Can I Sell You a Lifeboat? The True Cost of Dream Careers

Perhaps the line between empowering guru and charlatan isn’t as clear as we think? We needn’t look any further than the hucksters of dream jobs that typically involve being your own boss and working from home. They float on the fringes of our ship-wrecked careers selling what else? Life boats.

Their sales pitch is success. After-all, look at what they accomplished! Here’s the problem. Sellers of quit-you-day-job, become famous, be your own boss type courses are smart enough not to make promises that legally make them liable. They make NO gaurantees that following in their footsteps take you to the same destination. They rely on our frustration with current circumstances and need for relief to drive our decision to purchase.

Then, after we’ve bought, we instantly become to them a liability. For most unethical gurus, teaching us is merely an item on a to-do list that needs to get done. Unless we can be sold something more, every minute spent on us is seen as a necessary expense.

Good Intentions – Poor Vision

One can’t broadly implicate all marketers of ineffective advice as wolves-in-yuppies-clothing. In many cases, they may truly believe in the knowledge they impart. After all, look what they accomplished!

Unfortunately, they may have one or more blind spots that cloud their decision-making. One blind spot may be the fact that lucky circumstances played a role in their success. Another could be that the marketplace that made them successful has changed to being less favorable to people following in their footsteps. A more concerning blind spot would be a success guru’s lack of awareness that their own achievements are tenous and based on short-game thinking. This refers to a hyper focus on short-term success over long-term goodwill, Seth Godin (an example of an ethical purveyor of advice), summed it up well in his blog.

A guru can have one or more blind spots and still have the best of intentions. Although they truly want to help us, they are, at times, misguided in their execution of that help.

Our Responsiblity as Advice Seekers

This is where we, as advice seekers, can benefit from caveat emptor or buyer beware approach. Wouldn’t most people be gainfully working for themselves if a single book or online course was all it took? This problem isn’t limited to infomercials or the online marketers either. Universities accross the country, from the local strip mall to the Ivy League offer courses in fields where success is statistically unlikely.

Perhaps, in some cases, the way training courses are marketed is all that needs to change. A more honest approach may be to promote some careers as side gigs or even hobbies. Do we want a world where the value of knowledge is measured only by return on investment? Shrinivas Rao recently conducted an interesting interview with William Deresiewicz on the Unmistakable Creative podcast on this very topic. A class on septic tank clean-up may impart skills that are quite marketable. Why can’t it exist side-by-side in a college course catalog with Selfie Photography 101?

Let’s not fail to ask ourselves, why we’re looking for advice in the first place.

Beyond the solving the problems of our current situation, what are we really looking for? An escape from stress? A feeling of legitimacy? To feel happy again? If so, click here to take my miracle course! (Just kidding! I had to do it.)

Seriously, what we really are seeking may be found in another source. That could be advice from a therapist or coach. By all means, we can quit the day job if we want. It may help first just to see if that’s the real source of our problems.

For me, no quick decision to quit my sales job was needed. What I found a couple years ago was that my perspective needed adjusting. As a result, I was able to grow from needing a quick career escape to patiently planning a career migration. No, things haven’t all gone perfectly for me since then. However, I can confidently say I feel much happier about myself and my work than had I not made the change.

As for anyone selling advice, yes there will the charlatans selling us inflated and false hopes. Reading uplifting stories sometimes focuses us too much on results. See my last post on measurement for more thoughts on this. We buy their courses because want the same happy ending they had. I’d like to see the tellers of miracle, David-and-Goliath-like, success stories give more consideration to how realistic and repeatable their success actually is.

Therefore, we can all benefit from tempering our expectations of the people we pay to teach us and question any story sounds too Cinderella-like to be true. We can choose instead, to keep our day jobs, for now, and measure success in joy not dollars.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

Feel Like You Never Measure Up? Blame Claude Monet

“The next four weeks will feel like taking a sip from a fire hose!” I remember the trainer telling us on the first day of sales training. It was 21 years ago. I had just landed my first real job, in sales for a large software company. He was warning us about the onslaught of information he was about to deliver. All I remember is wondering how I would take it all in and make sense of it.

