Sales and Marketing Newsletter #242 – Empathy, Resiliency, Peaches

GREG’S BUSINESS GROWTH NEWSLETTER #242
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Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue:

– Techniques for FIT
– Being Human
– Random Stuff

Techniques for FIT
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• Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is a skill we can learn, and teach. First step, catch yourself and your people classifying others with broad terms. Reframe your thoughts by re-classifying others as individuals like someone’s daughter, or son.
• Each time you feel the urge to dismiss another’s thoughts, take a minute to consider what would have to happen for you to think the same way they do.
  

• Third, be humble enough to acknowledge inside everyone’s head is a world and you’ll never be able to see all of it.
• Hardest of all, consider where you fit in the big continuum of life and use that perspective to give others a break. No one has all the answers, no one gets out alive.

Being Human – Dealing with change
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Many bog down in the messy middle, but some thrive.” 

Earlier this summer, the Wall Street Journal had a good essay/article about dealing with change, “Learning to Conquer Life’s Crises,” and I was reminded of it while reading about the speed at which we consumers are adopting to new ways of consuming.

In the essay author Bruce Feiler describes how those that struggle with change tend to be less flexible and therefore, less resilient. His studies show that for most people, things do get better over time, but to get through the pain of change you need to plan for flexibility.

This is what we preach for business strategy and business plans too. Right now I’m working with a leadership team growing impatient with my focus on their vision and how they will to provide value to clients at that time. “We need to know what to do now,” they say, and we’ll get there, I reply. They will emerge with a plan that is flexible, makes their people stronger, and allows the company to successfully deal with change faster than their competitors.

Things change. When it happens, there are elements of change our companies are great at, and elements we struggle with. Knowing where we want to emerge helps speed up the time scraping the bottom of our adoption curve:

This is what we want our organization to do:

But the best way to speed through change is to plan on wallowing into the depths for a short time:

Change happens. Plan for it.

Random stuff
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L I B!

Three summers ago, I was told we were planting a peach tree. The tree people came, agreed on the best location, dug a hole, and voila! We had an orchard.

My lovely bride said we’d have 100 peaches in year 3. I was skeptical because this poor stick with few branches and fewer leaves didn’t look like it could support one peach, let alone one hundred.

The tree planters returned within a week because they accidentally nicked the sprinkler system when digging, so I asked them. 100? Really? Yes, they said. Three years.

Year one gave us one super sickly looking fruit that could be mistaken for a peach. Last summer the tree produced a single, perfect peach, which (to my surprise) tasted exactly like a peach. For about 12 months I mused about our one perfect peach, publicly expressing my skepticism about next summer’s (2020) harvest.

Then this happened:

How many? 77. And the squirrels/birds/bugs ran off with what had to be another 20. Easily 100 peaches in year three. As the old joke goes, I exclaimed, “L-I-B!” and went on with my day.

I was wrong to doubt her, but you knew that already.

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