Leave this blog now.

You don’t need to be here right now.

You don’t need another new idea. You don’t need a new insight. You don’t need a new tool, a new technique, or a new strategy. You don’t need to do any more research. You don’t need to do any more reading (today, anyway).

The gap between your present results and the results that you need can only be filled by your taking massive action on all that you already know.

You know who needs your help. You know who you need to help.

You know how to help your dream clients produce better results, and you know what new results they need to produce.

You know what you have to do to open the relationship.

You know what you need to do to win the opportunity.

You know what you need to do to execute.

You know how to create value and you know what value to create.

No more information is necessary. Now it is time that you do the work.

Questions

No more questions. No links. Just do.

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I can’t imagine that anyone reading this blog doesn’t have an investment account with some brokerage firm. We know we have to make investments in our future, and we make regular contributions to our chosen investment vehicles. We take the asset that is money, and we invest it so that it will grow. In doing so, we make choices about how and where to invest our money, and we check in regularly to see how are investments are doing. We make adjustments when those investments aren’t moving us closer to our goals.

It’s easy to do all of this while ignoring the primary asset with which you have to generate all other assets: yourself. The asset that is you only produces greater results when you contribute more to it.

You are so busy working, so busy going and doing, it’s easy to fail to take the time to invest in yourself.

Your Relationships

When it is all said and done, you will not judge the quality of your life by your financial statements. You will judge the quality of your life by the quality of your relationships. What is important in life are your experiences, the part of your life that you shared with others, and the parts of their lives they shared with you.

If you take a few minutes and reflect on the most meaningful events or experiences in your life to date, you will discover that all of your best memories include other people. If the memories aren’t when people were they for you, they will be the memories where you were there for them.

Make a list of the people that matter most to you. Make a plan to invest time in those relationships, to generate other meaningful experiences. The investment you make in relationships is perhaps the greatest invest you will ever make.

Your Health

It would be hard for anyone to be guiltier than I am of neglecting their own health to instead work. To wind down after a long day of work, I like to do even more work. But this isn’t sustainable and it is a form of neglect.

You are your only real asset. You have to maintain the asset through which all other results are produced and generated.

Investing in your health requires that you take time away from producing results to work on the asset that does all of that producing. We all make different investment choices that meet our needs. For me it’s the bicycle. For you it might be running, weights, or meditation. Whatever it is, know that these investments are critical and transformative. The greater your energy and your capacity to produce, the greater your results.

Make a plan to invest in your health. Do you need to commit to that exercise plan you have avoided? A better way of eating? Meditation or yoga classes?

Your Mind

It’s easy to overlook investing in one of your most vital assets: your brain.

We all spend so much time working and taking care of the business of life, that after a long day, you want to unwind. We also expect other people, especially our employers, to develop and sharpen our skills for us. We expect them to give us the training, coaching, and development that we need in order for the asset that is our brain to better produce results.

Like your relationships and your health, the development of your brain is your responsibility alone.

You might need to read more books or listen to audio books. Maybe you need to go to your community college and sign up for courses. Maybe you need to attend a conference. Or you might need to spend time writing your own development plan that includes some or all of the above.

Whatever you decide to do, make the investment in your brain and your mind. It is a critical part of the asset that is you.

Are you investing enough in yourself?

Questions

What investments are you making in the relationships that are most important to you?

What investments are you making in your health? How do you ensure that you have the energy and capacity to perform at your peak?

What investments are you making in your brain? How are you getting better?

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Salespeople are getting soft. Like marshmallows.

Many haven’t embraced sales. Many more that share the title “salesperson” don’t believe in their hearts that selling is meaningful work. Some have adopted the belief that there is something wrong with the activities that make up selling. They believe and behave as if these activities are somehow dirty, beneath them, unjust, or unnecessarily manipulative. They believe and behave as if taking some sales activities means that you can’t really care about your clients, that you are completely self-oriented.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Cold Calling and Prospecting

Proactively calling your dream clients could be seen as aggressive, self-oriented behavior. After all, you do want to make a sale, and making a sale would certainly benefit you and your company. But the funny thing about this Western, free-market capitalism is that, in order for you to collect the benefit of your bargain, the person or entity you are bargaining with also expects to receive the benefit of their bargain.

The truth of the matter is that your dream client needs you—or someone with a real interest in helping them—to take their business results to the next level. Your dream client is waiting.

Prospecting is how you determine who it is that you can help and how you might do so.

