29: If you want to transform your life, don't try and transform your life!

If you want to transform your life, don't try and transform your life. Send a little bit weird. Well that's the advice of James clear and his awesome book atomic habits.

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welcome to the bite size sales podcast where we believe that sales is the most important team and a B2B company that the sales team deserves great sales skills training but usually doesn't get it. And that taking bite-size steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve results. I am your host, Andrew Monahan , and I'm using my experiences in B2B sales to bring you simple, actionable ideas every day to help you get better.

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All right , welcome to episode 29 of the podcast and we're heading into Wars the end of the year now. Uh, thinking about next year, which is why this concept, this idea and on this morning's episode is one that I think is quite relevant. So stop me if this sounds familiar, right? You decide to make a big change in your life. You know, common ones and personal life might be lose weight, exercise more or things like that. In our work life, it might be, I want to double my income this year. I want to build a much bigger pipeline or I want to call in higher and counts I'm used to doing and try and transform my results that way. And you have these big things you want to change. So what you do is you start with big changes in your routine, right? You say, not that I'm going from you . You say I'm going to , I'm gonna go to the gym every day this week for an hour and hour workout and pound a pint a treadmill and lift some weights, right? Or if you're trying to build a bigger pipeline and say, I'm going to prospect for 25 hours the next week. And you go at it and you get the emails go in and make calls and you do all these big things and then suddenly it fizzles out and the changes you want to make in your routine don't actually stick. And it becomes tiring and hard work to try and maintain this huge big change that you are trying to make. And before you know it, you're back to your old ways. If you've experienced that, you've experienced what pretty much every human being faces when they're trying to make these big changes. Um, we take on too much. We try and go from not to 60 in like two seconds in some new thing and somehow expect us to keep up with the 60 mile an hour. It's something that as humans, it doesn't really work very well and this is something that James clear addresses and talks about in his book atomic habits. And in my mind there's many books on habits by atomic habits. And my mind is one of the probably top one or two maybe top three books and is readable. It's awesome. It applies to all sorts of facets of our life and it definitely applies in the sales world when we're thinking about how we make changes and he talks clearly about the power of small habit changes as opposed to big ones and how small changes are things are , are what will stick is what we'll commit to and follow through on. And then it's what you build on to get the results that you want. So let me just read a little bit from the book as a couple of pages. So stick with me. So the , the section is titled why small habits make a big difference. It's so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. Meanwhile, improving by 1% isn't particularly notable. Sometimes it isn't even noticeable, but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference, a tiny improvement can make over time as astounding. Here's how the math works at . If you can get 1% better each day for one year, you'll end up 37 times now , 37% but 37 times better by the time that you're done at the end of the year. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for one year, you'll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more habits are the compound interest of self improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It's only when looking back to five or perhaps 10 years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent. This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don't seem to match very much in the moment. If you save a little money now, you're still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you're still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven't learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines. Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn't move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they'll forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be tying to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss, but when we repeat 1% errors day after day by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results is accumulation of many missteps, a 1% decline here and there that eventually leads to a problem. The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the root of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you're flying from LA to New York. If a pilot leaves leaving from Lex , adjust the heading just 3.5 degrees South, you'll land in Washington D C instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable , noticeable at takeoff . The nose of the airplane moves just a few feet, but when magnified across the entire U S you end up hundreds of miles apart. Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. So that's read straight from the book atomic habits, habits by James clear. And this is social important concept. And you know, he goes on throughout the book to talk about the idea of tiny habits and there's other work being done on this as well. There's a book coming out at the end of the year from BJ Fogg from Stanford about a book called tiny habits. And it's the idea that , uh , you know, rather than saying , I went to the gym for two hours tomorrow and every day you want to think about what's achievable in two minutes, you know , could just be, I get in the car, I drive to the gym, right? It could be for tomorrow. I sit down at nine o'clock and I pick up the phone and make the first call. These small habits when they start formulating into your psyche, you then build on and build on and build on. And you know, I, I know people I know, I know one person who, who wanted to um, uh, exercise more. And what he did was just go to the gym, go to the pool, and he said, you know, I'm going to go just for five minutes until I feel uncomfortable until I'm getting out of breath and I'll get out and I'll, I'll go home and I'll do that the next day and the next day, the next day. And now, you know , two years later, he's there for an hour and a half every day. And you know, fit is anything full of energy and all the respite, right? So there's these things that you don't try and you set yourself up for failure, you set yourself up for success and then you build on them as you go along. So my challenge to you is how do you take this concept of small habits, atomic habits in the James clear terminology and start using those to start making changes in your life? If you look at the big things you want to achieve going into 2020 and beyond, one of the real small things you injust right now, they will have such a huge impact as you build on them and embed them in what you're doing going forward. This idea of doing small things to get big results as opposed to doing big things to try and big results get big results. That's the way to get them.

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The episode is sponsored by unstoppable dot du . Most sales teams are not trained effectively. The skills and mindset they deserve, and these are the most important people in the company. It's no wonder that only about 50% of reps make quarter every year. Unstoppable is a service that helps sellers and leaders get great at the skills and mindset they need without taking time out of the field. It exists because if the sales team has the right skills and mindset, they thrive. They are confident,

and they performed much better. Find out more and even get a free sales book@bitesizesales.com and now to wrap up as Ryan Harvey

PF sales at Tanium may or may not have one said training without implementation is just entertainment and preparer entertainment when Monaghan does it. So make sure you take action on what you learn and keep getting better every day. This world does not need more sales BS, so don't create anymore . Be great at the fundamentals. Be honest, be real. Be yourself. Just do not be us . And finally, I'm setting off as the great Joe Sexton would by saying, gone to sell

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