If you have a fear of flight. Think how differently you feel, if you manage to fly to your holiday, even with help of tranquilizer, compared to staying home and letting down your family. In which case would you go and seek help and try to overcome the fear? Which case would have stronger impact on your future behavior and would make you change?

Have you ever been in a situation where in a fight you have had to give up, because your opponent has just been too good and you had a zero chance of winning? What about in sales, where you have noticed that you have nothing to offer to the customer and her arguments against you are just too strong? You knew, that you have a solution suitable for her, but just couldn’t get the conversation up and running. Have you just given in and moved on to a next prospect?

Losing is hard, but for a goal oriented person to give up is many times harder. It is very difficult to admit that there is nothing you can do to win the fight or close the deal. If you have put your heart in it and still have to forfeit, this is the best situation for you to learn a valuable lesson. It all starts with asking yourself a question. Very simply put: Why did this happen?

Being honest is the hard part

Self reflection on the issues that made you to give up is often very difficult. Will you blame it on the situation? Or can you dig in and find plausible reasons in how you had prepared yourself and what really went wrong. Not just giving reasons for failing, but seeing the real reason behind why you would fail again.

In a fight, if you say to yourself: “this was not my day”. Why wasn’t it? Why was it your opponent’s day? The poorest reason for losing is in my opinion: “he just wanted the win more than me”. Why would you let anybody beat you, just because he wants it more? The real question is: “why did he want the win more than you”? Did he prepare himself more than you? Why was the fight more important to him than you? Try to find your real reasons why he was better than you. They could be like: he was stronger than me, or he had more versatile technique repertoire or he had that one trick that I fell into. Try to find reasons for losing and why your opponent was better than you and how could you become better than him in those specific fields.

In sales, sometimes it feels that the prospects aren’t smart or that competitors are playing unfair games and even lying to the prospects. What kind of mistakes did you make in your sales approach? How was your timing and ability to react to your prospects needs? Did you really understand the problem and provide the best possible solution? Too often, it feels that you had provided the best solution, but somehow the competitor lured in with something else, and the stupid prospect bought that idea and bought from your competitor. Look into your flaws and the mistakes you have made and think through can you improve them and if yes, then act upon it.

Losing vs forfeiting

You learn a lot, when you lose a fight or a deal. Especially, if you self reflect properly and go through what you could have done better. But when you forfeit and really feel down, you will learn a lot more. You will be more honest about what you really feared and why you felt that you had no chance in winning. These issues are the ones, you need to fix, in order to make you more successful. These issues are the ones hindering you from being the best. These issues are the ones, you admire in others and consider to be your weaknesses. Start improving those and I guarantee that you will become much better and will have a much brighter future.

When I was competing in martial arts, there was a one guy who was much stronger, quicker and very versatile in his techniques. He knocked out many opponents and in one tournament I was supposed to fight him. This tournament was arranged in my hometown, so it was easy for me to help with the arrangements. In the end, I was wearing a suit and being the announcer of the tournament and skipped fighting. I was so much afraid of fighting him, that I took the easy way out. It wasn’t easy to skip the tournament and for several months my self esteem (in fighting) was very low. Then I started to go through the real reasons of skipping the tournament and why I was so much afraid of fighting him. I started to build my skills against him and improve the things I thought he was better than me. I never fought against him, but I managed to use the fright of facing him to build a better fighter of myself. I have lost many fights, but none of them has thought me such a deep lesson than giving up before the fight. This had much deeper impact on me and gave me long term motivation.

In sales, you skip opportunities constantly. It is quite easy to explain to yourself, why you shouldn’t try to win one particular prospect. What are the real reasons behind that? There are many steps in sales processes, are you mastering them all at a sufficient level? Or are you lacking some knowledge that you should have in order to be the best expert in your field? I remember when working in media sales, when at first we all were saying that social media will never be replacing traditional media in marketing. We were coming up with excuses, why traditional advertising will be better than social media advertising. In the end, I have studied and operated with social media marketing for a few years among with traditional media. I had to learn them both and today I am much stronger in discussions related to marketing than I have ever been. I found my knowledge gap and fixed it. There was a time, when I thought that I have to move to another industry, because there wouldn’t be a bright future for someone working in a traditional media company. Today, I feel just the opposite. Not because the change in the industry, but because of the change in my knowledge and the approach that I can take with my prospects and customers.

Check also my previous posts "The fear of getting hurt" and "Win or lose, you have to train tomorrow again". They also cover the same subject.