Prospecting and caring are not mutually exclusive.

Gaining Commitments

Asking for the commitments you need from your dream client can also seem to be assertive or self-interested. You need your dream client’s agreement to create and move an opportunity forward, and moving the opportunity will certainly benefit you and your company. But this is only a half the story.

If you create value at each stage of your sales process, and if you truly care enough to help your dream client succeed, then you create value by guiding them through their buying process. They expect you to know how to move them from where they are to where they need to go. You are offending no one by asking for the information that you need to help your client or by asking for the access to the team whose consensus you will later need.

Gaining commitments and caring are not mutually exclusive.

Resolving Concerns

Asking for meetings to help resolve your dream client’s concerns at the end of the sales cycle can certainly be perceived as self-serving. You want one last bite at the apple, and you want to make certain that you are chosen over your competitors and over the status quo. That’s one way of looking at it.

A more thoughtful and mature view might be that your dream client is going the natural resistance to pulling the trigger that accompanies every major decision. You create value for them by helping them to resolve their concerns and assuring them that will achieve the outcomes you are selling. You provide them with answers, proof, and confidence to move forward to a future state they both need and desire.

Resolving your dream clients concerns and caring are not mutually exclusive. Not even close.

There Is No Choice to Make

Are there still some salespeople that are self-oriented and selfish, only selling so that they can receive the benefit of their bargain without caring about their customers? Sure there are. But if you are here and reading this, it isn’t likely that you are old school salespersons.

There is no choice to make. You can, should, and must be confident and comfortable with the activities that succeeding in sales requires of you. You must take these activities and you must care deeply about helping your clients to succeed.

It is your intentions that make the difference. Your intentions are the difference. If your intentions are good, then you don’t need to worry about being “non-salesy” (whatever that means).

Questions

Can the same activity be different when taken by two different people with different intentions?

Is it selfish to want to help your dream client if you also benefit?

What do you have to believe about your clients in order to prospect and cold call?

What beliefs do you have about asking for and gaining commitments?

What beliefs do you have about overcoming objections and resolving concerns?

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A good sales process can help you to win your opportunities—and faster, too. But a good sales process has three different sets of stakeholders. If it is designed and executed well, it will serve all three of these stakeholder groups.

Your Dream Client’s Stakeholders

Your dream client contacts are stakeholders in your sales process. They have needs as they go through their buying process, and if you get your sales process correct, it will serve those needs.

Your sales process will serve their buying process. It will address their needs, regardless of whether you find them without dissatisfaction, with some recognition of their needs, when they are evaluating their options, or when they are trying to resolve their concerns and mitigate risk. Your sales process must create value at every stage of your prospective client’s buying process.

Your sales process also has to serve your dream client’s needs as your future client. It needs to help build consensus and develop the relationships that will allow you to execute and manage change.

You, Your Deal, and Your Quota

It’s sometimes difficult for salespeople to believe—or remember—that their sales process is really designed in part to serve them. You also have a stake in following your sales process.

Your process should be a reverse engineering of all of the activities you must take, as well as the commitments you must gain, as you move forward from target to close. Your sales process codifies your best practices, and it helps to stack the deck in your favor. It helps you to win before there is ever a contest.

Your process helps you to win your dream client opportunity, and it helps you make your number. You are another primary stakeholder in the process. It can define the way you sell.

Your Sales Organization

While it’s difficult for salespeople to believe that their clients are stakeholders in their process, and while they don’t often think of themselves as a beneficiary of a good process, they have no trouble understanding the process serves their sales organization.

And your sales organization does need to be served by your sales process.

You sales management team needs the ability to forecast future sales. They need to provide reliable information to management so that other decisions may be made. The process provides the forecast with integrity.

The sales process also serves other processes and systems. Documentation is needed, including credit-worthiness, service agreements and expectations, and legal documents. The sales process addresses the collection of information that serves your company’s other processes and systems.

It’s often overlooked, but a good sales process can help produce the information, the documentation, and the relationships that allow for a good handoff. Getting your internal professional service firm engaged in the sales process can help you to win your opportunity—and to execute once you have.

Questions

Who is your sales process designed to serve?

What needs do your buyers have as they move through their buying process and how can your sales process serve those needs?

How does your sales process help you to win opportunities and to build a competitive advantage through your sales actions?

How does your sales process serve your organization?

When you don’t follow your sales process, what do you put at risk for these stakeholders?

