By Mary Bermel, Owner, Bermel Interactive

Marketing Consultant and NEJS Volunteer

Carl Harvey, founder of sales training and development firm Success & Self-Esteem, and author of What’s Stopping You combines psychology with  the art of selling to help professionals. What does that have to do with the job search? Everything. As Carl explains it,job seekers are in the business of selling themselves, and the same challenges that stymie the most gung-ho sales professional keep job seekers from moving forward to achieve their carer goals.

Carl spoke to the Expert Connections’ Meet Up founded by business leadership coach, Karen Burke in Acton on Thursday, November 5th.   He says it is critical for sales professionals and job seekers alike to develop an “expanded capacity of self-esteem to deal with the risks, challenges and uncertainty” inherent in the job search as well as “relentless confrontations, negatives and disappointments.” It starts, Carl explains with understanding what self-esteem is: one’s sense of  his/her capability and worthiness in meeting’s life’s challenges by thinking and acting in ways appropriate to the task at hand. Simply put, you have to believe you are capable and worthy.

For the truth is, selling is always an “inside job”. What people see, our behaviors and the results they produce, are always consequences, effects of what they don’t see, our inner state of either self-confidence or self-doubt, either our best self or our diminished self. The battle in sales is always fought from the inside out.

- Carl Harvey in preface of his book, What’s Stopping You?

He offered solid advice on how to build one’s self-esteem:

» Read more: Motivation and Self Marketing: A Matter of Self-Esteem