Miss America of Sales

May 24th, 2010

I am a member of the downtown Rotary Club, one of the reasons why I truly enjoy my experience there is due to the speakers they invite to our weekly meetings. The club will give a preview of the following weeks speaker and they happened to mention that Katie Stam from lovely Indiana was going to be speaking. I was curious to hear what she was going to talk about with our group and I started to formulate my own assumptions that were thankfully all wrong!

Katie takes the stage the following week and starts to share her story with us. I was a little skeptical on where the story was going but she did a great job of keeping the audience engaged and in my opinion was a great speaker. There was a part of her story that really caught my attention and I wanted to share this with you.

When Katie was a young girl, she used to hold mock Miss America pageants with her cousins. She mentioned she used to picture herself winning the crown and she even made a homemade sash (I just learned the technical term for this today!) with the words “Miss America” on it. Every time she was with her young cousins they would always talk about her becoming Miss America and she mentioned several times when she was young she could picture herself winning the title. Here is the cool part…..before Katie was preparing to leave for the 2009 pageant, her cousin who she played with as a small child, came up to her and handed her the same homemade sash she made when they were just little kids as a good luck charm!

What Katie did was nothing more than role playing out what she wanted. She pictured herself winning, she knew exactly what that would look like and practiced (or played in this case) over and over to prepare herself. We should all take this lesson and apply it to our sales worlds. Are you mentally picturing yourself winning and practicing over and over to ensure you achieve the goals you feel you deserve? If not, maybe it is time to create your own sash with the label you want to achieve.

Aaron Prickel

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