Today, we have more data at our disposal than ever and less time to interpret it. Reason being, we have more tools than ever to observe, measure, and record information. Facebook was started as a quest for one crucial piece of data: which young women on the Harvard campus were single. Using the same tool, we as users, measure the popularity of every picture and hilarious or profound message we post. Companies also analyze and record what we post, like, and view. Again, the net result is that they have more data on us as ever. And, need we speculate on how much of our personal information the government has? At work and at home, we tell ourselves that more information gives us more insight. We make better decisions, and have better connections with others because of it. We reason that simply having more data on the actions of employees and consumers must , in itself, prove it’s value.

It’s this need to make sense of all the data that can cause us to betray ourselves and others.

Measurement to Metrics – from the essential to the absurd

Measuring as a way of collecting data has been the key to humanity’s survival. How else would early man know how many buffalo to bring back for the tribe? Today, you car’s speedometer keeps you from sailing over a cliff. Your alarm clock lowers your likelihood of needing unemployment benefits. We put our lives in the hands of measurements every time we step on plane. I rest assured knowing somebody knows what all those gauges mean!

Sports, it can argued, are essentially a form of measurement. Which team is better than which? Take a peak at a replay of an old football or baseball game and what will be missing from the screen? Many of the stats we see today (eg Yards per catch, on base percentage, etc). Heck, you may even be hard-pressed to find the score! Given our propensity to bet on sports, a whole industry providing “valuable stats” is sprung into being. You now can know how your favorite football team is likely to perform coming off Thursday night loss, on the road, in the snow.

Measurement and the collection of data has even seeped into our art. We no longer have talent shows. We have talent competitions in which the TV viewers rate performances. Why? Because we can! When watching a TV performance, I’ve never wondered what the rest of America is thinking. Call me a Luddite! Perhaps the fact that we have access to new information implies it must be important?

Thanks to technology, we have the ability to measure more than ever at work as well. Some of us may not be aware that spreadsheets were actually created on paper at one time. Today, there’s no edge of the page to prevent us from creating more columns for more things. And, since we have computers to do all the calculating, we can make new measurements combining two or more current ones. This beckons us to increase the complexity of our measurements.

Over time, we’ve replaced “measurements” with the more sophisticated sounding “metrics”. In the course of performing our jobs, we’ve begun to measure many more things. Salespeople arent’t just measured by their sales. They’re measured with things like sales call to close ratios and calls per day. Physicians aren’t measured by how many patients they cure or see. Their performance is measured in RVU’s or relative value units (a way of determining how valuable the work they do is to the hospital).

So, we live in a cycle of ever-increasing metrics, which create more data, which in-turn creates the opportunity for more metrics. Clearly, we’re beyond the point of measuring for survival, but who cares? More data legitimates the need for more managers to analyze it. It gives viewers a reason to tune in. It tells how much we are “liked”.

Monet-tizing Data

American businesses have learned how to take the data gleaned from metrics and turn it into revenue, an act referred to as “monetizing”. YouTube is no longer just a sharing service for videos of amateur stunts or people’s cats. It’s a sophisticated tool for advertising to select groups of people. Your video watching habits tell advertisers exactly what ads to send you. Sometimes this works and you see a video for something you’d actually consider buying. Many times it doesn’t.

Statistical science gives us ways to compare information and make legitimate sense of it. The problem is that most of us are not scientists. In the absence of verifiable statistical methods, we still try to make sense of all the data we have. Smiling at our own genius, we often draw conclusions from information like someone who is walking backward in order to take in an Impressionist painting. I call this act “Monet-tizing”.

The nice thing about metrics and the knowledge they provide that they make you feel smarter. You now see correlations between things you never noticed before. Things make more sense, or so we tell ourselves. Stories abound about companies finding one crucial metric that helped them create a turn-around. They found the Monet painting in the data, aka. the meaning of it all.

Paradoxically, the more we want our data to tell us, the less it actually delivers. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, is so insightful, that I don’t mind being the hundredth or so writer to reference it. In the book, Dr. Kahneman cites several ways that we commonly misinterpret data. He refers to them as cognitive biases. They illuminate why, after we collect our data, we often draw faulty conclusions. We may see patterns in the data that paint, for us, the picture we’re looking for. In reality, our brains have evolved to find what we we’re looking for and disregard the rest, giving us a skewed view of reality. Sometimes, we draw conclusions when we don’t have enough data. In short, there are many ways we can misunderstand the information we have and it’s implication to our work.

Why We Need to Find Pretty Pictures

Despite technology, our basic needs of food, shelter and companionship haven’t changed. These needs aren’t the result of rational choices. They’re our needs as human animals, not human beings.

