Peak Performance Selling

How to Increase Your Sales by 80% in 8 Weeks

Dr. Kerry Johnson

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781722522759
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Managerial Accounting
• Index: Business

Most of us self-sabotage. Most of us are undirected. Yet by using these step-by-step techniques, you will be able to get past your self-defeating behaviors, stay on a weekly business plan, and nearly double your business. All in eight weeks!This is the basis of Dr. Kerry Johnson's famous one-on-one coaching system. Hundreds of thousands have already used these innovative techniques. Now you can too in this eight-week program. You will gain insight into: your self-sabotaging fears, your peak performance levels, how the rich and famous made it, tactical and strategic planning, and how to stay on the game plan.The eight-week method that will make you wealthy.

PART ONE

WHY YOU’RE HOLDING BACK

One

Overcoming Limitations to Performance

In the last six weeks have you procrastinated?

Not prospected enough?

Not asked for enough referrals?

Found that when you finally got around to organizing your messy desk, it was during prime business or selling time?

Avoidance Behaviors—Symptoms of a Problem

If you said “yes” to any of these questions, you are practicing avoidance behaviors. Avoidance behaviors are the things we do to keep from feeling psychological discomfort. If left to run rampant, they can destroy productivity.

As a consultant, I constantly deal with folks who exhibit obvious avoidance behaviors. Some people in the businesses I work with are incredibly unproductive.

The issue is probably not that they don’t know what to do. These managers or employees have typically spent many years learning their jobs. Their knowledge and experience are quite sufficient.

Why don’t these people do what they know they should do to double or even triple their level of productivity? Could they be lazy—or it is simply that they want to avoid the discomfort that the change to a higher productive state may bring?

I recently hired a staff person to do follow-up marketing calls. A basic part of her job was to call people who were interested in using our services. Unfortunately, she consistently found ways to avoid making those calls. Her avoidance behaviors included typing out forms to keep track of the phone calls, or reorganizing the filing system to make the resource materials more accessible. All of them were to avoid making the calls that stressed her out so much.

While it was obvious that making calls was the most important thing to do at the time, she risked her job by not doing it. Was this laziness, or was it an unconscious desire to avoid the discomfort those phone calls brought?

Time-management programs promise higher productivity. Unfortunately, many people who spend upwards of $180 to $250 for a day-long seminar often don’t seem able to change their behavior enough to reach the promised level of performance.

Why don’t people use their time more effectively after they come back from a time-management seminar? Why don’t they make more calls, answer more letters, and get rid of useless pieces of paper on their desk?

The answer may lie in avoidance behaviors. To immediately erase all avoidance behaviors from your life and instead practice the desired time-management techniques, you would need to change a great deal all at once. Very few people become that efficient that quickly on their own, often because of underlying subconscious reasons that cause them to be disorganized in the first place. These reasons manifest themselves in avoidance behaviors.

We’ve all seen avoidance behaviors at work, both in ourselves and in coworkers. These behaviors may include shuffling cards around the desk, arriving at work late, leaving early, taking an extralong lunch, or even reading a book or magazine on the job.

Pause for a minute. Can you think of avoidance behaviors you engage in in your own life? Do you spend thirty or forty minutes chatting with associates or friends in your office before you get down to the business of making phone calls or dealing with difficult projects? Do you read your mail during the 8-to-5 workday, knowing that it may be the least productive use of your time?

As you might have guessed, avoidance behaviors are not the actual problem. They are merely the symptoms. They indicate that you may be experiencing a psychological dilemma on a much deeper level, or a variety of self-sabotaging fears.

Self-Sabotaging Fears

I like to joke that human beings are only born with three great fears—(1) fear of falling; (2) fear of loud noises; (3) fear of the IRS—and that all other fears are learned responses.

