Usually, being ordinary is a bad plan. Pursuing the path of least resistance means high-grade mediocrity and “close-to-but-just-not-there” success.

You are active yet ineffective. Moving…. just not toward your dreams.

If you have two minutes (and have 35 seconds), listen in as I explain the art of “outrageous”.

What do you think?

Do you feel a little closer to your dream?

What moves you? To tears. To get up in the morning. To invest your time or money.

What will make you change?

Here’s the question that answers all the rest: “What are you passionate about?”

It’s different for all of us. For some of us it’s a sports team that we cheer for (like the Redskins) or an activity that we do (like running).

Sometimes it looks like a cause, a goal, or a belief.

Usually a little of each.

What’s key to remember is the power that we create when we are passionate. How we bend the world to our will when we so deeply care about the outcome of our activities. How without it we are powerless.

My grandfather is 92 years old and in an assisted living center. For 89 years of his life he was independent. He drove his own car. He read the newspaper every day. He went to church. He was passionate about living life his way.

His wife was equally as independent and strong-willed . (Gramma and I shared the same November birthday) She baked cookies. She went walking. For a while she was even part of a bowling league. She passed away about 18 months ago.

Over the last month, my grandfather has slowly been losing his passion to stay alive. It’s extremely sad. And a lesson in passion.

Even with a pace-maker in his chest, my grandfather is in as good of health as I am. Maybe better, since half my blood is Red Bull. And yet, he is dying. He doesn’t want to live. He hates the place where he is staying (which is basically a resort). Doesn’t want to make any friends. He doesn’t want to even leave his room too many days.

So I called him…  See if I could put a smile on his face.

That’s where I learned how miserable he was.  In so many words, he told me that he was just “waiting”.  I can only assume that meant he was waiting to die.

Sad.  Right?

And so many lessons for us.

If life were a candle, my grandpa is starting to sputter.  And it’s not because the wind is blowing.  Because his will to keep the the flame going is gone.

It brings a lump to your throat.  You want to scream “LIVE… Fight!  Don’t give up…” Right?

Have you been there before?  Are you there right now?

There’s a million lessons.

Here are just a few things from the heart:

1. It’s gotta be your passion – You can’t will someone else to live your dream.  You may really, really want others to see it your way, but you can;t let your passion be a “hammer” to crush those around you.  It has to be a torch that leads others through the darkness.  Passion isn’t anger.  It’s empathy, patience, and vision.  And it’s gotta be your passion.  You can’t borrow or beg; you can share it though.
2. When you lose your passion, you die – You can’t let your passion go.  It’s tough out there.  Circumstances have a way of stealing your dreams from you when you need them most.  It’s so tough sometimes that you can’t find a way to do it another day.  But you have to.  You can’t lose your passion.  It’s keeping you alive.  You need to believe deep-down that at whatever the cost you have to keep your passion alive.

So, what are you passionate about?

Right now.  This second.   Think about it for a second.  What makes your heart beat?

That’s where you’re powerful.

High performance. You know it when you see it. It’s one of those stories you can tell a dozen times and still be excited each time.

It’s captivating to watch. More of an experience than just an event or an occasion.

Remember this one?

Warren Moon and the Oilers had the 1993 NFL Playoffs in hand when, two minutes into the third quarter, the score was 35-3. A complete blow-out. With a depleted Buffalo offense (Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas were both injured), the Bills had little chance to win this game. That is, until the Bill’s backup quarterback, Frank Reich, began an unthinkable series of amazing plays.

With the score 35-10, Buffalo recovered an onside kick and Reich threw a 38-yard bomb to Don Beebe to make it 35-17. It didn’t stop there. Five unanswered Reich touchdowns put the Bills up, but at the last minute, the Oilers tied it up with a field goal. In overtime, Nate Odomes picked off Warren Moon to set up the most improbable of victories and the greatest NFL comeback in history.

Final score: 41-38 for the Bills.

High performance?

Most of us don’t know how to describe it any other way.

Is it a comeback? an underdog story? pure passion? The truth is that it looks like a lot of things.

That’s why it can be so hard to explain.  Even harder to do.  Which brings us back to selling — high performance selling.

What is high performance selling? And how can you do it?

Here are some observations for you about high performance selling:

* You are baking a cake not scoring a touchdown.

Not sure how to say it any other way.

This applies to anything you do.  By now you probably have all the the right ingredients.  You know how to build rapport.  How to qualify your prospect.  How to close the deal.  You have a recipe that you go to for your selling process.

If you don’t already have the basics of the selling process then you need to go grab a brand new book by my friend, Jill Konrath, that comes out in a few days — SNAP Selling.  (And, by the way, I am in no way paid anything to heartily recommend that book to you).

