servants heart | David M Masters

Sharing Your Light with the World & Some Selling is Required

Selling is more than a business transaction; it’s a spiritual act—a sacred exchange of energy that allows you to share your gifts, create impact, and connect deeply with others. When you stop fearing the act of selling, you unlock opportunities for abundance, growth, and purposeful living. The fear of judgment or rejection often holds people back, but overcoming that fear is the key to stepping into your power and fulfilling your purpose.

Let’s take a look at the spiritual essence of selling, practical strategies to master the art of selling, and tips to dissolve fear, build confidence, and align your sales approach with your greater purpose.

Why Selling Is a Spiritual Practice

Selling is not about manipulation or coercion; it’s about service and connection. When approached with integrity and love, selling becomes a way to:

- Share Your Gifts: Your unique skills and talents are valuable. Selling allows you to share them with the world.
- Serve Others: Your product or service fulfills a need or solves a problem for someone.
- Create Impact: Every sale can spark transformation, whether for an individual, a family, or a community.
- Embrace Abundance: Selling enables you to generate financial resources, which can be reinvested into creating even greater impact.

When you shift your mindset to view selling as an act of service and generosity, it transforms from something fearful into something deeply fulfilling.

Is the Fear of Selling Holding You Back?

Many people fear selling because they associate it with judgment, rejection, or being perceived as “pushy.” This fear often stems from:

- Worrying About Others’ Opinions: Fear of judgment can stop you from showing up authentically.
- Fear of Failure: The possibility of hearing “no” can feel overwhelming.
- Self-Doubt: Questioning the value of what you offer can make you hesitant to promote yourself.

These fears create a barrier between you and the opportunities that selling can bring. The good news? You can dissolve these fears and replace them with confidence and purpose.

7 Keys to Selling for Masters

1. Understand Your Value
  Recognize the unique value your product or service provides. When you believe in what you’re offering, your confidence will shine through, making others more likely to trust and invest in you.
2. Shift Your Mindset
  Instead of seeing selling as “taking,” view it as “giving.” You’re offering something that can improve someone’s life—whether it’s a product, service, or idea.
3. Listen First, Then Speak
  Great selling starts with listening. Understand your customer’s needs, desires, and pain points before presenting your solution. Empathy builds trust and rapport.
4. Practice Authenticity
  Be honest, transparent, and authentic in your interactions. People can sense sincerity and are more likely to connect with someone genuine.
5. Learn the Skill of Selling
  Selling is not an innate talent; it’s a skill you can learn and refine. Invest in training, read books, and practice consistently to develop your ability.
6. Focus on Relationships, Not Transactions
  Long-term success in selling comes from building relationships. Prioritize trust, loyalty, and service over short-term sales goals.
7. Embrace Rejection
  Rejection is part of the process. Each “no” brings you closer to a “yes.” Use rejection as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Tips to Dissolve Fear and Build Confidence

- Identify the Root of Your Fear
  Journal or meditate to uncover why selling makes you anxious. Is it fear of rejection? Fear of judgment? Understanding the root will help you address it.
- Reframe Rejection
  Remember that a “no” is not personal. It often means the timing isn’t right or the person isn’t your ideal client.
- Affirm Your Worth
  Use affirmations like, “My service is valuable, and there are people who need what I offer.” Repeat them daily to build confidence.
- Visualize Success
  Imagine yourself selling confidently, making meaningful connections, and hearing positive feedback. Visualization trains your brain to expect success.

Aligning Selling with Your Purpose

Selling becomes effortless when it aligns with your values and purpose. To ensure your sales approach feels authentic:

1. Clarify Your Mission
  What drives you? What impact do you want to create? Knowing your “why” gives you the motivation to overcome fear.
2. Serve Your Ideal Audience
  Focus on connecting with people who truly need and resonate with what you offer. These are your ideal clients, and serving them will feel natural and fulfilling.
3. Infuse Your Passion
  Let your enthusiasm and passion for your work shine. People are naturally drawn to those who believe deeply in what they do.
4. Give Without Expectation
  Share free value—whether it’s advice, resources, or encouragement. This builds trust and positions you as someone who genuinely cares.

