About 15 years ago, I received a call on Saturday evening, where I was explained that tomorrow at 2 pm, I should be trying to break the Guinness World Record (GWR) on the highest martial arts kick and it would be filmed for the official GWR program to be shown internationally. I know that you would want to read a fairy tale story, where I would be the hero and break the record, but I’m sorry, this is not the case. So, if that was the reason for you coming to read my blog, I have to disappoint you now, in the beginning of this post.

In my training group, there were two guys, who might had had a chance to break the record (2,94m that time), but they both were injured. I had been the contact person and thought that the record breaking attempt had been called off and had no idea, that it would be tomorrow. In training I had managed to kick up to 2,7m (I am 1,76m tall), but nothing close to the current record. If you have read my previous posts, I have written about yearly black belt test and on that Saturday, we had run 30kms in a rough terrain. My girlfriend had injured her knee and was in the waiting room at the hospital to get assistance. So you can imagine, how I felt at the hospital when the caller said that “you have to come here tomorrow and try to break the record. We have flown people from England to this attempt to be the officials of GWR monitoring the attempt and possible approving the record". I entered the train at 7 am and was at the recording studio at 11 am on Sunday morning. I knew, I had no chance of breaking the record. And with the 30kms run, I had no explosivity left, but this chance to be on tv and get the promotion for the martial art, was more important than losing my face with failed attempts. I hoped that I would break my own record, to say the least.

In sales, I have many times got into a situation, where my superior, perhaps the CEO of the company, had talked to a client and promised a very good deal. When I entered the negotiations and screened the needs of these prospects and their budget, I was in a place, where I would need to sell gold with a price of garbage. The expectations, were so high and the budget so low, that there were no chances to meet their expectations with the offer. There would have been no business for us, if I had sold with the price they were expecting. Of course, in those times, I reached out to the CEO and explained the situation, but that didn’t solve the problem. Even if he had approved the super low pricing, it would just help to close the deal, but not to make any business. We would have more likely lost some money and I would have had to come up with a lot more sales from other clients than possible, in order to recover the loss.

Even if you don’t win the price, you might still gain a lot

Both of these cases, required a lot of self-esteem. I was in a place, where I was not going to be successful and very likely a lot of (important) people, would look down on me and maybe even blame me for not succeeding. Especially, the record breaking attempt on TV was a hard part for me. I managed to kick 2,5m in the show and was very disappointed in me. I knew that there would be a lot of martial artists, who would laugh at this result. Especially, when it was announced to be the Finnish record (since nobody else had tried it, under the officials of GWR) of highest martial arts kick.

We got a lot of good exposure from the GWR show and that helped us to promote ourselves a lot. There were discussions in many internet forums, where people were laughing at the poor result. I felt ashamed about the result, when I was introduced as the Finnish record holder in different events. But the show opened us new doors for other TV performances and still gave us a lot of credibility among people, who didn’t train martial arts.

With previously explained situations in sales, where I was sitting in a table, I would not normally make. When trying to close an impossible deal, I chose to represent me as I am and not trying to sneak my way out of the situation. I tried to build the best possible solution and come up with a price, that nobody else would get, but which would still be much higher than the customer had stated with the current budget. Out of 10 situations, I was able to close 3 deals. Those that I wasn’t able to close that time, I have been able to close almost all of them later with a new solution. I knew that if I couldn’t meet the price they were expecting, I had to over-exceed their expectations of my expertise. So I put everything I had and asked for help from my colleagues to put the best offer ever built. And I prepared myself for the best performance possible, when presenting the offer to the prospects.

Mentally from rags to riches

Both of these examples played into my favor in the end, even though both cases felt like a disaster at the time. I didn’t give in. I did my best, even though, I knew that I had no chance at that time to succeed. I have had many excellent discussions during my professional working life about that GWR video. People find it on YouTube and value my performance there. With my world championships gold medal and that, people who work with me or are my customers, give me credit and admire me for my accomplishments. These help me to differentiate myself from other sales people. And in sales management, they give me a strong background of succeeding in life, which make it easier for my team to believe in me and work for me.

