-achiever because Jack refuses to be effective. But that’s the one answer Jack can’t accept. To do so would be admitting to himself that his work habits and methods must be drastically changed before he can ceed. Too painful, too frightening, to think about. Far easier to blame the newcomer’s success on favoritism, pure dumb luck, a lack of ethics— anything that will steer the guilt away from Jack’s shoulders.
But, no matter how ingenious Jack’s been about excuses, no matter how much time and effort he puts into keeping those excuses tight, the truth is always in there, gnawing to be free.
After this happens a time or two, Jack automatically develops anxiety whenever a newcomer shows promise. Alert, hardworking, eager-to-learn people have a nasty habit of quickly succeeding, Jack learns, and that always forces him into another agonizing search for an acceptable explanation. The pain reaches down into Jack’s subconscious mind and demands relief. Then Jack begins to act on a sad and false belief: That the best way to cope with other people’s success is not to have any of it around. Soon he’s attained a high level of non-achievement by becoming skilled at stifling ambition among his peers. Every weakness detected in an eager person is deftly exploited. Peer pressure is subtly guided toward containing anyone who shows signs of drive. If these tactics seem to be failing, Bumyears and friends will suddenly turn cold, and reject the budding winner whenever they can. This is where the ambitious sales person who has a strong need to be accepted by his or her peers runs into danger, because the price of peer acceptance is to accept being average. Only the strong can resist this pressure; only the strong can pay this additional price of success.
Our profession of sales is one of the few that people can retire into. Normally, you retire to the pasture. If there’s anyone who attacks the usefulness of this book, find out their income. If they’re not making what you want to make, you’ve found a Jack Bumyears.
Surround yourself with people most like the person you want to become Whether you realize it or not, what happens is that you become more like the people you associate with, and less like the people you don’t associate with, as time passes. You unconsciously pick up little and large ways of achieving—or not achieving—from the people you rub elbows with every day. Unconsciously, you gather attitudes and ideas, and absorb everything from petty details to major concepts that’ 11 spur you on to greater achievement—or sink you deeper into non-achievement.
Don’t hang around with people whose financial and emotional thinking is on a lower level than yours. You need to grow. They don’t. So they won’t help you expand your horizons, and they can’t inspire you. Choosing the right associates calls for hard choices. But we have to drift away from people more messed up than ourselves, or we’ll continue to soak up their influence, advice, and failings. Family responsibilities are one thing; your choice of friends is another. Mix with people who are plusses. It’s hard enough keeping yourself up so you can climb higher. Don’t make it tougher on yourself—possibly too tough—by trying to drag a bunch of losers up with
yoU.
Are you trying to get everyone to like you?
Are you holding back a little on your push for success because you don’t want to anger certain people who’ve let you know they don’t care for hard drivers? Why? You can’t afford to be popular with the losers.
Write down the names of the people you spend most of your time with, Go over that list carefully, and think about whether each person on it is an emotional plus for you. Put everyone who isn’t a positive force in your life on a second list, and then consider finding new people to be around instead of the non-plussers on your second list. If you decide to replace any of your present associates who are negative with enthusiastic new friends, you’ll be pleased at how effortless this process will be if you do it gradually. No open breaks. No frank discussions. Simply make yourself less available to the minus people, and fill the time saved with activities that’ll bring you into contact with positive new people. Some of them will become your friends.