Are You Practicing Excellence?

Are you approaching your work with excellence as your primary goal and outcome? If you are what you repeatedly do, as Aristotle famously said, are you practicing the habit of excellence?

It’s easy to be mediocre. If you look at a bell curve, you’ve got very poor performance on one side of the curve and excellent performance on the other. Mediocrity takes up the massive bulk in the middle. It’s easy to be mediocre. It’s easy to be neither good nor bad.

What is more difficult is being excellent. Being excellent takes more effort. It takes more energy. You have to try a lot harder. To be mediocre you just have to do the work. To be excellent you have to do the work with an unmistakable passion and energy. You also have to do the work with the desired outcome being excellence.

What About You?

You could be excellent when you’re making your prospecting calls by focusing on creating value for your dream clients—even when you’re asking them for the first commitment (their time and attention). It’s a lot harder to be excellent at prospecting and winning appointments than it is to be mediocre and face certain rejection.

You could be excellent during your sales calls and interactions, giving your entire focus to your dream client and being deeply engaged. But because you’ve made a lot of sales calls before it’s easy to be mediocre.

You could deliver what your client expects of you, and that might even be enough. But you could also invest the energy and passion to deliver something better than what’s expected. You could deliver excellence.

Mediocrity gets lost. No one talks about mediocrity. They talk about excellence.

Excellence provides meaning. It’s built on passion, and it generates even more passion from both you and your clients. Excellence defines. It differentiates. If you are going to do the work there is no reason not to go all the way and practice excellence.

Questions

How different would your results be if you focused on excellence instead of simply doing the work?

What would your dream client say to other people about you if you delivered standout, excellent performance that defined the rest of your category as mediocre?

How do you deliver excellence when you are prospecting? What would you change?

How do you deliver excellence during sales interactions? What would have to change?

How could you change what you do to produce results that define you as excellent?