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Sometimes your prospect knows that they are dissatisfied. They know that they need a better result. They may even know what they need to do to produce the results that they need.

But other times, you dream client may have no idea that they should be dissatisfied. It’s quite possible that your prospective client can produce good results and still have a massive gap between their results and what they are capable of with your ideas.

In cases where your dream client isn’t dissatisfied, when there is no gap, you have to provoke them to nudge them away from their current thinking. You have to provoke them.

Connotations and Prerequisites

Words like “provoke” or “challenge” come with baggage. They connote something negative. In the wrong hands, these ideas can be a source of problems. The way in which this approach is used requires skill and special handling.

Provoking clients with new insights and new ideas can make clients uncomfortable. In fact, it’s supposed to. In my experience, it is necessary to have developed the relationships that allow you to confront their thinking head on.

It’s true you need to be a subject matter expert. It’s true that you need to bring your clients ideas and teach them. But in doing so, you can be perceived as condescending. You can be perceived as you pointing out that your client isn’t doing their job well, that they don’t have their eye on the ball, and that they are responsible for the gap you are showing them.

Really provocative ideas require equally deep relationships.

Resistance and EQ

Ideas that challenge the status quo are almost universally met with resistance. Challenging ideas can cause your dream client contact to feel the need to defend past decisions. Your ideas can cause them to entrench.

A salesperson taking this approach needs to have a very high level of emotional intelligence. They need to be aware of the feedback they are receiving from their contact so they can adjust their approach and their language choice this is especially true if you are presenting a difficult idea on a first sales call, or where you don’t have as deep a relationship as you wished.

Provocative ideas need to be presented by someone with the emotional intelligence to be able to present them in a way that doesn’t cause their dream client to entrench and defend.

Challenged Back and Business Acumen

Challenging ideas can also be challenged. In fact, this is exactly the sort of engagement that is useful. But because a prospective client that is a subject matter expert can challenge your provocative ideas, it requires that you have the business acumen to defend the ideas.

When you provoke your client to abandon their thinking about something, you need to be able to handle the conversation that comes with that provocation. You need to be prepared to deal with all of the questions about what it takes to succeed, the outcomes that can be expected and when, and the risks and how they are mitigated.

Provoking to action can be both good and necessary. But without the relationships to support that level of conversation, the emotional intelligence to manage the conversation, and the business acumen and subject matter expertise to support that level of dialogue, the conversation can move from provocative to offensive.

Questions

If you are going to challenge your dream client’s current thinking and provoke them to take a new path, what kind of relationship is necessary?

What clues or signals do you need to be aware of to ensure that your message is being received in the spirit in which is it intended, so that you can be sure you aren’t causing your prospective client to entrench and defend?

What kind of business acumen and subject matter expertise do you need in order to have the level of dialogue that accompanies this kind of conversation?

What are the risks of failing to have the candid conversation you need when you know what your client needs to do to produce better results but doesn’t yet know or understand?

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For a very long time, successful salespeople had a very specific set of competencies. These sales skills served them well for decades and decades. But changes in society, technology, and the business environment required new sales competencies. And so, the stack of competencies grew.

In the last couple of decades, the world of business—and sales—has been racked by ever more disruptive change. Success in sales requires more—and greater—competencies.

And it requires that you, the salesperson, have the whole range of competencies.

Foundational Competencies

Salespeople have always had to ask for commitments.

They have always had to prospect for new business.

They used to have to overcome objections, which has transformed into a higher-level skill of resolving concerns and limiting risk.

Salespeople have always had to demonstrate the value of the goods, services, and solutions that sold, even though we no longer think of features and benefits alone.

They have always had to tell stories, to present.

Each of these skills is still necessary to succeed in sales. As sales grew more complex and more complicated, additional skills were necessary.

Second Level Skills

As we moved into selling solutions, the ability to diagnose, to understand a prospective business client’s needs, became critically important. Like the foundational skills, this skill is still critical and necessary.

As different solutions were sold, the ability to negotiate also became more and more important, especially as competing companies created very different levels value and different results.

Because this is true, it can be difficult to distinguish one solution—and one company—from the next. It became critical that the salesperson possess the ability to differentiate themselves and their offering.

As selling has become more complex, even the abilities to diagnose, differentiate, and negotiate aren’t enough. A still higher level of skills is required.

The New Consultative Salesperson

While all of these skills are still necessary to creating and winning opportunities, the new consultative salesperson requires additional competencies.

