I thought I had a handle on this game of sales, after all I'd made a living at it for 24 years. I thought that I'd always be able to make something out of nothing. This was all fine until a year and a half ago when I lost a business I'd built up for ten years. It was like a marriage gone bad and I'd decided to take the high road and walk away leaving my sales staff and a few hundred accounts. I didn't realize it then but there was a big ol' pattern at work here that would bite back. I struggled for the next year trying to get my feet under me and after missing the mark on a couple of other businesses I was really scared.

My confidence was shot. I had lost "it". I tried so hard to make something work and here I was nearly broke. I didn't get that my ego was acting out full force imposing its will on the universe and demanding to be heard. It wasn't working yet ego tried all the harder. By accident, while looking for something else in my garage, I found a box of accounts I thought I'd gotten rid of. I told myself earlier that I'd never have anything to do with that business again. I had felt so disconnected from it for a few years but I decided to suspend judgement. No story lines allowed here. I'd call everyone in the box and when I was done I'd see how I felt. It wasn't bad. I made a couple of sales even. And for the past ten months, I've been learning how to sell again. I work a lot by intuition or feel. If I feel myself pushing to make something happen, I know now that I need to back off and put my energy elsewhere or sometimes do nothing. A novel concept for me. There is an interesting shift from a positive intention with a winning sales effort and the effort and push that I used to throw into my work. Strain and forcing my will doesn't cut it anymore.

What wants to be lived or who wants to be called? I cold call most of the day so there is an endless number of directions that I could go. I get a kick out of just happening to reach someone who has a purchase order ready. There are sales out there ready to happen and all I have to do is show up. If there is an opening or willingness I'll move forward, if there isn't I'll move on. I won't walk away from a sale at the first obstacle but I'm sensitive to resistance and I am more willing to pick fruit that is ripe now. The old me would butt my head against a wall when there was an open door available. You know the feeling you get that makes you turn your head to see or notice that someone was looking at you? I feel I'm kind of playing with that phenomenon in reverse in connecting with people that are ready to be spoken to.

I had to get past the idea that I had lost all my accounts. Holding on to that energy and story line wasn't serving the moment. I had to feel that I was coming from a place with something to offer rather than from a place of need and scarcity. Energy attracts like energy. I had to embrace that there was abundance available to me even though I may not be able to see it. Just like I know that though my tree outside my house may look bare, its leaves are a part of the tree's make up that will manifest themselves in time. When I'm connected to this part of the process rather than in ego separation, it's a whole different game. Sales wind up coming when and where I'm not looking.

Ego had me believing that it was all me making things happen. I know now in my bones I just do the legwork and that the results are not my doing. I've heard that ego and humility can't be in place at the same time. It makes sense to me.

Conrad Romo sells computersoftware, and is a stand-up comic in his spare time.