MANY years ago, just out of college, I worked in my father’s company as a salesman. There’s one lesson I learnt in sales, I’ve never forgotten, and that was to never allow the customer to feel that you needed the sale so desperately because you had no order.
Three were days when I would go the whole day without a single sale, going from house to house selling my product and then finally I had someone who let me in and evinced interest in what I had to sell.
I would take a deep breath, clear the desperation from my face, sit down and act as if I had an order book full of sales. I had to act as if I did not need his sale, and that helped me get a huge order and also not allow my rates to get lowered.
Several years ago there was a well-known television circus show that developed a Bengal tiger act. Like the rest of the show, it was done “live” before a large audience. One evening, the tiger trainer went into the cage with several tigers to do a routine performance. The door was locked behind him. The spotlights highlighted the cage, the television cameras moved in close, and the audience watched in suspense as the trainer skillfully put the tigers through their paces.
In the middle of the performance, the worst possible fate befell the act: the lights went out! For twenty or thirty long, dark seconds the trainer was locked in with the tigers. In the darkness they could see him, but he could not see them. A whip and a small kitchen chair seemed meager protection under the circumstances, but he survived, and when the lights came on, he calmly finished the performance.
In an interview afterward, he was asked how he felt knowing that the tigers could see him but that he could not see them. He first admitted the chilling fear of the situation, but pointed out that the tigers did not know that he could not see them. He said, “I just kept cracking my whip and talking to them until the lights came on. And they never knew I could not see them as well as they could see me.”
How true isn’t it? There are many of us who have a sob story and want to fall over the nearest friend, uncle or aunt and cry our story out, it’s just a matter of time before we get our head crushed in with all the pity we get, and then people cease to want to be with us, because of our weeping and self pity.
Instead learn not to let others know you’re facing rock bottom, and with that, not only will you move on with confidence but soon have a smile as you see it working. Crack your whip and don’t let others know it’s dark around you. When you learn to face the tigers in the dark, the battle is half won..!
—Email: bobsbanter@gmail.com