Here’s the key thing to remember — you are creating art.  You’re aren’t grabbing a ball and running as fast as you can for the end zone.  There are factors outside of your control that require you to adapt.  You need to recognize that.  And even if you ace the baking part (don’t burn out), you still have to add your own icing to what you create.  You have to make it your own.

Now, here are three secrets of high performance selling:

1.  Failure starts to look more like success.

When you fail and it starts to look like success to your peers, you know that you are a high performance seller.

Look.  Let’s get real frank, real fast.  Life isn’t a competition with anyone other than the rock star that you were intended to be. If you think that I am advocating that you look around and compare yourself to anyone else, you are dead wrong.

You know better than that already.  That’s a complete waste of time.

Here is what I trying to say.  High performers look at failure as a step closer to success.  It’s not an act.  It’s a way of life.

Rejection and loss are not end points.  They are guideposts.

High performance selling requires the discipline to look at each opportunity and say “What could I have done differently?”.  Here’s a reality — some times there is nothing you could have done better.  (But I haven’t had one of those moment’s yet.) I have always found 3-4 (to a dozen) tiny mistakes that all contributed to my failure.

It was by adjusting and relaunching that I was able to turn that failure into outrageous success.

Master your failures.

2.  Extreme behavior is expected activity.

You have to know going in that it’s going to be rough.  Rougher and tougher than anything you have ever allowed yourself to imagine before.

There is a reason that we call this the top 1%.

The air is thin at the top.  And not because your nose is out of joint.  Because you are pumping your knees so hard you can barely breathe.

You have to be ready to work harder than you ever imagined (and then double that).

Listen, you can lead a balanced life by working a  guaranteed 35 hours a week at Target.  You will have plenty to time for all your hobbies without the stress of having to change the world.  But high performance requires working smarter and harder – both.

You need extreme:

• Effort — you put in more value, more passion than anyone…
• Creativity – you care more, about your prospect, about your ability to provide a solution …
• Discipline – you don’t let your immediate feelings stop you from realizing your long-term goals…

In this age of tolerance and equality, it is almost heresy to suggest that you need to be different.  That’s the only path to high performance selling.

There is no other way.

3. It starts (and stops) in your mind.

You can only achieve what you believe.  The battle for high performance is won long before you ever go through the motions of winning.  It’s all in your head.

Your dreams. Your fears.  They are all part of what you will ever achieve.  High performers think about high performance.

It’s that simple.  They think, they obsess, they plan for high performance selling.

• They don’t fear — they act.
• They  don’t wonder — they discover.
• They don’t doubt — they try.

It’s a fundamental difference between those who envy and those who are.

It’s all in your head long before it ever happens.

And because that is all that is in your head — no fears, no doubts, no questions — that is all you have time to act on.  And what a powerful difference that makes.

You truly are invincible. You are a high performance seller.

Remember Frank Reich we talked about earlier?

He actually had a history of high performance.

Reich was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the third round (57th overall) in the 1985 NFL Draft. The Bills already had drafted future Hall of Famer Jim Kelly in 1983 and when Kelly signed with the Bills in 1986, Reich’s only option was as backup QB. Reich got his first start only Kelly went down with a shoulder injury in 1989 — after more than three years of only playing a supporting role.

And he took advantage of the opportunity.  In front of a Rich Stadium crowd of more than 76,000 fans and a Monday Night Football audience, Reich led the Bills to two straight victories. He rallied the Bills in the fourth quarter by throwing two drives down the field for a 23-20 victory over the previously unbeaten Los Angeles Rams.

Reich returned the following season, however, when Kelly was injured again late in the season. Reich provided the Bills with another two key wins, clinching them the AFC East title and home field advantage throughout the playoffs.

He is now a coach for the Indianapolis Colts where he expects high performance from the quarterback he trains – Peyton Manning.

What about you?  Is it time for some high performance selling?

Here’s a harsh reality:  We‘re just not tough enough…

On my wall framed hangs the famous inspiration quotation from Vince Lombardi about football and winning and what it takes to be number one.  It’s been on the wall of my office for the past decade.  It’s my own mezuzah to excellence and always pushing the limits of what I think is possible.

Last week as I was working – somewhat puzzled over some frustrating issues – my eye flickered over the glass encased picture.  At the top of the picture underneath the title, in font that was bigger than the rest of the speech by Limbardi, the following words jumped out at me:

You’ve got to pay the price…

Simple words.  A big challenge.

All of a sudden it hit me.  I needed to toughen up a little.  I needed a little more mental discipline.  I was letting my fears destroy my vision.  It reminded me a of story I had been told about a soldier in World War II.

Apparently:

A team of soldiers were fighting inch by inch for a painfully embattled strip of island.  Day after day they fought — losing men and gaining little headway.  Each day their supplies ran lower  and several of the men started getting sick.  The classic symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting would be bad enough if enemy snipers and cleverly booby-trapped minefields weren’t even more dangerous.

