In Brian Tracy’s brilliant book Eat That Frog he talks about the principle of dealing with your toughest tasks first and always everyday. The thoughts of eating a frog for breakfast would put anyone off but what if you have two? Eat the ugliest first.
Each one of us have parts of our jobs we simply hate doing. We hate them so we prevaricate and avoid them at all costs.
The problem with this is that they are frequently the most important things you can do to really move your business or your career forward.
Let me illustrate this with a real life example.
John is the Country Manager of a new business start up in Ireland. The business is in the fashion trade and has great potential growth opportunities.
John is passionate about the business and the plans for the business. There are however a huge number of tasks to be completed in order to get through the start up phase.
There are people to employ. There is a showroom to set up. There are customers to meet. There are targets to be met.
John doesn’t work from a task list, and has never really prioritised his tasks. John works on memory and momentum. He is hands on. He is a doer.
The thing is that there is just not enough time in the day to complete half of the stuff.
Monday was taken up with unpacking boxes. Tuesday and Wednesday were filled up with cold calls to potential clients retail stores. Well actually 2 to 3 calls to be accurate. Thursday was tied up in talking to utility companies for the new showroom. Friday was tied up in meetings with the team and interviewing new personnel.
Working with John we quickly establish that the real Frog is sales. This is the critical constraint to any future success if not focused on.
So why is John unpacking boxes, and driving for hours during the key working day to cold call people?
The real truth is that John hates using the telephone to sell. This is John’s really ugly frog. He hates “cold calling”. He is intimidated by them. It’s outside his comfort zone.
He has easily justified his actions by finding excuses. “Nobody takes cold calls”
“I have a better chance of getting someone by dropping in on them without an appointment”. “Someone had to unpack those boxes”
Just by focusing in on the key priority John was quickly able to realise the effect changing his habits could have on his business.
By paying some students €50 per day, he could easily delegate the unpacking and literally save several days in time to focus on sales.
By clearly specifying his sales goals and using the GOSPA model by crystallising his sales goals in to daily must do activities he quickly made significant progress.
Once he had identified that if he made just 15 calls per day to set up appointments (remember you don’t sell on the phone), he could generate significant progress towards his goals for appointments and new customers.
Once he had prioritised this activity in to a daily habit and gave it the number 1 priority everyday, he quickly established a routine that was easy to integrate in to his busy schedule. He simply moved his schedule around to suit his primary goal which was sales.
Also by breaking down the overall sales goal in to small tasks (15 calls daily) he was much more comfortable doing it and less intimidated by the “mountain” he initially perceived he had to climb.
Action Steps
What one thing do you hate doing, that if you were being honest to yourself, by not doing it is sabotaging your success?
Write it down now. Analyse why you hate this task so much. Then set yourself a goal to become truly excellent at it. In other words set yourself the goal of eating that frog daily.
Best of luck.
Contact me on www.ronankilroy.ie and arrange a FREE 90 minute coaching session.
