How small changes can lead to big gains in your personal and professional life.
By Jim Poggi, Principal, Tested Insights
In this column, “today I will” provide coaching on how to increase your productivity, sales performance and peace of mind – while growing your business in the process. This column will not focus on lab products, but on the state of mind needed to harness your internal power to sell more and live at your highest level of performance and satisfaction. That may sound like a tall order, but read on and let’s see if I can deliver on this promise.
The guidance I intend to provide has worked well for me and countless others in a wide range of endeavors in sales, athletics, adventures and exploration, and so many other areas of life. It’s all about a conscious decision to make tiny changes in how you manage your life. These small changes ultimately result in delivering a different, more efficient and confident mindset that you can harness to achieve your goals.
This is not to be confused with a rousing group “positive thinking workshop.” While I have attended my share and felt the adrenaline rush during the meeting and shortly thereafter, without committing to make changes in my attitude and daily habits, my enthusiasm faded rapidly. This column will focus on taking a continuous series of small steps and committing to reinforce these behaviors daily to achieve results.
Better and better
There is ample proof all around us that the human will can cause a person to perform at extraordinary levels. In sports, we often see examples of record-breaking new benchmarks eclipsing records previously considered impossible to break.
The first acknowledged record keeping for the mile run took place in 1850 with a time exceeding 4:50. The next recorded time was 4:28 in 1855. The first sub four-minute mile was run in 1954 by Roger Bannister, in 3:59.4. Incredibly, the next two runners to run sub four-minute mile did so only two months later. Fast forward to 2024 and 1,755 athletes have run the mile faster than 4 minutes. The mile record today stands at 3:43.13 seconds.
To a certain extent, it proves that expectations and your personal mindset have a profound impact on outcomes. We witness it all the time, but the progression of faster speeds in track at virtually every distance proves this rather conclusively. Other athletic endeavors have experienced similar progressions in performance.
While dedicated, highly trained and motivated athletes have shown the way to harness will power, there are other, more remarkable examples of humans conquering nearly impossible odds and proving that “mind over matter” is not just a clever turn of phrase. There is a plethora of examples of wartime performance by both combatants and civilians that further demonstrates that will is a powerful force. Whether it is one soldier or small unit outnumbered but winning the battle, to civilians and prisoners of war determined to survive dire circumstances, the human will drives outcomes and results in shining examples for each of us to consider as proof that difficult is not the same as impossible.
Sometimes the adversary takes the form of the forces of nature arrayed against man’s desire to explore and learn more about the world around us. At the turn of the 20th century, the South Pole was an exciting and largely unknown frontier. It was first successfully reached in 1911 by Roald Amundsen. Sir Ernest Shackleton had twice failed to reach the South Pole in the years leading up to his third attempt in 1914. The expedition to reach the South Pole was both a scientific journey and an attempt at redemption for Shackleton leaving Plymouth, England on Aug. 8, 1914, on the ship Endurance.
The journey was beset by obstacles including brutal cold, a 10-month stranding on an ice floe, loss of his ship Endurance when it was crushed by the ice around it and a subsequent small boat open ocean mission to find a settlement known to be on Elephant Island to engage a rescue for the entire crew. As luck would have it, the Shackleton party made it to Elephant Island but landed on the wrong side and needed to march miles to reach the settlement and get help. Their brutal experience ended on Aug. 30, 1916, more than two years after setting out on their mission. While they never did make it to their original destination, remarkably every single member of Shackleton’s Endurance crew was safe at journey’s end. Faith, commitment and the positive attitude of Shackleton and his team overcame odds stacked against them and gave us a remarkable story of survival that still amazes and inspires.
A turnaround
My personal experiences are not nearly as remarkable, but do provide some reinforcement that “today I will” works equally well when the outcomes are far less dire. Two examples can demonstrate the impact of “today I will” on my life. Early in my career as a salesperson, I relied heavily on my background as a lab tech to create a relationship and kinship with my customers and prospects. I found sales training courses I had attended to be more oriented to finding clever ways to get the customer to agree and buy than opportunities to have a clearly laid out sales process that I could use. Over time, my competition was able to overcome my technical advantage and I lost deals I should have won.