Each night, a few brave soldiers would swim back to the battleship anchored two miles off shore to get more supplies and ammunition.  Many never made it back.

In the middle of this sad, miserable jungle, George fought side by side with his band of brothers.  While others became feverishly sick with dysentery, he raised morale with his wit and charisma.  Things seemed to be getting better.  The enemy was being pushed back and the team was alive.  And then things got tough for George.

He became ill.  Very ill.  George got so sick that he could barely move.  As the rockets and mortars crashing overhead as he lay in his foxhole, it seemed like a matter of time until one landed too close.  And then it happened.

George said that you could always tell by the sound of a mortar overhead how close away the round might be.  Your senses perked up when the difference between death and inches is just a few seconds and quick movement.  And in a weakened state, lying pathetically at the edge of a foxhole, George and his partner had little time to move.  The round crashed into the back of the foxhole where George’s partner sat huddled.  The shrapnel completely obliterated George’s partner and gouged deep flesh out of George’s back and buttocks and legs.

Blood soon mixed with diarrhea and infection set in.  George had to get back to the boat or die.  There was no other option.  No one was able to carry him back.  To live, he had to go it alone.

And so when darkness fell, he crawled from his foxhole to the beach and into the saltwater — salt ripping deep into open and raw wounds.  And the unbelievable happened.

George swam the 2 miles back to the boat and lived.  In spite of the odds, in spite of his weakened state, George made it.

And I’m glad he did.  George Waldschmidt was my grandfather.

What kept George alive is the same thing that will help you dominate — mental toughness.

There wasn’t a cheering section waving flags and rooting my grandpa on the last 200 yards.  There wasn’t a friend putting SuperPoke “You can do it” messages on his Facebook page.  And forget about any Tweets with the words “crush it”, “good job” or “best of luck”.

It was icy water, diarrhea and deep wounds, infectious fever, and a ravenous determination to live.

Mental toughness is a process of muscle growth like physical exercise.  There is NO magic potion.  You have to intensely focus on a few key repeatable exercises.  Here are a few of them:

1. Avoid the need to blame others for anything. — Mean, small-minded people know that they suck.  That’s why they are so cranky and eager to point out your mistakes.  They hope that by causing you to feel inadequate, everyone will forget about how woefully off-the-mark their own performance is.  Stop the habit of blaming anyone for any reason ever.  It’s a bad habit.
2. Stop working on things that just don’t matter. — Not everything needs to be done in place of sleep.  If you work for a boss, then you owe them solid time.  You can’t cut that out.  You can however cut out the television time, board meetings, and anything else that gets in the way of you staying focused on your destiny.  Replace entertainment with activity toward your goal.
3. Find the positive side of any circumstance.  It’s there. — Find a negative person and you’ve found a mentally weak person.  It takes no mental courage to say that something “won’t work.”  Frankly, that’s the easy route.  What does take mental effort (lots of it sometimes…) is to believe in something when you are the only one in your cheering section.  Make it a personal challenge to find the best in every situation.  And tell someone when you find it.
4. Refuse to let yourself wallow in self-doubt.  You’re alive to succeed. – Stop comparing your problems to your last 18 failures.  They are not the same.  You are not the same.  Here’s something to remember: Your entire life has been a training ground for you capturing your destiny right now.  Why would you doubt that?  Go conquer.  Stop whining.
5. Ask yourself “what can I do better next time?” and then do it next time. — Guess what?  Spend a decade or two earnestly trying to “be better”, and that’s exactly what will happen.  The next best thing to doing something amazing is not doing something that’s stupid.  So learn from your mistakes and use the lessons to dominate.
6. Actively take time to do things that fuel your passion. (e.g. exercise…) – Living in the moment requires you to live at peak performance.  A huge part of mental fitness is physical fitness.  So go fight someone. Or go running.  Mental motivation gets accelerated by physical activity.
7. Say thank-you for something that you have taken for granted in the past. — The exercise of gratitude is a powerful ignitor of creativity.  Selfishness limits our ability to work at peak performance.  When you think only of yourself, you miss out on the real key to world domination — help other people.
8. Apologize to yourself and those around you for having a bad attitude. — Do this once or twice and you’ll snap out of your funk pretty fast.  When you start having to genuinely apologize for being a bad influence on those around you, you learn to stop whining and start winning.

The quickest way to fail is to let your fears and doubts get in the way of your passion.  It’s what happens naturally.  If you want to dominate, control your thought, young Jedi.  You’ll find yourself conquering more.

Is what you doing right now something the world can’t live without?  Are you the difference between success and failure?  Are you truly indispensable?

“So, Seth, do you consider yourself indispensable?”

That’s what I wanted to say.  But I ran out of time.

