From Sales Training to Life Lessons, Learning About: Ownership, Action, and Growth

If you sometimes feel like you're out of control, if you sometimes don’t know where things go wrong, these concepts can help you zoom out, reflect, and help you understand what type of behavior you need to change.

I had a sales training at one of the companies I work for, and there were three tools that I found really interesting and that are not only applicable for sales but also for life if you frame them right.

So that is what I want to do, I want to break them down in my own words, in my own way so that I can understand them correctly, and so that we both can better our lives.

It is funny how most business and sales stuff is transferable to life in general.

Well right now we're gonna break down the following principles and matrices:

• Owning your responsibility

• The B.E.A.R circle

• The Growth column

The principles work in order; it helped me understand the way I can create better.

These principles helped me zoom out and see a bigger picture.

Now let's dive into them.

Owning your responsibility

The first and foremost thing you need to do in your life is to take extreme responsibility for everything in your life.

No matter what reason you can come up with or in which situation, you are responsible no matter what.

It can sound a bit extreme, but what you're actually doing is clearing the way for external excuses.

Having this type of responsibility can lead to ownership, you owning the life you live, you owning the results you get, you owning the relationships you have.

Why?

Really simple: everything you put the blame on is the thing that you give control over your situation, results, and therefore your life.

You give away a piece of your ownership.

Actions have consequences, therefore the sentence: Action brings reaction.

Reaction results in an outcome.

Every action can be led back to a choice.

The choice you made consciously or subconsciously, that choice as well as its outcome is your responsibility either way, conscious or subconscious.

The external factors out of your control can happen, but the way you're dealing with it is in the end just a matter of choices, or so-called extreme responsibility.

Thinking in this way had a major impact on my life and helped me grow a lot in the last year.

The B.E.A.R circle

Now we know we need to take full responsibility for what we do and the choices that we make.

So then it is time to understand the process you can take responsibility over through the B.E.A.R circle.

What is the B.E.A.R circle? Well, it is the circle of events that happened before you get a certain outcome.

It is a simple matrix to track where you are in your process.

Well, at least that is what I made from it and how I reframe from the sales training that I had.

• B.E.A.R stands for:

• Believe

• Excitement

• Action

• Result

Like I said, the B.E.A.R circle is an overview matrix for a process to see where you are in the process.

So each step in this cycle reviews a stage.

Let's walk them through: Believe: that is where everything starts, with believing in an idea, with believing in a concept.

If you do not believe something is worth doing or has no meaning at all, you wouldn’t do it.

First, believe you can do something so when you start doing your results will be better than if you do not believe.

Excitement: excitement is the part where you start to consume all sorts of information.

This is the part where you are fueled with energy to start, and this is also the part where most people stay in a process.

Consuming, endlessly preparing before they go to the next part.

Action: action is where the magic happens, change happens when you are in action.

You are creating, you are doing the thing.

Action is the part where you are doing the work that needs to be done.

Result: after action, you have results, results of the outcome of the thing you believed in and the thing you were excited for.

It could be negative or positive but results can help you spark new ideas, address certain issues and in the end help you grow your belief or tear down your belief and then the circle starts over again.

With this circle, you can identify yourself in certain stages or can identify where in the stages was the bottleneck.

Was it in the Action, excitement, or belief?

In sales, it helps you trace down your results, but it can work for building a business, a relationship, or a career as well.

It's about how you frame it and if you take ownership of your results.

Growth Column

When you own your results, when you can identify where the bottlenecks are, you can start reflecting to improve the process.

This can be through the growth column.

The trick here is to be as concrete as possible and write down things that you can do, don’t do, or are currently doing.

The growth column works as follows: you make 4 lists and write above one of them Start, one of them Stop, one of them More, and one of them Other.

What every word means are the following questions:

• Start: What do I need to start doing?

• Stop: What do I need to stop doing?

• More: What things am I currently doing that work and I need to do more of?

• Other: What things am I doing and do I not need to do more of or either stop with, but can just stay the way they are?

Now you start filling in those lists over the process you want to improve in, the business you want to evaluate, or whatever.

After doing this exercise, I personally had concrete lists of how I could improve my sales.

You can use it for whatever you want as long as you use concrete terms.

Go Forward

What we talked about in this article are some practical tools from a sales training blended with my knowledge and experience of life so far.

To sum it all up really shortly: Take responsibility, no matter what. Identify the stage of your process in your journey so you know what to do next.

And last but not least, reflect on your results and process to see what you can do better in a concrete and practical way.

The one concrete step I want to give you right now is to share this with someone for whom this might be valuable and subscribe if you're new and want some sort of value delivered to you for free every week inside your mail.

I make this to capture my learnings and share them with others.

For now, go forward and take action.

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That's it for now.

I wish you a good day - Job Baltes.