I get emails everyday from people seeking answers. Likewise, I read dozens of articles from people purporting to have the answers.
The questions cover hundreds of areas:
How do I get a person to answer the phone?
How do I get a meeting?
How do I differentiate my solutions from the competition?
What’s my/our value proposition?
How do I make sure I’m dealing with the right decisionmaker?
How do I avoid discounting and defend my price?
How do I make sure I hit my numbers?
How do I make a killer sales call?
How do I create a winning strategy?
What’s the best way to handle this objection?
What’s the best way to make sure my pipeline is filled?
What do I do with low performers?
What do I neeed to do to build trust with my customer?
What do I do to get my people to perform?
How to we compete against?
How do we define our price?
How do I get that promotion?
How do I keep my job?
What is the best way to ….?
How do I …….
What do I …….
Too often, the question is focused on finding the one right answer. It’s the pursuit of the silver bullet or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Too often, there’s advice, some of it good, lots of it bad. There are people that have the answer! It’s what worked for them. It’s what they discovered in research—“90% of high performers do this….”
We take the advice, but it doesn’t work for us. Or it’s difficult, we encounter resistance, so we abandon it, searching for another answer.
Most of the time when someone comes to me seeking answers, unfortunately I disappoint them. My response is, “It depends.” I then deluge them with questions about the situation, the people they are dealing with, themselves, what’s happening, what they need to achieve, why……..
In the end, we discover there is one answer to their question.
But it’s never the answer they read about in a blog, or the advice from an expert saying, “Here is the secret to success….”
It’s the answer for the individual comes up with—for the specific situation they are dealing with, for that moment in time, what they feel confident they can execute.
There is always one answer, but it is unique to us, not the answer that has worked for someone else.
The problem is, we don’t take the time to figure out “our answer.” We either are too lazy, use the excuse of being too rushed, or don’t have the personal confidence in figuring it out. So we choose someone else’s answer, or one that may have worked in the past, but is no longer appropriate.
Sometimes, we are paralyzed in choosing an answer, there may be many alternatives, but we have to make the choice.
Ultimately, there is one answer, until we choose it and execute it, we don’t produce a result.
Sometimes, it’s the wrong result, we learn, we have to figure out what’s the right answer to recover and take the next step.
Finding answers to these questions is, sometimes, difficult. Finding “our” answers is often more difficult.
But that’s what growth, learning, and achievement are about.
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