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A Propensity to Take Risks

Don’t get the wrong idea. We’re not talking about skydiving here. Nor are we talking about sinking your life savings in the new start-up dot com that your neighbor told you about. I don’t mean taking risks that might endanger your health, safety, or long-term security.

Instead, I am talking about taking risks that force you to move out of your comfort zones on the job—risks that will stimulate you to stretch yourself, to become more competent, to gain skills you may not currently have, to expand your abilities and maybe, help you become more effective and more efficient.

When I began my business, my focus was 100 percent on consulting. I had never given a seminar in my life. But I read the books on how to build a consulting practice, and all the experts recommended giving seminars as a way to build a consulting practice. I was determined to do so. I developed a program, How to Find, Interview, Select and Hire a Good Salesperson, and approached the local business college with a proposal to jointly present it. They agreed, and a few months later, I presented my first seminar. It was a huge risk—something I had never done before. It caused me to stretch myself and to learn a new set of skills. The seminar was successful and led to another, and to more after that. Within a couple of years, I had realized that speaking and training could be major parts of my practice. Today, my speaking and training income exceeds my consulting income by a great distance.

If I hadn’t taken that first risk, I would never have built a speaking practice and traveled all over the world presenting. Not only has my income expanded, but my life has broadened, and I’ve gained new skills.

That’s the kind of risk I’m talking about. If you can build a propensity to take risks into your job, you’ll grow faster and further than if you remain safely inside of your comfort zones.

You take risks in a lot of ways. When you call on a different type of customer than that with which you are comfortable, you take a risk. For example, when you call on the chief financial officer of a business instead of just the production supervisor, you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone and taken a risk.

When you choose to implement a new strategy or tactic, like rearranging your territory to invest more intensely in your A accounts, you take a risk. When you choose to try a new way to make a presentation, build relationships, or handle objections, you are taking a risk.

Some of those risks will turn out well, others will become failures. Regardless, you’ll become more competent, more confident, and more effective. That’s what good time management is all about.

An Attitude of Openness

You don’t learn anything from people who agree totally with you. You only solidify and harden your beliefs. It’s for this reason that every cult and manipulative organization or person seeks first to exclude their followers from communicating with people who think differently.

I once worked with an extremely manipulative minister who sought to control the loyalty of his followers by influencing them not to talk with people who thought differently. He did that by planting seeds of doubt and distrust. “Be careful about talking to that person, he’ll spread rumors about you.” Or, “So and so is having trouble in her marriage, so don’t talk with her because you’re liable to push her off the deep end.” All of these cleverly planted seeds of doubt served to prevent communication that could have caused people to learn and change their thinking.

When I was a child growing up, the religious institution in which my parents raised us taught that it was sinful to visit a church of another type. We were taught to be afraid to do so. Take even one step inside, and we would somehow be corrupted. That’s what we were taught, anyway. I suspect that the real reason was to discourage us from other ideas. We might be challenged to question some of the beliefs we were being taught, if we exposed ourselves to different ideas.

Much of the world holds on to this approach.  We have visited in Morocco, for example, where conversion from Islam to Christianity is treason, punishable by death. I understand that is almost universally true in the Islamic nations.  Could it be that the mullahs are afraid of what questioning their beliefs might lead to?

Whether it’s a manipulative individual, or a fearful institution, the basic instinct is to cut off people from other ideas in any way they can. When you do so, you cause them to harden their beliefs, and prevent them from questioning and growing.

The opposite tactic, then, becomes a means of enhancing your growth. If you want to grow, improve, and become more successful, then you need to expose yourself to people, practices, and ideas that are different from your own. You need to nurture an attitude of openness.

Add these sails to your life, and watch yourself gain speed and power. Then, put them in juxtaposition with the keels that slow you down. That’s when you begin to perform at your peak.

Life Keels for the Salesperson

The keels in the life of a salesperson are those things that give you substance, that hold you back and tie you down.

In order to stay on course, in order to be effective, use time wisely, and stay afloat in all kinds of conditions, salespeople need to build keels, as well as sails, into their lives. They need those things which provide them depth as well as energy. They need direction as well as power.