More seriously, the four self-sabotaging fears are simply learned responses. But if they go unchecked, these fears are nothing to kid about and can seriously impair your performance. These four fears are:

• Fear of rejection

• Fear of embarrassment

• Fear of failure

• Fear of success

Each of these fears is discussed at length in chapters 3 through 6. Erasing them is one of the first steps to increasing your productivity. Techniques for doing so are found in chapters 8 and 9.

Performance Barriers

We all face psychological barriers to goal achievement, often daily in our business and personal lives. These performance barriers are not likely to go away by themselves, because they are frequently symptoms of much larger and deeper issues. But in order to rid ourselves of these barriers, we must first become aware of their existence.

But first let’s examine some symptomatic behaviors that limit our productivity. They include:

• Procrastination

• Disorganization

• Lack of motivation

The first problem behavior is procrastination: putting things off intentionally and habitually. When we procrastinate, we do not accomplish tasks when we know they should be done but postpone them until the very last moment.

The word procrastinate is derived from the Latin pro, meaning toward, and cras, meaning tomorrow. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you should do today.”

Usually we procrastinate because we are faced with a difficult task we don’t want to do. The task might require anxiety-provoking emotional involvement, like paying bills. Or we may be afraid of making mistakes, for example when talking to intimidating people. So we simply put these things off. Procrastination not only limits performance, but also can counter productivity.

When you procrastinate, you might often find yourself asking yourself:

“What did I do today?”

“Why didn’t I accomplish what I wanted to accomplish?”

“Why didn’t I achieve what I had planned?”

You feel guilty because you didn’t meet your own expectations. Your self-confidence is threatened. In turn, your performance decreases. Think of the last sixty days. How many times have you ended up losing a sale or ruining a big deal because you procrastinated—you waited until the last moment, put something off, or didn’t do it at all?

The second performance barrier is disorganization. Do you find it difficult to locate things in your office? Do you fail to keep track of your ideas? Of things you’ve talked about? Are you spending too much time looking up information that should be at your fingertips? If you were more organized, would you cease to neglect doing those things you know would make you more efficient and productive?

Disorganization as a barrier to productivity is certainly not a new concern. Entire seminars are devoted to time management. Numerous books go into great detail about becoming organized and include ways to think about time and your physical environment.

Surprising as it might seem, remember that, by nature, people recognize and like to replicate patterns. Human beings like to be organized. There is nothing in your horoscope that predestines you to plague yourself with disorganization.

The causes of disorganization are primarily psychological, stemming from childhood as well as from the challenge of coping with a highly complex world. Many disorganized people are in essence still challenging childhood authority, usually that of a parent.

Parents teach their young children that there are ways things “ought” to be, that there is a “right” way to do things, and that a “good” child is “disciplined” and “orderly.” The demands parents make and the attitudes they instill in their children toward life affect them deeply.

Most parents have begged their children in this way: “Jeff, clean up your room.” Depending on the circumstances, the child may interpret this demand as an infringement on his identity and autonomy. At some point defiance begins. The child begins to resent the parental control and tends to rebel, in effect saying to the parents, “I won’t be orderly or disciplined.” So he or she fights the parents’ authority in the belief that order means entrapment or loss of identity and that disorder means freedom from parents and greater self-identity.

My experiences with my daughter Catherine are a prime example of how disorder and rebellion towards parents can manifest. Even though my wife, Merita, asked her daily to pick up things lying in her room, she usually made a point of throwing pajamas on the floor, spreading her toys across the bed, and causing her room to look as though a bomb had struck.

At first glance, it seems to be a natural childhood function to be disorderly. When we dig deeper, however, we find that the disorganization often comes from a child’s refusal to do everything the authority figures have demanded. This is because the child needs to establish an identity. In fact, when Merita asked our daughter Caroline to eat a little more slowly, she would sometimes slams her fork down and exclaim, “I don’t want to eat anything at all!” To many children, a very simple request becomes an intolerable order.

The problem also manifests itself later in life. When executives’ desks are so disorganized that they can barely find things, and their secretaries are constantly after them to clean up the desk, or asking, “Where is the Smith account or the Kellermark research?” Executives know they should be organized, but for some reason, they continue to be disorganized, even though it may be destroying their business.

