It really does make sense that we should spend those hours of week in areas
of aspiration and mastery instead of drudgery. You're listening to the Audible Ready Podcast,
the show that helps you and your teams sell more faster. We'll feature
sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps
you fuel repeatable revenue growth, presented by the team at Force Management, a
leader in B to B sales effectiveness. Let's get started. Hello, welcome
to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel Klatt Miller. Today, as
we start another year, we are going to talk about looking back, assessing
your years so you can excel in twenty twenty four in the way that you
want to. Jim Poolyapolis we call him Polly, is joining me for this
conversation. Polly has been on our show before. I hope you've listened to
his other episodes, but he's really an expert in finding your motivation, what
makes you happy, excelling in your career, and it's all with an angle
for people who do sales for a living. Fully welcome, it's so great
to be here, Rachel. Thanks for having me on again. Yeah,
yeah, ge me coming back. I love doing these well, we love
having you, and this time of year aligns really well with your expertise,
and I know the topic you are most passionate about. We're going to tackle
several areas in this podcast today and ways for you to get your mind around
what you want to do, who you want to be in twenty twenty four.
And you've done some work executive coaching on this very topic, and this
whole idea of like looking back to move forward is one theme that we're going
to tackle. Yeah. Absolutely so to that point, I actually spent a
number of years as an executive coach, and I worked with technology leaders that
work with business owners. And one of the things that always kind of came
back to me as a theme when I was coaching these individuals was that we
might be sort of focused on trying to help them solve a specific career related
problem or some challenge they were facing in their organization, just trying to get
them to kind of move forward with the business at hand. One of the
things that I learned early on was that I had to coach the whole person.
By that, what I mean is I always had to kind of ask
them to step back a little bit from just what personal or professional challenge you
were facing and talk a little bit about what else is going on in their
lives, you know, family, personal goals, personal issues, relationships,
intellectual pursuits, hobbies, you know, just the whole bucket of things that
every human has, getting them to step back a little bit and seeing how
all of that fit together and did it align well enough so that they could
actually be productive and efficient at work and at the same time maintain, you
know, a little bit of balance between work and personal lives. And I
saw a lot of this really change during COVID because we were, in many
ways is forced to merge and meld our personal lives and our work lives into
one life because suddenly people were working from home and we were dealing with family
at home, or we were trying to do our work from home, we
weren't going into the office. So many things changed. And now we're sort
of trying to re extract those two lives and you know, sort of decombine
them again as we kind of move forward beyond what we had a few years
ago. So it's a really interesting time to kind of do this exercise of
looking back and then planning on what we want to do going forward. So
that's kind of the lens that I bring to us. Yeah, and I
think too often we compartmentalize when we're goal setting or when we're looking ahead.
It's like you think about your career separate from your family, but or your
personal life, I should say, but that personal life is going to impact
your career. Your career is going to impact your part. Like you have
to think about that big picture to your point in those areas of folkus.
So as we like kind of assess twenty twenty three, You know, sometimes
as I was thinking about the questions, I was going to ask you,
God, I don't want them to sound so like flowery and like look at
that. But really, when you want to look back at your year so
you can fix what you don't like and keep doing what you do, and
what tips do you have for kind of doing that in a meaningful way?
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things people can do. So one
a number of years ago, I did a TED talk on regrets on how
do we deal with regrets in our lives? And regrets is you know,
one of these emotions. I think that's very misunderstood So one great way to
kind of assess how you did in twenty twenty three is just look back over
the year and kind of think through some of the categories of life that we
fall into. Right our career as a salesperson or sales manager, Right,
that's one bucket career, call that professional lens. Another lenses family and relationships.
Lens might be I mentioned earlier, intellectual in terms of you know,
just working on my own intellectual curiosity, building new skills. It could be
physical, my physical nature. Right, Am I fit? Do I have
energy? Do I need to lose weight? You know, what are some
of the things I need to do physically? Could be spiritual. You know,
a lot of people have a variety of ways of looking at the world
spiritually, religiously, you know, looking back at all these elements, just
kind of list those out and make two columns. One column would be what
regrets do I have in these categories from the past year, Like what things
do I regret? So take one from a family for example, maybe you
canceled a vacation because you had a milestone that you couldn't deliver upon them.