I finally found a sales text that I could relate to and believe in. The text explained how to use a highly disciplined and detailed process to engage the multiple stakeholders in the capital sales process to create a win-win result for both the prospect and the salesperson. It was only when I read this well-written sales text and adopted the sales process it explained that I was able to turn my sales career and win rate around. My “today I will” moment was when I decided that “today I will” set my preconceived notions of sales textbooks aside and find a sales process I can believe in, and that “today I will” use it in my daily sales activities.
My second “today I will” moment came when I took my first job as a product manager. Again, I was confident my technical background and experience in sales would make me successful and that I would find this new career path easy, fun and rewarding. Early on, I learned that product management had several important daily tasks that were anything but fun: revenue reports, quarterly business reviews, meetings with regulatory about product issues and returning challenging calls to unhappy sales reps and their customers became the antithesis of the job I thought I wanted. For a period of time, I made my daily task list and put these items toward the bottom of the list. The result: I either got them done in the nick of time or completed them with a halfhearted effort. I was floundering and I knew it, but overall I liked the job and thought I could do it.
My “today I will” moment? It was “today I will prioritize ONE difficult or unpleasant task before I engage in any of the activities I like more.” At first, I was concerned that my day would only consist of a struggle to get one ugly task behind me and never get to the fun stuff. It took a few months of exercising my new discipline to get comfortable with this approach and to make it a confident part of my daily routine. Soon, my productivity shot up, I was rewarded with the confidence of management and the respect of my peers. As importantly, my product lines grew faster than others and skills I struggled to master earlier became second nature and every day became easier to manage and master. I conquered my fears, became more confident, began to like my job as much as I thought I would, and my career grew as my skills and confidence grew.
I also took on one other discipline in the process. After dodging delivery of “bad news” early in my management career, I finally learned to deliver bad news as quickly as possible with a clear message of what happened, my responsibility for the situation, how it could have been avoided, what next steps look like and what the most likely outcome could be. I use this process to this very day and it has become a trusted friend. Both my internal customers and my vendors know they can count on me to deliver the news promptly when it is bad and needs management, and at the right time when it is good and deserves celebration. This results in respect and better collaboration across the board.
Sidebar:
Action Plan
Many of us can take this sort of conceptual information and framework and develop our own plan without any more help. Some of us, myself included, need specific examples to spark our thinking and get our creative energies going. Here are a few ideas I hope will be food for thought on useful “today I will” tactics.
In my professional life
Today I will list five customers I want to reinforce my relationship with. Today I will make that list and today I will commit to meet with each of them in the next 30 days and interact with them as if they were new customers.
Today I will make a list of a few (maybe five) products I do not sell confidently and set work with dates for each of the key manufacturers of these products to make realistic prospect sales calls in the next 30 days.
Today I will make my own list of the products my most highly penetrated customer uses and review this list against five of my less penetrated customers.
Today I will set up time to list and review some of the higher volume products my less penetrated customers are NOT using. Today I will NOT try to sell these products to these customers but today I will create a list of questions to ask to learn more about WHY they are not using these products.
In my personal life
Today I will actively seek coaching and guidance from a person I admire. It may be career coaching, help with a habit I want to break and just help with self-awareness, but today I will seek coaching to continue my development.
Today I will look back on one relationship that needs improvement for one reason or another and today I will reach out to that person and seek ways to improve that relationship.
Today I will read something I have wanted to read but have not taken the time to read. It could be a sales text, a work of fiction, a biography, a best seller, or a book of cartoons. I just need to open my mind to something I have wanted to think about and enjoy.
Today I will make my own short list of things I need to do in order to enjoy life more, become more productive at work, share the love with someone I want to open up to, learn something or just to deliberately engage in goofing off. Today I will make the choice to make today I will a life habit.
Today I will step out of my lab-focused comfort zone, share some personal thoughts and try to make a difference for you.