Some keels are:

• An examined spirituality
• A chosen character
• A set of higher ethics

An Examined Spirituality

What’s a section on spirituality doing in a book about time management for salespeople? I believe it’s the starting point for a transformation to greater success in your life and your job. It’s at the very heart of who you are. When you make changes in your spiritual beliefs, those beliefs shape everything that you do. Your spiritual beliefs shape your worldview and your worldview determines how you see everything in your life.

Years ago, my wife and I visited Soweto, a large African township that is part of the greater Johannesburg, South Africa metroplex. At the time we visited, some of the children in the elementary school were skipping school in a sort of loosely organized strike. From our perspective, that was pretty unusual. Even more unusual, however, was the reason for this strike. They were objecting to being graded as individuals. In their tribal culture, either the whole class passed or the whole class failed. To separate one child out of the group as doing better or worse than another was to attack a deeply held, spiritual belief about how they saw the world and themselves. They saw themselves less as individuals and more as members of a group.

Think about how that worldview will impact the lives of those children for as long as they live. This was a deeply held spiritual belief underlying their culture, probably below the level of conscious choice, which will determine much of the course of their lives.

While that may be a dramatic example, the principle applies to all of us. Our deeply held spiritual beliefs impact everything we do.

Yet, few people ever examine their spiritual beliefs. The beliefs that are handed down to them are good enough for them. They never examine whether those beliefs are right or true. They only hold on with emotional attachments to beliefs held mindlessly.

I’m writing this amost two decades after the terror attacks of  September 11. It occurs to me that the actions of the terrorists are a powerful example of an unexamined spirituality dictating the course of their lives. People can so deeply believe things that they lose all touch with reality, and that which is good becomes bad and that which is bad becomes, in their mind, good. I wonder if the terrorists have ever stopped to examine their spirituality—to question the core beliefs and to ask if these are right and true. What if they are wrong? What if murdering innocent men, women and children isn’t a good thing commanded by God? What if they have been deceived by a belief system that is fraudulent?

Have you ever examined your spiritual beliefs? Have you held them up to the light of what is reasonable? Have you considered what evidence there is for you to believe what you do?

Spiritual beliefs are so deep inside us that they have the power to shape and direct our thoughts, our mindsets, our attitudes and, of course, our actions.

I happen to be Christian. I came to that position as an adult, at a time when I was searching for some meaning in my life. I came to it as a result of a pretty thorough study of spiritual issues and religious paths. As a result, I have a deep-seated belief that God instilled certain gifts and talents in me, and that part of my appropriate response is to consciously exercise those gifts and talents in a way that strives for a more complete and influential use of them.

If you have examined your beliefs to the point where you are convinced they stand up under the light of critical inquiry, then you can move on, secure in knowing that you have shored up and supported that most basic and deep part of yourself.

A Continuously Refined Character

It wasn’t so long ago that we had political elections in which one of the much-bantered about phrases was, “character doesn’t count.” The idea behind that cliché was that if a person does a popular job in his political office, his personal character was a non-issue.

What garbage! Not only does character count, but character is probably the single most important component of a successful life.

Here’s how Webster’s defines character: an individual’s pattern of behavior or personality; moral constitution. It’s our pattern, the way we can be counted on to act and react. When faced with a possible confrontation, some of us can be counted on to become aggressive, others reasonable. Some may avoid the confrontation. At this point in our lives, our pattern is pretty much set, and we can be counted on to act in that way. In other words, how we generally act in certain situations is a predictable pattern for most of us. It’s part of our character.

Our character determines, more than anything else, our destiny. For every action there is a reaction. Every time we do something, we cause some response or reaction in other people, or we influence the course of some events. So, if we routinely respond to confrontation by becoming aggressive, that aggression prompts other people to resist us. Instead of having a pattern of cooperation, we create an expectation of resistance around us. And that leads to people making decisions about us that are not in our favor.

Wonder why you didn’t get that promotion you were expecting? It probably had more to do with your character than anything else. Can’t figure out why that customer went with the competitor, when you knew you had a better solution? Maybe it was you, not your offer.

