Business is personal. We might want to tell ourselves that business is emotionless and purely objective, but if we are honest, it is almost impossible to completely separate how a situation makes us feel from what might be the actual facts of the situation.
This is why fields like medicine and science have conflict of interest policies, deliberately removing even the brightest minds from having to grapple with an emotional element to an objective choice.
(Related: When One Idea Is Better Than a Dozen)
In sales, we may not be working in an emergency room, but as the stakes get higher and the sales opportunities get bigger, keeping emotion out of our work becomes more and more difficult.
For many of us, our businesses are our life's work. We started out in the trenches as young advisors and built our firms up, one client at a time, over decades of difficult work. Our business is our passion, and it's how we provide for our families. Instead of entertaining the fairy tale that we can separate our emotions from our work, we should learn to recognize when our emotions are running hot and seek an outside perspective.
Our sales coach, Dan Hudock, talks about this dynamic when he coaches our salespeople and when he works with our clients. Sales is hard. Even though we are out there on our own as salespeople most of the time, we should still take the time to step back from a challenge and get another perspective.