The Power of Selling with Light

When you approach selling as a spiritual exchange, you open doors to abundance, connection, and fulfillment. Your service is valuable, and the world needs what you have to offer. Every sale is an opportunity to share your light, help others, and grow into the person you’re meant to be.

Mindful Selling:

- You are not just selling a product or service—you’re creating impact.
- Your energy, confidence, and authenticity are your greatest tools.
- Facing your fears and stepping into your purpose will bring rewards far greater than financial gain.

It’s time to show up, share your gifts, and thrive. Selling is spiritual—embrace it, and watch your life transform.

How Can I Help You?

For those of us in the help industry often lead with the question, “How can I help you?” If it is not just your job but your calling to help others, you will find yourself helping everyone, all the time, which if you let it get the best of you, will find yourself in burnout.

Helping others is a spiritual calling, one of the spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:28) which unless you have the servant’s heart, your offer to help will only be regarded as a job. If you have the gift of helps your drive to help and your efficacy in helping far surpasses your contemporaries, and it’s easy to get lost in the exercising of your gift of helps.

Any endeavor you are incredibly passionate about can get the best of you. You want to do your best, but in order to do so you need to give from the best of you. This is far different from giving all you’ve got until there’s nothing of you left.

In my mission, “Helping others achieve their highest and best,” the word, “helping” is right at the beginning of the darn thing. Believe me, I’ve let this helping consume me so much, that there was nothing left, and it is terribly apparent, if you allow your calling to overwhelm you, you will find yourself at the most desolate place in life.

You want to offer your assistance to others with the best intentions when you ask, “How can I help you?” When people or organizations accept your offer of help and have benefitted from your assistance, they can become obsessed with your ability to serve them. This is where you, as the helper, need to be responsible enough to manage their need in respect of your desire to help (not your ability to help).

When, “How can I help you,” turns into someone’s assertion, “I need you to help me,” makes you feel good as if you are accomplishing your mission and being true to your calling, unless or until your helping has fallen out of balance.

For me to help someone achieve their highest and best, I could give and give and give even more, without regard to my self-maintenance (and I have found myself in this situation, periodically). At some point, you awake from the momentum of enthusiastic helping with a moment of clarity in the realization that you’re in need of a little (or a lot of) self-attention.

What you do at this moment of clarity makes all the difference. You can say, “I made a commitment, and I must follow-through because I gave my word,” and let your integrity take you to an early grave, or you could learn how to apply your sacred, “no.”

All things in life are subject to change, so taking action as early as possible to renegotiate the terms of your agreement to help, is of primal importance for the continued performance of your gift of helping others in perpetuity.

Even if your client, organization, or friend protests and in tears and proclaims, “But I need you,” reinforcing with, “I can’t do this without you!” you are about to allow a miracle to take place.

Your ego might step forward and assert that there is no other way for this work to continue without you, as if you were not to continue to perform your function, all your work will crumble to the ground and fail. Recognize this and keep your ego in check.

Understanding that telling someone, “no,” is a sacred act on your part which offers the person you’re politely adjusting to experience a secret, “yes.” They are not aware of the secret yes at the outset, because they may experience a feeling of rejection. Yet, the secret is that there is an amazing opportunity waiting to emerge on the other side of every no.

In this way, your sacred no ushers in growth and expansion which desires to be brought forth. Every sacred no is a secret yes.

The whole universe desires to see all the goodness be born through the work you have begun and momentum you have helped to build. When you start to withdraw from a project, it allows others to step into their gifts and special abilities.

In this moment, they are able to overcome their inner fear and obstacles because their inner hero is being called forth. Thank God, you were able to allow this to be birthed. In this way, you have encouraged someone else to embrace their gifts and special abilities to rise to achieve their highest and best.

Your sacred no helps you to maintain your high level of performance and has helped to make the world a better place.

Try it and see what happens.

Never stop inviting others with your, “How can I help you?” Just be aware that you need to serve by being true to yourself and to share from your overwhelming love and care of yourself.

Thank you for all you do to help others and make the world a better place.

