'Just thinking..'

Like most sales guys in their 20s, I used to be a big fan of sales conferences.

Besides the obvious luxuries of being pampered in some fancy Five/ Seven star resort for 3-4 days, these events used to provide the perfect getaway from the grime and the grind of the sales field for a few days.

If you are a sales person yourself or have seen or been to one of these conferences as an observer, you would agree that they follow a typical pattern, and nothing much has really changed from the days when I used to be a youngster, till the present day.

A typical day in a sales conference starts at about 7.45 AM when most participants wake up nursing a whale of a hangover from all the mixed- up alcohol of the night before. From popping asprin and sipping black coffee, to cursing their bosses and their constipations, generally the sales guys make it to the breakfast buffet by around 8.26 AM and by then they have just 3 minutes left to do breakfast and reach the conference hall. Some of them manage to do this heroic act with precision (thanks to a mastery attained from years of practice),but there are always some newbies who would not be so lucky and who would saunter into the conference hall several minutes late (sometimes, they also could end up inside a solemn conference of some OTHER organization in an adjacent hall, and not even realize it before the next coffee break?!).

So, between cookies and coffee, power point business updates and some odd motivational speaker trying to wake them up from their deep sleep, somehow most sales guys love the first two days of the conferences as these are mostly passive in nature and all they have to do is get into a dark corner and doze off while they can.

(I personally know of instances when some of the sales guys went on sleeping even AFTER their meetings for the day had ended and the rest of their group had left the hall. And even when a NEW group came in and started ANOTHER meeting around them).

The last two days tend to become more painful because that’s when they are called up to make presentations on their territories, justify shortfalls (if any), and to take in a lot of uncomfortable questions from a bunch of fat and balding morons sitting at the head table (who somehow give the impression that they have NEVER sold a single thing in their whole life !).

However, all that is made up during the evening cocktails, when they forgive all those interrogations or unpleasant tirades , and drown their entire anguish in scotch. The unending kebabs accompanying the whisky give their newly protruding bellies(applicable to the younger sales folks ) the right doze of toxic calories, and you can easily tell the difference in experience levels of the sales guys by looking at the circumference of their middles.

A quick ready reckoner to the same is as follows –

(?Sales Executive?: Waist- 32’ ;?Area Manager?: Waist -36” ;?Regional Manager?: Waist 38-40” ; ‘?National Sales Manager?: Waist – N/A , since it now looks more like a circus tent and not a human waist anymore).

And you can imagine how all these guys look when they start dancing (!) together after their 6th drink, some getting wildly emotional and others adventurously swinging their booties to dangerous degrees !

Anyway, guess I am digressing and getting carried away in nostalgia.

Coming back to the title of this chapter, there used to be this guy in one of the organizations I worked with, and who was a little different from the flock of sheep that we all used to be during those days.

He used to be articulate, well prepared & alert during the meetings and often he used to be the one who would come up with the most insightful observations and suggestions in the room.

(Also, he did not sport a pot belly like most of his peer group).

He was a young (around mid 30s) Vice President of the company. Let me call him ‘Sid’ for the sake of respecting his privacy .

So, we were in this 5- day conference in Goa sometime in the early 2000s, and it was the second evening (meaning, the next morning was when our ordeals would kick off).

I was on my way to my room to change into my casual wear and come down to the evening bar when I passed Sid sitting on one of the beach facing pool side benches & staring at the sea.

He was alone, and seemed to be deeply engrossed in something.

I said hello and asked him what he was doing there all alone.

He took a while to come back around to the surroundings. He then gave me a quick smile and said simply –

“Hey Ayon. No, I am not doing much. I am just thinking..”.

Long after I left Sid sitting there, or even during the evening drinks and yet later as I lay on my bed at night , my mind kept going back to Sid’s words. I realized why Sid was a little different from the crowd.

In our mad rush to jump from activity to activity, we often don’t spare a few moments to sit quietly and THINK. I reflected that like most of my?mercenary?colleagues , I too was doing the same thing – hopping from one mad scramble to another, burning myself for no reason, and without any analysis of the past or with a strategy for the future.

Even today, I often remember that incident .

Along the years, I have mellowed down as a sales person. Yes, I still drink at conferences . And I still (sometimes) long to fall asleep during long meetings (though these days I don’t have that luxury too often, as I have graduated from being a youngster to being one of the senior citizens in the conference rooms?and probably a butt of jokes among my younger colleagues?:) )

But somewhere over the past decade, while having embraced many bad habits, I have tried to build on this one good habit. And I recommend every young sales manager to try and do this too. It would help

I have two blocks of time kept aside every day during these meetings / conferences.

The first is my morning running hour on the treadmill .The second is an hour I try and squeeze in between the time when my afternoon session ends and before the evening opens up.

I call this my “Sid time”. Or my “Me Time”.

I do?NO?multi -tasking during these periods.

I just?THINK.

And curiously, things start taking shape in my mind as I think. Difficult questions automatically discover their own answers. Plans form on their own and start making sense, all by themselves. Conversations start getting played and replayed as I think on and they get polished as I go over them, talking to myself .

I thank ‘Sid’ for this.

Try building this habit if you too are a young sales person and eager to get better as you grow up . It helps.

Sometimes, we need to just empty our mind from everything and withdraw into our silences. They are always trying to tell us something.

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?This is a chapter from my 2020 book, 'As You?Life?It'. A big thanks also to my reader friends for such a generous response to my new book, 'Life-ing?it'. You may grab a copy at Amazon ( links below) or Flipkart ( India). If you are in other countries, Google Play, Smashwords etc also have it instantly available).

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