How Being Labeled Ugly Didn’t Stop Me From Selling
A story popped into my head recently that relates to selling with confidence. And it ties back into what I always like to talk about on this show: what prevents women from showing up and making the money they deserve?
In this episode, I reveal something I discovered about the hiring process before I went into sales, how it momentarily paralyzed me in the corporate world afterward, and how I overcame it to become a sales-generating badass.
4:14 - The shocking thing I learned about the staffing agency I worked for
6:12 - Why I believe the agency thought I’d have a problem finding a job
8:19 - How judging yourself based on past trauma can affect your sales confidence
11:02 - How I overcome the judgment and succeeded in spite of it
13:07 - The most important thing about people’s experience when working with you that you must remember
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
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Transcript for How Being Labeled Ugly Didn’t Stop Me From Selling
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
♬ Your body lightweight speaks to me. ♬ Hey, party people. It's Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. No, I can't sing. But I keep some joy in my heart because I always have some music playing. Today's episode is brought to you by Chris Brown Under The Influence. If you haven't heard that song, I don't know what you're doing with your life. You need to go and listen to it. But I am always playing some type of music before I get ready to record. It gets me in a mental space to chat.
So here we are, how y'all doing? I'm doing great. Thank you for asking. Today I want to talk a little bit about things that keep women from showing up to sell. What else is new? I always talk about that. I'm always going to be talking about it until women are just radically confident to go out and make the money that we deserve. It's funny, I've shared in a previous episode about all the money I made for this recruiting company that I worked for back in 2000s.
In the 90s, I was in high school working at Checkers. But yeah, back in the day when I worked for a recruiting company, and I've talked about how much money I made and gave me my street cred, sales, and all the things, but I also thought, I'd tell you a story that popped up in my mind recently as it relates to going back into selling in corporate spaces, it has everything to do with confidence, so stick with me.
Before I went into sales, I was an administrative professional. I was a secretary. I was an assistant in HR. I had some other low-level roles in terms of clerical roles. I remember one time I was looking for jobs, so the same staffing agency that I went to work with later on at the time that I was an administrative professional, I went to register to help them find me a job. I went and never heard anything back from them. I've never gotten any interviews from them. They never placed me on any jobs.
But hey, I didn't think anything about it until fast forward after I started working for the company. After I started working for the company, I found out that when we interviewed candidates, we had a rating system. The rating system was based off of three things: it was based off of your appearance, your intellect, and your personality. The system went from one, being absolutely excellent, you could place them in any position anywhere, to a four, which means you can only play some in the worse environments, like environments where a one wouldn't want to work kind of a thing.
To my chagrin, I'm like, “Oh, okay.” As they were training me, they told me, “This is what you look for when you write a person a one. This is what you look for when you're writing a person a two. This is what you look for when you’re writing a person a three,” and so on and so on. The most ideal candidate to get to come through the door was someone who was 1-1-1. So, one in attitude, one in intellect, one in personality, that was a person who would be easily placeable, no problems.
Fast forward to I remember that I applied here and I wanted to see what they had rated me. I looked myself up. Sure enough, I was still in the system, even though that was many years ago, I was still in the system and I looked it up and they rated me a three in appearance, one in attitude, one in intellect, but a three in appearance. Wow. My heart was like, “Oh, my goodness.” I felt crappy. I felt bad. Because here was a system that I was writing on and they thought it would be problematic to help me find a job because I was obese. That's what I would like to say.
I would hope that it was nothing else other than that, but you know what? It just reminded me of how attractiveness can come up in a hiring process, in a sales process. Now, what was funny was I was too ugly for you to find me an administrative job, but it was just fine for me to come in working your startup division that went on to make you millions of dollars. Isn’t that crazy how the f*cking world turns? Isn't it insane?
But it came up for me when I was thinking about going back into selling in those spaces, because I was like, “Dealing with people's temperamental attitudes towards beauty could impact my income,” and I wasn't too hip with that. I wasn't too keen on going back into those types of situations where I would be judged, and now I'm 20 years older, I'm definitely fatter, I'm just not interested in playing those games is what I thought.
I bring this up to say that sometimes when we're thinking about confidence and putting ourselves out there, we might be judging ourselves based off of trauma that we've experienced around what is attractive. What is conventional attractiveness versus what we might believe ourselves to be? That literally may paralyze you the way that it momentarily paralyzed me. It made me reflect because I didn't want to be judged in that way.
