Over the past 30+ years, I’ve worked with over 500 B2B salesforces, training them in the best practices of their profession. I’ve learned that in spite of all the excitement and good feelings generated at a training session – typically a number of people will come up after the session and declare that this is “one of the best things they have learned” – I’ve often observed that two or three months later, only a handful of the participants have managed to build those good ideas into their routines.
Why is that? It’s not the fault to the ideas from the seminar. I’ve proven the principles and practice that I teach in the caldron of real-life experience with thousands of salespeople. The ideas are sound and can make a difference in the career of a salesperson.
It’s not about communicating the concepts. I have refined my presentation over 30 years of trial and error. The concepts are presented in a compelling, engaging way that everyone understands. I’ll often receive comments from the seminar participants about how much they have learned. I typically receive an email after the event from the meeting planner detailing good feelings about the session.
So, it’s not about the principles and practices that I teach, nor about the way they are taught. People do understand them and are convinced that they can put them into their routines and get results.
Yet, they rarely do.
You may think it is an esoteric trainer’s issue but, it is more important than it might appear at first sight. We are living in a time of unprecedented change. The world around us is changing at a pace that is unknown in the history of mankind. Everywhere we look– from the businesses we run, to the national culture, to our lives – we see things changing more rapidly than ever. And while it is easy to focus on the specific and personal expression of that change — say your job is now more complex than ever – the underlying trends are the most concerning. The change that we see in our lives and businesses today is not an isolated event, but rather the expression of a trend that runs deeper and far into the foreseeable future.
If we are not able to change at a pace equal to the pace of the world around us, we will fall behind and eventually become obsolete. One solution to rapid unrelenting change is to nurture the ability to learn as rapidly as the world around us is changing. And learning, for an adult, means mastering the ability to gain new skills, new competencies, and new attitudes more rapidly than ever before.
Learning, defined as change in behavior, has become the ultimate survival skill for our age.
And that brings us back to the gap between idea and action. If we are going to survive and prosper in this new rapidly changing environment, we must be able to bridge that gap – not occasionally, but regularly and predictably — so that we can continually gain the skills and competencies we’ll need to keep pace.
Over the past 30 years, this has been a passion of mine. I have created a set of tools I call Menta-Morphosis® – thinking skills that allow you, among other things, to change your behavior more rapidly than ever. And, while Menta-Morphosis® deals with a larger scope of activities than just the gap between idea and action, it provides powerful tools for that specific application as well.
What is missing in most people’s repertoire when it comes to turning good ideas into specific habits, are two things: Specificity and accountability
Specificity
As long as an idea remains vague, it is almost impossible to turn it into action. For example, one of the core modules in my curriculum is the ”Art of Asking Better Questions.” After having been exposed to that content, a participant may conclude,
“Asking better questions is a good idea. I should do that.”
That is a vague charge, and highly unlikely to turn into changed behavior. However, by turning that vague idea into a specific “precise prescription” for future behavior it would look like this: “I will prepare and ask three better questions for every important engagement.” This statement is much more specific and therefore more likely to turn into changed behavior. Here are three criteria to help you make this transition.
1. Observable. The language you use to frame the prescription for your action should describe something that can be seen by an objective third party observer. I tell students to imagine a little gnome riding on their shoulder all day long. At the end of the day, this impartial observer, watching your behavior, should be able to say “Yes” he did it, or “No, he did not” . So, “I will think good thoughts” doesn’t count, while “I will compliment at least one person every day” does.
2. Daily expression. While some behaviors are most likely to be used once a week, or even once a month, try to describe your good idea in the smallest increment of time. So, a daily event is better than a weekly, and weekly is better than monthly.
3. Begins with the words “I will…” Your commitment has to be your commitment. Expressing your changed behavior in terms of “I will” puts the responsibility squarely on you to be the person responsible for changed behavior.
Putting these three criteria into play turns “Asking better questions is a good idea. I should do that,” into “I will prepare and ask three good questions for every important engagement.”
The second rendition of the idea is much more likely to result in changed behavior than the first.
Accountability
As long as a desired change remains personal and private, it will not have nearly the power to change behavior as a more public expression. Accountability – having to face up to the consequences of not achieving what you said you would — adds a layer of power to the process that you cannot achieve on your own.
Accountability requires a couple steps:
1. Publish your ‘precise prescription’. I don’t mean to buy an ad in the local newspaper. But I do mean to let people around you know of your commitment.
You may tell your spouse, for example, or post it in the lunchroom or add it to your computer’s wall paper. The more people who know of your commitment, the more likely it is that you will follow through on turning that commitment into a new habit.
2. Develop an accountability partner. This is someone who agrees to ask you whether or not you have done what you said you would do, and do so on a periodic and regular time table.
Since I work with a lot of B2B salespeople, I have developed accountability programs for salespeople to work with their managers who serve as accountability partners. In our XI Community we pair people who don’t know one another and provide a format and a timeline to check in with each other.
The prospect of repeatedly saying to someone that you did or didn’t do what you said you would do adds the power of guilt to the equation. There is nothing wrong with feeling guilty if you are guilty.
Bridging the gap between idea and action by adding specificity and accountability to the equation is one of the 25 most important lessons I’ve learned. Build it into your learning programs and you, and your organization, will be far better equipped to deal with our tumultuous world.
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