Therefore you had to cancel a family vacation. Just to do some work and
get it done. Another column of successes or places that you feel most proud
of in these areas. Those two columns should give you a really strong lens,
a really strong photo, if you will, an image of what you
value most in life, the things that you regret, like a photographic negative
of the things that you value the most. So if you regret canceling a
family vacation, obviously that means family is very important to you and you're thinking
about it. Right. If you have something in the plus column that you
were able to attend your children's soccer games, You didn't miss a soccer game
for your daughter all season long, and you put that in the plus column,
that means obviously you value time showing up and supporting your children. So
those are some of the things that you kind of assess that And maybe a
third column is to say what does this mean about me? Because that gives
you sort of you know, a lot of organizations and companies all have mission
statements and vision statements. Right, what we're trying to do is kind of
create our own operating statement going forward to say, these are the things that
I am most concerned about, These are the things that I value the most.
These are the values that I hold most dear to myself. I think
you have to start there before you look forward to the new year, to
say, how do I want to align everything that I do around the things
that are most important to me? Because once the year starts, we get
pretty busy being busy, right, we lose track of the things that we
set are important to us. And then another years passed and we realized maybe
we have the same regret. I almost feel like if you have a regret
and you don't learn from it, and you make the same mistake, you
make a decision like that that causes that regret to occur a second time.
It's kind of like that old saying, fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me. In other words, I have
the regret, I learned from it, and I'm going to work hard not
to allow that regret to happen again. Or I have the regret I didn't
learn from it, and I allow it to happen again. Now it's a
pattern. Right now, it's a pattern that it's a little harder to break.
So regrets and wins, and what does that tell you about yourself from
this past year. I think that's a really helpful exercise to go through.
Yeah, good way to look at that. You know, it's kind of
whir because it's like you might think of a regret as a negative thing,
but framing in that way really tells you what you want to change moving forward.
And I know, Pully you've said this before. We aren't like talking
about a new Year's resolution here, like I am going to do Like,
that's not what you're frame with. This has no no I think new Year's
resolutions, it's one of these things everyone's It's kind of fun for people to
talk about them, right, and it happens every year and we get all
excited about it. I really don't like the concept of a new Year's resolution.
I think we operate on our own sort of basic fiscal year. Right.
The year begins January first, it ends December thirty first, and you
know, we get to the end of the year. There's always this in
sales, of course, there's this huge flurry of activity as we try to
close out the core or close out the year. You know, see where
we end up production wise by the end of the year. But you know,
the whole idea of the resolutions is I feel like resolutions are almost like
statements about I wish I could be like this, right. These are like
the I wish I was better at my job, I wish I was healthier,
I wish I had better relationships. But they're just wishes, right.
So for me, when I think about sort of that annual resolution process or
goal setting process, I think it's kind of a hollow activity unless we step
back from it. Now we get a little more tactical and say, if
I want to achieve something this year, I state that as my resolution or
my goal, that's great. But if I don't understand the actions that are
required on a daily or weekly basis to help me get there, and what's
the point I'm making the resolution of the goal if I know that if I'm
in a BDR role, for example, I know if I make eighty to
one hundred calls a day, I'm probably going to connect with five to ten
people. I may be able to generate one appointment, one lead appointment,
one demo appointment a day, get fired the week. I know that that
leads to some outcome that my employer is looking for. I think we have
to do the same thing with every one of our resolutions, if you will,
or annual goals to say, if I want to lose fifty pounds this
year in twenty twenty four, if I lose a pound a week, I'll
get there. So what does that mean? That means each week I have
to monitor my intake. I have to eat the right kind of food,
I have to do daily exercises. All these things add up to reaching the
goal. But just saying I'm going to lose fifty pounds and that's my resolution
without that underlying action plan, it doesn't work right. You need that action
plan, then you need those daily habits to get there. Yeah, And
it's how we think about sales. I don't know how many times in this
podcast I've talked about you have to understand the how you have to follow the
process. If you want to crush the quota, you need to follow a
series of processes every day in your daily sales motion if you want it,
if you want the deal to close, what's your medic framework? How are
you like? It's all about the steps to get there. And it's the
same thing in our just overall well being and when we're setting those goals for
it let's talk about sales goals. Right. Let's say you look back and
you look forward to twenty twenty four, and you want to really crush your
goal. Right. In many cases, you're given your revenue goal, right,
your quota. You know what that's going to be. You want to
exceed it, perhaps, right, I want to exceed it by ten to
twenty percent. Well to your point, you know what got you to achieve
the goal this year? What were the activities and the things that you had
to do to get there. So create a tracking system for yourself to track
those activities on a daily, a weekly basis. One of the most famous,
sort of simplest and most famous examples is Jerry Seinfeld, ridiculously successful comedian.
