Being Point

Tag: culture

  • Self-Care Is Ultimately About Loving Yourself

    Self-care is ultimately about loving yourself. It’s thinking enough of your own body – your being – to be attentive to ways that you can nurture and healthily soothe yourself.

    Our culture gives us very mixed messages about our lovability. Much of marketing is designed to convince us that we’ll only be lovable – only be enough – to the degree that we consume the things that advertisers want us to consume. We’re graded and judged and categorized almost constantly.

    Without the self-care of actively loving ourselves, sometimes it’s been easy for us to forget to do things that are good for us and that we enjoy.

    Play, for example, is a profound form of self-love. How playful are you? How able are you to be relaxed and fun with friends, family, colleagues? What are the primary influences on your attitudes toward play? Can you see how being playful is loving yourself by setting down your burdens while you’re playing?

    How can you actively cultivate the habit of loving yourself? Who can support you in this self-care? Are you willing to experiment and see what kind of positive difference loving yourself as a form of self-care can make?

  • How Do You Feel About “Sales Call Reluctance”?

    There has been not inconsiderable resistance in our culture to identifying oneself as a salesperson.  Many consider selling to be “beneath” them or somehow inferior to holding a “professional” job.  Over 25  years ago, psychologists Dudley and Goodson created a test to measure the degree of “Sales Call Reluctance” which measured 12 different areas that are predictive of success as a salesperson.

    Among the 12 categories is the general category of the willingness to be identified as a sales professional.  One’s score reveals the degree of embracing or rejection of a role as salesperson.  Obviously, if one rejects the role, she or he is going to have a hard time selling successfully.

    Where do you fall in terms of willingness to identify yourself as a salesperson – either directly or in terms of functionalities within your job?  Where do you see salespeople within a socio-economic hierarchy?  How valuable or not valuable are salespeople in your opinion to the ultimate betterment of society?

  • Service Is Not Slavery

    My friend, Peter, a 30-year veteran of leading high-end travel tours, once told me that his favorite country is India . . . “Because it’s the only place in the world where people will come up to you and say, ‘Please, sir, may I give you a service?’ It’s part of their culture. Nowhere else in the world is like that.”

    I have recounted Peter’s story often while working with companies to teach them the art of service. The word “service” derives from the Latin “servus” or “slave.” The word has evolved to mean “work done by one person for the benefit of another.”

    We live in a service economy, yet how closely do we identify with the goal of our work’s being for the benefit of another?

    How can we improve our attitude of service? Do our employees and vendors exhibit the optimal level of service? Service is not slavery . . . but do we sometimes see it as if it were?

    Copyright 2009. E. B. Hutt Bush and Coaching for Results, Inc.