How well am I doing at my job? How much money will I make this year? How much closer am I to winning that promotion? These are the typical metrics we put above all else at work. I call these our core metrics. They feed our basic needs.

To achieve some desired level in our core metrics, we happily place more metrics on the outside world than on ourselves. This includes managers critiquing a growing list of metrics on their employees. The popular business mantra ,“I can’t control what I can’t measure” gets inverted to mean that everything measurable is controllable.

We rely on a multitude of external metrics to insure we deliver on our core metrics. Beneath all the data, however, we’re all still anxious sports fans, holding our hands in prayer, hoping we win the metrics game. We’re hoping that the next article we write explodes in popularity or our next business venture is an overnight success.

Measurement Madness

On a personal and deeper level. We often fail to realize that we look for, in measurements, self-validation. We want our efforts in our work to tell us that we have value. We want our work to prove we are worthy of praise, respect, love, etc. We crave what Cognitive Psychology expert Albert Ellis called, Conditional Self-Acceptance or CSA.

If CSA, were a mental illness, most of the World’s population would need to check into a health facility. We all have it, to some degree. Just as measurement can keep our lives on track, their overuse can derail us. Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness, believes that we always have only one true reason for doing everything we do. Everything else is fluff, or useless information we use to justify our decisions.

Simply saying to yourself, “I am a good at my job” without any supporting reasons probably seems irrational. Shouldn’t you have proof of your skill? Some backing evidence, perhaps? Ironically, it’s the meaning that we assign to the “proof” we seek that is irrational. Saying to myself something like, “I must be popular to truly be a good writer!”, would actually be irrational. There are plenty of popular authors that I don’t care for. Instead, I can decide that I accept my writing as “good” without needing the approval of others. Even better, I could chose not to make my proficiency as a writer as a condition for liking myself.

Defining Your Own Metrics

Dr. Ellis called the willingness to accept oneself regardless of any faults or misgivings USA, or unconditional self-acceptance. It involves much more than being one’s own personal cheerleader. Instead, one discovers the beliefs that cause irational thoughts and disputes them. Perhaps the Monet you’ve created of yourself is based on erroneous or irrelevant information. USA allows you to throw it in the trash like a garage sale replica.

I’m not sure where the rush of data is taking corporations or consumers. We may be continue to be measured in ever-increasing ways at work. Our future social lives may be evaluated in more ways, not less, and there may be databases we simply can never remove ourselves from. What I do know is that we as individuals don’t have to let it define us. We can chose not to measure ourselves.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

Ps. I’d also like to credit Srinivas Rao and his book: An Audience of One: Reclaiming Cretivity for Its Own Sake for providing the inspiration for this writing.

4 Reasons to Love Selling (And Why They’re Making You Less Effective)

Do you like your sales job for the wrong reasons?

“Pride cometh before a fall” – Biblical Proverb

Many of the stereotypes of salespeople are unfair. Not all of us are the money-hungry, hyper-competitive, egotists portrayed in movies like Boiler Room. Still, some grains of truth can be found in the way we act when times are good. Consider the following reasons why, as a salesperson, you might love your job:

You love the money and all it brings

The fit of a new suit. The sparkle of a new stone. The smell of a new car. Who doesn’t savor these things?

You enjoy the respect you receive from mangement and co-workers.

You just finshed a great sales year. Your name mentioned multiple times at the sales meeting. Co-workers are asking for your secrets. Life is good!

Your customers love you!

Obviously they do. They buy from you, don’t they? Being liked is much better than the alternative. No doubt, a salesperson can make the difference when choosing between two similar products.

You play to win. And, more often than not, you do.

You’ve never shied away from a fight. You take pride in how focused you are on achieving your goals. Other salespeople aren’t as effective because they’re less confident or they get distracted with customer concerns.

“Yes? So what’s the problem?”, might be the response of a typical salesman at this point. Read on, if you dare, and see how your love for sales may betray you.

Big Money, Bigger Problems

The joy of spending money is in all things new. Alas, like the sales contest you won last month, all things new become old. After a long day of enticing customers with new things, we often, ourselves fall victim to them. Sometimes we make them the very purpose of our work.