Moreover, I have gone through mentally tough situations, which have build up my character a lot. It would be nice to tell the story of having a Guinness World Record and closing all the big deals easily, but I consider these experiences more valuable in building my character than what I would have got from success. On the contrary, I do understand how top level athletes feel, when they disappoint their fans in big events in front of live tv or how it feels to let down your company and employees by not closing the big deal available. These all are valuable lessons and it is up to me to use the full potential given to me.

photo credits: Seppo Iivonen

How easy would it be, if you knew for sure that what you do today (to improve your skills), would bring you improvement for tomorrow? If your maximum for push-ups is 50 today, then next week for sure, you could do 55. If you called one more customer today, you would sell 5% more next month. If you learned a new thing today, you could use it in real-life situation tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. For some time, you can keep up the development, but then after a while, you will stop developing by doing the same thing allover again. Don't get me wrong here. You need routines in order to develop, but in the end, you need different and updated routines for keep continuing your development path.

In the beginning, work as hard as you can

When I was actively teaching beginner's courses in martial arts, we spend about half of the training time in developing condition and stretching. We had many different movements we were improving, but as an example, we started off with 10 push-ups. Each week we increased the amount by 5 and in the end of the beginner's course, everybody did 50 push-ups. I know what many of you are thinking now. How can someone go from 10 to 50 push-ups in few months. To add more steam to your thoughts (Finnish expression coming from steam in the sauna), after a year of training, everybody did 100 push-ups. The point in this is the amount, not the quality. Many other instructors and teachers in other martial arts, started to demand push-ups with perfect technique. There the development is much slower, whereas with this method, everyone hits higher numbers each week. The point is to set the mind for higher goals and build a stamina for development, not for perfect push-ups.

The same example goes for sales as well. When I get a new team member, fresh out of school, I will put him to contact prospects and existing clients. In my previous post on "Goals and Dreams", I emphasized on building knowledge from the beginning and this method of active contacting might sound like a contradicting method, but it is not. It is very hard to learn business and sales related skills, without talking to customers. You need to hear what kind of language customers are using and how they are approaching different situations. From these conversations, you will start learning your field of expertise and the more customers you talk to, the more information you gather to your knowledge. Therefore, the first step is to learn to work hard in contacting your customer base, whether it be existing customers or prospecting to new business sales.

Start with 10 phone calls per day and next week do 12 and the following 14 and so on. The first conversations don't need to be in-depth ones, but just that you reach a customer and get to the next stage. These could be anything ranging from getting the contact information of the right decision maker, setting up a meeting or getting information for your RFP. Then you move on the the next call. The most important part is to get a routine of picking up the phone quickly and getting back to talking with the prospects.

In my first sales job, I wasn't told about this strategy and was trying to sell immediately to the clients. I got disappointed in not succeeding and wanted to prepare myself better before the call. I spend a lot of time preparing the possible questions and answers, but in the end they were wrong ones. I wasted a lot of time got even more insecure about myself. Later in my career, I got to work with experienced sales people, who drank their coffee at their desk, in order to be able to call the next customer as soon as possible. I started to measure how much of my working time was I on the phone and started writing offers, when it was hard to reach people on the phone. My only goal was to get step further in the sales process and with that in mind, I was able to call up to 50 customers per day. Today, I can easily do the same, whenever needed.

Then comes quality

I can ensure you, that after a year of trying to do more push-ups weekly, you will start building resistance to your development. You will start telling yourself and your instructor, that you cannot hit bigger numbers each week. Your condition is not developing as it was months ago and your body is getting tired and maybe more stiff. You don't recover from 100 push-ups the same way as you did from 10 in the beginning, even if both were your maximum at the time.

This is the perfect time for start learning techniques and building quality in your movements. Now you have the stamina to train harder and some knowledge of your body control. With better body control, it is easier to pick up instructions and control your movements better. With hard physical training, you have built better muscle control and this helps your development in techniques as well. This is the basis in movies like "Karate Kid" or my favorite movie "Drunken Master". At first, the master puts the student through tough physical exercise, which builds stamina for harder training and at the same time has taught the techniques in some mysterious way.

