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A story about past events and future success! This is a direct transcription for your benefit, so excuse any weird typing errors.
I’ll let Sharon take it away!
I promised you a story, and it’s a famous Sharon one. Imagine. Let’s go back, probably 30 years now, which is a frightening thought. It’s the early days of my sales career. I was a pharmaceutical salesperson, and I was going for my first promotion. And that meant that I potentially could enter the world of selling all day to consultants, to pharmacists, to professors in hospitals. And it was a big step up at that point, two years into my career.
And I remember the day, I can even tell you the hotel where this conversation took place. It was on the M62 at Brighouse. And my boss at the time said these words, and they’re almost like ingrained in me. It stayed with me. I was affected by them for quite a while afterwards, but I have binned them, but they have stayed with me because it’s very meaningful. Because this person said to me, “Some people, Sharon, have higher aspirations than their abilities allow.”
And the outcome of my conversation was that I wouldn’t apply for this hospital representatives position. And at the time, as a naive 23-year-old, I initially thought, “Well, he’s done an okay job of managing my expectations.” Until I went away and thought about it that night, and I suddenly thought, “Some people have higher aspirations than their abilities allow.” So here, this person was saying to me at 23 that actually, I peaked. And I didn’t have the potential to go any further.
Don’t Let Your Past Determine Your Future
Now, if I had allowed myself to be defined by that statement 30 years ago, there were so many things that I wouldn’t have done. I would not have ended up managing a team. I would not have ended up being a national trainer. I would not have ended up being an external trainer, coach and consultant, creating leadership training programmes and delivering them across the world for one of the biggest online hotel accommodation booking companies. I would not have left the corporate world and set up a business. I would not still be here 15 years later in business.
If I had allowed that one statement to define me, I certainly would not have allowed myself the opportunity to be Pfizer’s top salesperson selling Viagra, which I still dine out on today. We all have success, don’t we, that we’re particularly proud of. And that’s one of mine. Now, why am I sharing this story? Because as business owners, as we go through our life generally, and as we go through our business journey, we have highs, lows, and challenges.
Living in the Past Limits Your Ability To Live in the Future
Now, if we spend too much time focusing on what went wrong, what the failures were, what the challenges were and how we overcame them and have the fear around, “I don’t want that to happen again.” If we spend too much time living in the past, potentially, that limits our ability to focus on the future, on what we want, and to have that clarity around how much I want to grow the business? What will that mean financially in terms of the numbers that I want to achieve? Do I want to go from 1 million to 5 million in a certain timeframe, or is it 5 million to 15 million? It doesn’t matter really what the number is. It really doesn’t.
Make Decisions From Your Future Self
What matters is where you focus your energy and your time. And when you’re reading and listening to various entrepreneurs who are massively successful, there’s a consistent thing that they share, and that is when they realised and made the decision to focus their decision-making and their actions on their future self; that’s when things really started to shift for them.
Let me explain a bit more about that.
The person you are today in your business, whatever level of turnover and profitability you have, you think in a certain way, do things and have a certain kind of role. And you are successful today getting your business to that point.
However, whatever your growth trajectory is, however big you want your company to be, how many people you want to employ, you will need to think differently. You will probably have a slightly different role in your business, and you will do different things.
If you start to make decisions today from your future person, your future self, rather than who you are today and what got you to where you are, you will put yourself in such a strong position to create that as a reality. As opposed to making decisions about where you want to be from who you are today.
So, Denise and I will often have conversations as we’re doing our planning and looking at where do we want to be? What do we want? What is that going to look like? All that kind of detail. And then we start making decisions about investments and resources, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that we say is, “What would the Sharon in five years time, say? What would Denise say? What would that decision be?
And that piece of advice was given to us by our first mentor many years ago. And it’s one of the best pieces of advice I think we’ve ever had.
So, make decisions from your future self, be clear about who your future self is and stop making decisions and reflecting and spending too much time in the past. Good luck!
How We Can Help
We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.
Thanks,
Denise