See how this works? People react to your character—your pattern of behavior. And the way people react to you determines, to a large degree, how successful you are going to be in your life and in this job.

Your character is the composite of the ingrained habits you have created over the years. Many of these habits have become so deeply imbedded that you don’t even think about them, you just do them.

A habit is created when you repeat an action enough times that it becomes an unconscious pattern. The very first time, as a young child, you chose to respond to a confrontational situation didn’t create a pattern. But by the time you repeated that action a number of times, you established a pattern which became part of your character. It was repeated actions that turned into habits. Those habits became your character. Your character determines, to a large measure, your success.

We can take our analysis of how this works to one more very significant level. At some point, the stimulus to our actions—those same actions that eventually became crystallized into our character—began with our thoughts. Before we can do anything, we must first think it. Remember learning to drive a car? You had to think about every step of the process, from fastening your seat belt to turning the ignition switch to stopping at a red light and so on. You had to think the thought before you could do the deed. Then, after thinking about it over and over again, it became an unconscious habit. But the starting point was a thought—a conscious willful decision to do some action. Our character, then, is the ultimate result of our thoughts.

Let’s review this cause-effect sequence. The way we influence people and events determines our success in life. That pattern of behavior which determines how we influence people and events is called our character. Our character is the assemblage of habits which we have created over the years. Our habits are the results of our repeated actions. Our actions began with our thoughts.

Here’s an incredible principle, certainly one of the most powerful laws in the universe.

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You Can Choose Your Thoughts

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That’s right. You can choose to think the kind of thoughts you want. And when you choose your thoughts, you change your actions. When you change your actions, you modify your habits. When you modify your habits, you shape your character. When you shape your character, you control how you influence people and events. When you influence people and events, you shape your success and your destiny in this life.

This is one of the most powerful truths in the world. And like all such truths, wise men have discovered and rediscovered it from time immemorial. Two thousand years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Paul meant that you can transform yourself—your character and the way the world reacts to you—by renewing your mind, by changing the way in which you think.

More recently, Martin Seligman, Ph.D., in the book, Learned Optimism, described how you can choose to think about adversity in your life, and how that choice of thoughts impacts your level of optimism or pessimism, and how that determines the degree of success you have in your life.

This should come as no surprise to the wise student of human behavior. Of course, your thoughts determine your actions, your actions set your habits, your habits become your character, and your character influences your destiny.

If you can choose your thoughts, you can, therefore, refine your character. Bill Gothard, the great Bible teacher, holds that there are 49 character traits that we choose over the course of our lives. We choose for example, to be generous or stingy; courageous or cowardly; responsible or irresponsible.

Sooner or later, the serious pursuit of the effective use of time comes up against this truth. Over the long term, it is not the tactics you employ to be more efficient that determine your success, it is the character that you exhibit. It is more who you are than any techniques you employ.

The long term challenge, then, for you, is to become a person of continuously refined character—a person who has chosen your thoughts, and shaped your character to become the kind of person who positively influences events and people around you.

A Set of Higher Ethics

There are some ethics that are particularly important for a performance–conscience salesperson. These include honesty, integrity, a serious work ethic and a genuine concern for other people. Let’s consider each.

Honesty and Integrity

Honesty can be defined as telling the truth. The dictionary defines integrity as: intactness, firmness of character. It means that you are who you portray yourself to be—that your habits and commitments can be counted on. You’re not changeable and fickle.

These are of great value because they stimulate trust in your customers, and trust saves you time. I was speaking to a group of professional salespeople in Johannesburg, South Africa, on the subject of integrity in business. At dinner later in the evening, my host, who had been sitting in the audience, sheepishly shared with me that several of the people seated near her snickered at the idea. Evidently, to them sales was just a series of transactions, and the salesperson’s job was to wring as much money out of each transaction as possible, under whatever means were necessary.

Their position was, I believe, sad as well as unwise. Honesty is a powerful sales strategy that is probably more important today than ever before.