I remember explaining to one of my first sales managers, that I don't want to call prospects that don't buy. It was hard to make dozens of calls each day, when the majority of the prospects didn't want to do business with me. I was trying to explain, that if I had more time to concentrate on each prospect, I would be able to have better conversations and do more sales. If only, I could do less calls each day, I would do them with better quality. This all sounded very good in my head and I'm sure that many of you has had the same conversation with your sales manager.

The problem was that, the less you call, the less you will have conversations with potential buyers. The quality comes from repetition and control, not by avoiding hard conversations. Did I want to develop myself or avoid feeling down after unsuccesful sales calls? Preparation is important, but it needs to be done right. Especially in sales, it is not about the hours you put in, but the results you bring in.

Quantity and quality together

After reaching your limits in developing your skills with approaching quality, it is time to focus on repetitions again. This gets your mind out of quality for a while and soon you will notice that the quality improves even without concentration. You will be able to perform techniques better, even if you don't put emphasis on them anymore. There are times, when you will have to come back to focusing on high quality, but you can never forget to build up your condition as well.

My master, used to demand black belts to take part in the first degree black belt test each year. There you had to go through the hard physical test (including 150 push-ups, 3000 squats, 3 kms running under 11 minutes and many more) and the technique test with the new black belt candidates. This was mentally really hard to go through each year. Many of us, decided not to take part in those events and soon these people quit training or at least reduced the amount of training a lot. But those who went through the test each year, developed very well. The condition was each year better and the skill level was much higher each year.

Many times in sales, these teachings are forgotten. It is hard to go back to telesales, especially when your title might be Sales Director or similar. It is nice and easy to talk with the same customers as you have talked for many years. But don't forget to talk to new prospects as well. Don't forget the basics and go back to the basics often enough. If you are great in sales, it doesn't matter which part of the sales process you pick up, you will do well. If this is not the case, then you are not great in sales yet. With changing your focus back and forth from repetition to quality, you will become one.

What is the difference between a goal and a dream? For achieving your goal, you have to have a path and a plan, but for a dream, you simply need an image in your head and continue until you have conquered your dream. Goals are attainable, when you put your effort on them and dreams occur when you have reached enough of your goals. Think how differently you will act, if your goal is to win world championships next year or your dream is to win it someday. With the first one, you will find yourself training immediately, whereas in the latter you will find yourself smiling and continuing the dream. This doesn't mean, that your dream couldn't come true, but the level of urgency is different than with goals.

In order to achieve your goals, you need to have a path and a plan on how to achieve them. For goals you build up routines and for dreams you build up hope. Planning is more important than willpower. You just need to follow the routines. There will always be distractions and other challenges, but with a good plan, you will have room for these as well.

From ABC's to University

The best part with goals, is that they make you to work for them. You simply need to build a path for you, where you will break the path into smaller attainable and doable pieces. In martial arts, you can make a target of completing 10,000 repetitions with high intensity or make a path for development with setting up different skill levels for you.

My master, used to break levels with school grades. We would start to learn a new technique from the ABC's, meaning preschool. This was the outlining of the technique with enough details to understand how it should be performed. From there, we would do the movement with a continuous rhythm, which was called the elementary school level. This would continue up to University level and sometimes upto upper-upper-upper-upper University. The most important part, was to keep the rhythm constant, or else the technique was done at the ABC level. No matter how quickly it was performed. This helped us to understand which techniques we could pull out in a tournament and which not. You knew, that if you cannot perform at the University level, you cannot use it in a fight. Therefore, the goal-setting was very simple. Train as long as you are able to perform at the university level. And the path was clear too, with these simple and understandable steps from school grades. Check my previous post Does this work in real-life situation for another example, how my friend learned to skateboard like pros.

Sales approach

In sales, I have broken this idea into sales questions and steps. First, you need to master your field of business, meaning what your products and solutions can provide to your customer. If you don't have a clear picture on what you are selling, it is very difficult to help others to buy from you. The basics need to be clear in your head, or they won't help to continue in the sales process. You might be able to make sales still, but in the long run, you will not close deals as well as you should.

