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    Fear Less, Sell More: Find Your Courage and Make Millions
    Fear Less, Sell More: Find Your Courage and Make Millions
    Fear Less, Sell More: Find Your Courage and Make Millions
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Fear Less, Sell More: Find Your Courage and Make Millions

    By Tom Stern and Jay Leno

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    About this ebook

    As an ADHD child with dyslexia, Tom Stern felt unable to live up to the great expectations set by his very successful grandfather and father; as a result, he suffered from extreme anxiety. Over time, he developed a methodology that increased his confidence and enabled him to achieve success in the entertainment industry, later founding an executive search firm that has sustained excellence for more than a quarter century. It is Tom’s goal to help others achieve success in sales and realize their dreams by overcoming their fears as well.

    Fear Less, Sell More uses a fictional story, humor, and a conversational approach to making friends with fear. Drawing from Tom’s circuitous career, he shares his unique insights into the psychology behind selling that can bolster the success of any sales professional.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPost Hill Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2021
    ISBN9781642938838

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      Book preview

      Fear Less, Sell More - Tom Stern

      © 2021 by Tom Stern

      All Rights Reserved

      The information and advice herein is not intended to replace the services of financial professionals, with knowledge of your personal financial situation. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of any profit or any other commercial damages, including, but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. All investments are subject to risk, which should be considered prior to making any financial decisions.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

      Post Hill Press, LLC

      New York • Nashville

      posthillpress.com

      Published in the United States of America

      Dedicated to the sweet memory of Noah Stern

      Contents

      Foreword

      Preface

      Section I: Fear Never Sleeps

      Chapter 1: Why You Need to Manage Sales Anxiety

      Chapter 2: How I Overcame Severe Anxiety to Achieve Sales Success and Happiness

      Section II: How to Go from Fearful to Fear Less

      Chapter 3: You Are the Boss of You: Meet Your Inner Corporation

      Chapter 4: Sigmund Fraud: All the Stuff We Tell Ourselves that’s Not True

      Chapter 5: Fear Is Your Frenemy: False Negatives, False Positives, and the Locus of Control

      Chapter 6: The Act of Sales: When the Curtain Rises, Understand the Performance

      Chapter 7: Fighting Fear with Fun: The Ups, Downs, Highs, and Lows of Singing in the Shower (or Your Car)

      Chapter 8: The Fearless Myth: Outsourcing Your Fears

      Section III: Keep on Keeping On

      Chapter 9: The Happiness Balance

      Chapter 10: Postscript: One Year Later

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Foreword

      I first met Tom Stern at a comedy club in New York City in the late ’70s. Among the unknowns at that time were people like Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Andy Kaufman. The first time I saw Tom perform, I knew immediately he would one day become a successful corporate recruiter and write a book called Fear Less, Sell More. Not to be cruel, but that’s one of the harsh realities of show business—you need a combination of talent, luck, ambition, and have to be in the right place at the right time. Miss any one of these and it’s over. The measure of a man is not if he wins or loses, but how he deals with the realities of his situation. Some turn to alcohol or drugs, or something worse. Others pick themselves up and play the hand they were dealt.

      Tom pulled me aside one night and said, Jay, I think I am better at selling ideas than writing them. That’s the sort of honest self-assessment you rarely see in show business. I knew of an agency that was opening a West Coast office and thought Tom would be an excellent addition. Knowing comedians and comedy the way he did, he soon became head of the film and television department.

      Oh, he’s still doing shows—only now he does it one client at a time. Maybe he can teach you how to do it too.

      —Jay Leno

      Preface

      Anytime you introduce an idea, two friends, or in this case, a book, it’s tricky. You want to create anticipation for what is to follow while simultaneously building rapport and common ground. Establishing credibility is important, but puffery is alienating. It’s a delicate balance. I remember one time I was nervous about a big speech and impressing the audience, so I wrote an introduction that referenced every accomplishment I’d ever achieved. Tone-deaf to how overblown it was, I asked my wife if there was anything I should add to the introduction and she said, An intermission.

      A poorly managed ego and its attendant expectations can create anxiety. Anxiety is definitely a double-edged sword. It can paralyze you, stagnating future possibilities, yet those same insecurities can fuel you to climb higher than you ever thought possible. Anxiety can be a curse or a blessing: you can be paralyzed by it, watching possibilities vanish, or fueled to climb higher than you ever thought possible. I’ve been both at different moments in my life and career.

