The Prospecting Professor

Write Your Own Epitaph

"For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been."...John Greenleaf Whittier

If you got hit by a bus today, and had the spooky prescience to write your own epitaph right now...what would you say?

Would your words be filled with regrets?

When you look back at 2005, what are the things that you most regret NOT doing? In the early months of 2006, are you on track to NOT DOING them again?

Sales trainer, Jim Meisenheimer says that the best way to transform regrets into opportunities is to set them up as personal goals. He suggests writing down five things that you regret not doing last year. With this in mind, he says to make a list of the five things that you'd like to accomplish in 2006, professionally and personally.

Thomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph...with few regrets I presume. In the months prior to his death, Jefferson designed his own gravestone, and wrote, "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious toleration & Father of the University of Virginia."

None of us will ever have the chance of comparable achievements to President Jefferson, of course. However, we can always take control over our next, immediate steps.

"What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now."...Buddha

Reach for the Stars

The concept of "stretch goals" have been in the management vocabulary, under various names, for some time. However, in the early 1990s, Jack Welch and General Electric became avid promoters of the concept. By definition, stretch goals are goals that one does not know how to reach. By specifying the "unattainable", people are required to "think outside the box", and able to improve performance by a magnitude they had never thought possible.

The risk of "stretch goals" for financial advisors is that the goal is initially set in a wild burst of enthusiasm, and not reached...causing the advisor to feel like a failure. In fact, I suspect that many salespeople have lived for years with "achievement failure"...constantly setting goals that are not realistic. This failure can become a habit...or acceptable.

For most all of us, reaching a goal is tremendously psychically rewarding and provides important psychological nourishment and reinforcement.

In contrast to "stretch goals", Loren Dunton, the noted sales visionary and strategist, espouses the Ten Percent Secret. The Ten Percent Secret establishes reachable goals and embraces the psychological power of small successes. Mr. Dunton believes that modest goals, set and achieved daily and weekly, are much more energizing than the goals that are set impossibly high.

In other words, each and every day, reach for the moon...first. The 'reach-for-the-star-thing' will take care of itself.

Stair Stepping

One of my fonder memories of my youth was running up stairs. I played varsity basketball for Lowell High School in San Francisco. I didn't have as much natural athletic talent as my peers...and I had to compensate for this deficiency by focusing on my own fitness. My "secret weapon" was running stairs...one of the best ways to improve one's anaerobic fitness. The best stairs to train on in San Francisco surrounded the football stadium at City College of San Francisco (CCSF). The stadium was constructed on the side of a hill, and the stairs were very steep, and seemed to ascend forever. Best of all, I could run up the benches, which were equivalent to running up two stairs at-a-time. The benches also had this natural "springiness" that seemed to propel me up the incline.

In all of my years since, I have never had a workout quite like these stairs.

Fran Pirozzolo PhD, is a sports psychologist with a doctorate in neuropsychology. (Good article about him in yesterday's Journal.) His clients have included: the New York Yankees, the Houston Texans, Evander Holyfield, and Greg Norman.

He has a number of interesting theories and training methods. One of his more interesting theories is that it's the "common people" who are most likely to achieve extraordinary accomplishments. He thinks that many great athletes have overcome a crisis in their childhood...common children who face uncommon circumstances, such as living with an abusive parent, or economic deprivation.

Getting back to my stair analogy,  Dr. Pirozzolo recommends a "stair-step" approach to fixing problems. For example, when he works with a struggling pitcher who, during practice, is only able to get 40% of his pitches in a certain strike zone...Dr. Pirozzolo encourages his client to strive for a 50% goal first, and then move it up gradually. He doesn't set 100% goals, which he believes would set his clients up for failure rather than success.

As we set our own personal goals, it is important that our "inner monologue" be positive and forward-looking...not stuck in the past, magnifying faults and replaying failures. By setting goals that are challenging, yet achievable, we can build upon our small successes until the 100% goal is within our grasp.