Selling with Soul: Achieving Career Success Without Sacrificing Personal and Spiritual Growth

By Sharon V. Parker

The ability to sell yourself and your ideas may be the most essential skill for achieving business success. Even so, society demeans selling and salespeople, perpetuating stereotypes that make us cringe. In Selling with Soul, author Sharon V. Parker attacks those attitudes head-on and explodes the myths about salespeople being unprofessional and driven by self-interest.

Selling with Soul counters many of the negative notions of selling by explaining why it is an honorable profession that creates value for all when it is done with empathy for the customer and a firm commitment to principles. Parker helps you learn the skills and attitudes that result in successful sales careers, and she shares the lessons that can result in a successful, balanced lifelessons she learned during a twenty-six-year career in sales.

In this, the second version of Selling with Soul, Parker includes a review of sales basics, updated with how people buy today. She also shares ideas for finding and keeping new business, and she presents lessons in the soft skills so essential to selling with integrity and empathy: listening, conflict resolution, understanding personal styles, dealing with temptations and compromise, and creating a life consistent with your values.

Selling with Soul helps heal the split between job and spirit. It shows how problem-solving, creating value, and treating others with empathy and integrity are the keys to sellingand livingwith soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469753294

Sharon V. Parker

Sharon V. Parker successfully sold high-tech products and services for twenty-five years. In 2004, she launched the Sparker Company, a resource offering coaching and professional training. She lives with her husband, Joel, in Portland, Oregon. Visit her online at www.sparkercoaching.com.

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Same Same

Ly Nguyen

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iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Same Same

Copyright © 2012 by Ly Nguyen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4697-3825-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-3823-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-3824-6 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012900805

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 2/13/2012

Contents

Preface

Returning Home

Departure

Big City, New Life

Under the Table

Maternal Instincts

Closure

To Camille Ylan—

May you understand where you come from.

Preface

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Same Same is a fictional tale inspired by elements of my life and the women I met working in my mother’s nail salon in the 1980s.

For over twenty years, I walked around neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, where nail salons are only blocks from one another. I peered in to see the manicurists who were refugees of the Vietnam War, limited English speakers, and most likely encouraged to take the path of being a lifetime nail salon worker.

The characters in this book represent the members of the Vietnamese community who played a role in carving out an employment niche to survive in the United States. My hope is that this story offers an intimate portrait of a Vietnamese family that worked together to provide a better life for themselves and for those in their family who remain back in Vietnam.

Same Same is dedicated to the Vietnamese women who work long hours servicing the hands and feet of strangers for low wages; they somehow remain strong and resilient despite the trials in their lives.

Returning Home

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Where my mother calls home, one can hear the children laughing in a distant schoolyard, scooters honking on bumpy roads, and cicadas chirping at dawn. Bamboo grows freely, next to swaying palm trees 2wn tucked between Hue and Hanoi. The houses are aged by the unforgiving heat and monsoon rain. Bundles of incense burn from altars that dominate family rooms, and portraits of the dead watch over those still living.

During my son’s first trip to Hoi An in the summer of 2005, Thien covered his eyes while meeting his great-grandfather.

Scary, scary, I want to go home, he said. My grandfather, Ong Ngoai, laughed and went to another room. Ong Ngoai peeked out slowly. He didn’t want to scare Thien but wanted to watch his great-grandson play with the water in the well.

Ong Ngoai was recovering from a stroke. I looked at his dark face with lines drawn deep underneath his cheeks—his eyes sunken, his hands frail, his hair white. Ong Ngoai ate very little during our stay and rarely got up from the wooden bed in the living room. When Ong Ngoai did get up, Thien raced to the bed to hide underneath the mosquito net, trying to avoid having to speak to his great-grandfather. Thien was scared of Ong Ngoai’s skinny and aging face. In that moment, Thien looked like a native Vietnamese boy with freshly tanned skin and peasant pajamas.

The first night’s dinner was festive with all of Mom’s five siblings and their children sharing a feast of fried fish, water spinach soup, caramelized prawns, and big bottles of beer. We sat on a bamboo floor mat, either kneeling or squatting, with our porcelain bowls and chopsticks. The cups and bowls were aged and chipped, but no one seemed to mind. Ba Ngoai, my grandmother, didn’t believe in throwing anything away and refused Mom’s offer to buy a new set of dinnerware. I noticed that Ong Ngoai didn’t speak much during dinner and instead smiled while watching Mom catch up with everyone.

After all the siblings left, the house was quiet again. Ong Ngoai’s voice softened, and his face lit up as he watched Mom unpack for the three-week stay. Mom began to divide up the handbags, American cheese, and beef jerky to give out to extended family.

Why did you bring so much stuff? he mumbled while stretched out. Out of habit, Ong Ngoai always gives Mom a hard time for bringing too many gifts.

Years had gone by since Mom’s last trip to Hoi An. Whenever I sat on the pink plastic stool and stared out at the dirt path, Ong Ngoai liked to point out the ficus tree next to the gate. Thirty-five years ago, he planted that tree as a symbol for Mom. She had left their home near the end of the Vietnam War and didn’t return for twenty years. The tree was older than me, and the leaves were overgrown and dipped into a fishpond. At certain angles, the tree seemed to weep.

Their house was emptier