The reality is that the thinking of a guy like Seth is quite indispensable.  You can’t really live without it.  You may survive.  You might be the last of your friends around at 87.  But what you did probably won’t have really mattered…

After a string of emails and the kindness of Seth (and Ishita) to take a few questions from me last week on Seth’s new manifesto, Linchpin, I started to round out the edges of my thinking around edginess…

Part 1: Is life like art?

Seth Godin is a legend in any discussion of “changing the world”.  After more a decade of writing with a distinct perspective about community and marketing and the art of being the dude that doesn’t let the wheels fly off the operation, Seth really makes it personal with the idea of fear.  He makes the case that:

“fear is the dominant emotion of our lives –Seth Godin”

What stops us from being amazingly successful is our fear of failure, our fear of being different, our fear of not doing what we are told, our fear of being laughed at.  We are afraid of our own destiny.  We have the choice to do something shocking and we trade it in for a few less laughs?

Part 2: Why are we so scared?

Gives us all something to think about.  Right?

But, Seth goes further, he talks about the value of what we do as artists.  That being edgy (on the edge of what the rest of world things is normal) is risky and amazingly rewarding…

Part 3: Can you put a price tag on what you do?

What a great reminder to avoid toxic influences in our day-to-day lives.  I make the mistake many times of trying to win over all the detractors —  at the risk of losing my core focus on the overall goal.  Many of you find yourselves doing the exact same thing.  You get burned out trying to change the wrong part of “the world”.  Some things, some people will not change while you are alive….

Know that what you do is amazing, unique, and sometimes only partially comprehensible.  And just know that means you won’t be able to convince everyone of your value.  Be edgy.  Fight for your destiny.  And avoid “schmoes” who make you insane.

Part 4: Do you expect a “Thank You”?

Part of being effective (on the edge of outrageous opportunity) is the idea of giving away your talents.  They are a gift.  Something that you don’t expect to be fully compensated for.  Can someone really pay you enough to get the extra mile with each email or phone interaction you make for your company?

That means that you create art.  And you let karma bring you the appreciation.

You do what only you an uniquely do and stop worrying about “getting the credit”.

Part 5: Are you doing enough? Anything at all?

..

Nothing gets done until someone else benefits from your passion (your “gift”).  Sadly, we too often trade what is safe for what would change the world.  That means that we fight for our “day job” and the pay raise when we should be focusing on investing in other people’s lives and our own personal development.

And putting in amazing amounts of effort is an admirable quality.  It shows discipline.  But it’s not “art”.

Art is when you finish what you started.

It’s when you close the prospect….. It’s when you finally make contact with a contact that help you influence the decision maker….  It’s when you take hopes and wishes for a deal and turn it into a relationship….

It’s not so much about about what you do but how you do it.

Part 6: Are you the guy who will successfully have bad ideas?

Wouldn’t you like to know that you are indispensable?  That without you the wheels falls and the cart crashes to the ground.  Not in a twisted egomaniacal sense of tyranny, but in a somber sense of inspiration.

Art is edgy.

From the raw definition.

Some art connects with a large audience.  Some a much smaller group.

You will fail along the way.  At least it might appear that way.  If you use failure as your laboratory for building your destiny, you will find that each time you hit an obstacle you fight to get back to the edge.

Because at the edge is where you’ll find success.  That’s when you’ll realize that you are indispensable…

]]> http://danwaldschmidt.com/2010/02/edgyconversations/seth-godin-indispensable-edginess/feed 27 http://danwaldschmidt.com/2010/01/edgyconversations/yep-your-new-year-resolutions-are-worthless http://danwaldschmidt.com/2010/01/edgyconversations/yep-your-new-year-resolutions-are-worthless#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:09:22 +0000 Dan Waldschmidt http://thedewview.com/?p=1496

It’s that time of year again where we take stock of our poor performance from last year and write down blissful wishes for what we want to make happen this year.

It actually a pretty worthwless activity…

From joining a new gym to going to church more to drinking less — whatever you resolve come New Years has a 78% chance of ultimately failing.  That’s almost everybody!

I didn’t make that up.  That’s what a recent international study of almost a thousand people indicated.

Just like we have been trained to do nice things for people around Christmas even though we act like inconsiderate jerks the rest of the year, so we have also trained ourselves to pause ever so briefly at the beginning of each year to wish we could do a few things differently in the coming year.

And it’s a worthless waste of time for 8 out of 10 of us.

And while I am on the subject, why are we still talking about 3-year and 5-year plans when we can’t get this yearly thing figured out?  Seems like a bunch of silly nonsense.

Seriously, are we committed to real change? Real sacrificial “it hurts like hell” change.

We don’t even apply the same level of respect to our own goals as we do the dudes we watch on ESPN.

We respect an obsessive work ethic that makes an all star like Michael Jordan sink 100 free-throws in a row before leaving practice.  We marvel at the obscene practice put in by perfectionists like Tiger Woods who practice distance putting at 3 and 10 foot intervals for hours a day.