The primary competency for salespeople now is business acumen. None of the foundational skills or second level skills is valuable without business acumen. Of all of the skills and competencies required, business acumen reigns supreme. Business acumen is the new sales acumen.

Without business acumen, it is difficult to know how to help your clients produce better business outcomes. That’s the new game. It’s not product. It’s not features and benefits. It’s not solutions. It’s business outcomes.

Getting those business outcomes requires change. The consultative salesperson has to possess the ability to mange and lead change in their client’s organization, and in their own. The new consultative salesperson manages change.

Managing this change requires leadership skills. A salesperson may do a lot of the heavy lifting by themselves or with their small sales team, but the execution belongs to a team of people on in the salesperson’s company and in the client’s. The new consultative salesperson is a strategic orchestrator; they lead the change by leading the team.

Like no time before, when you sell it, you own it. You sell outcomes, and that means that you own those outcomes. Managing the outcomes is what new consultative salespeople do. They don’t own the transactions; their team does. But they own the outcomes, and they ensure that their clients get the benefit of their bargain by acting as part of their client’s team.

This is what is required of the new consultative salesperson.

Questions

What are the foundational skills that salespeople have always required?

What changes have required salespeople to need to acquire new skills?

What are the new skills that consultative salespeople need in order to succeed in sales?

What new skills do salespeople require to succeed for their clients?

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New salespeople can be confused as to how much prospecting they need to do to succeed. Part of the confusion is caused by what they observe from salespeople with more experience.

Some salespeople with more experience may be far more effective at prospecting, and so they can produce results with less activity, especially if they are exceptional at cold calling.

Unfortunately, some experienced salespeople that don’t prospect give the impression that prospecting isn’t important. If management tolerates too little prospecting, then new salespeople believe that their lack of prospecting activity is acceptable, even though it will later cause them to fail–and it may cost them their job.

So how much prospecting is enough?

Enough is Enough

The answer is that it is different for different salespeople. It’s also different for different sales organizations. The right amount of prospecting is the amount it takes to produce the outcomes you need. This is true regardless of the prospecting methods you choose.

You need to create and open opportunities. The amount of opportunities you need to create is based on a number factors. You need to do enough prospecting to create the opportunities you need to make your quota. You also need to prospect enough to build a pipeline that will allow you to lose opportunities and still make your number based on your close rate.

If you are new and have no pipeline, much of your time will need to be spent prospecting to develop your pipeline. If you have existing accounts, you may need to create opportunities within those accounts, and that may mean you need to do less prospecting outside of your assigned accounts.

Your company’s goals may also play a part. If they are launching a new product, or entering a new market, you may need to do more prospecting to help reach your company’s goals.

The answer is that the amount of prosecuting you need to do varies.

Too Little

The answer for most salespeople is that they could stand to do more prospecting. Prospecting is the heavy lifting of sales. But opening is the new closing.

As your clients have been charged with owning greater financial results and producing those results with fewer resources, they are more time starved than ever. Add to that the fact that globalization is making things more competitive than ever, and the fact that we are all under more pressure to break out of the commodity box, and you understand why opening is the critical activity.

Even the best of salespeople with good prospecting skills believe they need to do more prospecting to succeed.

You should prioritize your model sales week by starting with prospecting and build the rest of your week around that activity.

Questions

How much prospecting do you do each week?

Are you dedicating enough time to prospecting to reach your goals?

Are spending time in different prospecting approaches to be sure you reach your client where they are?

How would sales results be improved by having more opportunities?

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One of the primary attributes a new consultative salesperson must possess to succeed today is the ability to lead a team.

Creating value for your clients is a team sport. To create value, to execute, and to succeed, you need to build a team within your organization. Think of it as your own professional services firm.

The Operations Arm of Your Firm

You might be the sharp end of the spear when it comes to opening and winning opportunities, and you may own the outcomes that you sell, but when it comes to delivering on the promises you have made, you need a team. You need deep relationships within your own organization, as deep or deeper than the relationships you have with your clients.

You cannot succeed—and neither can your client—without your operations team. You need to really know the people that serve your clients. If you want them to do as well as you need them to, you need to spend time with them. You need to understand their world. And, you need to give them whatever they need during your handoff to ensure that they succeed for your client.

You have to care about the team you build as much as you want them to care about your clients.

