So often we see an idea, a new training class, or go to a seminar and are ready to revolutionize our worlds. We see HUGE opportunity by making HUGE changes and then what happens? More times than not, nothing at all. Big change looks scary and we often shut down, we plan to do the new idea, but every day we walk up to it and push it back another day until we forget all about it.
Change is hard, that sentiment is so widely accepted we don't even question it. Just look at New Year's Resolutions, which almost always fail. The average American makes the exact same resolution ten years in a row without success. Within four months 25% of resolutions are abandoned and those who eventually succeed usually do so only after five or six years of failure. Yet, business books and gurus come to us with these quick fix overnight promises that we treat very much like those resolutions.
However contrary to popular belief, changes don't have to be hard. Not if you use proven techniques to help you eat that proverbial elephant one bite at a time. It comes with working with how your brain is wired as opposed to against it. We, as humans, have three distinct parts to our brains, the reptilian brain or brain stem that makes sure we breath and our heart beats, our Middle or Mammalian brain where you would find the fight or flight reflex, and our outer more advanced Human brain, the Frontal Cortex. When big change comes to us, it often stimulates the fight or flight portion and we freeze. It literally shuts down our ability to think, it was designed to so we wouldn't analyze the tiger but run away. It also shuts us down when we face tests, papers when we get "writer's block," or when we try to implement new changes that seem too big for us.
So, the Kaizen Way of doing so, that came from the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. If you haven't heard of Deming, he is the man who taught the American manufacturing industry this method of incremental improvement that allowed America to win WWII. He then was hired by the Japanese to come turn their manufacturing around and did, from a conquered nation to the most powerful manufacturing nation in the world for many years. It could be said, that Deming changed the world twice with his teachings. I strongly recommend that you pick up this little book on it and read it for yourself.
Today, as I was coaching one of our agents. She told me how she is using this method to overcome a fear that has held her back. She is terrified of role playing scripts, but she sees the value in them. So she has taken to reading our Buyer Conversion Class and Seller Conversion Class workbooks every day, reading all the scripts and pattern inside. She is speaking about how much more confidence she is already feeling. We discussed that the next step for her might be shutting the work books and trying to write down the scripts from memory. Then the following step might be speaking them to her children or even her dog to get used to them coming out of her mouth. If these small steps are made then, even that which she has feared, will soon be easy for her.
We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in five years. When we overestimate, we then start beating ourselves up over our "failures" and make development of our skills and habits even harder. If we embrace a slow steady growth, we won't believe the people we will be in five years from now, actually a whole lot sooner.
A rule of thumb on starting something new that has scared you in the past is break it down to the absurd. If you want to develop the habit of reading and you have set a goal to read but then don’t, maybe set a goal to read 15 minutes a day. That 15 minutes a day would allow you to read an average sized book in a month. However, if you set that as a goal and three days go by and you aren't reading, cut it back. Maybe try a paragraph a day, if you don't do that, try a sentence a day. Start small to go large rather than start large to give up.
You can do it, one bite at a time!!!
