By David Lund
“All of life is an experiment, the more experiments the better.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you really want to do something, the “how to” shows up everywhere. Getting into and staying in action is the key. Having and holding onto the notion that we must have the answer first kills our endeavors. Let me give you an example.
A client of mine hired me to help him grow his new real estate business. We did some sessions and something was revealed. He had a predisposed notion of how his business should grow. He was close to trying some new ways to grow his business. He had heard the stories of the other more established and successful agents, and he thought his path should be the same. I was able to get him to see this by asking him what else he had tried and acknowledge the fact that if he REALLY WANTED to grow his business he would be willing to try some new processes and get out of his own way.
He said something very interesting in one session: He said he didn’t trust an idea.
We were discussing a door-to-door meet and greet strategy where every day for two weeks he would spend three hours going door to door introducing himself and giving the people he met a nice little note pad with his firm’s name and his name and coordinates. Not rocket science but 10 days @ three hours would equal 30 hours of meeting people. What might that create?
“Who knows until you try?” I asked.
He said, “I don’t trust the process, it seems weak and I’ll be like a door-to-door sales person.”
I said, “You don’t need to trust anything, take that step out of your to do list, don’t trust it, TEST IT.” This was a game changer for him. Get into action, stay in action and test. Be a scientist and do experiments and test, test, test.
Testing means experimenting
Experiments never fail because we are just experimenting. We learn from experimenting. How did you learn to walk? How many experiments did it take? Thousands. You just forgot.
As adults, we think we need to have the answer: the trusted answer, the sure thing, the winner. That’s what holds us back. If we are willing to suffer a little injury to our imaginary ego and put ourselves out there and get into action—stay in action—we will find our way. If there was a store where we could go to purchase the code to light our way to success, it would be a busy place. But, it does not work that way.
If we are willing to drop the need to know that what we are doing will work and continually get into and stay in action with our business, our leadership and our relationships are going to succeed much faster and better. On the contrary, if we stay shut down and hold onto our limited beliefs of what should work, what should be the way, what worked for someone else, we are out of action and we get discouraged easily. This is poison for growth. Trusting is poison.
Inside your business ideas either get blown up or shot down. We blow them up if we are willing to test, we shoot them down if we need to trust.
“Test! Experiments give you a way to play with the universe. They allow you to interact with the real world and get some interesting answers. What works, what doesn’t. Let’s try again. This is starting to kick in. You test, you learn, you grow.” Steve Chandler – Crazy Good
If you would like a copy of any of the following send me an email at david@hotelfinancialcoach.com
- EFTE and Productivity Exercise
- Hotel Financial Policy Manual – Inventory of “Sections”
- Hotel Financial Coach “Services Sheet”
- F&B Productivity Spreadsheet
- Rooms Productivity Spreadsheet
- Financial Leadership Recipe F TAR W
- Hotel Financial Coach – “Speaking Sheet”
- Flow Thru Cheat Sheet – Enhanced