Do we expect physicians to work soley for the money? Of course not. They take an oath to put a patient’s welfare before themselves. Teachers consistently say they teach for the joy of teaching. Yes, there are others, perhaps a vast majority of people, for whom work is strictly a means to a paycheck. Sales is different. Salespeople are enticed with wealth.

“Glittering prizes and endless compromises, Shatter the illusion of integrity.”– Neil Peart

In the place of taking serious oaths, salespeople jump and cheer at sales meetings for the new goodies that define next year’s success. Houses have house payments. Expensive jewelry needs to be insured. Luxury cars have luxury repair bills. As years tick by, a salesperson’s “success” accumulates until she wakes up to working for a company she hates, just to pay the bills.

The price of fame

One month after finishing on top of the salesforce you receive the new year’s sales goal. You now have to sell 30% more than you did last year! Within a span of weeks, the intense effort you put in last year becomes “not enough”. Following traditional (and de-motivating) sales management logic, you can never be allowed to feel too confident. Why? Because confident salespeople are lazy! Salespeople respond by working harder to regain that original feeling of confidence. There is another group of people who live in constant pursuit of an original good feeling. They’re called drug addicts.

When you work for the respect of your co-workers you give up something much more important. Respect for yourself.

Your customer is cheating on you

The result of basking in too much customer praise is, however, blindness. We get so wrapped up in being charming that we fail to realize our customers have jobs to do and lives of their own. Salespeople who believe they are loved are often not listening to their customers. Take away the product they sell and away goes the romance. Relationships are important. Still more important is the problem you solve for your customer. That’s why you’re getting their time and attention. If you’ve done your job correctly, your customer is in love with your product, not you.

Playing to an empty stadium

However effective in short-term scenarios, theres a problem with focusing on competition in sales. Customers don’t care. When buying a car, do you want to work with the Salesman of the Year to wait on you or someone who needs your business? Customers like what you and your company do to help them solve problems. The more difficult their problems, the more creativity is required. When we’re in competition mode, our brains can only focus on a few things. To customers, this makes you appear single-minded. This isn’t helpful when an innovative solution is required.

Should salespeople fear success instead?

No. Don’t fear success. Fear the all-consuming need for success. It’s easy to love something when it gives you immediate rewards. A new car never looks (or smells) better than the day you drive it off the lot. Romantic relationships feel great when we haven’t been with the other person long enough to have a disagreement. Being a salesperson feels great when you’re on top. What matters is this, do you have a reason to go to work when times aren’t good? Don’t let what feels good now set you up for disappointment in the future.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

Four Reasons to Hate Sales (And Why They Make You Ideal for the Job)

Let’s start with an introduction. Person who hates sales and swears never to become a salesperson, meet salesperson who is frustrated and unhappy with her job. You have a lot in common!

Surprised? Take a look at the following reasons to hate selling and see if you agree. Then, consider how that belief (even if ill-conceived) makes you a better potential salesperson.

The job of a sales person, at its core, is to lie or exaggerate.

Toilet paper. However boring or unpleasant, can we all agree it’s a product that effectively fills a need? Successful salespeople find customers with needs they can fill. At times, ambition and greed drive salespeople and their companies to push use of their products on customers who don’t need them. So yes, some salespeople do lie or exaggerate.

Luckily, not all companies are that desperate. Greed, on a personal or corporate level, is a choice. Customers buy from people whom they trust and who go out of their way to be ethical.

Feeling the constant rejection of a sales job would be devastating.

We humans are naturally focused on ourselves. We evaluate products based on our own benefit first. Salespeople start their careers with the same self-centeredness. They think their job is to be liked. In reality, customers tend to reject products or selling situations*, not salespeople (unless they’re rude).

Turning our focus away from ourselves and onto the customer helps us see what rejection actually is: information about a customer’s opinion, not a personal judgement. Rest assured, it’s good to be want to be liked. You’d be a jerk if you never cared what others think of you. Just try not to take every part of your job personally.

The pressure of a quota is too much to bear.

Ok, this concern can be legitimate. Not every sales job is created equal. Some employers treat their salespeople like stocks. They buy them low and dump them quickly on bad news. Still, other companies take the time to train and support their salespeople.

Finding a sales job, in today’s market, without a performance target is difficult. Keep in mind, you probably don’t fear the outcome of falling short. You fear what it says about you. Does failing make you a failure? That’s your choice to make.

Anyone in, or considering a career in sales should weigh the level of support offered by a sales position compared to it’s performance expectations.

