The founder of AIM Training & Consulting teaches the importance of understanding the clients’ ‘why.’ 

At age nine, Amy Lemire, founder of AIM Training & Consulting, survived a near-fatal car accident in St. Louis, Mo. “I woke up in a hospital room one day, not really knowing why I was there and what had happened, and then my mom explaining to me we’d been in this car accident,” she recalls. “I looked in the mirror and I was just horrified. The story that I was told was, basically, that, as I was in the intensive care unit, my family was told if I did survive, it was likely I might be deaf, blind [and would] probably have permanent brain damage.”

The many cosmetic reconstructive surgeries Amy underwent turned out to be the “easy part,” she says. “The tough part was what it did to my self-confidence.”

After reading a copy of The Value of Determination: The Story of Helen Keller that her grandmother gave her, she recalls, “I started learning at that age that we can choose our thoughts. We can choose to be confident and courageous and determined in spite of adversity.”

Today, she taps into that experience to help others understand their inner potential at AIM Training & Consulting. As a consultant and motivational speaker, she helps leaders and teams “be more, make more and sell more with confidence and momentum.”

She draws on more than 20 years working as a frontline sales professional and an additional decade as a corporate sales trainer — experiences that inform her two books: From Zero to Sales Hero: How to Double Your Sales and Income in Less Than 90 Days and From Zero to Speaker Hero: How to Achieve Fame, Fun, and Fortune As a Speaker or Presenter.

A Social Capital leader, Amy has embraced a business philosophy that goes beyond numbers. Her focus is on valuing and developing the individual, tapping into their essential motivations.

“It’s really all about bringing out the best in people … by helping people get unstuck [and] out of their own way, so they can perform better on teams, within companies,” she says.

Establishing trust through empathy and vulnerability is part of this. “The most important thing we need to do first is we need to find out somebody’s ‘why’ or ‘why now’ because when we can do that, then not only can we guide them to a new solution, [but] it [also] makes it easier to paint out a vision for where they want to go,” she says.

Ultimately, achieving sales and growth goals isn’t just about mastering external techniques, according to Amy. She’s a believer in cultivating an “inner game” of mindset, self-confidence and discipline, along with the “outer” one.

“Most of the companies I worked for only taught the ‘doingness’ of the outer game: how to get more business, how to sell, how to close, how to negotiate and handle objections,” she says. “One thing they never talk about is how to be mentally tough, resilient, confident, determined, courageous. When I work with companies, what I try to help them see is we play two games in sales and success. We play an inner game, which is, again, our mindset, our self-confidence, our determination, our courage, self-discipline. It’s six habits I talk about, and then we play an outer game.”

Her advice on how to bring about that growth? Turn to mentors for help, advises Amy, who almost lost her job until she hired a sales coach to help her improve her performance. “That is probably one of the best professional decisions I ever made,” she says.

Amy recently spoke with Chris Benguhe, founder and president of the Dave Alexander Center for Social Capital. Click on the link below to join them.