The next step is to understand how the customer is currently solving the situation, and where your product or service would provide a solution. Here, you need to build understanding on customer's business and get more in depth knowledge on what makes this customer unique from her company's perspective. On paper, many companies look the same, but they are all different. And this is the step, where you should understand why.

Then at the evaluation step, one goes into discussion whether the current solutions is providing wanted results or is there a room for improvement. Here your knowledge and expertise play a big role. You need to convince the buyer that you actually know how to improve her situation and that you will provide better results for her. You can attain this goal by using good questions which clarify your customer with understanding of the flaws of the current situation. Good questions bring doubt to her mind that there is a better solution than what she is currently using. You can also provide data to  back you up and to tell stories of successful companies with better approach than what she is currently using.

The last big step is to build a tailor-made solution for your customer. This doesn't mean that the actual solution is something new which nobody else has ever seen or used. This means you have paid attention to your customer's needs and when providing your solution, it feels like it was made just for her. The execution needs to feel like it was prepared for this case, since like I wrote before, each company is different.

The same goes in martial arts. You need to be able to modify your movements to your opponent. The basic form might look the same, but in reality, the techniques need to be altered to fit the situation and the opponent. How that is done, should be another blog post on its own.

Dreams are your vision

On top of goals, you need a vision. The vision sets the direction where your goals are at. Without a vision, it is hard to commit to goals. The difference is that, it is hard to build a path for a vision, the same way as it is for goals. Dreams can't be changed and modified easily. They need to be big enough, so that you have to develop yourself accordingly. My master used to tell me that it takes 7 years for each cell in your body to change, therefore whatever you do know, will affect you for 7 years. I don't know if that 7 years span is correct, but this made me for sure to think carefully, whether I wanted to improve my condition or do something that I would suffer for the next 7 years. With this in my head, I paid very close attention to everything that I did during the day, not just during the training. For instance, I stopped drinking alcohol, since that ruined my recovering after training. Drinking didn't ruin my training as per se, but it affected how my condition was building up and I wanted to build a better condition rather sooner than later. Small decision, but big influence. The vision was strong and made these kind of decisions easy to make.

 photo credits: Seppo Iivonen

If you have been a martial arts instructor, you must have heard the question: "does this work in real-life situation?" many times. People see a technique and feel that it cannot be used in a real-life situation. It just seems unrealistic that the real-life situation would end up in a similar situation where you can perform the technique just the way as shown. The real-life situation cannot be as clean and you cannot predict the movements of your attacker in a way that you would get control of the situation as done in practice. Is this true? If yes, then why to practice unrealistic techniques?

Win or lose, the next day is more important

Sometimes you simply lose, no matter what

How does being afraid affect you?

Learn to love, what you are afraid of and you will win

Often people tell you to work outside of your comfort zone and expect that you will become stronger and better. I don’t fully agree to that, especially when it comes to overcoming your fears. Of course, you need experience and to be able to be outside of your comfort zone, but you also need to learn to like what you do and get the kicks out of it. If you have, for instance, a fear of heights, it won’t help you to push yourself to the limit. You will still be afraid to climb up to tall buildings. But if you look around you and love the sights you see, then you will forget your fear of heights.

So instead of pushing yourself into uncomfortable situations, where you will feel frightened, start looking at your motivation from a new perspective. In martial arts, you are actually trying to get better in fighting and that involves heavy contact. The reason for getting used to the heavy contact is to build your body and your mind to be able to evaluate, what is the best approach for you in each situation. Should you try to block, evade or counter attack. Or is it time for you to find a good spot for your attack. When you get the new perspective, you will start seeing the attacks differently. When being frightened, you can’t move yourself so well and you almost freeze to your spot. You are just waiting to get hit and likely you will get hit. But when you stop being afraid, you will move as smoothly as in your training and will be able to adjust your techniques to your opponent’s ones.