Preserving the Servants Heart

I have a servant’s heart, as do many of my clients. There is a downside to being selfless in service to others, and that is neglecting the self-care necessary to maintain a healthy life for the person with a servant’s heart. The result is a decline in emotional health, which is left to deteriorate, will affect the biological system, and add undue mental stress. This could result in a lack of self-respect, angst, premature aging, and a host of other health-related issues.

Servant must find ways to preserve themselves to serve their clients, community, and/or the world more effectively. Often, the servant feels as though “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” (Spock, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan).

There needs to be a healthy balance; even so, one may be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good, albeit rarely. Many have had to answer the call, including my 20-year-old son, who answered this call on a particular 4th of July while serving in the Armed Services in Afghanistan. Although most of us in the service of others will not face paying the ultimate price on their behalf, many have.

That said, to better serve others, we in service must pay sufficient attention to our own needs to maintain a healthy platform from which to work, enabling us to serve our communities more effectively.

Servants need to stop feeling the needs of others are more important than their own. If you have neglected your self-care, it’s time to take back control of your life and increase your effectiveness in service. Your needs are essential, and only you can attend to them. It can be uncomfortable, but taking steps to preserve oneself is paramount to success in effective service over time.

The key is balance

Learn to say, “No.”

For the servant, it may seem counterintuitive, but you were created with an internal sensor to help you monitor when and what serves the highest and best performance in your service. Some call it intuition; at the very least, it is that undaunted feeling of overwhelm, a clear indication the situation at hand is not congruent with your terms of service.

At this moment, it is undoubtedly prudent for you to exercise your ability to say “No.” (I can see that grimace on your face.) Stay with me…) You must start using this word. Uncomfortable as it may be at first, trust me, it will get easier. It’s a small two-letter word that will help you create enough space to establish an essential parameter. It is not your calling to be all things to all men, and besides, saying no doesn’t imply that you don’t respect or like someone; it only means no. That’s all.

You may need a little wiggle room to muster a firm “no.” If so, you could offer a stall tactic, such as, “Let me check my schedule and get back to you.”

If you have a long history of always saying, “Yes” when it was not in your best interest, you could dress it up a bit by saying, “Now is not a good time for me,” or, “That’s not my area of expertise,” and refer them to someone more keenly attuned to that particular circumstance or project.

You can refer them to someone who is better suited or equipped to take on the task or encourage the person approaching you to assess their abilities. Some insightful reviews might lead them to the conclusion that they possess the necessary skills to undertake it independently. Why not use your intuition to allow them to grow?

Suppose you have accepted a particular responsibility and felt uncomfortable or resentful about taking on the challenge. In that case, this is a clear indication that, when approached with a similar offer in the future, declining the assignment is certainly in order.

For those who call on you to serve them and show little respect for all that you do, ask yourself, “Would I let this person treat my son or daughter in the same manner?” If the answer is no, then it’s time to start setting some healthy boundaries.

Listen: Help Someone in Personal Crisis

I’ve been in the people-helping business for a long time. Although the focus of my ministry (that’s how I refer to my work, so get over it) is not helping those in crisis, it is not uncommon for a regular client to come to a place where their life intersects with a crisis scenario.

This is one reason why I am thirsty for new modalities and methods of helping people dealing with unforeseen circumstance. Having these tools in my collection can help keep the client from being derailed and thrown off-track from their progress or goals (though it is not my specialty, so if the crisis is significant, it may be time for a time-out and referral to someone who specializes in this type of challenge).

All of us have the opportunity to help someone within our social inner circle – people we know or are well-acquainted with – who need a helping hand when encountering a life crisis.

In our attempt to help someone in crisis, are we more apt to help or harm?

Therapists, counselors and clergy all hold, “help and do no harm,” as the basis of their approach when helping others; as do the rest of us. Of course, in our attempt to help someone along their life’s journey, we would hope that our assistance would be more helpful that harmful.

When people are in crisis, they are in an altered state of mind. It is easy for us to forget this when we see someone that we care about – a friend, co-worker, relative or client – suffering when dealing with an unforeseen crisis.

Your first response to anyone in this altered state of mind is critical.

For example, let’s say your best friend from high school just happens to be in town on business, has been recently diagnosed with cancer and has been given three months to live. He or she wants to meet with you for lunch to talk.