He talks about how when he was really getting started, he just decided
that he would set a goal for himself of writing one joke a day.
And he said, I didn't set a goal of writing one good joke a
day. I just would write one joke a day so that I kept the
creative juices flowing. And he had a big calendar on his wall and he
would take a red marker and put an X on every day that he wrote
a joke. Good or bad, and he said, my whole goal was
not to break the chain, just to keep the chain going, so that
he had that built in accountability. I think for a lot of salespeople,
they have some built in accountability. Obviously, they've got managers they have to
report to, they've got CRM and tracking system that are showing their progress.
But I think if you really want to do something unique and go beyond what's
expected now, you have to create a tracking system for those things that you
know are going to get you to that other level and maybe found someone who
can, you know, kind of help you with that accountability, maybe someone
that you can on a daily basis kind of confer with and say, right,
I made my hundred calls today, or I reached out to ten people
via email or whatever happens to be, and I added two extras at the
end of the day, right, And I know by tracking those things,
I'm going to exceed my goal long term. I think the reason people regret
things, you know, there are these sort of foundational regrets, which are
you get to a certain point in life and you look back and say,
oh my gosh, I didn't save enough money, or oh my gosh,
I didn't adequately take care of my physical health. Right, those are some
of the more common regrets. Those are because we didn't track those things.
We just didn't keep track of them on a daily, weekly basis. So
I guess what I'm saying is, what's the chain that you want to create
for twenty twenty four? What are the chain of activities? And then literally
just track it on a piece of paper or online someplace, but make it
visual, make it so that it reminds you of a daily basis the things
you said you wanted to achieve at the beginning of the year. Yeah,
you know this time of the year, there's many of you listening out there
who I know are preparing to attend your company's annual SKO, which is like
this kickoff to the year and what we're going to do, and those are
often a great rallying cry for the year. But also you know, you
can use that like benchmark to think like, hey, am I where I
want to be in my career? Yeah? What do I want for this
year? I mean in the right place? And what are my specific goals?
And really questioning that can be healthy because it gets you on that plan
to what you're speaking about Yeah. So you know, in addition to working
for forced management, I teach at a university, right, I teach at
Bentley University, and I have a lot of seniors come to me who are
panicking about graduation, like where am I going to work? What am I
going to do? And I tell them there are a few things you always
have to think about. And this doesn't just apply to graduating seniors from college
you. It applies to all of us. But we kind of get so
wrapped into our careers we forget to do this. So I think there are
two elements that generate career satisfaction for an individual. Number one, what do
you do well? Right? That's a basic one, and that's one that
a lot of people understand. Right all through middle school, high school,
college, early years of your profession, people are telling you what you do
well. Oooh, you're great with mathe and science. You should do that.
Yeah, that's a good thing, You're good at these things. The
real important second question is what do you enjoy doing well? Because you can
do something really well but not necessarily enjoy doing it well, it doesn't bring
you any satisfaction. In my case as a recovering engineer, as I like
to joke about I've got two engineering degrees, and I started working as an
engineer. Got my master's degree while I was working because everyone told me,
as I said earlier, I was good at math and science. You'd be
a great engineer, natural engineer. You're so good in this stuff. You're
so smart with math and science. I got into that career and I realized
I could do it. I could do it pretty well, but I don't
really enjoy doing it well. It wasn't It didn't bring me satisfaction right,
and it took me a long time to figure out a better path. So
I think what every professional should do. Every sales professional should do the following.
Every six months, ask yourself, what do I do well? What
do I enjoy doing well? And you almost create like a two by two
matrix, right, because if you do it well but don't enjoy doing it
well, that's drudgery. Right. I do it well, but I don't
really enjoy doing it well. People keep coming to me asking me to do
these kind of tasks, but it's drudgery, right. Eventually, drudgery will
lead to a point where not only do you not enjoy doing it well,
you just don't do it well because you start to kind of mail it in
in terms of your performance. Right, So your drudgery is sort of a
burnout into failure mode. What you really want is to be doing tasks that
you do well or even below average in the beginning, things that you do
but that you enjoy getting better at. That's like an aspirational mode and that
can then lead to a period of growth where you do it really well and
you enjoy doing it well. And that's sort of the mastery that you want
to get to. And there's always going to be some drudgery with all jobs,
right, there's always going to be you know, ten twenty percent of
every job is going to be stuff you just don't enjoy doing. But if
you can get to a point where eighty percent of what you do are things
that you do well and enjoy doing well, that's a pretty good recipe for
long term satisfaction. And what happens then is it builds upon yourself. You
begin to become known for the things that you do well. You just seem
to do effortlessly that other people can't do as well as you. So when
you do that kind of every six months or every year, when you look
back on your previous period of time and say, what are the things that
I enjoy doing well? How can I do more of those? In many
ways you can do those. You could probably find ways to do more of
that in your current role. But honestly, if you're in a role that
is kind of impacting you negatively from a mental health point of view, sometimes
it's because you're doing things that you just don't enjoy doing well. But you
do them well, right, so people keep coming back. So maybe it's
time to make a change. And it's okay to think like that, you
know, honestly, it's okay to think like that. I know that a
lot of people say, well, what about loyalty and what about sticking with
it? I think you have loyalty, and loyalty is a two way street.
