Get comfortable with uncomfortable.

Rubber bands.

That's right. Rubber bands. We've all used rubber bands. We've made large rubber band balls that bounced around the classroom, we've made poor attempts using them to put our daughter's hair into a kind-of-ponytail looking clump, and we've pulled them off lobster claws. We've snapped them, shot them, broken them, and stretched them further than we thought they could go.

Why rubber bands? Metaphorically, it's perfect. How far do you stretch yourself? Speaking to an audience mostly made up of sales professionals, how much further have you stretched your capabilities recently? Ask yourself honestly - how much better are you today at your job than you were at this time last month? Last quarter? Last year?

When my family and I moved to Dublin, Ireland in 2013, I joined a local gym. Emblazoned on the wall and on the backs of all of their t-shirts was a simple saying: "Get comfortable with uncomfortable." At first glance, it was annoying CrossFit speak. Especially at 5:30 in the morning. But over time, the meaning of the quote evolved. As the coaches helped tweak and improve my form on certain movements, the words meant more. As small changes yielded incremental improvements, the saying started to resonate. Over the course of a few months, as I began to directly address fears, comical inflexibility, and other challenging portions of different workouts, the phrase took on a whole new meaning. It became a life-motto. It was something I carried with me into the office and brought home. To "get comfortable with uncomfortable" was to become a better version of myself. It helped provide context during challenging situations in all facets of life. And when you're in sales? Well. Uncomfortable is common.

Looking back on a sales career that began as a 22 year-old knucklehead gopher processing orders and grabbing coffees for the Lynnfield, MA-based team at Sophos, I distinctly remember my first uncomfortable moment: the day one of the reps asked me if I wanted to get on the phone and start cold calling. I thought "this is my chance - I can show these guys that I can sell too - I'll finally get a shot at a BDR role - don't screw it up." My first few dials, much to my relief, went to voicemail. But the third call - to a large school district in southern California - was answered by the exact decision maker I was targeting. Which scared the bejesus out of me. I believe it went something like this:

SoCal School Dude: Hello?

Me: HithisisJoshcallingfromSophoscanItalktoyouaboutyourcurrentanti-virusimplementationforafewminutes?

SoCal School Dude: Sorry, can you slow down. Who is this?

Me: Sorry about that - this is Josh calling from Sophos. Can I talk to you about your current anti-virus implementation for a few minutes?

SoCal School Dude: Oh, hey Josh. Thanks for the call man, but we're all set over here.

End call.

I can still feel my 180 bpm heart rate from that call. And when he hung up, I felt I had failed miserably. Understandingly, the sales rep turned around and said, "Hey man - congrats on getting your first one under your belt. Here's something you might want to try next time you get someone on the phone..." and coached me through some steps to improve. It was the first time in my very young career that I had been made truly uncomfortable, and as a result, got incrementally better at my job. I learned something new. And I didn't keel over and die doing it. Over the course of the next 15 or so years, I've tried to yank myself out of that comfort zone as often as possible. As Ignatius of Loyola once remarked "If you're not getting better, you're getting worse." And the only way to get better is to work on the skills you've yet to master. In sales, that's objection handling, price negotiation, quality discovery questions, prospecting, forecasting, and on and on and on. There are so many skills to work on, in theory, we should spend the rest of our long, successful careers continuously improving. With that approach, you can get better. You will get better.

Think about your own accomplishments in life thus far: graduating from college, finishing a musical or theatrical performance, winning a big game, crushing an interview and getting the job, closing a tough deal, finishing as the top rep for a month - what do they all have in common? Those accomplishments took a tremendous amount of discomfort to achieve. All the practice, study, effort, emotional & mental equity - it was a challenge. A challenge you faced, sometimes with disdain, but faced nonetheless and got to the other side of it. And you had help - coaches, teachers, spouses, parents, and managers all pushed you to be better. You were asked to stretch further and f-u-r-t-h-e-r until you became something slightly different than what you were. You improved and emerged a better version of your former self.

Take a moment to ponder your sales career this way: if you get a tiny bit better today, then a little bit better tomorrow, and you follow that pattern of small improvements over the course of a, dare I say it, 30 year sales career, where would that leave you? Well, if you work an average of 246 days per year (261 available work days minus an average of 15 days off), that's 7,380 days of work - more than 59,000 payable hours over your magnificent career. If you were to dedicate just 15 mins per day - 15 minutes per day - trying to get better at your job, that's almost a year's worth of time spent on skill development - development most of your peers aren't bothering to indulge in.

What qualifies as "skill development?" The category is broad, but the best way to think about it is what can I work on today that I'm either a) not very good at, b) doesn't come naturally, or c) I don't already know. If you have a training or sales enablement team, they likely have a boatload of material for you to review to keep the saw sharp, but it's on you to review the material regularly. Are you signed up to Google alerts for things happening in your industry? Have you mastered the pitch for the new product you're launching? When's the last time you asked your cube neighbor, team lead, or manager to do a role play? Have you asked the top rep this quarter how he's positioning the product differently? The resources for improvement are truly without boundaries. If you want to learn and become a better salesperson today than you were yesterday, do it. It's right in front of you. The only resource it requires is effort.

That small, daily, incremental effort will separate you from your peers who choose to rest on their laurels and hope for opportunities to arrive at their doorstep. It will provide openings to take on bigger challenges and more responsibility than your peers. Frankly, it will make you different. And as we've learned in our sales training "you can't be perceived as better unless you're perceived as different."

So which rubber band are you? The small, inflexible one with limited range? Or the one willing to stretch to the point of almost breaking for the sake of morphing into someone with a greater range of ability? Choose the former and you'll be a comfortable commoner. Choose the latter and you're only as limited as your tolerance for occasional discomfort.

Be rare. Be uncommon. Get comfortable with uncomfortable.