You think, “This is great,” I know so many people who have been diagnosed with cancer and kicked it, naturally, I can’t wait to share all this information with my friend. You go about collecting all the data (personal testimonials, googled information, scriptures and sample nutrients) you can find, throw them into a wheelbarrow and rush over to help your friend kick their cancer to the curb. Hooray!

Wrong

When someone has just recently engaged with significant tragedy or bad news, their tendency is to sink into a somewhat depressed and/or angry state.

Your first interaction with them will either open them up to your assistance, or shut you out.

Being too aggressively helpful when someone is in psychological pain will result in them not being able to hear you. Unless they are asking you for ideas (and even so, please proceed with some restraint) their most important need is to be able to get rid of some of the frustration that they feel inside.

What they really need is someone to listen

In most cases to help someone in the best way possible is to just listen to what they have to say.

Establish trust by promising them confidentiality in regards to anything they might say – and be true to your word. Anything that they say doesn’t leave this room.

Let them use whatever terms or phrases that they feel like using, without judgment or interjection. Allowing them to vent freely without restriction is the best help you can offer in an initial sitting with someone in crisis.

Simply nod, actively listening, agree and/or encourage them to continue while they are letting it all out.

Then, when they have said all they have to say… pick your best five words to say – no more – and make an appointment to meet them to talk again.

In doing so, you have established – with this person who is currently in a weakened state of mind – you care. If they are agreeing to meet with you again, then you can slowly and gently, offer advice (suggestions, not demands) and interact with them more, being careful not to appear non-compassionate, intolerant, have a lack of understanding or result in their alienating you.

If you truly want to help, consider, “being there,” for the people that you care about with compassion.

Show them you care by letting them share.

What Can I Do for You?

You are such a blessing to others, offering love, support, and assistance you greet others with, “What can I do for you?”

There are those of us who come to this planet with a servant’s heart. That is to say that we thrive when serving others. I am a person whose optimal performance shines when assisting someone to achieve their highest and best. In my work, little is more exciting than being in the room when someone achieves a breakthrough or epiphany.

Many occupations in our society are performed by those who perform at their best, using all their skills for the betterment of others. You find these mild-mannered super heroes in jobs like child care, church work, clergy, coaching, consulting, counselors, emergency response personnel, firefighters, military service, missionaries, nursing and health care, social workers and volunteers, etc.

The persons who are born with a servant’s heart are willing to put aside their own personal wants, needs, and desires so that others can survive or thrive. You will find many of them serving in a full-time capacity and volunteering their free time to help even more.

I am quite impressed that a firefighter chooses an occupation that requires them to run into a burning building to help whomever might need their assistance getting out—and they love it—this is their calling. Now, I might run into a burning building to save someone, but I would not want to have to work a job that required me to do that all day long.

Fortunately, there are those whose hearts and skills are more attuned to service work, relishing and performing tasks for the greater good. Although someone who tends to be a giver, they can be quickly taken advantage of, and these people can’t give to everyone all the time without risking their ability to perform their practice.

It is in our best interest to monitor these high-functioning service workers to see if they appear to be giving too much. Are they depleting their personal resources? Are they being manipulated by abusers or users who will drain (or monopolize) their resources? Are they sacrificing their own needs too much (rest, eating right, health maintenance, time with their own family, etc.…)?

Let’s keep a watchful eye out for those who might have a tendency to sacrifice all and help them notice that it’s okay to take some time out for themselves, to take a break, to eat a good meal, to spend time with loved ones, to take a vacation, a spa day—do something fun once in a while. Because oftentimes, the best givers maintain such a high level of giving that they fail to take a moment to look at their own lives.

These mostly unsung superheroes receive expressions of gratitude and sometimes recognition or praise for their courageous acts of service. Still, there is nothing more meaningful to someone who gives and gives… than hearing those few words that they often speak when arriving on the scene or meeting someone:

What can I do for you?

To those givers – who are giving your all – for the greater good, I honor your service.

And don’t be offended when someone tries to get you to take a look at your own life, encouraging you to take some time to recharge and rejuvenate so that you are better for continued service without the threat of burnout (or worse).

Where would we be without you?

Keep an open mind and cherish those who support you in kind.

Loving you and all that you do