Change is never painful, Only the resistance to change is painful.
– Lord Buddha
Do you know any habit of yours is detrimental to your growth? How many times did you realize that some of your actions are not in sync with you values? Did you fail to bring about a consistent change in your behavior?
Familiar? If you ask me, I would say 100%. I have realized this bitter truth many times over the last couple of years.
Sometimes through my friends and at other times, through deep introspection, I have realized that I am unable to remove the limiting behavior or bad habit. It looks like it has become my second nature.
In this post, I will try to articulate my thoughts on why I repeat this limiting behavior and what can I do to stop it altogether? Also, I will address why do we provide resistance to change and what can we do about it?
Identifying a Limiting Behavior
The first step to resolving a conflict is to find the source of the conflict. So, in this case, I must first identify which of my behavior is not helping me grow.
In order for me to identify which of my behavior is not in line with my goals, I must look at dissatisfaction in different areas of my life.
I can take the example of Sales for my company. My results are not in sync with the goals that I had identified for my company. I knew there is something that is not working right.
Instead of putting the onus of sales on my Sales team, I questioned my contribution to the Sales & looked at my efforts that contributed to the Sales of the company.
I found that although, I did contributed well, it was not enough to get us past the goals that I had decided for my company. Also, I knew that for my team to outperform, I must outperform first.
I digged in further only to find out that I was reluctant to do cold calling. and was not focusing on meeting customers daily. I was merely trying to get busy by involving myself in the daily production and management of the company.
Unfortunately, how much hard I work on the operations or management level, it is never going to contribute towards my top-line. I knew that Cold-calling potential prospects and converting them into opportunities would improve my chances of improving sales.
My reluctancy to not pick up the call could be due to many factors, I realized that this is something that I must overcome.
Taking Ownership
The first thing that I realized is to own this challenge. Instead of finding somebody else the scapegoat, I should know that I am responsible for my behavior.
I am past the age where I could blame my parents, my conditioning, the environment that I was brought into. Although, I know that all these could have influenced the early part of my life. They are not responsible for the current resistance to change.
Taking Ownership has forced me to become accountable for my habits / attitudes / behaviors. Taking Ownership also allows me to remove the mental agony that comes from blaming others.
Instead of trying to find fault with others, I am now better placed to focus attention on finding the best solution to this challenge of changing habits. My mind is less occupied with negative emotions and is now always on the lookout for ways to overcoming this challenge.
So, I took up the task to improve my cold-calling and thereby creating opportunities for my business. But how can I overcome this inertia?
Always Improving
I can safely say from my experience that the ability to overcome any resistance can be achieved by doing 3 things:
- Breaking it into small achievable tasks
- Giving it time
- Doing it consistently by using a tracking tool
After I came to know that my Sales goal achievement would depend on my effort to call / meet / interact with potential prospect, I immediately decided to address the challenge.
I knew that my behavior to delay, procrastinate or outsource my Sales effort is doing serious damage to my organization. I decided to break this effort into small parts.
The first thing I did was to decide a fix time in my day at which I will call. For me it was 11 am. Next I decided the frequency of calls that I would make. I broke the whole effort down to just 1 call. So my effort was to select 1 person whom I should call a day before (it should be a cold call) and call that prospect at 11 am.
I knew that overtime I would get better at calling people and getting business. I gave myself time and didnt rush into things. Its ok to fail but its not ok to not give it a shot. I knew that the law of compounding would work in my favor. So slowly I gained confidence, many times my prospects educated me about my business which was great!
Soon, I started building on it and added the no. of calls that I will be making everyday. I then added another task of meeting 1 client every week. Soon, I started building over it to take that number to 9 clients per week.
Another activity that I did was to put this on my tracking tool to help me make myself aware of the progress that I am making every week. It also helped me identify if I am going back to my habits. I have already explained in one of my earlier posts about such a Tracking tool that you all can make. Click here to read the post.
More Help!
In order to make myself accountable, I created a common scoring system for all Salespeople in my organization where every Salesman (including me) would punch in their efforts at the end of the day. So for Sales, the different efforts were : no. of cold calls, no. of old leads called, no. of opportunities identified and no. of conversion done.
This helped me bring in healthy competitive spirit in myself and motivated my team to push more. It also in a way showed how accountable I am towards my work. So, from no onwards, if I introduce myself as a Salesman, everybody knows I mean business.
It also acted as a Tracking tool for my Sales team that showed exactly how much effort everybody was putting in. Of course, there were every chance that the data would be wrong but we put in place a weekly review system where all the effort will be reviewed by all members.
I was assisted by the wonderful Leaders at ILEAD – a commune of committed and motivated Entrepreneurs who are all focused on getting the best out of themselves. I would totally recommend getting in touch with an organization like ILEAD where you can get the association of like-minded individuals.
Conclusion
From my experience, I can say that Inertia or resistance to change is not rare. This is ubiquitous. Different for all. Some might be having difficultly in cold-calling like me. Others might find it difficult to read books.
What we can do is to identify the behavior and take baby steps to overcome the barrier. You might be assisted by the association you keep so do get touch with organizations or group of friends who can help you with your challenge.
Hope this was a good read.
“Identify, Build”
~RG~