So if you feel that there are things you want to experiment and try,
your employer should allow you to try some of those things, because from
a long term retention point of view, you want to be feeding things they
do well and they enjoy doing well. If I'm an employer, right,
otherwise people leave. But people leave all the time, and that's okay too.
So those two questions I think are the core of what leads to career
satisfaction. What do I do well? What do I enjoy doing well?
And that is another way to look back over twenty twenty three and almost kind
of create a matrix and say, these are things that I put in this
box. These are the things that I've put in this box. Man,
I did a lot of things that would drudgery this year. I've got to
slowly begin to move away from those, move more into some aspirational tasks that
I that can really grow into. And I think that's a good way to
look at it. Yeah, I love that word drudgery. Or the other
thing that comes into play here fully is your salary and money. And yes,
how many times have you heard from somebody but we all want to earn
a great living, But like, how many times have you heard like,
oh, I don't really like what I'm doing, but I get paid.
Well, Yes, I did this for decades myself. Right. So you
know there's an old saying, right, the best time to plant the tree
was twenty years ago. The second best time to plant the tree is today.
Okay, So what it means is when it comes to like your career,
the best time to have really thought out what I do well and what
I enjoy doing well. Is the moment you start your career, right,
But most people don't. Most people shoot out of college, go into some
job, eventually start to make some good money. And what in many cases
happens is they're wrapping their career around their lifestyle. Right. I want a
new car, I want to live in an expensive city. I want to
go out every night. I want to go to Starbucks every day and buy
coffee. Right. So that requires a certain level of income, and you've
got a job, especially in sales, that can generate that kind of income.
So you're wrapping your career around your lifestyle. In other words, I
have to make this much money in order to for the lifestyle I have.
So if you started down this path earlier in life and said I'm going to
wrap my career around my lifestyle, you can get stuck in that rut.
Right now. If you step back and say I'm going to wrap my lifestyle
around I want to pick the career in other ways to wall right, and
then I decide what my lifestyle can be. So again, in sales,
we have this beautiful opportunity to make as much as we want. But if
we just start off by saying I do these things, well, this is
the kind of work I want to do, and then figuring out what our
budget is to live right, so the money doesn't necessarily drive our career choices
throughout the course of our life. I think that's a little bit easier,
longer term to do. And that's why I said the best time to plant
the tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. The
second best time to kind of reassess where you are in your career and what
it costs you to live and where you live and your lifestyle and your spending
is today, right. This nothing you can do about the past, but
you can look and say, are there changes I can make in my lifestyle
that gives me a little bit more flexibility in my career? Right? Another
way to look at this is I think there's a Ven diagram of analyzing your
career in terms of moving forward, and the Ven diagram has three bubbles.
The first one is what role do I play? Like? What role do
I have? Am I an account executive? Am I an se AM?
I doing tech sit? You know? Am I doing face to face selling?
Am I selling over the phone, you know, what's the role,
what's the nature of the role. The second bubble, I think is the
industry, the industry or the type of product or service that you sell.
So there's an intersection there between the role I have in the industry or the
product and services that I like to sell. And I think the third piece
is location in quotes. Location is literally where I do the work or is
it sort of a hybrid role work from home, work remote work in person.
Those three bubbles together kind of create the ven diagram I think of what
a person's is. I do this job in this industry, and this is
where I work. I think you can pick two of those bubbles. The
third one is the one you have to accept and take what the universe gives
you. Let's say, so if I say I want to be an AE
and I want to work in the sports industry, I want to be an
account executive or a salesperson in sports, right, then the location quote unquote
where I have to go to do that job is what I'm going to have
to be variable about. You know, I might have to move to the
Midwest, I might have to move to a different state, different country perhaps
to do the job. But if I say that I want to be based
in Boston and I want my role to be account executive, then I think
the selection of the industry will be driven by what's available in Boston as an
account executive. So I don't have as much choice over the third bubble.