And yet when it comes to putting in a little more effort for ourselves, we tend to be the first to come up with excuses (good ones too).  And the older we get, the more experience we gain explaining why our failure was really a good thing.

Aren’t you tired of mediocrity?  Of being an “almost all-star”?

Are you willing to do something about it?  To change?

Are you willing to:

1. Connect your goal with a larger mision in life… (turn “making more money” into “helping a small company flourish”)
2. Construct your goal into a series of smaller monthly milestones… (turn big deadlines into a series of progressive tasks)

If so, you might be ready to see breakthrough this year.  This might be the year of YOU… ALL of the 22% who accomplished their annual goals noted that these two were the two primary drivers for their success — passion and planning.

It’s amazing what you can do when you really want something more for yourself.

You might just change the world.

This weekend, the missus and I wrapped up our shopping for family for the holidays.  I have to say: “We were more thoughtful this year than any time previously…”

(at least I thought so)

We really thought through the whole process and I am pumped by the stack of “stuff” sitting in our kitchen that needs to be wrapped.

It’s about the relationship, right?

There are people you care about — people around whom you really want to build a history.  It kind of parallels your deal making process.

Makes sense, right?  You want to do business with people that you can stand being around.  People you like.

That’s about building a relationship.  Not seasonal email torpedoing.  But a consistent communication thread.

My inbox got me thinking……….

How special would you feel if you were sent the following e-card from someone that you spent money with this year?

I love the “We hope this communication is welcomed…”  Makes me feel like you really remember who I am.  And are you really giving me the option to unsubscribe from next year’s seasonal greetings?

You tell me.  Maybe I am being picky.

Now how about this one…  Are you feeling the love?

I now have to click on a link to go a site to see all the Christmas warmth you can’t wait to share with me… As if that isn’t enough to do, there is the obligatory signature language informing me that I could be sued for mishandling the email you are sending me.  WOW…. way too much baggage for me to do anything with.  I just have to archive it…

These both ended up in my inbox (along with a tiresome few others…) and I just didn’t have the energy to keep clicking through to link after link so I could get in the Christmas spirit.  It kind of made it all feel like a “chore”…

Like maybe our relationship wasn’t so important after all…

Know what I mean?

It gets you thinking.  What’s the logic behind this?

Who emerged from their marketing “bat-cave” with the fantabulous idea that impersonal seasonalized hyperlink creation was something that made customers feel like “you care”?

Was there a memo in the late ’90s that I missed?

Two words: CALL ME…

I know I’m a little cranky when it comes to this stuff, but doesn’t it seem a little dis-ingenuous?  Even if you give the sender the “benefit of the doubt”, you can’t overlook the general lack of creativity.  The fact remains that in the haste to have another “client touch”, the marketer forgot to put himself in the recipient position.

Here’s reality: No one really reads this stuff.

(not even your grandma who has unlimited Facebooktime)

Maybe the first one you get (right after Thanksgiving), but right around the second week in December you are left with no other choice but massive select-and-archive.  You even feel a little bad about it, but you justify if by telling yourself that if you have time, you’ll dig them out later at home to look through.

And you never do…  It’s just not a high priority.

Without a relationship, you just avoid all the rest of  the noise coming at you.

And certainly this mirrors a hunch I have had for some time now as I talk with C-level executives and ask about their behavior to inbound messaging.  I decided to test my theory.  About a week ago, I put a poll up on LinkedIn asking the following question:

“If relationships really do matter in sales, why don’t we build better ones throughout our selling process?”

Here are the overall results:

• 40% stated that they didn’t have enough access to the right people to build a great relationship…
• 10% noted that they tried to build good relationships but didn’t know how to keep it up…
• 20% thought that it wasn’t really a good use of their time…  AND
• 30% admitted they weren’t really sure how to build great relationships…

When you study this further, you see that ALL of the CEO’s who responded to this question answered the same — that they had not developed this skill of long term relationship building.

Are you surprised?  You might have thought that senior level executives had “schmoozing” all figured out.  Maybe not.  Maybe there’s more to that cocktail parties and fast one-liners.

The numbers get more interesting when you look at the size of the companies responding.  All of the big guys (who would have the biggest sales and marketing budgets) all noted that they didn’t have access to the right people to build great relationships.

Essentially, the guys with the most advantages toward building the best relationships were the least likely to know how to get the right people.  Interesting indeed.

When you look at the age for relationship building, it becomes even more significant.  The young guys and old guys fall into the same category — limited access to the right executives.  While the mid-life high-performers know the right people, but aren’t really sure what to do to keep their attention.

Kind of what you would expect from life, right?  You work hard to get somewhere; and then once you’re there you push so far and fast ahead that you lose valuable ties to people who could be a valuable resource to you.

