Leader, Forgive Yourself

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.

[0:21] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, day sharing with you ideas and insights around the concept of leader, forgive yourself. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Join us at the 2023 Sandler Summit, March 16 and 17 in Orlando, Florida. Go to hamish.sandler.com slash Orlando for more details. Longtime NBA coach Pat Riley coined the phrase, the disease of more in relation to professional sports teams who win championships. When that team is on the road to winning their first championship, they're pulling together, they're working with each other. And then once that championship is won, everybody wants a little bit more. They want a little bit more money. They want a little bit more recognition. They want a little bit more playing time. And eventually things fall apart unless the team can control that disease. This affects us as leaders just as much as it does professional sports teams that win championships. Either we are so focused on realizing our organizational goals that we fail to see we've left our people.

[1:40] Way behind us, or we're so focused on navel gazing that we fail to see our people and unfortunately, likely our competitors have moved past us. But hey, we're all human beings in addition to being leaders. So we are subject to all of the fallibilities and vulnerabilities that it entails being human. And that can tie into things like unintentionally reinforcing our beliefs, one of the most common ones that I've heard from leaders is no one else can do whatever the task is like me, or no one else can do that task as well as me. So what happens is we say, well, if no one else can do it like me, it's probably going to take too long to train someone to do it like me. So I should just end up keeping doing that myself.

[2:35] And that now we're reinforcing. Now we get into a spiral of negativity where we are railing against our beliefs that we are reinforcing through not taking action to change them because our beliefs are not going to change on our own. We actually have to take action to change them. So in the example, we would need to hire someone, we would need to train them and then give them the freedom to go out and do whatever that task is. And ideally, we'll discover that they've got a much more effective way of doing that task and a more efficient way of doing that task. However, if we are emotionally attached to the task being done exactly how we would do it, that belief is going to continue to be reinforced over and over and over again. But if we carry on with that belief, what is going to happen is we typically have endless lists of to-do items. We've got strategic projects that get abandoned because we've got to focus on tactical firefighting when we probably caused the fire. We have insufficient time and focus spent on our own mental and emotional health, sleep, diet, and exercise.

[3:47] And we've probably damaged relationships with the individuals who are closest in our lives. Now, I imagine at least one of the things that I just mentioned resonated with you. So when we see that we have created these mental walls to keep out the negative results that have created by the negative spiral we've got in reinforcing our beliefs, The number one action we can take, and it may be with our head in our hands or face on our desk, is to forgive ourselves. Is to look ourselves in the mirror, in the computer monitor and say, I forgive you out loud. You must say it out loud. And I'll tell you from personal experience, it's going to be really beneficial.

[4:46] I almost put myself out of business several years ago and it was through not understanding the consequences of some choices that I was making to make some investments in marketing and other sorts of things. And when the bill came due, as is said, and I reached out to one of my friends for support, one of the first things they said to me was, have you forgiven yourself yet? And my response was, well, no, how can I forgive myself? I put myself here. And they said, yeah, you did. And you're obviously owning that. But until you forgive yourself, you actually will not move forward because you're now emotionally invested in beating yourself up. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. So on the phone with them, I forgave myself. And immediately after I finished by saying, you, I forgive you.

[5:46] It was like a million pounds had been lifted off my shoulders and I could actually sit up straight again. And at that point, I was able to move forward. And now my business is in a significantly better place than it was. The team has expanded by more than double and we are supporting many, many more organizations and individuals than I could have ever even conceived of when I was in the pit of despair, to use a reference from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride. Very current reference for everybody who's listening. Now, once we've started taking this small, proactive, positive action of forgiving ourselves, how we're going to pull out of this negative spiral that we're in is by clearly defining our personal vision. Yes, personal vision. This has nothing to do with the vision for our organization or for our team. This has to do with our personal vision. What do we want to be when we grow up? Now, we may discover.

[6:51] That our personal vision and the vision that the organization has for us or that we have of it, if we're the owner, they might conflict. Now, that's okay because we can either find ways to integrate our personal vision into our organizational vision, or we may discover that that we want to transition away from our current organization.