      Reflecting on my long journey with its bumpy lows and its exhilarating highs, I found the sales path in my late twenties was what organized my whole life and gave me an independence I never thought possible. I hadn’t considered sharing that transformation and the lessons that led to it with other sales professionals until I hit an unanticipated milestone—arriving at my favorite movie theater to receive my first senior discount. I realized the time for legacy-building had come.

      My story is odd in its contradictions. On the one hand, I was from a very affluent and powerful family, whose wealth and social standing had enabled extreme entitlement in me as a young man. (More than once I have said, A carton of milk in the sun for a month would not have been as spoiled as I was.) Not a sympathetic portrait. Conversely, I had many challenges and difficulties, not of my own making, that paint a picture of isolation, neglect, and terrible insecurity. (In sharing my story, I recognize it is one of privilege, and it does not speak to the trying social and economic times we face today. However, its relevance is authenticity, which I believe is the foundation for all self-knowledge, a governing principle in my philosophy of attaining sales mastery.)

      It seems both my life and career have intertwined two seemingly oppositional elements—confidence and fear. I spent my childhood intimidated by my family’s legacy of success. My great-grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, took over Sears, Roebuck and Co. in its early years, making it a retail behemoth under his stewardship as CEO and chairman. He also pursued a highly impactful philanthropic mission—establishing a system of formal education for blacks in the South with the help of Booker T. Washington. My father, Alfred R. Stern, was outwardly charismatic but an emotionally distant man. One of the founders of cable television, the association’s national chairman in the ’60s, as well as the chairman of Mount Sinai Hospital, PBS, and other prestigious organizations, he ran our family as if it were a business. With its reviews and updates, the dinner table was more like a board meeting than a family gathering, thus his nickname CEO Dad. He only wanted to hear about achievement and success; intimacy and affection were not on the agenda. At the end of the meal, he would break down the discussion into a series of lessons and conclusions for the family moving forward, which is why I always said his favorite dessert was apple pie chart.

      Of his three children, I was the most disappointing to him, with no visible talent besides making my mother and sister giggle at inopportune times, and my father was always overly critical of me. Each bad report card brought vehement condemnation. Would my CEO dad call me into his office one dark day and say, Tom, I love you very much, but I’m going to have to let you go.? An absurd fantasy, but my emotional reality. This man I admired so much, whose love I so desperately sought, was out of reach. Sadly, my conclusion was as simple as it was devastating: I just wasn’t good enough.

      When each morning, I left our 4,000-square-foot upper East side pressure cooker for the Dalton School—one of Manhattan’s most prestigious institutions of learning—things only got worse. There, my family’s status could not protect me. An ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) dyslexic with the nervous system of a gibbon, I had everything from physical tics to loud, rapid speech. It seemed I could not live up to the family name anywhere. I was unable to focus and listen, and it was clear the Dalton School was not equipped to educate me. In addition to my academic failures, my classmates would not accept me and took great pleasure in publicly mocking me. When I wasn’t being humiliated, I was disruptive, and seemingly spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom. Constantly getting in fights and bragging about my class-president-and-star-athlete-brother, Nicky, I had no friends and was desperately lonely. (I tried to joke it all away by telling my favorite teacher that even my imaginary friend wouldn’t return my calls.)

      I came home defeated every day, only to incur further judgment each night. My bedroom was my only sanctuary. It was there that I withdrew into a fantasy world, rocking on my bed for hours each night, imagining myriad ways I could succeed and show them all!

      Careening toward the vast, deep space of my unconscious, whipsawed by grandiosity and a life devoid of self-esteem, I might have orbited a very empty and destructive place till my future had been extinguished. Fortunately, a candescent light pierced my dark despair. It emanated from my mother’s smile every time I made her laugh. She seemed to intuitively sense that I was starved for support and gave it to me with the constant enthusiasm of a studio audience eagerly responding to a hyperactive applause sign. In her mind, there was nothing I couldn’t do, and she constantly told me so.

      She pushed me toward the arts: writing, singing, and acting. As I explored them all, she only cheered more loudly. Although I was still a melancholy and fragile individual, I found distraction and solace in these pursuits. I became the class clown to distract from my poor preparation. When my history teacher asked me if I knew who Caesar was, I replied, He invented croutons. As I was thrown out of class, I could still hear the lingering laughs as I walked away, beaming. I believed all this performing would lead to fame and glory in entertainment, but looking back now, I realize those skills were actually training me to evolve into something

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