The School of Greatness - 771 Believe in Your Value with Christian Howes

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

YOUR FALSE HUMILITY IS HURTING YOU. We all can struggle with taking money in return for our services. It’s hard to ask for what you need. My father sold life insurance. He taught me a lot about not being ashamed of selling something that adds value to another person’s life. That’s why, for this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with my brother Christian Howes about how artists can set themselves up for financial success. It’s all about knowing your worth. If you are making other people’s lives better or easier, you should be comfortable putting yourself out there as a business. Learn how to believe in your value by using the power of selling in Episode 771. In This Episode You Will Learn: The most important thing that sets people up to make money from their art (1:41) What Christian learned from his dad about selling (2:30) Why you need to know your value (4:10) About the danger of “false humility” (5:25) Follow me on: Instagram @lewishowes Twitter @LewisHowes Facebook: Lewis Howes

This is 5-Minute Friday! What do you think is the, is it packaging and marketing then and positioning that sets people up to make money around their art or to be able to put their art out there in a way so that people can consume it? What do you think? All those things are just part of a larger thing, which is looking at your business or looking at what you do as an artist, as a business, having a business model. And so marketing and sales and all that is part of the same thing. I mean, for me, in my opinion, it's the thing that helped me the most was getting my mind wrapped around selling and just not being ashamed of that I was going to go out and sell my services just to say, Hey, I, I want to be able to provide a service and literally

framing it that way. Like that a sale for me is asking for the opportunity to be of service. It's just that simple. And I think most artists can't get their mind wrapped around selling. As you know, like our dad sold life insurance. So, I mean, the story I tell a lot of times is when you think about life insurance salesmen, most people cringe because they think selling life insurance is like this ugly thing. And I didn't understand it growing up. But later on, after I talked to my dad about,

our dad, about business and asked for advice about how to go out and create a career for myself, I realized a few things about what he was doing and that it was beautiful, that what he did is beautiful. Because number one, he believed, well, he had a couple reasons for doing what he was doing. Number one was duty to his family. And he really had that sense of purpose. Like, I have to provide for my four kids and my wife. And so every day he knocked on the door because he had this, I have to do this.

I need to do this. I know why. Clear vision, clear purpose, dedication, focus, you know, drive. The drive for him came from duty. But the other thing was the value, that he believed that he was giving people something valuable. So when he would go to the head of a household, he would say, look, this is going to protect your family when your family's gone. What could you do better? What could you do to be a better person than to sacrifice now so that when you're gone, people you love will be taken care of? And that was in alignment with our dad's Christian values.

And he wanted to pass those on to other people. So he really believed in the value of what he was giving to people. It wasn't just asking people for a handout. It was he wanted to give people something good, something that was meaningful. And he knew why he was driven to do it, because he had the duty to his family. So that's that's so heavy and you have to figure out if you're an artist you have to figure out why you're doing it and why you know what your sense of purpose comes from what your sense of drive is if it's not faith

in god if it's not that you're just desperate that you're about to get evicted from your apartment if it's that you really want to impress some girl you just met, it can be a lot of these different things. At the end of the day, I think the ultimate thing is to have that belief in your own worth and knowledge of your purpose, clarity of vision, as you always talk about in so many different ways. But when you have those things, that gives you a purpose. That gives you drive.

That says, this is why I'm going to get up in the morning. I'm going to make five hours worth of phone calls. This is why I'm going to ask for agency representation or ask labels to look at me or see if the television news will put my record on or ask somebody to buy my CD or tell people about my next show or whatever. This is the why. Because I'm driven. Because I believe in myself and I believe in what I have to offer, it has value. And segueing into the value proposition, believing that what you're offering has value,

and that when you're selling, you're giving value to people. You're not just taking from people. So that's why I say asking to be of service. I'm asking for the opportunity to be of service. That's different than saying, I'm the best thing since sliced bread, you should give me money because I'm asking for the opportunity to be of service. That's not like, that's different than saying, I'm the best thing since sliced bread. You should give me money because I'm awesome. And I think artists, they have this false humility in a way sometimes because they're like, I'm not going to sell.

But really that's this false humility because they're like, I'm just so awesome people should just give me money. They should just, you know, and it's like where you have to believe in the value of what you have, but you have to humble yourself to ask for the opportunity to provide it sometimes.