“If you want to transform your life, don't try and transform your life.”
That phrase flies in the face of all first-reaction logic, doesn’t it? But this James Clear-penned advice has a depth of truth to it.
Let’s put that into familiar perspective:
When we make goals, we often decide on a major quantifiable goal. There’s a big change we want to make - perhaps doubling our income for the year. So that creates a very large thing that we want to change. And we always start with active changes. The first steps.
We prospect for an additional five hours each week. We set aside specific time to hunt for clients. And we really go at it. We are super committed, hitting those goals hard and then - then the momentum fizzles out. We don’t see changes right away and we feel burnt out, so we don’t stick to the routine and then, before we know it, we’re back to our old ways and not in pursuit of our cybersecurity sales goal.
The common root cause of this is a pretty human one: we simply take on too much. We start too fast and too strong and expect ourselves to be able to go from zero to sixty with no problem. But that never really works.
So don’t go overdoing it when you want to change something in your life, whether personally or in cybersecurity sales. You aren’t going to change it all in an instant and you’re only going to feel let down. Instead, focus on the power of small habit changes as opposed to big ones - things we know we will stick are what we will commit to and follow through on. And then you build on those smaller results to get to the big results that you want.
This can be difficult to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don't seem to matter enough at the moment. If you save a few dollars a day, you’re not a millionaire. If you go to the gym two nights in a row, you still don’t have an instant six-pack. So, we start to internalize that little changes don’t matter - and that can lead to some bad decisions.
If eating a salad for dinner every night for a week doesn’t make me shed five pounds, then what harm will there be eating a burger at the same rate? The slow pace of transformation can be a curse. The scales tip back and forth as we make little changes and then make little poor decisions and so in this way, we never see the big cybersecurity sales result we want.
So, this is the big thing. Instead of trying to take on everything and expecting your life to completely change, take a step back. Expecting the big changes and bug transformations to happen at once is simply setting yourself up for failure. Instead, what are some small steps you can take starting today? What little things can you do that will ultimately blend into habits? What can you build from?
Slow and steady wins a lot of races. You might not think that you’re making much progress, but even a 1% daily improvement compounds and, in a year, you’ll be surprised at how far you’ve come. All because you stopped trying to change it all at once.
You might also like this blog: Tips for B2B sellers on connecting better with prospects
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