Start Being Honest With Yourself

If you want to make massive improvements in your results in business, in sales, and in life, the fastest way to get there is to be brutally honest with yourself. Start with this: If you are the source of your success why are you not also the source of your failures?

We believe our successes come from all the things that we are. It’s the way you sell. It’s the product you created. It’s your education and experience. It’s your special ability to create rapport. When you succeed and win you can easily identify all of the things that you did that resulted in that success.

But when we lose we don’t look inside. We look instead at external factors. It wasn’t anything that you did. It was some external force that was working against you, wasn’t it? It was your competitor’s price. It was the prospect not giving you a fair chance to compete. It was the fact that the prospect didn’t understand the value that you create or the ROI. When you lose (or fail) you can easily identify all of the external reasons you lost.

If it was the manner in which you sold, the value created as a sales person that allowed you to win the opportunity, why isn’t it also the manner in which you sold, the value you didn’t create as a salesperson, that caused you to lose? We tend to take too much credit for our own successes and avoid responsibility for our failures.

You know what this makes you? It makes you human. But the key to being a better, more effective human is to understand that you are responsible for your many successes (but that you likely had a a lot of good luck and a little help). You also take responsibility for your failures, your losses, and your shortcomings.

You only make improvements when you take responsibility for losses and failures by owning them. Because as soon as you take responsibility for your failures, as soon as you believe that you are responsible, you are empowered to start making the changes that allow you to do better in the future.