I got an email today from a client who feels uncomfortable with “selling” full stop. And I think it’s a common problem amongst small business owners.

I used to feel incredibly shy about ‘selling’ my services. But I’ve changed a lot. And I want to explore how and why it’s changed in this post.

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Value your work. Value yourself.

Put simply, if you’re good at what you do, you can create value for others. And if what you’re doing helps other people, creates value, it’s perfectly right and acceptable to expect an equal exchange of value. Isn’t it?

No-one is ‘taking’ anything from anybody – unless of course you either don’t value your own work and the difference you can make, or you’re someone who sees the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I think it comes down to self-confidence, self-belief and self-esteem. These three are core business skills. You can’t run a successful business without building them.

It’s also about refusing to become an object commodity – more of which I talk about in my audio book and seminars.

It’s all about flow.

If you have a world view, or a belief system in which you believe that every transaction is taking something from someone else – your view of selling is going to be negative.

For me, things changed dramatically when I stopped thinking about money as money and profit as profit. Instead I began to see it as flows of value. Just like the water cycle. Just like blood circulation.

When you create value in the world in the right way, you create conditions for money to flow towards you. But it’s not going to stop with you. It’s also going to flow on to other people.

In the past couple of years we’ve seen how deadly it can be for the economy if that flow is stopped abruptly. Let’s face it, our economies almost tanked for a moment there.

 Economies and the lives of millions in those economies work precisely because money flows.

You choose how money flows

Playing devil’s advocate, it’s fair to say that in some parts of our economy, money flows in less healthy ways.

However, we also have a choice to take part in exactly how that money flows only when we’re part of the game. The bigger the part we play, the  more change we can make.

Anita Roddick, for example, changed the flow of money towards cosmetics not tested on animals. Guy Watson changed the flow of money towards organic farming with Riverford veg boxes.

Being part of the flow of money means you’ve got a greater opportunity to promote the values which you think should change the world – whatever they are.

The myth of ‘taking’ from someone else.

According to Nick Williams in The Work We Were Born To Do, if all the money in the world were distributed absolutely equally, we’d all be millionaires.

If you’re something less than a millionaire right now, don’t worry, you haven’t technically amassed your fair share of the world’s wealth yet…

Natural Born Sellers

Not all of us are natural born sellers. I’m certainly not.  But it’s a skill we can learn.

More important are the beliefs we hold underpinning what we do. You’ve got to believe you can add value to the world. That you can help people. And you’ve got to believe it’s okay to take your fair share of value back from the world in return for what you give out.

And you’ve got to believe that economies remaining in a state where there is a dynamic flow of money between people – is a good and healthy thing too. And if you have certain ideals, it’s got to be possible to hold true to them and still do what you do well – and there are plenty of examples of that.

So that’s why I’m no longer shy about selling myself or my services. I know I can make a huge and valuable difference to the business owners I help. So I feel okay about getting myself in a position where I can help them, and accept ‘value’ in the form of money as a form of appreciation.

It’s good to be appreciated.

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(and I’ll send you a free report about how to double your business)