How to Sell as an Empath: Aligning for Heart Centered Sales

In college, I was hired for a job promising twice the pay of my former restaurant job. Starry-eyed with dollar signs, I didn’t realize until I started training what exactly I’d been hired for: selling kitchen knives door-to-door.

I quit on the first day.

To me, sales evoked sleazy salesmen swindling you into something you can’t afford. Pushy peddlers preying on sensitive souls—easy targets for their manipulative tactics.

Certainly there is a shadow side to sales, but I’ve since learned that sales, like design, is often misunderstood. Just like design is more than making things pretty, sales is more than a greedy hawking of goods. And both are necessary to a successful business.

So how do you sell in a way that’s aligned, not icky?