Young or old, big or small — we all need to work a little harder to keep our relationships strong.  They are our lifeblood, our lifeline to accomplishing our life’s mission.

So think about how you treat your relationships.

Are you asking friends to triple-click through your e-card nonsense, or are you bold enough to just say “Thank You”…  and mean it…

P.S.  Thank you to all the amazing readers of The DEW View!  Have a Happy Holidays.  I am grateful that I was able be a part of your 2009 selling year.  Take some time to get recharged and then let’s plan on changing the world together in ’10….  Thanks again!!!

Do you have big dreams? For 2010?  For right now?

What you do, how far you succeed, what you achieve — they all come from what you think about. They all come from what you are thinking about RIGHT now…

And here’s the kicker……

Controlling your thoughts is the hardest part about struggling toward success. There is nothing more difficult. There is not a bigger challenge.  Frankly, nothing you do is more important.

Let’s face it.  The journey is brutal and you will likely end up bruised and battered along the way, but above all else you have to remain mentally tough. You have to stay focused on your future.

(Are you shaking your head yet?  Do you agree with me?)

Good.  Let’s get our hands dirty with this….

Let’s talk about your finances and your relationships.  These are the two biggest areas of concern for any of us.

When thing start going to sh#%!t in these two areas, it is harder to stay focused on your future.  Close to impossible.  You get sidetracked and start thinking about how to solve the most recent problem instead of spending effort and time on your destiny.

That’s usually never a good thing.

YES, you need to get distractions out-of-the-way before you start tackling your goals, but also you need to be cognizant of what you are doing – of the impact of your change in focus.

When you let personal matters — like your finances — go unchecked, you find yourself trading the right thing for the right now thing.

Isn’t the biggest influence on our decisions on ANY given day personal finances?   So if you don’t have a handle on your budget, start fixing it today. There are plenty of tools to help you solve this problem.

Try using Mint or Rudder to manage where your money goes. And while you are at it, go grab Peter Dunn‘s new book, 60 Days to Change.  Solve your bad habit of hoping everything works out and guarantee that it starts heading that direction.

Know what I am saying? Take control of your goals — your dreams of destiny — by taking real-world, tangible action to boost your success.

Don’t pretend this doesn’t apply to you either.  I know the “I’ll just sell more” excuse.  I was king of that line of thinking for way too long.  There is a better way to capture your dream.  Peter actually makes it fun.

Anything that comes between you and your goal — physical or mental — is your enemy and you must destroy it…  Take money off your brain and start focusing on deals that will help you be a bigger success…

—————————-

FULL DISCLOSURE:  Pete’s team asked me my thoughts on the book and here is what I wrote on the back cover of his book:

“You can’t change the world while fighting with the bank to forgive your 17 overdraft fees. To get extreme results, you have to take control of your personal finances. Pete breaks it all down with wit and wisdom into a 60-day mission of personal financial domination. In between chuckles, you’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t read this earlier.”

Lips blue and hands shaking beyond human control, Carl Brashear struggled to find the next step up the side of the metal ladder to the wooden pier.  As he made it to the top of the landing, he staggered to a wooden bench to sit down.  His legs were no longer strong enough to hold him beneath the weight of a 200 pound brass diving suit.  No one had survived this long.  No one yet.

For the past 9 hours, he had searched the floor of the ocean for the couplings, brackets, and screws he needed to complete his task.  Against supernatural odds and direct opposition from the world around him, he had found deep within himself the power to continue.  Years later when asked why he fought so hard, he simple stated: “I ain’t going to let nobody steal my dream”…

In 2000, Cuba Gooding Jr. starred in the telling of Carl’s story.  It ranks right up there with Rudy as one of the most inspirational movies of all time, Men of Honor…

Which got me thinking about a personal quality that is often overlooked by those who want to be high performers — honor….

Honor can be a confusing concept.  I think of it less as a “knight and fair maiden fairytale” and more of the quite resolve that guides what we do.  It’s our own code of conduct.  The rules we set for ourself and how we do business…

Changing the world demands a code.  Without it you get lost in the noise of the critics and lose out to the temptations to chose shortcuts and the easy way out.

Here’s the harsh reality of our lives:

Most of us will quit too early…  Give up too soon!

We let our critics wear us down to the point that we convince ourselves that changing the world is no longer important.  We get tired of the friction of being different and acting different and decide that maybe the cause isn’t that important.  We start taking failure too personally and start living petty lives derailing others.

We let others steal our dreams and our souls.

And here’s another harsh reality:

It’s our fault we lost our way… We let this happen.

We gave in to the pressure.  We stopped fighting when things for too tough.  We traded acceptance for belief.

And now we need to change it.  We can recharge our honor system; invest back into our code.

So let’s do that….

(It starts with patience…)

Soren Kierkegaard, a danish philosopher said it best: “Patience is necessary… you cannot reap immediately where you have sown.”

