I saw it the moment she walked into my office. Energetically, she was not in good shape.
On a self-leadership scale of 1-7, Anna was at 2, meaning she was angry and frustrated.
She sat down and for the next 10 minutes she let it all out; how she’d been working around the clock to finish this “damned” research paper before the deadline. How upset she was by this prospect, who “used” her to get information from her and now had rejected her proposal. How this just wasn’t fair because she worked so hard and saw no results. Why didn’t her plan work?
At the beginning of something new (in Anna’s case starting a new business), we have a vision and make structured plans to turn it into reality. We feel inspired, confident, creative and excited. In other words, we are HIGH on our ENERGY scale.
At some point, often in the middle of executing our plans, things are bound to get messy because some plans won’t work out the way we hoped. That’s when doubt and fear can creep in and our ENERGY drops. We feel stressed, it’s hard for us to see the bigger picture and it’s easy to lose sight of our vision.
- All Anna could see was that SHE:
- FAILED – the prospect rejected HER
- FAILED – she was not good at Sales
- FAILED – maybe she should quit her business
- FAILED – she did not have good writing skills. (She even considered taking a writing course.)
Two misconceptions here that pulled her ENERGY level down;
1. NOT all is about HER – she took things way too personally.
2. Anna confused FAILURE with FEEDBACK.
As we were working to shift her ENERGY to a higher level, she began to see:
- FEEDBACK – the prospect was looking for something different than what Anna had offered. How could she find out what the prospect’s decision criteria were so that Anna could make a choice: adjust her service offering or accept that this company isn’t a good fit for Anna’s business.
- FEEDBACK – Let’s dissect the sales PROCESS. What worked well, what didn’t work and use that to optimise her system.
- FEEDBACK – Remember the vision. Get back in touch with WHY she wanted to start this business and re-connect with that feeling of excitement she felt in the beginning.
- FEEDBACK – A writing course – is that what she really needs? When we doubt ourselves, it’s so easy to think we ‘need’ more skills. At this point, Anna should only be focussing on her CORE business. Unless new skills add value to her CORE business in this start-up phase, let’s not get distracted and use “I need more of…” as an excuse to move forward.
Lets’ Lead!