I can't tell you how many women I talked to who don't want to do Instagram lives because they don't want to look at their faces. How many women don't want to show up on a YouTube video because they're afraid of the nasty comments from trolls that will be made about their teeth, about their weight, about their level of attractiveness. When we know that these mediums have a lot to do with how we are able to market these days, when we opt out of these things, it could negatively impact our businesses and how quickly we grow.
I got to thinking “How did I overcome that? How was I able to see that rating system and still get out there, get on the phones, go meet clients, and all the things knowing that the very company I'm representing, a representative of that company found me unconventionally unattractive?” One of the big things, and this is what I would want to offer to you, I know it’s not easy, especially as you age, and especially being inundated with social media where everything is about the likes, the clicks, the comments, and those sorts of things, and you're constantly looking at your face.
I remember thinking squirrel, but I remember hearing back when we were in the heart of the pandemic, and everybody was working from home, Zoom had to put in a feature that you could turn off your camera where you couldn't see yourself but people can still see you because it was bothering people that much.
If you think that this is not a thing, or if you think you're the only person who ever has these fears, you're not, it is very common. It's driven though, I believe, by the constant need to be affirmed, the constant need to be told that you're pretty or socially acceptable. So much so to the fact that you're afraid to show up in a space where you can be criticized.
How did I overcome that? I overcame it by number one, knowing that I had a job to do, that whether they found me attractive or not, it didn't matter. It didn't take away from my intellect. It didn't take away from my personality. Guess what? It didn't impact those who found me attractive, namely, number one, my husband, hello, hello. I started to think about the fact that it's not about how pretty I am, it's about how valuable I am, how much knowledge I have, and the ability for me to provide a transformation.
People don't care if I was grim with warts all over my face. I look like an actual troll. If I have the remedy to their problem, they are going to overlook the external. If I'm not so hung up on the fact of how I look, most people aren't paying that much attention. Yeah, they might make a quick judgment, but when you get into a conversation with someone, unless they're crazy, that quickly goes out of their mind. Like, “What can you do for me? Can you help me?” Because we're not in junior high anymore. We're not kids. People want solutions for their problems. We have to let go of trauma that we've experienced around being seen as unattractive.
I know one of the worst things in the world for some women is for somebody to call them fat over someone to say that they're ugly. It causes them to shrink in a major way. People have called me fat and will call me fat again. People have called me unattractive and will call me unattractive again, people have called me gorgeous and will call me gorgeous again. People have called me absolutely magnetic and will call me that again. Because my mom always said, “Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.”
Let's talk about the beholder, which is you ultimately. How you see yourself in your worth is what people experience. If you're self-conscious about how you look, if you aren't showing up because you don't believe that you are worthy of showing up, people feel that. That insecurity that we have, they actually pick up on it, which makes it more difficult for us to sell, which then makes us think “I didn't sell because I wasn't conventionally attractive, they didn't find me smart.” It's just this loop that you can find yourself in, so today I want you to free yourself from that loop.
Number one, you are worthy whether you have pimples all over your face, chipped teeth, funky skin, whatever. You are worthy because you exist. You have the answer to someone's problem. We're not going to let some cosmetic things or something that we deem as imperfections stop us from showing up to change our customers' lives. When you start to compare yourself, when you start to feel down about your appearance, I want you to remind yourself “I am more than the body I'm in.”
Because here's the truth of the matter, everyone's going to age. None of us look the way we did when we were 18. But you can't beat yourself up about our natural process. Men don't do this sh*t. It's women. Like I said, it's not our fault because we are judged more harshly about those sorts of things. But we have to start taking accountability and responsibility for how we show up and how we talk to ourselves.
Do you feel like you love the body you're in? Do you appreciate the body you're in? No, it's not about being happy about your body and your looks 24 hours a day, but it is being comfortable in your body, it is feeling good about the body that you have because it's the only one you're going to get, whether you feel like you improve it or not.
I want you to get to a place where you just feel comfortable. Because when you feel comfortable, you can show up as who you are, and when you show up as who you are. People feel your level of comfort and they rise to match it. Don't let these fake ass beauty standards stop you from getting your bag.
Until next time. If you need some help around confidence, you know where to get me. My Unshakeable Confidence Program is opening up and we talk about these things. I like to hold a container for the inner thoughts that women have so that we can come up with solutions to step forward in spite of. You gotta reach me at hello@lesliedlyons.com. Hit me up on IG @lesliedlyons. Until next time, own your beauty, stand in your worth, and go out to sell something. Grace and peace.