Eracing Attitudinal Barriers to Creating Promotional Relationships

If you’re having difficulties creating promotional relationships, the problem may not be anxiety, rusty social skills, or ineffective marketing strategies. It may be your attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs that are preventing you from initiating promotional interactions.

The problem with some attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs is that they may be so ingrained in your view of self-promotion, the world, and how they operate that they may be nearly invisible to you. Ferreting them out and exposing them to the light of day is essential.

For example, what is the first thing that comes to mind when someone talks about making a "presentation"? What’s your first reaction to the word “selling”?

There are many common, and sometimes insidious, attitudinal barriers to promoting yourself. They include the following:

Social Situations Must Be Spontaneous
Someplace in the inner recesses of your cranium you may believe that planning any aspect of social interaction is deceitful, manipulative, unethical, or speaks ill of you. Perhaps it’s not unlike when you ask a pregnant teenager why she didn’t use some form of prevention. The all-too-common reply is that she didn’t want to look as if she had loose morals by anticipating and preparing for the interaction.

According to this belief, social interaction of any kind should be “natural” and open to whatever happens. There should be no process or defined goal in mind.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that in order for you to interact effectively to present and promote yourself, you have to know what you want to achieve, what you want to say and how you want to say it, and how to attract and engage the other person. This requires anticipation and preparation.

Relationships Just Happen and Are the Result of “Vibes”
While we’d all like to believe that relationships occur by magic, they really develop as a result of effort – effort expended by both parties. Participants are consciously aware of what each is giving and receiving and build intimacy and trust upon this reciprocal exchange.

Your initial attraction is another is generally the consequence of association, not pixie dust or pheromones. You resonate to those with whom you associate something favorable in the past. These positive feelings, like an aura, are transferred to the new person and make the transition from stranger to acquaintance easier.

By being pleasant, helpful, and interested in the other person in a business setting, you can engender these same positive feelings which will then become anchored in past positive associations.

People Ought to See and Experience the Real” You
The “real” you is really whoever you are at the moment. It’s your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, values, and behaviors in a particular situation. This means that as the situation changes, the so-called “real” you will tend to change as well.

Different situations require that you take on different roles. The way you present yourself at a holiday party with old friends will differ from how you present yourself to potential customers or clients at a seminar. Different roles have different expressions of who you are.

Therefore, there is no absolute “real” you, only what variations and nuances that you choose to share to meet your goals - whether it's having a good time at a party or influencing seminar attendees to seek out your help.
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Once you have become aware of those sorts of attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs, you have to test them to see which pass the Reality Sniff Test. Those that don’t make the cut, that erect perceptual barriers for you, have to be chucked.

It makes no sense to maintain negative thoughts, fears, or biases about “marketing,” for example, when you can reframe and recreate your self-promotion "marketing" as a comfortable, confident, and dignified way to establish necessary business relationships.