You can’t build your honor system overnight.  You can’t.  There is something about living by a code that requires you getting a thorough beating.  An untested code is nothing.  You have to be tested (and many times over).

But the good things about honor is that you alone are the master of your destiny.  You control your responses to those around you — the critics, the fans, the rest of the world.

SO:

1. Be honorable to you – You are all you have in the world and as soon as you lose your sense of “you”, it all stops making sense pretty quickly.  Don’t lie to yourself.  If you put in 40% effort and failed then admit it and put in more effort next time.  If you try to convince yourself that 40% was really 100%, then you just trimmed your peak performance in a huge way.  The effects get worse and worse and eventually you will find yourself sweating just to contribute 10% of your old self.  Decide to be unapologetically honest with yourself and you will find that even when you screw up, you perform at consistently higher levels than you did in the past.
2. Be honorable to your dream – It’s hard to stand up when you keep getting pushed back down.  But the dream (your dream) is the most powerful force you know.  People live and people die.  Bad things happen and good luck too.  You can’t always control your immediate circumstances.  But you can always control your attitude.  That’s important.  Bad things can turn right around into amazingly good things almost overnight.  It’s hard but you have to remember your dream.  You can’t lose that part of you when it looks like the world is fighting against you
3. Be honorable to your core values – Don’t do bad things to other people.  I don’t know how to say it any other way.  It’s amazing how karma comes around at the worst possible time to take it’s “pound of flesh”.  If you make it a habit to take advantage of other people, you can expect that you will get your ass kicked eventually.  Let’s hope it’s not at the time when you are taking down the biggest sale of your life.  Earn karma points by giving help to others without asking for anything.  Just do it to be a delight.  When you do take an uppercut, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people wanting to help.
4. Be honorable to your peers – Admit when you make a mistake and apologize.  Nothing tests your code like having to admit that you were a idiot.  It happens.  What doesn’t happen a lot of the time is us letting go of our egos.  And that sucks.  You can’t be better — operate consistently as a high-performer, when you don’t take responsibility for your actions (even unintended outcomes)…  Own up.  Move on.  Don’t hold out on apologizing because you think your peers haven’t noticed that you screwed up.  Guess what?  Now, they not only think you’re an idiot but an as$%hole at the same time.
5. Be honorable to your critics – It’s OK to go down after you take an upper cut.  Let’s face it — you weren’t expecting it in the first place.  Right?  You thought everyone wanted to play nice and instead you find yourself flat on your back trying to clear your head so you can get back in the fight.  Take your time standing up (take the full 10 seconds), but when you get back up, don’t throw low blows.  Critics operate under one basic premise — trying to convince the rest of the world that everything you do is motivated by the “mania of an ax murderer” (or something close to that).  Nothing you do will be right.  So just know that and move on.  Don’t let it affect your code.  And whatever you do, don’t really do something legitimately spiteful on purpose.  That just feeds the addiction your critics already have.

Friends come and go and circumstance change every few seconds but you have to live with yourself longer than anyone.  Be cool with yourself.  Live with honor.  Sell without limits…

My roots in understanding the concept of honor came from my dad, who just turned 61 on Monday.  Everyone who knows him knows what I am talking about.  He set a high standard…

I remember one snow day where all of us kids had the day off because the schools were closed.  Pebbled ice covered the road about 2 inches with another 6-7 inches of powder snow on top of that.  I expected my dad to be home with us as most of the federal offices were on leave because of the weather.  Instead, he took 5 hours to make the drive into the office at the NSA.  I don’t really know what needed to get done that day, but my dad make the trek because it was important to him.  It’s the small things that define our code.  It’s the things that we are remembered for in years to come.

I was in a conversation with a close friend last week about some serious matters when I just stopped everything I was talking about and simply summed it up by noting:

“You know? This is the hardest sale of my life”…

Have you ever been there? Are you there right now?

It’s a pretty incredible opportunity to really know that what you are engaged in RIGHT now is the fight of your life.

• Understanding that nothing else you have ever done before compares to the challenge you are facing right now…
• Realizing that when you walk away victorious from this challenge you will have won the biggest battle of your life…

It’s a do or die set-up.

A time when the fork in the road is a choice of harder or hardest. There is nothing easy about this — just a painful uphill struggle.

So what do you do if you find yourself in this opportunity? How do you handle the hardest sale of your life?

