One Key Element Of High Achievement

A few years ago, I was hired to coach a sales team whose performance had fallen drastically. I met individually with the sales people and discovered quickly that the problem wasn’t a lack of product knowledge. It wasn’t that the competition was better. It had nothing to do with a lack of prospective buyers.

The problem was that they had all attended an all day general public sales seminar a few months back. These multi-speaker meetings are great for firing up the troops but are usually short on specifics. Speaker after speaker hammered home the “general principle” that it took ten calls to get one appointment; three appointments to find a “qualified prospect” and three qualified prospects to generate one sales.

This ran contrary to the previously exemplary statistics this crew had established over the past five years. But the “experts” knew best, and for some reason these seasoned sales veterans accepted it—believing that the record they had established was a fluke that couldn’t be sustained. They lowered their expectations and the result was that their sales dropped substantially.

Charles Kettering, who headed research at General Motors for 27 years and also served as President of DELCO held 140 patients when he died in 1958. He once summed up the path to achievement with these words, “High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation."

Expectations provide us with anticipation of what will happen; a vision of what can or cannot be accomplished. Expectations help us chart our course into the future and is instrumental in how much staying power we have when the going gets tough. Expectations either activate or deactivate our motivation.

So, I ask you, what kind of expectations do you have? Perhaps, like the sales team I told you about you once performed at a higher level, but due to whatever reason you’ve lowered your expectations. Or maybe you have allowed past difficulties or peer pressure to dampen your enthusiasm for excellence, thus causing you to lower your expectations.

America was founded on great expectations and its future depends on the expectations we have for her future. The same is true of each of us.

That which we expect to happen shapes our thinking, affects what we believe about our abilities, potentials and futures, and sense of self and purpose.

Let me challenge you this week to examine what your expectations are, what type of vision they provide of your future, the direction they are charting your course and whether they are motivating you to live up to your God given abilities.
Have a great and profitable week!
Robert Hidde
bob@confidentliving.com