Kierkegaard on Guts

 

“The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.”

– Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Danish philosopher and writer

Sometimes, if we don’t have success after repeated attempts to do something, we can lose confidence and eventually give up trying. It’s called “learned helplessness” (we learn to be helpless).

Sales check: Any areas where you and your team have stopped trying (or try, but with little commitment) because prior repeated failures and/ or a perceived inability to succeed has trained you not to try? In prospecting and customer contact efforts? In motivating and improving team attitudes and cooperation? With customer care improvement initiatives?

If so, what can you start doing today to minimize any “learned helplessness” that may have set in?

Kierkegaard on Being Complainless

“Patience is necessary… one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”

–Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish philosopher and writer

Sales encouragement…

complainless: (adj.) 1. to be free of complaints 2. a pleasure to be around

Your words move others. Your words move you.

Let yours send everyone in the right direction.

Here’s how to be “ComplainLess”…

  1. Be aware. Recognize your typical paths to complaining – what (who) sparks your tendency to gripe. Minimize your exposure to them (eliminating those ‘sparks’ altogether may not always be realistic or the best thing). Know that your grumbling is a complete waste of energy.
  2. Be thankful. Regularly reflect on all the good in your life (people, opportunities, things). Understand and enjoy how lucky you really are. Be entitled to nothing.

Get the last two points, our favorite “Don’t complain” quote (by Emerson), or pick up the ComplainLess cards for a group of people. Use this link.
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No Gomo talks again next week with Sam (how to keep your team or yourself from going through the motions). If you’ve missed one or been closed out of a session, we hope you can join us.

Who’s Sam? A cofounder of JustSell.com, author of a lot of this stuff, and your crazy quote curator (really).
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Two of our favorite Complainless videos… Louis C.K. and Monty Python (outside the money hours, please).

Kierkegaard on Being Courageous

“The thing that cowardice fears most is decision.”

–Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
Danish philosopher and writer

Email this quote

Sales challenge…

What if you checked email only 3 times a day?

For just over a week, we’ve been doing this as a team at JustSell to see if it helps us.

The rules…

Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at lunch. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).

Here’s what we’ve learned so far…

  • We recognized our addiction to checking email.
  • We identified how it’s become a default task (automatically checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
  • We saw how we sometimes use it to hide out from our more important work (“If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be important in the long term but at least I’m of use at this moment.” – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
  • We learned that our email could wait* and that as the day came to an end, we were more productive and happier. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)

It’s cwazy**…

Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more important work that gets us closer to our goal of making good things happen?

Our next step here… Drop the morning check and look at it only twice a day. A few people have already passed out by thinking about it.

(how to check email 3 times a day)

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
American civil rights leader
Nobel Peace Prize recipient

* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response times.

** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of crazy – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You think that’s crazy?