1. You hold nothing back in your personal effort — The fight of your life demands the fight of your life.  You really have to lay it all on the line: mind, body, and soul.   And if there is anything else you have to offer, you need to put that in the game as well.   All!  Everything!  Every ounce of effort goes to winning this cause.  (And by the way, don’t confuse “almost” with “all”. One gets you close to the deal. The other is what helps you close the deal.)
2. You don’t stop your analysis until you find real meaning — Things are never as they seem.  Winners today can end up the real losers tomorrow.  You have to keep digging into the “facts” of the case until you get the answers that no one else has.  Here’s a DEW favorite: “remember that it’s always what it’s not – at least the first few times around”.  That means that the standard answers you are getting from your prospect about timeline and budget are the exact opposite from the actual words that you are hearing.
3. You are patient with results and refuse to over-react – Most sales people are their own worst enemy once they sense that they might not be winning the hardest deal of their life. They transform into irrational, paranoid super-sulky panhandlers asking for the prospect’s loose change. They stop thinking like the savvy business ninjas that got them into the game in the first place. You need to remember to be patient with the process. Put in place the “24 Hour Rule” ( i.e. No communication to the client for a full day after you sense bad news from a prospect.)  Use that time to find an alternative strategy that shows your care of the client rather than a hand-out attempt to beg for their attention.
4. You ask for non-judgmental advice from a guru – A guru doesn’t need to be a world-famous author or the biggest hotshot in your industry.  Sometimes that guy is the manager who has been doing this for three decades and has seen a million different deals come and go.  Sometimes that guru is just an article written on a blog or your favorite selling magazine.  The key is that the advice has to be non-judgmental.  You are where you are and asking someone (at this point) how you could have done it “better” is a huge waste of your time and a real “downer”.  Talk about “next steps” from “right here”.  Ask for advice and you will likely get some solutions you would not have considered all on your own.
5. You take time for physically tasking exercise – There is  nothing that compares to kicking ass in the business world like kicking ass in the gym.  It clears your mind and prepares your body for stressful situations.  The world-famous Mayo Clinic calls exercise “Meditation in Motion” and that seems to have been my experience running on the open road.   You need to be physically and mentally prepared for a potential beating and nothing helps you navigate the madness of your schedule like a regular session of body building.  Take 30 minutes and push yourself hard.  You’ll find new confidence returning just when you need it most.
6. You consider the advantages of the “outrageous” — Sometimes you need to break out the “clown suit” and go for broke — I am joking 99.5% here. While you don’t want to be silly, there is some solid reasoning to asking the hard questions you were afraid to ask during the sales competition — like “we didn’t really have a chance did we?” or “we sure seemed to miss the mark with you guys, didn’t we?” or “I’m embarrassed that we were so so self-centered we didn’t think more about the value we should have been providing to you.”  When you get the answers to these questions, you might find yourself with some solid “behind the scenes” information to propose a winning counter-solution.  You have nothing to lose, so go for it…
7. You reverse roles with your buyer and justify “you” – Think about how you appear to your prospect.  Are you a whiner? A bully? A loudmouth? A hot-shot?  A miserable time-wasting, arrogant asshole?  Who are you from the buyer’s perspective?  Consider that….   You can call yourself the superhero of value propositions, but if your prospect doesn’t get it, then you have failed – miserably.  Think about the words you are using.  How would you react if they were being “played” to you?  Reverse your roles and see how you look from the other side of the table…
8. You manage personal distractions by eliminating them first – You can’t execute a masterful strategy while you have nagging side issues beating you between the temples.  Conventional sales books have all made the case for running after distractions after you do your core mission.  I totally disagree.  That’s a horrible process.  It doesn’t work.  Distractions are a part of life.  You have to manage these issues FIRST, before they threaten your ability to perform at high levels.  Don’t half-ass the hardest sale of your life by focusing part of our attention on something else.  Get the nasty stuff off your plate – or at least partly solved – and then go kick ass.
9. You don’t ask if dropping your price will close the deal — At this point (in the middle of the hardest sale of your life) you are way past grovelling for a rock-bottom price negotiation vantage point. Don’t do it.  Double the value analysis of your offering.  Triple your support offering. But do not cut your price.  Customers want the best offer — not necessary the lowest price.  By providing the most VALUE (i.e. explained benefit to the buyer) you become the best offer.  And here is a question for you: Does a price drop really ever increase your odds of winning the deal?  Doesn’t it just make you more frustrated?  So don’t do it.  Force yourself to demonstrate value instead.
10. You close the hardest sale of your life — You face down your demons, put in the effort, and at the end of the day you take a commission to the bank.  You close the deal because you want it the most.  Because you are willing to ask for help.   You wait patiently through the chaos, the client demands, and personal fears.  You close the deal.

That’s what you do.

You close the hardest sale of your life.

And why? Because that’s all there is to do.  That’s why you are in the game — to fight, to win…

I certainly don’t want to gloss over this idea. There’s more to this idea and it’s not for everyone.  It’s certainly one of those topics that is easier to talk about than to actually do.

That’s because deep down some of you think that winning is for someone else.  That you aren’t the one who can win.

But you are mistaken.  You are a winner.  You were born that way.  You can do it. You can win big.  You can close the hardest sale of your life.

Call me, I’ll help you.

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