Customers are often ignorant and never happy. Why try to please them?

Some of us go to great lengths to avoid the people who actually create the need for our work. Customers. Ignore them long enough, and you risk mistaking knowledge of your own business for knowledge of your customer’s. Take the time to listen to customer complaints and you will learn valuable information about how to improve your product offering.

Therefore, it’s more than OK if you don’t want to be that lying, self-absorbed, and stressed salesperson. The profession has hit it’s quota of those people! Instead, Sales needs people who not only want to work hard, but also are sincere and want to help others. Sales needs YOU!

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

*A selling situation is anything referring to the circumstances surrounding the sales interraction. Some common selling situation mistakes are visiting a customer at the wrong time or day, attempting to sell to someone who is not a decision maker, or approaching a decision maker when they are negative state of mind. The customer rejects the situation, not the salesperson or even the product.

4 Ways Salespeople are Trained Like Puppies

Here’s a fun quiz! Below are three pieces of training advice. Read each and decide if it came from either: a popular book on training sales people, or a popular book on training puppies.

1. Invest a lot of time in the first 3 months to help your (sales rep/puppy) establish good habits.

2. Remain consistent when training your (sales rep/puppy).

3. Don’t reprimand your (sales rep/puppy) for mistakes made. Instead, quietly direct them to the proper behavior.

So, which advice is for puppies and which is for sales people? Answer: all three are for puppies!

Surprising? Not if you’re a salesperson. If you are, you’ve dealt with a mixture of treats and belt-lashings over the years. Here are 4 reasons to believe the training of sales people hasn’t progressed beyond that of puppies:

1. Like puppies, salespeople, regardless of experience, are often treated as if they know nothing. Years of selling experience can be negated by a simple change of industry. Hiring managers and trainers alike have little patience for learning the intracacies of selling anything other than their own product. Surely that information is irrelevant!

2. Because they all equally know nothing, salespeople and puppies are both given very rigid direction. Despite the recommendations popular management books like, “Leadership and The One Minute Manager“, sales training continues to use a one-size fits all approach. The problem is not that older reps can’t learn new tricks. It’s that they’re less likely to encounter anything that’s truly new to them.

3. When it comes to training, salespeople and puppies are given about an equal level of respect. Yes, humans are permitted to ask many more questions than dogs. But, no sales rep is permitted, realistically, to alter his own onboarding or training process before it’s done. Please don’t question me on this point until you’re done reading this article! (Get it?)

4. After initial training, salespeople face more negative consequences than dogs. Sure, no one is dropping their underperforming reps off at the pound. That would be expensive! Thankfully, the old tradition of negative reprimands are gone – if you’re a dog. Salespeople continue to face the pressure of quota attainment, despite the challenges of specific territories or customers. And, thanks to forced rankings, salespeople are compelled to sniff their own pile of mistakes on a regular basis.

So, what’s a lowly salesperson to do? The best response to being treated like an animal is to act like an intelligent human being. Your manager and trainer don’t want to see you fail. They may have perfect intentions, but no clue how to help you.

If possible, determine for yourself, what knowledge you need to be successful. If you’re not sure what that is, ask. Check first with other reps, then your manager, then you’re training staff. It’s important to talk to someone in the trenches first to learn how business is actually gets done. Only then should you move up the chain to learn the way things “should” work. Most importantly, you can reconcile the corporate and field points of view by asking informed questions in your training class.

Don’t be afraid to bark the loudest! When you get to the field, your leash may be long but your learning time will be limited.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

Ps: The book I borrow from is, “A Member of the Family: The Ultimate Guide to Living With a Happy and Healthy Dog“, by Cesar Millan.

Salespeople: Don’t Hope for Luck, Look for Leverage

Coins clinking out of a slot machine. The crowd cheering the winner of a marathon. A Sales VP announcing this year’s #1 salesperson. What do they all have in common? Chances are, they’re the sound of good news for someone other than you. Oh well, better luck next time!

We all know we shouldn’t be jealous of winners. Some people just have the luck! When WE win, we remember all the hard work and persistence involved. Some salespeople are bold enough to claim they make their own luck. And the debate rages on. High performing salespeople dismiss the influence of luck while others blame it. In reality, both sides miss the point. Random chance does exist. But, predicting or measuring it’s role in sales is pointless. Now is the time to move beyond the luck debate.