[7:21] Or if we're the business owner, shift our business from being a much more high growth company to maybe being a bit of a lifestyle business. And in either cases, full funnel freedom still applies. Because if you're creating full funnel freedom as a high growth business, well, there's just more in there. If we've got much more of a steady-as-she-goes, on-pace, lifestyle-type business. We still need to have full funnel freedom because we still need to have clients to service and people to sell to, but it'll be in a much different way and probably much less than if we are a high-growth company. Now, when we are looking at our personal vision, strongly, strongly recommend that it become as specific as possible. So it's not in the future. It's a specific number of years in the future. I'm not with my family I'm with name every member of your family how old they are it's not well we're going to live in a warm place we're going to live in the mountains really describe what.

[8:23] Your vision looks like however many years out. As Napoleon Hill said in Think and Grow Rich, whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. And our brains work on very, very specific pieces of information. So when we're supporting our clients doing goal setting to reinforce what I just mentioned, we don't say my family, we name my family because my family is an esoteric concept that our brain cannot create a solid picture of. However, if I said Kim Taylor and Lexi, who happened to be my wife and my two daughters, well, those are individuals I can actually conceive of and picture and imagine myself spending time with and enjoying moments together. So really, really define that personal vision after you've forgiven yourself. self.

[9:16] Now, here's the challenging part. And some of the stuff may have already been rather challenging, but human beings are creatures of our comfort zones. We love our comfort zone. So we're going to need to support to break out of our current negative belief spiral viral and create one that supports instead of stifles us. So all of the work that I've suggested you do up until this point has largely been individual. Now, I did say that it was my friend who suggested I forgive myself. I had that wonderful resource to turn to. You may not. So if you don't have that resource, but you still have forgiven yourself, you've still You'll craft it out, your personal vision. It's very, very specific. You can visualize it. You can see it. You can smell it. You can taste it. You can touch it. And yes, all five senses are really important when crafting a personal vision.

[10:16] When you go to implement, your brain is going to be wired to keep you in your comfort zone. So what you will need to do is share your vision and the specific support you are looking for with some of the trusted people in your life. Now that could be spouse partner, that could be older children, it may be some close friends, or it maybe is a third party coach or advisor who you've gotten to know and who is willing and able to give you the specific guidance and support you're looking for. Now what's really amazing about this process, once we've forgiven ourselves, once we've defined our personal vision, we're going to discover that our definitions of good or successful successful, in terms of our days, they're probably going to change. You know, in the past, a good day for us might have been, you know, we launched a new product, or we helped one of our salespeople bring a giant sale across the line. And now, our definition might be.

[11:17] I had the courage to have a difficult conversation with a team member or a peer. Or I ate dinner at home with my family, which, of course, you know, from March of 2020 forward might not seem like such an odd idea. But, you know, in the before times and as we are transitioning into whatever our new way of doing business looks like, more and more people are getting on planes and more and more leaders are spending days and weeks at a time away from their families. And so that might be a new definition for you if your personal vision includes having stronger relationships with family. Forgiving ourselves is that better than zero moment. That's the moment where we start creating momentum. Momentum and as a final thought if you are ever feeling down in the dumps you know you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders maybe you've had a bad conversation with a peer or the board has been challenging for you or maybe uh one of your team has uh has been challenging to interact with most of the time when we feel low we're typically sitting down you may be sitting down as you're listening to this.

[12:31] So when you have that down moment, you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. What I will encourage you to do is nothing more than stand up. When you stand up, you are actually creating momentum. And I will tell you again from personal experience, when I have felt the weight of the world on my shoulders, when I stand up, often I have a flash of brilliance by the time I'm fully stood up. Because I've created momentum, I've pulled myself out of that spiral that is grinding me down, and I'm starting to see with new eyes, the challenges that were weighing me down just a moment ago, but now are completely resolvable. And I have new ways of moving forward that I start to put into place right away. You've been listening to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I've been your host, Hamish Knox. Today, sharing ideas and insights around the idea of leader, forgive yourself. And how do we create momentum when we feel like the weight of the world is grinding us down.

[13:40] Like and share, rate and review. Connect with us on Instagram at Sandler in YYC. We'd love to hear what you would like to hear about on future episodes, or if you have a suggestion for a guest, please do introduce us. The Full Funnel Freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Join us at the 2023 23 Sandler Summit, March 16 and 17 in Orlando, Florida. Go to hamish.sandler.com forward slash Orlando for more details. And until we connect on the next episode, go create Full Funnel Freedom. Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[14:30] Music.