And I think that's kind of one of the things that a lot of times
will get overwhelmed with, how do I make this decision? I think you
pick two of those bubbles, you let the third one be dictated in some
ways to you. So again, looking back over the year, this is
a great time to ask yourself, how happy am I in this role,
in this industry and in this location, And if one of those is out
of whack or doesn't align with what you care about, now's a good time
to start thinking about making a change. And again, you you might be
able to do it internal to your organization or you might have to go external,
but that's a personal choice. And one of the other things that I
do that I've done for a number of years now is I know this is
an audible podcast, right, but if people could see me in my office
right now, over my left shoulder, there is a there's a poster which
is a tool that I use. It's a Momento Mory calendar, and basically
it's got fifty two boxes in each row, and there are eighty rows,
so it represents the average lifespan of a human eighty years, and each box
represents one week of your life. And at the end of each week,
so on a Sunday night, I always color in another box. And over
time, you know those roads that to fill up right with little black dots,
which means you know the weeks have passed. I do that intentionally because
the term of mental MOORI means remember you will die, which is a very
dark sort of phrase, but what it means is we have finite time on
this planet. And so each week you should step back and assess, am
I still happy doing the work I'm doing? Am I still productive? Do
I still feel a sense of impact on people? Am I building a sense
of mastery? Am I getting better at things that I like doing well?
Do I have autonomy in the work that I do? Do I know enough
and have the skills to do the work I can do without being micromanaged or
without having someone step in and help me do the work. So every week
I do that and I think back on the previous week, and I ask
myself, am I still happy doing that? Now? I haven't done this
my whole life, and I wish I had started earlier because it would have
helped me make some different career decisions years ago when I probably should have.
But I think once you stop being more aware of that, you start to
really put a premium on the number of hours that you can work each week.
And it really does make sense that we should spend those hours of week
in areas of aspiration and mastery instead of drudgery and eventual failure. Right.
So I think this is a perfect time of year to do it. Most
people have a little bit of time off, take a piece of paper or
get your laptop, go sit and have a couple of coffee and just run
through some of these concepts and to see what comes out, right, Just
see what comes out? Yeah, just doing the awareness is a great first
step. Polly. I just love your insight on this topic. And I
mentioned I think I did. You mentioned you wrote a book on this topic.
Go ahead and plug it because I'm a show notes. If people want
more of Polly's insight on how to be a well being, right, will
be a wellbeing. The title of the book Rachel well done. Yeah.
The title of the book is How to Be a Well Being. I co
authored it with Andy Cope and son Jeev Sandhu to other well being experts.
There are twenty two rules in the book and basically it's the unofficial rules to
live a better life. And in the book, one of the chapters I
wrote is about regrets, like how do we view regrets? How do we
use them for positive change? Another chapter I wrote is about career satisfaction,
where that matrix that I just discussed is actually laid out there. And one
of my favorite chapters is the one about abundance abundance thinking in other words,
thinking about what you actually have as opposed to what you want. And when
you switch your thinking like that, it really does generate a different kind of
positivity in your professional life. And I know in the beginning we said,
you know, we don't want this to be fluffy, new agey stuff,
but honestly, it works. And data proves that if you are happier.
Generally speaking, if you are happier, you are more successful at work and
at home. It doesn't go the other way around, like success doesn't necessarily
bring happiness. There's lots of successful quote unquote people that are miserable, but
if you're happier, it is the base from which all good performance can come.
So you just got to figure out two things. One what are you
good at? Two what do you like being good at? Once you figure
those two things out, the rest kind of falls into place, and then
on a daily basis, just thinking about things that you're grateful for and focusing
on abundance. But yeah, it's my mission in life to make a million
people happier. That's what I tell people. I haven't counted yet. I
think I'm pretty far from that number, but I'm getting there. Hopefully this
podcast reaches a few people with at We'll wake a little dead in that.
It's a little dead in universe. That's all we want. Well, thank
you so much, Polly. Check out his book. It's linked in the
show notes. Great little read for your time off this holiday. Appreciate you,
Poolly, Thank you, Rachel anytime. All right, thank you,
and thank you to all of you for listening to the Audible Ready Sales podcast.
At Force Management, we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams.
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