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Tip
of the Month: July 2007
Are you having any fun in your career? You better
be.
Dear Friends,
I was playing golf recently with a gentleman who was really at odds with
his game. He wasn't a bad player, but he was extremely negative about his
shots, his scoring, and the difficulty required to being a consistent striker
of the ball. While he really was a pretty good player, with all the negatives
running around in his head, he didn't have a prayer. As important, he just
wasn't having any fun and it permeated throughout his whole round.
Transfer with me this same thinking over to business, and particularly sales.
Are you having fun? I'm going to tell you that you better be, or my bet
is that you are in for a long and mediocre career. Or if you are lucky, it's
a very short career and hopefully you'll find something that you enjoy
doing. I don't believe that anybody can excel at what they are doing unless
they are having fun. It's human nature. We don't do what we don't
like doing for very long. If we are "grinding away" at our careers,
similar to the golfer described above, we're either eventually going to
burn out, get spit out, or at the very least lead a sales life of misery.
So let me ask you this, who buys from misery? Who buys from "grinder?" Who
buys from the self absorbed individual who is never satisfied? Who buys from
Mr. Negative? Who buys from Mr. No Fun? If you buy into the premise that long
term successful selling means networking, relationship building, and doing the
things required to attracting business via referrals and the like, then Mr. No
Fun will be too preoccupied with what's wrong to attract any meaningful
business. Said simply, nobody buys from Mr. No Fun.
Chalk the bad days up to "life happens" and move on. Don't
fuel your bad day with your own promotion of the fact that you are having a bad
day. Hunker down and get through it. It hasn't killed you yet and odds
are it won't. So just survive your bad day and come back tomorrow and have
some fun doing what you love. Sometimes just surviving is a successful day. Have
fun knowing it will pass.
Like golf, there is nowhere to hide in sales. Your results are your results.
Like in golf where you are certain to hit bad shots, in sales you will have bad
days. In golf you have to really "believe" in your shots. This holds
true in what you are selling also. If you're not having fun in golf, you
won't play the game for very long, and if you're not having fun in
sales, you won't play that game very long either. Like Golf, I wish I could
say it's only a game, but it's more than that. It's your career,
an even more important reason to have fun doing it.
All the best my friends. |
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