My goal with this blog post is to take you to my in-the-middle-of-a-launch mind and give you a real-time perspective on what it actually takes to have faith and sell well.
Selling comes with so much emotional baggage. When we don’t get enough likes, clicks, or sales, we start feeling insecure and discouraged. And for some reason, this emotional aspect of selling is not something we hear many people talk about in the online business space. And I’m here to change that because it’s only a matter of time before those #bossbabe inspirational quotes lose their flavour and power.
This past week has been super emotional for me. We’re about to relaunch YFP and I feel like I’m being attacked emotionally and spiritually. Although God has proven His faithfulness through my previous launches, I still have moments of doubt.
“No one cares”
“No one is gonna buy”
“You’ve said that already”
“You sound desperate”
“You’re a fraud”
“Who are you to teach this?”
These voices of judgement, shame, and anxiety are so paralyzing…
If you also feel vulnerable when selling — you’re 100% not alone. Putting yourself out there often feels like you’re about to perform a halftime show at the Super Bowl where you only have 15 minutes to prove yourself and the whole world (the Americans, to be exact) is watching, judging and comparing your performance.
The very first thing I teach my students is that being established in God’s word is the ultimate way to grow their revenue and relationships in a way that feels good, aligned, and empowered. That doesn’t mean we just read the bible and do nothing. We combine faith and practical copywriting skills to help Christian entrepreneurs succeed in meeting their revenue goals while honouring God and feeling good in the process. But the problem that comes up over and over again is that many of us lose faith and lack patience and persistence after praying to God a few times. To be honest, I am on the same boat more often than I’d like to admit. We like the idea of doing business with God and want to be rooted in faith, but we are easily distracted and quick to judge God’s plan for us. What we fail to recognize is that there is a door we all want to walk through, and being grounded in God’s presence with His Spirit can help you find it and open it.
How?
Start by telling God how you feel. That’s right. The first thing you should do when you are feeling like something isn’t right is to process it. Don’t sit on it, push it down, or try to ignore it; you’ll end up feeding your emotions even more, and that’s exactly what the enemy wants.
Have you seen the movie Inception? It’s brilliant.
Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief with the rare ability to enter people’s dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious. He’s asked to plant an idea in the mind of a CEO. To make sure the CEO believes it’s his OWN idea when he wakes up, Cobb and his team have to go four layers deep into his subconscious mind and plant the seed there.
The enemy works in similar ways. First, they use something small (e.g., how your teeth look like – it happened to me, for real) to trigger you, to make you feel dumb or unworthy. Then you get upset and start questioning your sales page, the value of your services, etc. Next thing you know, you’re in a spiral of negativity and you’re convinced that you’ll never “make it”. One lie after the other begins to take shape and form. You feel like you’re being swallowed by your own emotions, sometimes you can even feel the burn running through your veins, but there’s nothing you can do to stop letting it consume you.
There is a way out, my friend! At times we feel stuck, when the truth is that we’re empty. Romans 8:26 says “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”
There is power in God’s word. There is power and truth and revelation when we go four layers deep with God. But you have to be willing. You have to be open and have the desire to be FILLED by the Spirit and let God deal with what you can’t control.
Yesterday, all I could hear from God was I got this! And I am good. I heard but I didn’t fully believe it. So I listened to the song “King of My Heart”. In the chorus, it declares “You are good, good”. I literally sang this for 30 minutes straight, just to get it in my head that He. Is. Good.
I realize how simple the line is, but rarely do I actually believe it when challenges come. In seasons of launching/selling, there are a lot of expectations. Focus on leading people to experience what is possible and serving them in a loving way. While we cannot control our circumstances, there is one thing that will never change and will always be true, and that is the goodness of God.
One last thought I have for you…
Reaching your sales target is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make your whole journey that way. You don’t need to see what’s in front of you from a mile away, you don’t have to see your destination to know if you’re heading in the right direction. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.
You can’t control how people will respond to what you put out there. All you can do is focus on your next action and not lose sight. And your primary goal should always be fighting FOR your people and helping them win! Instead of focusing on how much money you’ll make, you’ll find more joy, courage, and hope when you focus on serving God’s children! There will be moments when you want to quit because the enemy would do anything to make you crash by planting a seed of doubt in everything you do. Keep going, friend! Practice your faith and talk to God. Let Him empower you. Remember, you can be disoriented and defeated by all the feelings, or you can choose to follow the light and know that you’ll make your whole journey that way.
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