You Need a Better Why | Building Resilience (2 of 5)

This is the second Episode of a five part miniseries on Building Resilience, you can find episode one here. You Need a Better Why I really struggled with math in high school. It's not like it was hard for me to understand the concepts, algebra is great geometry I loved, I just wish wish someone had told me why it was important. I didn't understand when I was going to use any of this. If somebody had come to me and said Robert, "As a sales guy, you're going to make a bunch more money. If you can multiply large numbers in your head." Yeah, I probably would have cared a lot more, I would have taken it more seriously. But nobody gave me a good reason why I should give a rip about math. I mean, my teachers would joke about how I'm not going to have a calculator with me all the time, which I guess the joke is on them because my phone, my watch; they all have calculators on them. Start With Why Simon Sinek, I saw a Ted talk from him and he has a good book about this titled Start With Why. It's great and you should go read it. As salespeople, we really want to start with the what and the how, and then maybe if we have time we get to the why. When people ask, "What do you do for a living?" It's just really easy to say I do IT Support, or I'm in sales... but that's not really what anyone's asking. What people really care about is why. Why do you exist? Why does the world care? And I guess the problem is that the why is just so much more important than the what or the how, but it's a lot more difficult to define and to lay down. As salespeople, we need to have a really good why. Selling a great product isn't the same thing as having a great why. It's not enough to just be good at your job and meet your quota. It's not enough to have a lot of success as a sales person. I mean, those things  help, but they're not going to get you through the tough times. That's because pain is really hard to deal with without a good why. You encounter people that have pain every day, they're called prospects and a ton of them don't buy. They just do what they've been doing.  Fear is Poor Motivation I just want to talk real quick about the fear of losing your job. The fear of losing your job is not a good motivator. Think of it as the coal of motivation. It'll certainly do the job. It'll get hot. It'll get you moving or create steam and the engine can run, but it burns dirty. Being afraid of poverty, or losing your job, or the shame of being homeless creates a lot of pollution in your life. Fear can get you through the week, or month, but it's hard to be successful over the long term.You also have to have a good reason to keep going when the job isn't that tough. What happens when you meet your quota? Whether you meet your quota or you miss your quota, I'm guessing a whole lot of your success is the consistent activity every day. Again, and again, and again, no matter what. We talked about this in the last episode, the discipline to keep moving forward.If you've met your quota, you have to still keep going. But also when you make more money than you ever thought, humanly possible. It's going to be really hard to keep doing the job if you aren't afraid anymore. Your Why Must Be Emotional Humans are driven by emotion, whether we like it or not. That emotion flows through us like a river. You may be able to direct the water of a river one way or another, you could maybe dam it up for a while, but that water is going to go where it wants.  It's going to keep coming. It's going to do what it's going to do. There's only so much you can affect it. Correctly managed, those emotions can be an incredible fuel. They can be very powerful, like a hydroelectric dam, or they turn turbines and create lots of energy. But incorrectly managed, emotions can destroy cities. Well, at least your metaphorical version of cities. Unchecked emotions can be incredibly destructive. Your why has to be emotional and it must drive you.