The Bad Reputation of Self-Possession

I’ve noticed that performance and sales share something powerful in common:

A bad reputation.

…Is it any coincidence that both mediums require self-possession, creativity, and masterful communication?

Is this a structural fault of the role—an earned negative reception, or… Could it be a symptom from our own culturally-held limiting beliefs?

The extraordinary results top sales performers and business owners generate, the extreme responses prestigious artists, actors, musicians receive, these hint to where our limiting beliefs begin.

When majority of people in a society learn, whether directly or indirectly, that strong character traits are punishable by exclusion (being cut off from the group–death) or failure (lack of resources–death!), the human spirit reorganizes to meet those basic needs it has evolved to protect.

As wisdom becomes more accessible, we witness the surge of people rising up to speak on their own disparate experiences in their strong character traits, a concept most succinctly summarized by William A. Miller as The Golden Shadow.

Society, through the structure of its own fragile expectations for human potential, teaches the majority beginning in childhood, that before you can be received, you must be disbelieved.

(It’s worth pausing for the parents resourced with education, love, financial power, or another form of abundance, committed to raising a family in a spirit-supportive environment, who most powerfully detonate these beliefs.)

Up to a certain extent, this is no personal fault of the majority.

The experiences you are subjected to when you have limited mobility in the world are most deeply a reflection of the world you are in, and are confirmed by what can only be experienced through you.

So when the consensus, severed from its own spiritual vitamins, leans away from expressions of personal agency, individuality, and self-esteem…Anything that rights the self as a worthy recipient of some desired outcome, if brave enough to endure the gap, will take the spoils.

Good. And the bad.

As for sales, as for business, we bring our bred method of communicating.

Biases and conclusions. Most people don’t care to harm others. Most just want to connect. Want to be seen as valuable, want to be valuable, and want to be worthy of proof that says they are.

There’s a good amount of people, in sales and in business, in performance and in artistry, selling to the wrong people.

And there’s a part of us, when accepted and trained, that doesn’t require negative influence in order to survive.

I think you know which part I refer to.

The only qualification is, are you willing to endure the unknown, in order to wear it?