Instead of ignoring or blaming luck, seek to clarify it. What we often label as luck is often really something else. Leverage.

The key is to understand what luck (presented as leverage) we have and act accordingly. The umbrella salesman in a rain storm has leverage. The snow plow driver in Phoenix has none, unless there’s a freak snowstorm. Any time your customer is forced to solve a problem you have leverage. Using the pricing of an existing product, with a current customer, to win the sale of new one? Leverage. Convince a customer to buy now to avoid next month’s price increase? Leverage.

“We’ll get back to you.”, is a phrase that experienced sales people learn to translate to mean “NO” or “Not right now.” Otherwise, days waiting for their decision can stretch out into months. In non-leveraged selling, your greatest enemy is the do nothing scenario. You’ve just spent hours of your time preparing for and conducting meetings with your prospect The result? You’ve delivered a free and comprehensive summary of how to solve a business problem. A problem that can wait.

What do I do when I don’t have leverage?

You have two choices: create it or look for it. Proponents of the Challenger Mindset will tell you your role is to create leverage. Go out and find a reason for your customer to act. Shock them. Scare them. Do something to shake your customer out of complacency. When done well, the customer thanks you at the end of the sale for helping them avoid disaster. When executed poorly, you look like yet another pushy salesman using fear to make a buck.

The easier option is to look for leverage. Know your product and potential customer so well that you can find prospects with problems you can solve. This learning process involves talking to current customers and even sales people. Get to know your product and industry a level deeper. Learn the signs and symptoms of a customer in pain and look for them.

As for luck? If your job or territory came with obvious leverage, congratulations! You’ve won the sales lottery. The rest of us have to work to find it. Yes, top performers are sometimes just plain lucky. But, let’s be clear about what they’re lucky for. Having the leverage. That’s luck. Recognizing and using the leverage they possess, that’s where the skill and hard work make the difference.

One final note on leverage. Don’t overplay it. When circumstances force a customer to act, don’t be the salesperson waiting to exploit their needs. No leverage exists forever. New competitors. New technology. Something will come along to take it away from you. Your customers will remember how you treated them.

In short, don’t ask whether or not you are lucky. Instead, look for the leverage waiting within your own territory. As they say in poker, “Play the hand you’re dealt!”

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

Ps. No. The universe is not required to hand out leverage equally, to all salespeople. Do the best to find and use what leverage you have. It could be that you need to work harder than another sales person in order to achieve the same results. Sorry. Therefore, never turn a blind eye to leverage in other sales positions. Use it as a key way to evaluate new sales positions. You won’t regret it!

Driven and Distracted: The Secret Problem Many Salespeople Share

A career in sales can be exciting and rewarding. The admin work required? It sucks. CRMs. Expenses. Sales reports. They take away your selling time with little payback. Other tasks, like customer follow-through, are essential to a sales person’s success. Doing them requires discipline and neglecting them GETS you disciplined.

Do you struggle with any of the following problems?

1. Difficulty completing boring-yet-important tasks, like entering calls

2. Habitually turning sales reports in late

3. Not fulfilling commitments to customers-even the important ones

4. Forgetting to bring something crucial to a sales call

5. Doing twice the work of your teammates because of any of the above problems

6. Feeling as if you’re the only rep on the team with these issues

Are these symptoms of a careless sales rep? A manager may think so. Heck, you may agree. To a mental health professional, these are possible symptoms of ADD or ADHD. (Yes, they are two different disorders. For simplicity’s sake I’ll stick to ADHD).

As you know, in sales, effort does not always equal output. Have you ever worked your tail off on a sale only to appear lazy or disorganized? Therein lies the problem. Administrative difficulties can push you away from an otherwise likeable job. At the same time, they distract management from your true effectiveness as a salesperson.

Here are 6 steps to addressing and feeling better about those little problems that add up:

1. Get tested for ADHD/ADD. See a psychiatrist or other physician AND talk a counselor. Why both? One focuses on things from a medical perspective and the other works on how you think. Accept that ADHD is a real affliction. Although you won’t be forced to take medicine, most are proven effective and safe. Do you have a child or other family member that’s been diagnosed? It runs in families. To better understand the symptoms of ADHD and how it’s diagnosed click here.*

2. Get rational about the World. After a mistake, you need to pick yourself up, not beat yourself up. Yes, forgetting your power cord at home, can make you want to throw your company laptop out the window. Stop and think. What can you change about what happened in the past? Anger and self-torture only take MORE time away from doing a better job in the future. And, a supportive, non-manipulative manager won’t be impressed with your self-loathing. You control only your own actions and feelings, not those of others. To take responsibility and stop upsetting yourself, check out, “How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything”, by Albert Ellis.