The smart new consultative salesperson builds an informal team of allies in operations and includes them in the sales process early. They introduce them to their client stakeholders and helps them build the relationships that they will later need. They also develop a list of questions and a list of “must haves” that enables the operations side of their internal professional services firm to execute.

The operations team is part of your professional services firm.

The Management Arm of Your Firm

As a new consultative salesperson, you spend your time in the field, with your clients. You spend more time with your clients and your dream clients because that is where you create value. You need to ensure that your team has the resources and the support to produce results when you aren’t available. To do so, you need a management arm of your internal professional services firm.

The smart new consultative salesperson builds relationships with key management individuals within their organization. They bring these individuals into the discussions and meetings around their clients and dream clients. They also pass ownership of the outcomes to these individuals so that they have leaders within their own organization that are as committed to serving their clients as are they.

Major accounts are built on exceptions. Large clients need modifications and adjustments to what we normally do in order to make it fit with the way they do business. The new consultative salesperson builds their internal professional services firm so that they can get the exceptions that their client needs, and so that their management team owns those outcomes.

If you have ever needed management’s support in a hurry, you know how difficult it can be to obtain. It’s far easier to gain their support by including them in everything leading up the point that your client needs something done differently. You win by building consensus before you need it.

Your management is a necessary part of your professional services firm.

Your Org Chart

Sketch out your own organizational chart. List the members of your personal professional services firm. Make note of the areas that you don’t have the relationships you need, where there is an empty spot on your roster. Make plans to develop the relationships you need to build the internal team that helps you to create value for, to sell to, and to execute for your clients.

And don’t overlook those you perceive as powerless. Include people from your information technology department, your accounts receivable department, and any other department that might in some way be able to create value for your clients.

The new consultative salesperson needs the ability to lead within their own organization and their client’s organization, and they need the ability to lead change. The stronger your relationships are internally, the easier it is to generate results externally.

Questions

Do you have the internal relationships that you need within your own organization?

Do you build consensus around how to create value for your clients within your own organization?

How do you include your operations and management team in the sales process early enough to ensure that they can execute for your clients?

How do you ensure management owns the exceptions that your major account clients need?

How do you make your company an extension of your will and your value creation for your clients?

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In many sales organizations, there is too little candor. There are conversations that need to be had that are instead avoided. If the candid conversations were had, the sales organization’s performance would improve, their obstacles would be more quickly removed, and the changes needed would occur. The performance of individuals would improve too, if someone would tell them the truth. But the truth is avoided.

High-performing sales organizations are honest with themselves and their clients.

A Word of Caution

Following Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People would solve many of the problems most of us have in human relations. In human relations, fast is slow, and slow is fast. Candor is fast. Therefore, you need to do some pre-work.

Covey’s metaphor of an emotional bank account is the key to candor. You can’t make withdraws from the emotional bank account that exceed your deposits without running into real problems. If you are going to be candid, you have to make the deposits before you make the withdraw. And candor can be a major withdraw.

Candor with Your Clients

The biggest area where salespeople can improve is in being candid with their clients. Too many of us fear that telling the client the truth will cost us the opportunity when it will in fact win us the opportunity.

We believe that if we tell the client what it will really cost them to get the result that they need, that they will believe the price is too high. The lack of candor means that we lose the opportunity because we built a solution that won’t produce the result, or that we price the solution wrong and that so can’t afford to get the result that the client needs.

If your client needs to invest more to get the result, you have to be candid and deliver the truth.

We believe that if we are candid about how difficult our change initiative is really going to be that we will frighten our dream client away. Or we fear being candid in telling our client that the reason that they can’t produce their desired result is something that they are doing, that they are causing their own problems.

If your client has a constraint that is preventing them from getting the result that they need, you become a strategic partner by finding a way to help them see it. You tell them the truth.

Trust is based on truthfulness.

Candor for Sales Managers

Candor enables speed.

If you are a sales manager, you are obligated to tell your salespeople what they are doing wrong, what is expected of them, and how they need their beliefs, behaviors, and actions to change to improve their performance. Allowing your team to continue to do things that hurt their performance is a tacit approval and it is an endorsement of those beliefs, behaviors, and actions.

If a salesperson isn’t prospecting, you need to be candid and have a conversation about what needs to change. If their opportunities aren’t qualified, you might save their feelings when they excitedly share their excitement with you, but you are also allowing them to continue take an action that will later hurt both of you.

