Your teammates don’t do good work when they surrender and become unhappy. They don’t think of fresh ways to help you. They don’t make the customer want to come back. In fact, if you get enough unhappy players on your team, the whole mission can fall apart.
So their happiness comes first. Before money, before success.
Most people have this process completely reversed in life. When you ask them why they would like to succeed financially, they say because it will make everyone happy. But the opposite is true. As the happy people in Seattle’s famous Fish Market proved, happiness leads to money, not the other way around.
Professional golf is considered to be a serious sport full of concentration and discipline. Yet the great golfer Ben Hogan said his formula for success was to “Be absolutely determined to enjoy what you do.”
Most of us are not like Ben Hogan. We wake up and surrender to the hardships of the world. We get out of bed and wave the white flag of defeat. All power is conceded to the outside: outside circumstances, family members, spouse, co-workers, customers, people of all kinds. Whatever they want. Whatever makes them happy.
The problem with that surrender is that we lose our self-esteem over it, and lose that sense of inner freedom that gives us energy for life. We lose all of it.
A friend sent us this passage from a book by Dr. Seuss because he said it reminded him of what we had been coaching him out of. This surrender thing we do.
“You have brains in your head,
You have feet in your shoes,
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own now and you know what you know
And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go!”
In all the years we have worked with salespeople, we have found that the greatest predictor for sales success is personal happiness. Most people say that it’s commitment, or drive, or purpose, or self-discipline. It’s not.
So have the first step you take each day be the happiness of yourself and everyone you work with. Start with your team. They are your internal customers. When they are on edge it makes you wealth-repellant. Light them up and customers will be drawn to that light. The team (including you!) comes first. The customer comes second.
All The Leader and The Coach blogs are here https://theleaderandthecoach.com/
The Leader and The Coach: The Art of Humanity in Leadership https://tinyurl.com/bdfzffmr
#leadership #leadershipcoaching #businesscoach #coachingleaders #leadershipdevelopment #executivecoaching #leaderascoach
