I have a confession to make. Sometimes the very things that I teach and preach and Coach I struggle with myself.

I know, shocking right? I just admitted to you all that I'm not perfect. But as I told my son when he graduated school, we're all kind of figuring it out as we go, aren't we?

Let me give you an example. Now if you're new around here, you might not know that I've been trying to write a book for a while and I struggled. I stopped and I tried again and I went back to the drawing board and well, I'm back at it again, but there is one major difference this time.

Now you may have heard by now about these "Not bout me" t-shirts I wear to remind all of us that in sales our conversations and intentions really need to be focused on others, not about ourselves.

Because selling isn't something that we do to others.

It's something that we do with them. This idea came about years ago. When one of my coaching clients after hearing me say it over and over again, “it's not about you”, he said to me “I just need a tattoo that on my forehead because I just forget and I need the constant reminder”. 

So rather than let him tattoo it on his forehead, I created the t-shirts. 

If you caught the first episode of this season's What Sales Can Learn From on the Sales Experts Channel then you've heard David Hoffeld and I talk about sales ethics studies that show that one of the reasons that were most likely to lose our integrity and selling is we're under pressure Financial pressure to it in my work with Sellers and managers.

I see this happen a lot and it's because of that pressure that the focus then becomes on ourselves and not on the other person. Now if you check out episode 3 of What Sales Can Learn From I'm going to be talking with former FBI Behavioral Analyst Robin Dreeke and you're going to hear us talk about some Harvard studies that show that we spend upwards of 40% of our time talking about ourselves because when we do our brains release dopamine, which makes us feel good. 

This happens when you're a CEO and your relationships with your customers or employees or if or a sales leader and you're talking to your direct reports or if you're a manager with your sellers and yeah, you guessed it if you're a seller with your buyers. 

And if you're a writer with your readers, you see the big reason I struggled for too long to write this book was because I was either focused on writing a book so that it was like a business card that I could hand out to get more clients. I was focused on what it was that I wanted to write about. It was all about me. And so I struggled but when I started focusing on who this book was for and what it is that they were struggling with right now and what they needed to get through it. It all became a little bit more clear now to do that. 

I had to first take stock of what my goal was.

Why am I writing this book? Anyway, why is it so important? What about it is so important and why do I feel so uneasy that I haven't finished it yet? 

After a little bit of digging and searching and I realized that this was my insurance policy “What happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow”  policy because there's so much that I've learned and seen others do and when they're about to hit those same potholes or the train that's coming towards them. I want to yell “look out!”. And if this book existed when I first started my business years ago, I probably would have saved me a lot of gray hair and sleepless nights. 

The second thing that I had to do was ask myself, “Who is this book for?”. 

I have to give a special shout-out and thank you to AJ Harper for this wake-up call because this is when I realized I was making it all about me.

I'm focused on writing a book for entrepreneurs who want to get more customers and clients, but they're struggling with finding the time and the right messaging and the process and the pricing and just might not realize that what they're really struggling with is their mindset towards selling that's preventing them from success. 

The third thing that I had to do is learn a process to start practicing with and find a group of people that would hold me accountable now whether you realize it or not, you are already practicing some of these things every day. 

The question is: are you deliberately practicing something that's going to move you towards your goal or are you just reinforcing the same things that you've done before that's gotten you to where you are which might be stuck 

Finally,

The last thing that I had to do was I had to face some of those conversations in my mind. 

You know the ones that say things like, “You don't have time for this you need to just get it done”. 

Nope. Not if you want to be an ethical leader, a seller, or an entrepreneur and take the focus off of yourself. You need to seek to be a resource to others. 

Keep your focus on your buyer with a "not about me" reminder tee shirt.

These tees are for leaders and sellers to wear as a reminder to themselves that it's not about:

• your product, service, or quota
• what you think or want
• how smart you are
• what people think about you