Short talk by Heather Hansen O'Neill (INBOUND 2016) about overcoming fear as a barrier to success in sales. She uses personal adventure stories (rock climbing, trapeze, skydiving, swimming with sharks) to illustrate strategies: surround yourself with supportive people, accept risk and learn from falls, and look for ‘handholds’ (lessons) to progress. The talk frames fear as the "number one killer" of sales performance.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Heather Hanson o' Neill and I am doing a program here called the number one killer of how to define diffuse and break through to success. I'm super stoked to be here at inbound 2016. It's been so much fun so far. And I'm especially excited by the fact that during Anna Kendrick's talk, she actually validated what I'm about to talk about tomorrow. And that's about making sure that you go through the. The scary. So I believe that salespeople are very unique individuals, not unlike athletes and entrepreneurs. They are willing to look within, delve deeper, and do the difficult tasks that help them to achieve success. And I enjoy working with them because that's what I'm all about. So I'm also an adventurer and I often do crazy things like, like jump out of airplanes, swim with sharks, eat fire. And I do this to help by pushing through my own fears and breaking through so that I can share those stories with other people so that they can get to the next level in sales without jumping out of an airplane. Tomorrow I'm going to be talking about flying on the trapeze. But I wanted to share another story today that has a great point that ties in with breaking through fear and why it's so important. And it has to do with the first time that I went rock climbing. It was something that I was a little bit hesitant to do, but I had a lot of fun the first couple of climbs. Mildly athletic, so it was fairly easy. And I heard the two guys I was climbing with say something to the effect of, oh, she's good. We should take her over to Dead Man's Bluff. And I'm like, oh. And that's when it got a little bit frightening. We went up about 200ft straight up. And I was about 150ft in the air when I couldn't find any hand holds. I was tired and cranky and hungry. But there was a gentleman below me who was holding the ropes that said, you're doing great. Keep going. And the guide above me was screaming, down, I got you. You can do this. So I screamed up, I don't have any hand holds. And he said, yes, you do. There's one about a foot and a half past your left hand jump. I'm 150ft in the air. I was a little reticent to do that, so I cried a little bit and looked around some more and realized that he was right. That was my only option. So I jumped and I reached for it and I got it for about three seconds and then I slipped and I fell and crashed into the mountain once, twice, until I felt the harness pull up and the guide had saved my life. As it turned out, I had actually fallen into a better place and I had handholds that were closer together and I was able to make it to the top of the mountain. And the reason I tell this story is it has so much to do with the strategies involved in breaking through fear. First one is that you need to remove yourself from the nagging complainers and surround yourself with people who say, you're doing a great job and I got you. And the other one is that when you are a risk taker because you want to better yourself, you're going to make some mistakes, you're going to fall. But when you do, if you look around for the handholds, for the lessons, then you'll be able to make it where you want to go even faster. And so I would like to talk about some of these things. And I'm going to be doing it in fear, the number one killer of sales. Thank you.