3. Get rational about customers. Yes, you play an important role in the sales process, but, you’re not the main character. Your clients are thinking, breathing, human beings that act on their own freewill. You don’t truly control their decision-making. After losing a sale, you’ll always be able to find fault in your actions. Stop telling yourself a flawless sales presentation would’ve guaranteed success. You’ve probably made some of the same mistakes with the clients you’ve won. ADHD is not an excuse, but a fact of life. Focus on getting better, not on being perfect.

4. Get organized. This is step 4 for a reason. If you lack a rational view of yourself and your customers, no to-do list will save you. Before you rush out to buy the next killer new app or Day Planner, change your work habits. In, “The Power of Habit”, author Charles Duhigg explains how you can replace bad habits with good. When its time to add technology (digital or paper), check out “Taking Control ADHD” podcast for tips on the latest tech and coping strategies. Always keep in mind, if you have ADHD, you WILL make mistakes again, Being organized will help you reduce, not eliminate, them.

5. Play to your strengths. Many people with ADHD are highly creative. Despite forgetting to put your calls in, you may be the best on your team at answering objections or crafting new solutions. Use that strength and don’t be shy about having it. This also means reconsidering the type of product you sell and company you work for. Companies that offer more autonomy to sales people tend to require less reporting.

6. Measure yourself differently. Accept that you may never be the best at the mundane parts of your job. Nothing about ADHD is a death sentence. Making mistakes and continuing to move forward separates those who improve and those who stagnate. “You’re Never Going to Be “Caught Up” at Work. Stop Feeling Guilty About It.”, is the title of a recent Harvard Business Article by Art Markman.

Ultimately, all of us work for ourselves. So, be a good boss! When you support yourself win or lose, you find the strength to accomplish more.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work

3 Ways Salespeople Miss Out on the Gig Economy

It’s been in the news and it’s now being studied by business schools. Have you heard the phrase “Gig Economy”? It refers to the growing percentage of the US work force that works independently. Think everyone from Uber drivers, to high end consultants, and everyone in between.

In the past few years, I’ve seen colleagues, some with 10-20 years at the same company, move on to new ventures. Switching jobs is nothing new to us. Companies launch new products and staff up and others get bought out and lay off. When you’re selling well, you ride a high of money and accolades. When you’re struggling, you drown in self-doubt and identity crisis. It’s the environment sales people have lived in for years. Gig economy workers share the same uncertainty of income, feeling of isolation, and risk of distraction that outside sales reps experience. At the same time, they receive several freedoms that corporate sales people can only dream of:

The freedom to define success

Corporate sales people are told how much to sell. Despite earnest attempts to make sales targets fair, there are always winners and losers. As we all know, the externallly imposed measurements, (see. ) directly affect our income, self-esteem, and motivation going forward. Gig economy workers have the ability to say when they have and haven’t accomplished enough.

The freedom to change directions

Corporate sales people are the first to know when a sales initiative isn’t working. At the same time, they are often pressured to stay the course. Gig economy workers are limited only by their own resistance to failure. They have no one to blame other than themselves. In contrast, corporate sales people are often blamed for “poor execution” when someone above them wants to avoid blame for a bad idea.

The freedom to define their product

Most sales people in corporations sell a product or service they do not produce or control. At most, they choose what to say about their product and what customers to target. Have you ever had to grudgingly acknowledge that a comptetitor’s solution was actually better than your own? Gig economy workers have the ability to throw out rules and craft their own solutions on a customer-by-customer basis.

In a recent Harvard Business Review Article entitled, “Thriving in the Gig Economy”, authors Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan J. Ashford, and Amy Wrzesniewski, interviewed 65 workers successfully working in freelance occupations. They discovered these entrepreneurs shared four common strategies they used to cope with the highs and lows of their work. These included self-defining your place, routines, personal support network, and purpose.

A sales job in corporate America can provide you with the first three elements. That is, until you outgrow them. As for Purpose, if your sales job comes with a sense of meaning, consider yourself very lucky! Most of us attempt to substitute money for that.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work