Hey, creative. I want to continue my little sales series here for you to help you be better at sales, be more comfortable with sales, understand the process of sales better, because so many people you’ve just been taught so badly and there’s so many bad examples out there of <laugh> how to it. I want, it doesn’t have to be that way, and I want make it better for you cause I know it’s scary and I know it’s, uh, challenging, especially for the creative community. But I have good news for you. Uh, believe it or not, we have some superpowers that other people don’t have that can make us really, really good at sales. I wanna share a book with you that talks about that. It’s called To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink. Daniel Pink to Sell is Human. This is an outstanding book for a lot of lot of reasons.
Um, but one, I wanna share one word from this book that I think is gonna really help you as a creative person to have some confidence that you can do sales and you can do it in your way. And you don’t have to be gross. That word is attunement. Uh, attunement, A t t u N E M E N t, attunement creatives are especially good at this. Let me read to you the definition. What Daniel Pink from his book says, attunement is attunement is the ability to bring one’s actions and outlook into harmony with other people and with the context you are in. Now, listen to this. Think of it as operating the dial on a radio. It’s the capacity to move up and down the band as circumstances demand locking in on what’s being transmitted, even if those signals aren’t immediately clear or obvious.
Now, doesn’t that sound like empathy? Doesn’t that sound like the creative’s ability to understand the human condition and understand what people are thinking and feeling? It’s what we do. We do it in film. We all films. We show people back their own thinking and their own emotions and their own inner self. Painters do this, musicians do this. Poets, writers, ceramic makers, potters. This is what we do. We attune ourselves to other people and then we pull that out and we show it back to the world. This is great news for you in sales cuz we can dial, we have a special ability. It’s a superpower to be able to be around people and to dial into what they’re right. By the way, young people, if you don’t know what a radio dial is, google it. You’ll see what I mean. Dialing in the station.
Sales is not all about you talking about you. It’s about you paying attention to them, about you connecting with what is important to people. This has an empathy, a feeling component that pink says. It also has a thinking component. It’s called perspective taking. We have to be able to lock into the feelings people feel and then lock into the thinking. People think what is their logic? What are they? And being able to tune ourselves and our art into what they’re thinking and feeling is attunement. It is magic. It is power. And then all of a sudden people are coming toward you. They’re like, oh my God, you understand me? You get me. You understand? And what I’m thinking and feeling, it’s like magic. It’s magnetic and creatives are better at it than anybody. Isn’t that good news? You can do sales. You can. You’ve just been taught bad and seen way too many bad examples. Get this book to sell as human and read it today, but start with your heart and start with that great empathetic and attuning superpower you have. You can do this. I love you.