Do You Take Yourself Seriously?
As a business owner like you, there’s something I noticed that has been stewing in my mind for some days now. It’s a question that has resonated with me from the beginning of starting my business – Do I take myself seriously?
It’s a silly question, right? Not really.
When I was building The Landscaping Employee Trap training materials, I realized that your own outlook towards yourself has a huge impact in how you run your business.
Your business is also your job. It’s only natural that when you are beginning, you are focused on earning money, paying bills, reinvesting in your company, and feeding your family. When we start getting enough money to support ourselves, that’s when we start seeing the returns in our investments. From there we move into our deepest life’s purpose – the things we’ve always wanted to do. Taking yourself seriously could be the fastest way to increase income.
See, when you grow up as a kid to a teenager and then to a young man, you notice older people not taking you seriously because you’re just a kid, right? It gets frustrating, more so, because there’s a part in us that gets stuck in our earlier stages. There could be a fourteen-year-old boy inside of you or a part of you that is stuck at 21. A part of you hasn’t gone through a breakthrough, yet. It happens to anyone. You can begin to notice that when you look around at other people, you can see that although they might be fully grown up there are still parts that are stuck in their younger years.
I know who mine was and I’d like to tell him, “man, you were the first person who took me seriously and I didn’t even know how to handle it.”
When somebody pays you that respect, you actually grow up and you hold them in high regards. There’s a sense of self-acceptance when somebody takes you seriously. Your hard work has been validated. Your ideas do have merit. This gives you much more power to take action and make those ideas happen.
When you walk up onto a property to give a customer a quote or shake somebody’s hand, do you look them in the eyes? When you’re in a social environment or sales environment, how seriously you take yourself will be reciprocated. The quality of your communication is the quality of your response. The more seriously you take yourself, the more your back starts to straighten up, the more you conduct yourself in that manner.
Let’s say you’re with somebody who owns a half-million dollar home and you’re giving them a quote to do service on their property. If your back is hunched over and you don’t have confidence because you didn’t pull up in a nice vehicle or maybe you don’t have a huge company...If they sense that, then their level of confidence in you will match that and you might not get the job. If you want to know how well you’re doing, pay attention to how serious people take you.
Casey Combden spoke about this some years ago. He said that the reason “people act like a fool is because in their heart they feel like a fool”. They can’t help it so they act it out.
I do act like a total fool sometimes in my videos and look just like a maniac but it doesn’t have to be that way when you are facing potential clients. If you’re serious about what you’re doing, it’ll translate through your sub-communication. The study of new linguistics says ninety percent of all human communication is nonverbal. It’s beyond what you say. It’s your eye contact, your tone of voice, your patterns and body language.
If you want to learn how to compose yourself when facing future customers, clients, or just about anyone... and more. Check out my training videos at The Landscaping Employee Trap.
This would have been an easy blog to do but I want to unpack all the information and discuss things from different angles so I hope that helped you out. If you’re reading this, I just want you to know that I acknowledge and respect you. Thank you for allowing me to impart this knowledge to you.