In sales, when you stop falling in love with your offers or stop being afraid to make the call, you will start to improve your results. What worked for me in sales and in fighting, was that I started to look at them as a game of chess. I didn’t mind losing a game, but I always wanted to get better. I started to analyze my game, no matter win or lose. I started to improve my weaknesses, not because of the uncomfortable situation, but because I wanted to get better. I wanted to become the best and in order to become the best, I needed to love what I was doing. I wasn’t working outside of my comfort zone anymore, I was working with what I loved. The fear was not there anymore, it was replaced by the drive for success. If I had concentrated only on improving my skills and arguments, I would not have developed the mental strength. But when I chose to not to focus on my fears, but on the strategic perspective of fighting and selling, I managed to build up a way of liking the situations, I previously was afraid of. Getting hurt is part of the game, but as long as you are not afraid of it, you have a chance in winning.

Do you want to improve your standard level of doing something into a champion level? If yes, then this post is for you. This also means, that you have to do a 7-day test, in order to see how routines affect your life in reality and how these will improve your everyday time management, sales/martial arts skills and moreover, help you to decide if you want to take the route to become a master. In my previous post “The way of perfection - is all about mistakes”, I looked into detecting mistakes you make and have the attitude of fixing them. Now I will give you some really simple steps to start building your path into becoming a master.

7-day test

Everyday routines make you develop everyday

 

If you follow similar routines, you will develop your skills to learn quickly. Whenever someone is showing you a new technique in martial arts, you can easily pick it up. When you watch a fight, you will see their weaknesses and strengths quickly. In sales meetings, it will be easy for you to listen and absorb the information, then process it in your head and go deep into the conversation. When you listen to sales training, you will remember the tips easily and can change your routines with new information easily. You can follow different sales tactics wiht no problem and with feedback, improve your skills quickly. All these come from constant concentration on developing yourself and with your daily routines. You will quickly see, even if you feel you didn’t do the best you could have done, you still do things better than a month ago, on your best possible performance.

The results sound great, but the way is long. Unfortunately, only few of us are willing to put up with daily routines. We often want to make decisions and explain to ourselves, why something should or shouldn’t be done at this moment. We come up with excuses and like to procrastinate whenever possible. But if you choose the path of becoming a master, start with routines. Start by concentrating on simple and easy-to-do routines, where you will start seeing yourself automatically fixing mistakes you make in your daily life. When you have accomplished the level of automated routines, you will for sure see how your quality in doing anything in your life, has improved as well. If you work in sales, you will sell more. If you are practicing martial arts, you will see how you have jumped up in levels much more than you would have thought would be possible in a short period of time.There are no shortcuts, but this is not difficult to pull off. You just need to make a habit of completing the routines of self development. Let me know how your 7-day test went. I'm sure my wife will ask me to do the same test as well and enjoy the tidy kitchen at least for a week.

One time goal vs life long goal

photo: Seppo Iivonen

Martial arts aren’t all about fighting, they also have a bit of an artistic side as well (as the name states). Some styles, concentrate purely on that side and some use it very little. The way I understood the meaning of arts is having something deeper to concentrate on. It also gives you the path for constant development. Imagine a situation, where you apply a perfect counter strike and knockout your opponent, and still you master says that your guard was down during your kick. It would be hard to understand, why the result isn’t the one you would be looking for, but a perfect form.

In sales, one can have ready written scripts for sales conversations. Sometimes, these feel unprofessional and you might feel like, you can do better without asking bluntly the same questions all the time. More experienced salespeople have developed routines and have skills in developing conversations without scripts. They might get sales training and improvement tips from a constultant. But how do you ensure your skills improve after 10 years of sales experience?

Paying attention pays off

You cannot accept a mistake, that you know is a mistake. That is a hard road to walk through, but that is also the reason, why there are so few masters in the world. The question is: do you want to become one or not? If yes, then you need to start taking first baby steps and start to be honest to yourself and stop doing mistakes you know are mistakes. Don’t worry about making mistakes, just concentrate on not doing the same ones again. The start is easy, but to fix them all and continue to do that is really hard. But don’t give up, before you have achieved the results you wanted to. This is not a 9 to 5 job, but a way to lead your life, but still you need to have a balance in life. Don't sacrifice everything to become better. Become better with everything you do.