One of the skills that has complicated my life the most is selling (besides swimming, for which I am completely useless 😪). This for several reasons:

  • I am introverted.
  • I am embarrassed to make a cold call and ask for so-and-so to then explain that I want to sell him something.
  • It makes me nervous to meet new people, sit down with a client in a cafe and explain my product, my knees have even trembled.
  • It makes me nervous to tell him how much it costs and even at the moment of charging.

Ironically I really like entrepreneurship; the problem is that I have learned that to undertake it is 100% necessary to know how to sell.

One day I was talking about this with a cousin who likes doing magic, and he gave me advice that blew my mind 🤯, he told me the following: “I also get nervous when I do magic, I’m afraid of messing up or that they won’t like the trick, but something that has helped me is thinking that when I do magic it’s no longer me, but I am in the role of a magician, I act as if I were a magician. Normally I am more introverted, but the magician is not, he is extroverted, he likes to be among people, that helps me overcome nerves and look more authentic”.

I started applying this when selling and BANG!, everything changed, my experience improved a lot because when selling I am no longer “the introvert who is embarrassed to sell”, now I am “the salesperson, the one who wants to help others and for that is extroverted and talkative”. And not only that, now I apply this to different aspects of my life, such as job interviews or asking something in a store (although in this last one I still suffer quite a bit).

Now, here are two things that could be considered negative. The first is that it goes against the cliché of “be yourself”, the problem is that sometimes being yourself does not go with what you need, you need someone with another attitude and other skills, but since it is not always possible to hire someone, well you need to “be another person” for a few moments. This leads us to the second “negative” thing, which is: is it hypocritical to do this? If you ask me my answer is NO, because it is not about lying or selling fake things, nor is it about pretending otherwise if you dislike someone, it is rather a way to psych yourself up to carry out a situation. Of course, my opinion is biased, it could be that for others it is indeed hypocritical, if you don’t feel good using the trick it is not an obligation.

The best of all is that it is scientifically proven that this works, there is a famous phrase in English “Fake it till you make it”. This is a TED Talks video where they talk about it, it is about how pretending can help us improve self-esteem and even shape our identity in the long term.