Seagulls, Stop It Now

One of the rules that we talked about recently in class caught my attention – “Don’t paint ‘seagulls’ in your prospect’s picture.” This idea of perspective I think is so important and it made me think about a couple of things that I hadn’t thought about before.

There are a couple important things that I think need to be kept in mind related to this concept when thinking about how to apply it. The first is that you need to understand who owns the painting. The second is that even if you know with complete certainty that someone should paint a “seagull” into their picture, it’s up to you to help them come to that decision themselves, not to paint it in without their permission.

The main thing I think about when trying to figure out how to best apply this in life and what it looks like to follow this rule is that for some reason people really struggle with this. Perspective taking is not commonly used and assumptions are commonly made. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that we are a very self-centered culture. We focus on ourselves all the time and only what’s best for ourselves, with social media and culture spurring on this self-centered and egotistical outlook on life. This attitude and outlook results in people having a very hard time understanding where other people are coming from, or attuning themselves to others. Then they also assume that if somethings wrong with the picture, they should be able to fix it, why does it matter if it’s someone else’s picture? This whole attitude causes a huge pitfall, one that I think salespeople have to work hard to not fall into.

It’s been interesting thinking about the different ways in my life that I paint these “seagulls” in other people’s pictures, and thinking about it has brought to my attention some different areas that I need to begin to change if I want to follow this rule.