Good morning!
In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey uses the phrase, “Sharpening the saw” as a metaphor. His advice is that we stop what we are doing and improve the quality of our work.
This is easier said than done.
For most of us in sales, business patterns are less seasonal than they are cyclical. Personally, I find myself either crazy busy, dead quiet, or heading to one of those two destinations. I thrive in the crazy busy environment, moving from one task to another with motivation and drive. When it’s dead quiet, I struggle. Always have. My brother used to tell me to go play golf, rest up for when things pick up. But I’ve never been able to do that.
Still, Stephen Covey’s advice looms over me. So I decided to take a look at what a sharpened saw might look like. That is, what would I do without the burden of the feeling that I needed to stay busy. How would I improve? What what I improve?
This is an interesting exercise and one that you might at least stop and ponder, making your own list. Here’s mine:
- Read the three business books that people have given you recently:
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- On Writing by Stephen King
- Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo
- Clean your desk
- Scratch that. Clean your entire office
- Then, clean your car
- Make a list of your Profit Pillars
- Go on the Apple website and see what workshops are coming up that might benefit you
- Watch some of the instructional videos on LinkedIn about how to use LinkedIn
- Go through your to do list and delete the nonessentials (typically these are tasks that have been sitting there for longer than a month)
- Go through all the files on your computer and reorganize everything while adding the essentials to the Cloud
- On the personal side, go through your recipes and find some interesting dinners for the next few nights
It’s amazing how easily those 10 bullet points came flying out of me. Seems that there is no shortage of saws that need sharpening.
The other benefit of this action is that it brings some calm to your demeanor. Do you remember the last time you came back from a vacation? The anxiety of feeling as though you have to do something every moment faded on day three. A day of sharpening the saw can give you the same kind of peace. Remembering that clients can hear every emotion you are having, their reaction to your sales calls might just change as a result.
Because I have no appointments today, I’m actually going to take my own advice. Perhaps I will blog about it and let you know how it went.