It works like this. If you have integrity, you save your customer time. In today’s frenzied world, time is more precious than money for a lot of people. If your customers cannot believe you, then they must spend hours, days, or weeks of precious time confirming the representations you have made. If, however, they can believe you, then they don’t feel the need to check for the veracity of every fact or statement.

Here’s an illustration. A few years ago, we attempted to purchase a condominium in a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. The condo was in a resort location, and had been used as a rental unit. So it came fully furnished, down to the silverware and cooking utensils. We thought it was a good value, a wise investment, and offered the owner exactly his asking price. Shortly thereafter, word came from the real estate agent that the owner, on receiving our full price offer, had increased his price.

The owner may have been looking at his action as a slick negotiating ploy. We saw it as a lack of integrity. If we couldn’t believe his stated price, then we couldn’t believe any of the representations he had made. We would be reduced to counting the number of knives and forks instead of believing the inventory sheet provided for us. We didn’t want to waste the time checking out every aspect of the deal. If we couldn’t trust some of the representations by the owner, then we couldn’t trust any. If we couldn’t trust any, it wasn’t worth it to us to take the risk in dealing with him. We walked away from the deal.

We saw the owner’s lack of integrity as causing us to invest a great deal of time to assure ourselves that the risk was worth the money.

The same is true of your customers. The more your customer trusts you, the less risk your customer feels in dealing with you, and the less time necessary to invest in understanding the product, service or program you are offering. From the customer’s perspective, it’s easier and less risky to deal with someone you trust than with someone you don’t.

And that can translate directly into dollars. I’m always willing to pay more for something if I can buy it with less risk. In other words, if I can buy it from a company or person I can trust. On the other hand, I’d rather not buy something at all if I have suspicious feelings about the vendor.

A Serious Work Ethic

One of the reasons that I’ve been successful is that I’ve always worked hard. I learned that value from my parents. It’s one of those ethics that people respect and that will serve you well over time. Notice I didn’t say work a lot. The average field salesperson in this country works about 49 hours a week. While there are some temporary situations that may call for you to work more than that, I’m definitely not recommending that you do. Working hard doesn’t mean that you work more hours than others. It does mean, however, that you focus on giving those hours your absolute best.

Think about your job in the way I described in Management Secret Two. You fearlessly and relentlessly pursue your goals and strategies. You follow your company’s directions and do what they ask you to do. You don’t take 30-minute coffee breaks three times a day and long, leisurely lunches. You work hard. You give it your best. You use every minute as if it may be the only one you have.

And as a result, good things happen to you. Every so often I run into a salesperson who has a story of some good thing that just fell on him. It seemed to come out of the blue.

I always congratulate the salesperson, and then inquire into the specifics of the good fortune. It can almost always be traced to some work that salesperson did somewhere in the past. It just took a while to come to fruition. I’ve found that the luckiest salespeople, coincidentally, happen to be the hardest workers.

A Genuine Concern for Other People

There is something in human beings that hungers to be understood. There is something that wants others to care about us. These human appetites well up out of the deepest parts of our psyche. All of us want people to care about us and to understand us.

Your customers do, too. Of course we’re focusing on business issues and the business environment. Still, it is impossible to divorce these powerful hungers from our business lives. And that goes for your customers, too. It’s not just about price and product, it is about feeling understood, about feeling that someone really, truly cares about us. When your customers feel that you truly do care about them, then they trust you more, share more with you, and buy from you.

This sense that you care about your customers is an incredibly powerful component in the customer/seller relationship. It is tough to fake, although some people do. To be believable long term, it has to be genuine. That means that you need to develop the value of really, truly caring about your customers.

In Balance

Blending those things that hold you back and limit your behavior with those things that speed your growth and empower your efforts brings you into peak performance. Emphasize sails without keels and you’re likely to spin hurricanes of time furiously going nowhere. Emphasize keels without sails and you’re likely to be stuck in an unmovable rut where nothing changes, especially you. When you build solid keels into your life and juxtapose them with powerful sails, you live in that area of dynamic tension between these two opposing forces which brings out the best in you. You become that which you are capable of becoming, you move out of the world of working hard into the area of working smart and becoming more effective.

Living in balance is one of the greatest time management strategies.