One of the areas we allow a salesperson to avoid the truth is in opportunity and deal reviews. We want the opportunity, they want the opportunity, and neither of us wants to talk about the massive obstacle to the deal or what we are going to do about it. We fear having to remove the opportunity from the forecast.

Candor is a better, safer, and faster approach.

This isn’t “spare the rod and spoil the child.” It’s simply making sure you give your people what they need—including the truth. The outcome isn’t to punish; it’s improvement.

Candor for Salespeople

It isn’t a sign of weakness to need help. It’s a sign of weakness to need help and not to ask for it.

If you are a salesperson, you need to be candid with your sales manager about what you need to succeed. If you are struggling in some area, having an honest conversation about what you need is the fast path to making improvements. Avoiding asking for help will only allow you to limp along, under-producing and under-performing, until something awful happens.

You also need to be candid about your opportunities. When a deal has hair all over it, you have to be candid about what it is really going to take to win the opportunity and to execute for the client. Avoiding the candid conversations here makes it more likely the deal will be lost, or that it will be won and your operations team won’t be prepared to serve your new client.

If you want candor, be candid. But also remember you too need to make deposits in your relationships.

It’s Personal

As much as we’d like to believe that “it’s just business; it isn’t personal,” candor can be perceived as being very personal. Sometimes it is extremely personal. Remembering that we are all human, and that we need to be human for others, is the key to enabling a culture of candor.

Your team can handle the truth only if you make the deposits in the relationships that allow candor. Be human and care about other people’s feelings. Ignoring their feelings and emotions doesn’t produce great results, and it surely doesn’t produce results faster.

If you are the subject of a candid conversation, remember that the outcome of the candid conversation is your improved performance. Be honest with yourself, and avoid being defensive about the improvements you need to make.

Questions

Does your sales organization have a culture of candor?

Are you candid with your clients about what they need to succeed?

Do you make the deposits in the emotional bank accounts that allow you to later make withdraws?

When does candor sometimes cause problems? How do you prevent those problems?

What do you need to have a candid conversation about right now? With whom? Can you make that withdraw without overdrawing your account?

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On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four minute mile. Before he ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, the four-minute was believed to be impossible. Two months later, Roger Bannister again ran a sub-four minute mile, this time with John Landy running a sub-four minute mile with him. A four-minute mile is now a standard for distance runners.

Before Bannister, many believed that it was literally physically impossible for the human body to run a mile that fast, but in reality it was impossible only for the human mind (except Roger’s mind, of course).

We humans are subject to believing that all sorts of things that are really only difficult are actually impossible–until it is proven otherwise. Fortunately, there are some that believe more is possible.

Two Sales Stories and the Bannister Effect

A friend of mine is a sales manager. His company had a new offering, and they rolled it out to the sales force only to be greeted with rolling eyes and shrugging shoulders. There was no enthusiasm for the product. Their clients didn’t need it. No one was going to buy it. It was stupid, and there was no reason to give it a minute of their attention.

Until the first salesperson to try sold the service and reached her annual quota with that single sale. In January.

As it turns out, it’s really an interesting service now, and the salespeople are out selling it—thanks to the Bannister Effect.

Another friend in sales management had a territory with too few hunters. According to the non-hunters, the territory was dead. In their minds, there weren’t any opportunities to be found anywhere. So my friend did what good sales managers do and he corrected the problem by hiring a couple hunters. They were only allowed to call on new business and were given no accounts of their own.

The hunters are finding multi-million dollar opportunities that had been ignored and neglected for years. Unfortunately, the Bannister Effect doesn’t easily inspire the order-taking salespeople because it requires the great effort that is prospecting and opening.

Could the other salespeople have developed and sold those opportunities? Absolutely, they could have.

It is Only Impossible Until It’s Possible

There are a lot of things we believe to be impossible only because we haven’t seen someone else do it. It’s impossible only because you don’t believe that it can be done. But once you know that it can be done, you know it is possible.

For many people, just knowing that something can be done makes them believe that they too can do the same. It removes the mental block that prevents them from succeeding. For others, the effort is too great. Some are immune to the Bannister Effect because, to them, the effort is too great . . . even if you only have to go all out for 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds.

Questions

Why is it easier to believe you can accomplish something difficult once you have seen others accomplish the same thing?

Who has accomplished something that you would like to accomplish? What did they accomplish?

What do you believe is “impossible” that you know that other people have already achieved? If they can achieve it, why can’t you achieve the same thing?

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