You’re w-w-welcome

 Like 230 million other parents who didn’t feel like cooking tonight, I decided to grab my kids something to eat from McDonald’s. When I drove around to the speaker, I noticed the guy taking my order stuttered and immediately my heart bled for him because I used to stutter too. I stuttered so bad that my sister used to have to interpret what I’d just said, so hearing the guy brought me back to the anxiety I used to feel when having to speak…and here was a guy with the same issue I had, working the most treacherous ground one with his condition could work. The drive thru. Initially I was annoyed, “Out of alll the people who work there, why would the manager put that guy in that kind of position?” When I got around to the window to pay, the young man had to partially read my order back to me; obviously it took more of an effort on his part to focus on getting the words out. As I handed him my credit card, I admitted to him that I used to stutter and understood the challenge of having to speak-especially under pressure. When I asked him why the manager had him work the drive thru he said,

“He didn’t put me in the drive thru, I asked to be put here because I figured the only way I was ever going to get better is to force myself to do the very thing that I feared most so why not have to do if for 8 hours a day.”

Can you imagine having to work 8 hours not only dealing with the timed pressure of getting a customer through the line, but also having to try to speak quickly, change an order, deal with rude customers who ridicule you, and slide on to the next order while trying not to let the previous jerk get to you? If you’ve never stuttered before, you have no idea how hard it is to deliver on something that comes easy for so many others. 

“He didn’t put me in the drive thru, I asked to be put here…” That’s a true G in my book.

How many times every single day do you pick the path of least resistance-to take the easy road instead of the long, arduous one? That young man didn’t have to work the drive thru…he chose to. He clocks in and says put me in the toughest possible position for 8 hours because the only way out….is through! 

Hard is a choice…and that’s on you. Do you have to work with customers today? Do you have to call them back? Do you have to offer one more angle..one more thought…try one more approach when they’ve told you no, no, no, a dozen times…yet you persistently try again?

Do you have to…nope…you choose to. 

What do you choose today? What’s your Achilles heal? What do you suck at today…and what do you choose to do about it?

It’s on you….

You don’t strike oil in 3 feet of ground…you gotta dig deep…hit the bedrock of resistance, yet keep on pushing. When your mind tells you, “Wait!” When your experience tells you, “I’ve tried that before and it didn’t work!” When your ego tries preserve what little self confidence you have left by pulling you back so as to not get stung with another No….

Before you have a chance to even think about it….do it. Do the hard thing. Put yourself in the hard position..stutter…stammer…turn red…break out in a cold sweat & hives…feel like you’re about to pass out…do whatever, but know this..

You won’t die…and on the other side, you’ll find out that your career will continue to live long and strong because you chose hard over easy.

Thank you…

 You’re w-w-welcome.

Subscribe to The Sales Life w/ Marsh Buice podcast where we make a point in minutes not hours. Check it out on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

“Forgive & Forget” is bs

Listen to the full 10 min episode, “‘Forgive & Forget’ is bs,” right here.

• Musician Lenny Kravitz was the son of a soldier and an actress. (His mother played Helen Willis on the tv show The Jeffersons.)
• After doing all she could to keep the family together, Lenny’s mother had enough of his father’s womanizing and she put him out…but before she did, she asked Lenny’s dad if he had any final words to his young son. His dad stood and said,

Yea, he’ll do it too.

• Those 4 words haunted Lenny for years and strained his relationship with his father.
• It was only on his deathbed did his father drop the facade.
• That’s when Lenny decided that he must forgive & accept his father-who he was…and who he wasn’t.
• I believe Forgive & Forget is total bullshit.When you’re hurt, people dismissively tell you to just forget about all of the wrongs..the disses…the betrayals from those who meant so much to you in your life, but how do you forget about all of the wrong when you cannot forgive what they’ve done to you and how they abandoned?

• • You don’t want to forgive because you don’t want to let them off the hook that easy…you think, “I can’t let them just walk away scott free while I sit here and try to pick up the pieces of my life!”

•  Listening to Lenny’s story I’ve realized that it’s not about forgetting in order to forgive…instead, it’s accepting what’s already been done.
• Healing is through forgiving & accepting. Accept the fact that you were kicked out, done wrong, forced out..& left to figure it all out or die.
• Accept too that you didn’t have perfect parents. Because I’ve been resistant to accept my parents, I’ve taken on the very characteristics that I resented. I’m sure my children ask the same questions I’ve wondered in my parents, “Who are you?”
• It’s not for me to change others, it’s to accept them so that I can move forward in my own life.
• You should never forget because that’s how you gain experience and wisdom, just don’t punish the world and your future self because you’re unable to forget.

• “If they’re no longer living with you then why are they living rent free in your head? If you no longer work for them, then why are they still your employer in your head?”

• Forgive and accept is not for others..it’s for you.

Share your thoughts with me from the podcast.

Subscribe to The Sales Life w/ Marsh Buice podcast where we make a point in minutes not hours. Check it out on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

Not even a second

I like Daniel Coyle’s book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips For Improving Your Skills-now he also wrote The Talent Code which is a good book about how individuals unlock their talent-a book that we’ll chop up later, but today I want to talk about something I hope that you’re doing every day…and that’s making mistakes-not only making them, but more specifically what you do after you make them. We don’t like to make mistakes-mistakes make us vulnerable to others…it exposes us to being laughed at, talked about, sneered at, pointed to, written up and even fired-and that’s just on the outside. The internal game -what’s going on the inside of us is even worse. When we make a mistakes, we begin to lose our internal mojo-our self-confidence, but self-confidence is a very strange thing: if you try and fail your self-confidence slips a notch…but if you don’t try for fear of failing, that too causes you to lose your self-confidence because you’re not producing- so it becomes one of those damned if you do..damned if you don’t scenarios. So here’s my thing, if you’re going to expose yourself to the possibility of losing your self-confidence either way, then why not lose it in the only direction that you have the possibility to not only gain it back but also inch it forward-and it sure as hell ain’t by sitting around…you’ll gain confidence and skills through making mistakes because as Coyle says in Tip #22, “Mistakes are your guideposts for improvement.” Coyle discovered brain scan studies that revealed that .25 seconds-a quarter of a second after making a mistake we do 1 of 2 things: We either ignore the mistake or we look hard at it…

…I’ll add a third to Coyle’s findings…

We justify the mistake. We justify why we did what we did, then ignore any sort of corrective coaching or measures thereafter. Some of the most intelligent people ask, “How could I have been wrong in the action that I took..” instead of justifying why they could’ve been right.

Don’t wait to look at the mistake- look at it right away. Players know this- as soon as they come to the sidelines they’re looking at their tablets trying to figure out how they threw the interception, how the ball was stripped out of their hands, or why they were called for pass interference- they don’t have time to explain away the mistake nor do they have time to deal with the mistake later- they analyze & correct immediately because the game is still going on…

So is yours…

…precious time is ticking away while you’re either standing around explaining (to those who really don’t even care) or you just flat out ignore one of the greatest teachers the Universe has to offer: Mistakes.

So do me you a favor…1) As long as they are not illegal, immoral, or unethical, make many mistakes today and right after you make them, 2)Look those mistakes right in the mouth- don’t wince or shy away from them…don’t blame anyone or anything for them. Own them- if you accepted the wins then you sure as hell have got to own the losses. Find & improve your mistakes. And as Coyle’s Law states, “Take mistakes seriously but never personally.”

I’ll see you on the Blacktop.

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