What Does It Take To Fully Engage in Sales
How do you start your day? Have you ever considered whether your daily habits are moving you forward in the right direction or dragging you down?
One of the most frequent errors sales leaders see individuals make is failing to match their energy to the job at hand. It’s all too simple to go into the workplace, sit down at your desk, and start checking email.
Your whole morning has been stolen before you realize it. You finally have some time before you have to go home to concentrate on your most important assignment, but by then, you’re weary and not thinking as clearly as you should.
When confronted with this scenario, most individuals begin to control their time. They shorten meetings, send terse emails, and generally attempt to eke out a few more minutes. But what if there was another way to look at the issue?
An Overview of Full Sales Engagement
We live in the age of digital. Our rhythms are hurried, rapid-fire, and unyielding, with our days cut up into bits and bytes. We value width over depth, and fast reactions above thoughtful thinking.
Most of us are just trying to do our best. When demand exceeds our capacity, we begin to make rash decisions that get us through our days and nights but cost us in the long run.
We get by on too little sleep, eat fast food on the go, fill up on coffee, and unwind with booze and sleeping drugs. When we are subjected to constant pressures at work, we become irritable and easily distracted. Hence, the basic currency of great performance is energy, not time.
This is the power of total commitment. Every one of our ideas, emotions, and actions has an energy consequence. The ultimate measure of our life is how much energy we put in the time that we have, not how much time we spend on the planet.
There are terrible employers, poisonous workplaces, tough relationships, and real-life disasters. Nonetheless, we have a lot more influence over our energy than we think. The number of hours in a day is constant, but the amount and quality of energy accessible to us is not.
It is our most valuable resource. The more we accept responsibility for the energy we provide to the planet, the more powerful and productive we will become. The more we blame people or external situations, the more negative and depleted our energy will be.
We must be completely present in order to be fully involved. We must be physically energetic, emotionally engaged, intellectually focused, and spiritually linked with a cause beyond our own immediate self-interest in order to be completely present.
Conventional wisdom says that if you select brilliant individuals and provide them with the necessary abilities for the task at hand, they will perform admirably. In our experience, this is not always the case. Energy is the X element that allows talent and ability to completely ignite.
Main Performance-Driven Energy Management Principles
The main energy management concepts that drive performance are as follows:
Principle 1: Full involvement necessitates the use of four distinct but interconnected sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Humans are complicated energy systems, and full participation is not one-dimensional. Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy flows through us. Each of the four dynamics is essential; none is adequate on its own, and each has a significant effect on the others.
To operate optimally, we must master each of these linked aspects of energy. When we remove any of them from the mix, our ability to completely ignite our talent and expertise is reduced, similar to how an engine sputters when one of its cylinders misfires.
In all aspects of our life, energy is the universal denominator. Physical energy capacity is assessed in terms of quantity (low to high), whereas emotional capacity is evaluated in terms of quality (negative to positive). These are our most basic sources of energy since no mission can be completed without enough high-octane gasoline.
Imagine if every time you shouted at someone in irritation, performed poor work on a project, or failed to concentrate your entire concentration on the job at hand, you were endangering someone’s life. You would soon become less negative, irresponsible, and sloppy in your energy management.
We hold ourselves responsible for how we manage our time and, by extension, our money. Therefore we must learn to hold ourselves equally responsible for how we manage our energy on all levels: physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
Principle 2: Because energy capacity depletes with both abuse and underuse, we must balance energy consumption with intermittent energy regeneration.
We seldom examine how much energy we consume because we assume that the amount of energy accessible to us is infinite. The capacity to completely participate in the task at hand, but also to withdraw and seek rejuvenation, characterizes the richest, happiest, and most productive lives.
Instead, many of us spend our lives as if we were in a never-ending marathon, pushing ourselves well beyond appropriate levels of effort. We, too, must learn to live our lives in sprints, completely engaged for periods of time, then entirely disengaged and seeking rejuvenation before leaping back into the battle to meet whatever problems present us.
Principle 3: In order to increase capacity, we must push ourselves beyond our usual limitations, training in the same methodical manner as top athletes.
In our lives, stress is not the enemy. It is, paradoxically, the key to development. To develop muscular strength, we must repeatedly stress it, spending energy beyond typical levels. We develop emotional, mental, and spiritual capacity in the same manner that we develop physical ability.
Principle 4: Positive energy rituals—highly precise practices for regulating energy—are essential for full engagement and long-term good performance.
Look, it’s tough to change. We humans are creatures of habit. The majority of what we do is unconscious and automatic. What we did yesterday is likely to be repeated today. The issue with most transformation attempts is that conscious effort cannot be maintained over time.
Willpower and discipline are much more scarce than most of us think. If you have to think about something every time you do it, chances are you won’t do it for very long. We are drawn to the status quo by its magnetic pull.
Wrapping Up
Look at any aspect of your life where you are consistently successful, and you will see that certain behaviors contribute to your success. If you eat healthy, it’s usually because you’ve developed patterns around the foods you buy and the dishes you’re willing to order at restaurants. If you’re in shape, it’s usually because you work out on a regular basis.
If you’re successful in sales, you undoubtedly have a routine for mentally preparing for calls and talking to yourself to remain optimistic in the face of rejection. If you manage others successfully, you probably have a feedback style that leaves people feeling challenged rather than intimidated.
To maintain a high level of positive energy despite hard work, you almost definitely have predictable methods of guaranteeing intermittent recuperation. And it’s such methods that will continue to propel you forward into success.
