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You Must Be Bigger Than Your Problems

Mar 7, 2019 8:52:06 AM

Back in January, Sarah Waple and I attended the annual Target Training International Conference. The conference always delivers great application insights for the science of Human Behavior that we incorporate into our programs at Growth Dynamics, and every year the team at TTI invites a key note speaker to address the close to 400 attendees. This year the speaker, Molly Fletcher, a sports agent out of Atlanta graced the stage and delivered a ten-bell message with humor, challenges and personal experience. I thought she was a great presenter with a great message.

Part of Molly’s presentation was her 5 keys to personal and professional success. I just want to share one of them with you in this post because it is something that can impact anyone no matter your age, profession, experience or title. Molly’s five keys are:

                Belief in your ability to evolve

                Discover the gaps inside ourselves that need to be closed to deliver our best

                Clarity of intention; having the integrity and courage to ask the right questions when it matters

                Discipline to recover from adversity, being present or what she called being where your feet are

                Execution with the goal to make everything we do about those we serve.

All five of these points are excellent in their own way, but one jumped out at me the moment I heard Molly say it; clarity about your intention. My thoughts immediately went to the time wasted over the years believing that I had made my intentions or next steps crystal clear, when in fact the other person didn’t get the same message. How much confusion had I caused? How much frustration had I felt? It made me think about the aggravation I inflicted on others by not be clear about my intentions.

Molly took it one step further, and it was too a point I didn’t anticipate. She shared a story about a very well-known client she and her agency represented with that turned out to be a real struggle. Every day this client called Molly complaining about one thing or another that wasn’t right, and no matter what Molly thought she had agreed to changed once the conversation ended. And because of the experience with this client, who was paying her handsomely, Molly created a new rule for her expectations regarding who she would work with and represent. The rule is powerful, and I believe any of us that serve customers ought to start making it part of our operating model. The rule simply states that all of her clients must be better than their problems. In other words, I’ll work with you, but if you take more than you bring to the relationship, I don’t want to be part of it. Forget potential fees or commissions, if you aren’t better than the problems you need to find another connection.

Thanks, Molly Fletcher for sharing that piece of brilliance!

 

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash