Tendencies take you down

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Show notes for episode #489 “Tendencies take you down.” Listen right here.

On Episode #488, we talked about details. The more professional you are, the more detailed, you should be, but usually it’s the other way around. The more professional we consider ourselves to be, the less detailed, we actually are.

Instead of using your experience to prepare, you instead use your experience to wing it.

NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Deion Sanders kept detailed information on every player he faced. Sanders kept details on every player he played against-from the rookies to future Hall of Famers.

You know what Sanders was looking for? Tendencies. From the way a player broke the huddle to the positioning of  his feet.

Sanders would use your tendencies to beat you.

Tendencies take you down.

Others aren’t beating you, you’re beating you…through your tendencies. Josh from Covington Louisiana, emailed me (& you can too @ thesaleslife1@gmail.com),

 “Marsh I’m three years into sales and no matter what I do, I always seem to sell the same amount of vehicles. Even if I start off hot, I end up in the same boat. How can I break free of this?’

Josh, asked a perfect question for today’s podcast. We’ve all found ourselves stuck a time or ten thousand…

Your growth is in your tendencies. You can’t have different by doing the old. Know your tendencies. Your tendencies are your natural default settings that you revert back to without even thinking.

When an environment is conducive to your tendencies, then your tendencies will kick in without your realization. It’s as if you’re floating in an inner-tube down a lazy river (of tendencies)…and the waterfall is just ahead.

When Josh gets rolling, maybe his tendency is to psychologically pull up, thinking, “I did it,” but the problem is he’s no longer doing it.

Maybe he’s lost his sense of urgency.  That’s why I say that you should work as if you broke & sell as if you’re rich. But when you achieve a little success, you tend to be dyslexic in thought.  You work as if you’re rich & sell as if you’re broke.

With an arrived mentality, you start coming in a little later and not as fierce as you started, plus you’re selling as if you’re broke- rejections mount up…deals don’t bounce your way, customers buy elsewhere, to the point where you begin to personalize the losses and feel sorry for yourself.

The world’s not picking on you. The world is showing your tendencies.

Tendencies take you down.

To conserve energy, your mind is always looking for patterns. It spots a pattern and boom, your defaults kick in.

If there is no trigger, there are no tendencies.

You have to disrupt your patterns by knowing your tendencies.

Bring your tendencies to an awareness, but this will take complete ownership on your part because you can’t blame your tendencies away, but you can bring them to an awareness.

You can begin spotting the times you start to veer off course. You have to disrupt your tendencies before the tendencies disrupt you.

Tendencies are small yet powerfully destructive. Where you sit…where and how you stand…the phone you use at work…the actions you take when when a customer buys or doesn’t buy. When they buy, do you hide to celebrate or do you look for the next opportunity? When a customer doesn’t buy do you spend 45 minutes recapping to others who were glad it was you and not them?  What do you say to yourself at certain times? Do you take the same route to and from work? When you’re having a bad month do you push yourself to come in earlier and stay later or do you fold to your feelings?

Many people write me and say that they are going to start getting up earlier, but they might as well sleep in because when they wake, they have the tendency to pick up their cell phone and look at social media instead of using the earlier time to make an impact in their own lives.

My tendency lately, has been to come home, grab something to eat, and sit down to relax. On the way home I vowed to go workout but the minute I sit down, I cave and promise to hit it hard tomorrow. I now see the tendency and that tendency can take me down. So I have to disrupt the pattern by changing clothes and  immediately getting the workout in…because I know my tendencies once I sit down.

So here’s your TSL never settle action item for today:

1. What are one or two tendencies that are taking you down? (Be honest. If you’re shrugging it off, it’s probably a destructive tendency.)
2. What have you traditionally done in the past?
3.  What will you do different?

Email me your answers @ thesaleslife1@gmail.com.

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What’s the 1 thing?

After losing 70 lbs many people ask me how I lost the weight and although I was excited to tell them all of the thoughts and methods that went into my no pill, no surgery weight loss, I found that I would lose them in mere seconds. At first, they were eager to hear, but when I exploded into my passionate ordeal, their eyes would glaze over with information overload. So now when people ask me the “how’d you do it” question, I keep it simple by saying, “Just do one thing..”

I had a friend who was frustrated because she couldn’t seem to shake the baby weight off and everyone she asked gave her conflicting advice. One person says more cardio and less weight training while another says less cardio and more weights; one says to eat more fruit another person says eat bacon and cut out the carbs. She had no idea who to believe so she ended up doing what most of us do…nothing.

She ended up joining a gym, but ended up never going because her days were overloaded with taking the kids to & from school, dropping them to karate and dance, rushing home to cook, take baths, and do homework so by the end of the day she was too exhausted to even cry. The thoughts of what she should do made the situation even worse, “I know I should work out, but I’m just too tired and hate myself  for not going,” she said. Her frustration led her to smoke more, eat worse, and sink even deeper into misery.

All I could do is smile because we can all relate to her story.

My advice to her? “Just do one thing…”

The reason why resolutions don’t work is because we try to change too much all at once. We vow to not eat fried food and never look twice at Blue Bell ice cream again. We swear that we’re going to get up early and not stay up late…someday…just not today, because we’re too busy running on the hamster wheel of Life.

Studies show that if you try to change 3 or more things at once you’ll have a 5% chance of success; if you try to change 2 habits, you’ll increase your chances of success to 30%, but if you just try to change 1 habit, you’ll have an 85% success rate. If you’re trying to lose weight, pay down debt, or be more productive or knowledgeable, just do one thing to nudge yourself in the right direction.

In my friend’s case I asked her, “What is the one thing that you could put into your already hectic life right now that wouldn’t disrupt everything else?” She stared at me blankly unable to mentally find the overlaps in her time.  She told me that she didn’t like to wake up early; collapses in bed exhausted every night, and her lunches are crammed with having to run around town and pay bills. Her only constant was her three 15 minute smoke breaks every day. “Give me 1/2 of each one your breaks,” I told her, “The first 8 minutes are yours to do whatever you want to do-smoke, gossip, drink soda-do whatever, but the other 7 minutes I want you to walk around the outside of the building. On the next break do the same thing except go into the bathroom stall and knock out as many air squats as you can in 7 minutes. The last break go for another walk and bang out some push-ups in an obscure location or do lunges the full length of the hall way.” The truth is we all have spare moments, but the fallacy is that we think the moments are too insignificant to see any real, meaningful results…so we end up doing nothing, but beating our self-esteem to death.

Without changing anything in the course of a normal, chaotic day, she just found 21 minutes to change the course of her life.

Can you write a book, master a craft, or have a beach body in just 21 minutes? Not in “a” day, but you sure as hell can “per” day.

The problem is we want the results, but haven’t yet built in the consistency, so taking 7 minutes a few times during the day will do just that. These micro-wins cauterize the depression and negate the self-sabotage and as you win more, you’ll find that you’ll challenge yourself to more too. With a fresh perspective, you’ll find more windows of opportunities to increase your success capital. Early into my weight loss quest, instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media while waiting for my son’s practice to end, I jumped rope while he took snaps. At games, during half time, instead of running to the concession stand, I would sneak off to a secluded part of the parking lot and do a 15 minute body weight program from the Fitness Blender channel on YouTube instead. This is what James Clear calls habit graduating; putting 1 habit into your day, becoming a mf’ing boss at that tiny habit, and then graduating with a little more along the way. My 7 minutes, led to 15 minutes, which parlayed to 1 mile that ended up in a half marathon and along the way, I ate better, thought clearer, and produced more.

The slights got you to where you are today…and the slights will take you where you need to be in the future…but first start with just 1.

I’ll see you on the other side and can’t wait to hear about your results.

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.

 

Do you still have the Ooh Factor?

After all of these years, do you still have the Ooh Factor? You do remember the freshman Ooh Factor when you first hit the blacktop; you were literally oozing with Optimism, [saw] Opportunity, and had [good] Habits. Like athletes, salespeople need an edge; these factors are edge- the triplets to maintaining a successful sales career.

• Optimism: What are you expecting each day? Are you looking through the lenses of optimism and seeing a favorable outcome or looking through the microscope of the daily minutia? When you look through a microscope, you magnify your problems and often you become drilled down into things you have no control over. You have no control over yesterday’s customer who had sub-par credit or was $11k buried in their trade. How many problems did you have when you first got into the business? The only thing you were focused on was making a sale; you didn’t know enough to have any other worries. A baby doesn’t know when he will begin to walk; he just gets up and tries, falls, and tries again. The same is true for you in sales; you fall down, and must get back up and try again.
• Opportunity: Because of your optimism, opportunities seem to open up everywhere. Ever hear of beginner’s luck for the green pea? Beginner’s luck is nothing more than optimism; because of the optimism, opportunity is created. While the new kid is sprinting across the lot in order to grab a key for his next customer, all of the veterans stand around and jealously sneer at his efforts. The sad truth is they remember they too used to be that way. Optimism breeds opportunities; conversely pessimism produces more problems. What you look for you will find; when you look for the problems in each customer, you begin to punch holes into your own sales. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimism overcomes optimism and becomes a vicious cycle. When this happens, you begin to focus on the problems hindering you from making a sale instead of cherishing the opportunity right in front of you.
• Habits are the glue that holds your fortunes or your misfortunes together. Habits guarantee results 100% of the time; unfortunately you may not like the outcome of your daily disciplines. If you make it a daily priority to read 30 minutes pertaining to sales, make 3 new phone calls, and don’t leave until you catch 2 ups each day, your habits will reap you a fortune. As Dennis Waitley said, “Habits are like a submarine, they run silent and deep.” It takes time to rewire your patterns you’ve developed; you didn’t obtain the habits overnight, nor will you rid yourself of them. If you don’t like where your are, change your habits to obtain your have-its.

You still have the Ooh Factor; it may be lying deep in the recesses of your mind, but it has never left you. All it takes is faith in your abilities, daily action, and focus in the daily disciplines. When you tweak the efforts-you will reap Ooh results.