Does the executive simply have bad business skills, or is he or she rebelling against authority? Perhaps the executive rebels because on some level the secretary’s authority in running the office reminds him or her of a parent scolding about picking things up in a room.

The most characteristic way people cope with the emotional conflict of order versus disorder is by developing an attitude of compliant defiance.

Most people desperately want to be correct. They yearn to have their lives organized the way they “ought to be.” This is compliance—the conscious acceptance of parental standards. These people set exaggerated goals and, because these goals are unrealistic and often irrelevant to anything practical, the person adopts the attitude of compliant defiance and says, “The heck with it. I can’t do it and I won’t.” This attitude precipitates feelings of failure, because we begin to see ourselves as unable to live up to the parents’ or parental authority’s expectations, which we have consciously accepted.

The Need for Order

The elements of real order include a physical environment that is easy to move around in, look at, and function in. Order is a simple necessity for dealing effectively with the volume of paperwork and money matters which we all must confront. Order is whatever helps us to function effectively. We define our particular purposes and create an order—the practical systems that allow us to function effectively and live purposeful lives.

Everyone is capable of being organized. We have a powerful inner drive toward order and clarity. Being disorganized is an avoidance behavior symptomatic of anxiety resulting from the four self-sabotaging fears we will discuss in chapters 3 through 6.

A third business performance barrier is lack of motivation. If you answer “yes” to any of the following questions, chances are you are experiencing a lack of motivation:

Do you sometimes feel that all you want to do is sit there?

Do you not want to dial the telephone, talk to prospects, or talk to people at all?

Do you find that your self-esteem is diminishing a bit or that you have no real enthusiasm or excitement for the work you’re doing right now?

Do you feel some sense of worthlessness because you’re not meeting your self-expectations?

In your job, are you avoiding some activities that cause you discomfort?

Sometimes a lack of motivation results from a feeling of complacency. Because of the anxiety the process of change brings, we merely resist change itself.

Beware of “rah-rah” motivational speakers who capitalize on our emotional vulnerability. Most motivational speakers who claim they can help deliver us from our lack of passion rarely fulfill their claims. Many attendees of motivational programs feel great immediately afterward, but rarely can remember what the speaker said.

Recently I was a keynote speaker at a large real-estate industry convention. After my presentation, I got the chance to talk with the program chairperson at length about some of the speakers she contracted earlier in the year. One of them, a motivational, positive-mental-attitude type, spoke at their conference in Texas. The attendees remembered him as a marvelous and gifted speaker with enormous rapport and enthusiasm. Unfortunately, no one could remember anything he said, nor had people left with any techniques, skills, or ideas they could use to improve their business or personal lives.

The late Jim Rohn, author of the book, The Seven Keys to Wealth and Happiness, saw the same attendees over and over at his speeches. Jim used to tell them, “I’ve seen a lot of you before. How come you’re in another motivational seminar? Didn’t you apply the techniques you learned last time?”

Jim’s point is basically that you can’t get motivation from a speaker or by reading a motivational book. If you ever played Little League baseball or school sports, you likely had a coach who gave a motivational pep talk before a game. That pep talk lasted for about twenty, maybe even thirty minutes. But the performance you gave was the result of your internal motivation, not the coach’s pleas. You remember the coach said, “Do your best,” but you probably had a tough time remembering anything else.

Many motivational speakers are entertaining and enjoyable. But until you are able to set a plan for yourself to achieve your objectives, you might as well be throwing money into a rathole.

Motivation comes from within. Motivation does not come from being pumped up externally. Motivation is an internal process. Another person can set the stage, but only you can act out the part and motivate yourself. You are the only one who can change yourself. No one can do it for you. This book is dedicated to helping you make the changes you desire.

Two

Self-S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Why You’re Holding Back
• Part Two: Designing Your Own Performance Program