You don't need to get comfortable with frogs

There are some behaviours that build towards the best version of myself that I don't enjoy. This lack of enjoyment ranges from mild annoyance, to hatred. Things like admin, recording my activity in CRM, expenses, planning meetings, debriefing meetings, more admin, cold calling.

I know these behaviours are important, but I won't do them for the enjoyment; if I want to be successful I need to manage them (and myself) effectively.?

"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first", Mark Twain

Let's put some meat on this frog shall we?

I enjoy the results of cold calls. I am proud of the opportunities I've closed because of a persistent and cunning outreach programme that started with an effective cold conversation. No one enjoys making cold calls. They are risky. Cold calling is a rejection sport. I fail more times than I succeed. The surest way to fail at cold calling, is not to do it at all though. Every call I make is an opportunity to talk to someone, learn something new and unearth a problem that I can solve. A problem that I can solve that remains unsolved, is leaving someone in pain. Leaving someone in pain is torture.?

Being in a front-line sales role is a privilege; you get to learn from people you would never normally have the opportunity to talk to. The cold-calling frog deserves to be cooked and served early in the day, to ensure it doesn't hop free. I schedule an hour in the morning, every morning to do a minimum number of cold calls, followed by other cold outreach behaviours. I am calling with the intention of talking to someone so I want to have the opportunity to call at different times in the day, and this is important because people aren't always available to talk to me at 9.32am. So, I schedule myself time at other points in the day to increase the likelihood of talking to people with busy diaries that look just as chaotic as mine. If something unusual or unplanned happens that derails my diary later in the day, I can be confident in the knowledge that I have maintained momentum and done a good number of calls already.

I record these behaviours in a simple spreadsheet so that at the end of the week I can feel a sense of success for having completed all the basic behaviours that I know gives me the optimum opportunity of success.

And if the lagging indicators don't come... ie I don't have the conversations and the meetings that should result from the input of my efforts... then it is easy for me to tweak, adjust and increase my input behaviours until the output I want is achieved.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable

"A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for", John A Shedd

It can be difficult to do the behaviours that we know we should do in order to achieve success. Sometimes it requires pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone: taking on additional responsibility, making a call to a CEO's mobile at 6pm, sky diving. All of these things appear more scary before we do them and then they become "something we've done before" and run of the mill.

I find that when I feel most uncomfortable about something it is exactly what I should be doing, to develop or open an opportunity. I've conditioned myself to seek out discomfort because I've learned that it is a good feeling on my path to achievement.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result", often attributed to, but probably not, Albert Einstein

If you've emailed someone every day for three days, requesting a response, what is it about a fourth email that is going to be successful? What else could you do to (re-)open dialogue? A personalised video sent over a social media platform wouldn't make that difference would it? It feels pretty awkward filming myself and the recipient might think I'm an idiot... Oh wait... Discomfort... Probably should do that then. Worst case it's a "failure" I can celebrate and I can bring it into my toolbox of tricks now that I've got over my discomfort...

Failures are the things we do on the way to succeeding

“I didn't?fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention of?1,000?steps.", Thomas Edison

The behaviours I want to do in my day to day pursuit of success are the minimum behaviours. They are not everything I do. Every day I will set aside dedicated time to fail.

Why would I want to fail every day? Doesn't that massively damage my ego?

No, because you learn much more from a failure than a success. If I learn something valuable every day then that is something to celebrate isn't it?

So what might these failures be? Something that makes me feel uncomfortable in the pursuit of achieving one of my daily or weekly goals. More goals?? Yes, didn't I mention that? Apologies...

Failures can be anything from picking up the phone to talk to the CEO of my own company to ask them a question, to designing and sharing a pricing model with my manager to suggest an alternative way of evaluating the profitability of an opportunity: anything that pushes me out of my comfort zone in the pursuit of progress.

The really bad news here is that if a failure behaviour comes off and succeeds... It's not a failure anymore so it's time to do something else to fail.

I need this

You might have found that there are certain words that trigger you in a different way. This is beyond their dictionary meaning. They evoke additional insight into the subtext of a statement because they indicate more of an emotional response than was intended.

need

/ni?d/

verb

require (something) because it is essential or very important rather than just desirable. "I need help now"

You may be familiar already with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. He suggested a pyramid of basic human needs that motivate us all. From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging needs (friendship), esteem, and self-actualisation.

?

Anything beyond this is a want and not a need.

You will hear people talk about needing to get a deal signed, or needing to buy a new car, or needing a project to be a success. This is a lot of pressure on something that might not come off. What happens if the deal doesn't close? Are we tying our whole being to it? Are we elevating its importance above food, water, shelter, clothing, security, our families? Are we binding the success of this project to our feeling of self-worth and how others see us? Isn't that a little too much?

It's important to create ourself space for safe failure. You may not agree that we can change our approach to failure by recognising that the more we fail, the more we learn, and the more we are likely to succeed. What happens if we load our wants with additional pressure by needing them to be successful and they may not come off? I would recommend protecting yourself and wanting success, never needing it.

Hold me accountable because I am human and will cheat

You might remember from when we looked at target setting that writing down goals increases the likelihood of success by 33%, and so does sharing those goals with someone who can invest in your success and hold you accountable to them.

Who do you know who would be completing similar behaviours to achieve their own goals and targets? You couldn't team up and hold each other accountable could you?

If you were to create a cookbook with all the recipes for your success, put it into a spreadsheet and record your activities throughout the week, you couldn't send it over to your accountability partner as one of your final actions on a Friday, could you? Maybe you could highlight some of your victories and failures in the email along with your learnings?

Doing that wouldn't make it more awkward to cheat and "take a week off" from your goals would it?

It wouldn't make you more successful, would it?