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.

The first post about how to win a fight, when your opponent is much better than you, was about making your opponent feeling insecure by not attacking when you get a chance, but building it up and waiting patiently for the best possible chance. There is also another method and strategy, that you can use, but this requires a bit more skills from you.

When you start a boxing training, you always start with skipping rope. This improves your stamina, but also helps you to train your rhythmic skills. Moreover, this improves your body for boxing steps, which you need in fights, in order to be able to move fluently across the ring.

In sales training, you often train for open-ended questions. Those keep the conversation going on and you get the customer to talk more than you. The better questions you can come up with, the more she values your conversation and feels that you are valuable to her business. But what if, her knowledge much better than yours? Or your competitor is already doing a great job with her? And you just have only single pieces of advice that you could give to her, not the whole picture she wants?

Rousey vs Holm on paper

I watched the UFC 193 main event fight Rousey vs Holm. Rousey being a dominant champion and destroying her last 3 opponents in a mere 64 seconds in total. Holm is a well-rounded boxing champion, who has moved to mixed martial arts. But still, Holm lacked a lot of experience needed for MMA fights and Rousey had previously been dominating with her judo-background in grappling and wrestling. Even though, Holm had been training those as well, she could not have the skills to win a grappling fight against an Olympic Judo medalist, who had a perfect record in MMA of 12-0.

photo: Heikki Immonen

Counter attack (part 3)

In martial arts, when your opponent is attacking you, he often pulls down his guard and is open for a counter attack. It is hard to keep a perfect posture, when trying to kick, for instance. Very likely your hands will drop or move, when you start your kick. But still, it is not very easy to take advantage of the situation and it requires a lot of skill and perfect timing from you to counter attack successfully.

In sales, it is often said that the customer is always right and not it is better not to win an argument or trying to prove your customer is wrong with her thoughts. She might get offended if you constantly try to make your point over hers and try to argue against her knowledge on the matter. There is a thin line between challenging her the right way and when you cross the line and make the situation worse.

Timing is the key in counter attacks

Pulling of a perfect timing in a counter strike, it almost looks like you fooled your opponent into a trap. It may look like, you started your attack first and he just didn’t realize it. That is exactly, how it should be. My master used to call this timing “from the feeling”. This means that you cannot plan your counter attack beforehand, it just happens automatically, when you are really concentrated on the fight. You have trained the technique thousand times and somehow the situation in the fight was exactly the same as you have experienced in training. The big question is then how do you prepare yourself in training to have that “from the feeling” moment?

In a sales conversation, you hear buying signals and objections constantly. Counter attack is the perfect answer to a sales objection and results in getting the deal or at least winning the trust of your customer. If you act too early in your best counter attack and try to close the deal, you won’t be successful. You need to set it up for and have the right timing. The big question is, how do you recognize the right momentum?

You need to act "from the feeling"

Back to martial arts and how to build “from the feeling” skill. In the beginning, I always concentrated into looking in the eyes of my opponent. I thought I could see better from his eyes, what he was going to do. That is true to some extent. You can read if someone is afraid, angry or has other emotions. But it is difficult to read the attacks and especially which attacks are coming. When you concentrate on something small, you lose the sight of the bigger picture. That is why, after the beginning and reading the emotions, later in the fight, I started look a bit lower and trying to sense also with my ears (and if possible with other senses too). This gave me a feeling of a much slower motions in the fight and helped me to read the movements of my opponent much better. The rhythm becomes clear and you start to see how your opponent prepares for the attack and then it is a lot easier for you to counter the attack. With a strong opponent, the signals are not that clear, but then you need “from the feeling” level even more. When you train, you should concentrate the same way and with repetition, you will start to feel comfortable, even if the speed is getting constantly faster and faster. You will start feeling the fight is in slow motion and you are in control of everything. At that moment, you have a chance for perfect counter attacks and you will win the fight for sure. These are the situations, when sudden knockouts often happen.

So how to get the same done in sales? First of all, you have to start to think the sales conversation as a whole entity. You can’t see the big picture, if you concentrate on each sentence and try to answer all the questions and sales objections with similar weight. You need to be able to let go of minor details and concentrate on the most important matters from her perspective. The more sales experience you have, the easier it is for you to read your customer. But still, you need to start looking for those important signals of the most important issues on hand. With good objection handling techniques and open ended questions, you are able to build up the situation to your favor. You can be nice and still counter attack at the right moment. When I attend a sales meeting, I always write down the conversation as well as possible with my iPad. I try to make the script and see if certain patterns follow. It is easier to read than to listen thoroughly. It is also possible to glance through the notes, while having a conversation. After the meeting, before entering notes to the CRM, I read what I have written down and try to spot the points, where I should have counter attacked and secured the deal. Sometimes, it also helps to have your manager or peer attending the same meeting and making observations. You can go through your notes together and discuss, where the most important signals where and how you should have responded.

Like in martial arts, you need experience in sales as well. Experience itself doesn’t bring “from the feeling” level, hence you need to start looking for it today. First you need to recognize the situation, then you need to start testing your responses and in the end, you will succeed in counter attacking. Let me know, how you are doing and what pushed you to the next level in martial arts or in sales. I really would like to read some comments and ideas. Those will help me to develop in both sales and martial arts.