Sales Badassery

7BOLDNESS IS FOR LOSERSSales Badassery Self-Confidence

Walk tall and carry a big stick.

—Theodore Roosevelt

There’s a blog I tried to like. It’s geared toward men and is about general business success as well as physical fitness. In other words, the exact things that interest me.

However, I have one big problem with it; it includes the word bold in the title.

This completely discredits the entire blog for me, because as a Sales Badass I know the difference between boldness—that is, fake confidence—and real self-confidence.

Here’s an example: Two people are going skydiving. Of the two, one jumper is bold while the other is confident.

The bold jumper yells, “Hell yeah, man, this is going to be awesome, I so totally can’t wait do to this! WOOHOO!”

The confident jumper gets up, gets ready to go, and simply says, “Let’s do this.”

See the difference?

Show Me, Don’t Tell Me

Being bold in the example is clearly nothing other than a big macho show. By putting on a highly animated show, yelling about how pumped up he is and is so excited, what that bold jumper is really doing is subcommunicating fear. After all, why else would he need to psych himself up if he weren’t afraid to jump? Answer: He wouldn’t.

That’s the problem with boldness. It’s “all bark and no bite.” Or as Texans say, “all hat and no cattle.”

The confident jumper didn’t do that. By remaining calm and collected—cool if you will—that individual demonstrated real confidence without having to say a word about it.

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