Lessons - How To Hold Yourself Accountable | Robert Barber - Author of CEO for Life

In this Lessons episode, we delve into the importance of personal accountability in mastering time management and achieving sales success. You'll discover effective strategies for prioritizing tasks, setting boundaries and staying accountable. The episode emphasizes the value of mastering these skills to achieve optimal results and live your life like a CEO. What tips going into sales? How did you learn how to do that? With an HR and an electrical engineering background, you had no sales experience. Well, you did, I guess, an HR little bit because you're brokering deals there, but how do you manage that? How do you learn? What I learned, quite honestly, so my mom was 17 when she had me. My mom was a tremendously successful businesswoman and an incredible parent and everything else, but also a great teacher. I learned from my mom, and this is really where it came from, but what the people around me is that it's the incremental part that comes with discipline that is the win. It's doing those little things over and over and over again that are going to make it work for you. What I learned quite honestly was I'm a time block king. I am a time block guy, so I think a key to anybody in sales. If you want to go into sales, you have to just consume everything you can about the mindset around time blocking. The philosophies will work for you, get really good at time blocking is an incredible concept in a mindset that you have to have if you're going to do sales. The concept is, in my opinion, very important, but I've never heard somebody speak to it as the precursor to the success in sales. Is it just so there's so much stuff happening and you just have to block it out so that you are just more efficient and without that you wouldn't get stuff done. I'm curious. Yeah, no, the way I look at it is so it goes back to the only thing you have as a sales person to sell is your time. Yeah, forget the product, forget the service, forget anything else, right? Really what you're doing is you're selling your time. And so if you're not sacred about your time, you already lost. And so that's the way I looked at it was like if someone was willing to steal my time or to try and take my time away, they're taking food off the table for my family. And I got seriously sacred about my time. And you know, that's the way I looked at it. And that just caused me to to line up everything else, right? Who was I going to spend my time with? What deals was I going to go after? What was I going to say no to? You know, at the end of the day, could I honestly measure how I did? Absolutely, because I could look at that time. So everything fell around the time. And if you are in sales, don't look at it like you're trying to sell the product because that's not really what you're selling. Really what you're selling is where are you putting your time in order to make that thing happen? Yeah, that's a damn good. It makes a ton of sense because said differently, if you're in sales and you're not qualifying out, if you're not saying no to people that aren't a good fit. If you don't have a process for that, or you don't even know what good looks like, you're chasing everything. Because there's no shortage of deals out there. But like you said, there's a shortage of time. And actually, the most effective sales reps say no more than they say yes to demos, to meetings, to calls. And like it's honestly even worse in a post-COVID world where everything is like an hour long Zoom call for no reason, right? And that can set like you can do a deal over maybe an hour an hour and a half Zoom call or that or a smaller deal could take you five, ten hours if you get the wrong customer for whatever reason. And there's back and forth and having a hauling and negotiating and that happens sometimes and you just lose like days of your life chasing the wrong customer. Oh, yeah, you know, in real estate especially, you know, I know it's another environment too, but you know, people will come with you and they'll shake money at you, right? And they'll say, hey, listen, go find me a deal. I need to I need to place a million bucks, right? And so you're like, and three to six percent of a million bucks, man, I need to go do that, right? But really what they're doing is they're just bird dogging you. They've got six or seven other people going out looking for deals. And if you don't, if you don't take care of your time, you could have only bird dog clients and guess what? You're going to you're going to go more than broke. You're going to go bankrupt. Yeah, so how do you how do you deal with that? What's the lesson that you learned to real estate on how to find where to spend your time? And is it something that we could easily take into other environments so that people can figure out where to not waste time? Yeah, and that's that's super good because I do, you know, because now I'm in coaching, right? So I'm doing the same thing. I'm selling my time, but it is, but with that being said is I got a real like you say qualify what those opportunities are like. So anyone that is in a sales role or growing a business and trying to figure out how to pick up clients and customers those kind of things. The first thing you have to you have to ask or you have to do is you have to be a really good listener. You have to listen for the cues of what people are telling you. If it first thing you need to know if it sounds too good to be true and you don't have to really work hard to make it happen, guess what? It's too good to be true. There's no there. There isn't. And you know, that's that's the first thing that's the first thing you qualify if it really if it sounds too good and it's too easy. It's not it never had those things don't happen. You're going to hit singles a lot more than you're going to hit those home runs. So, you know, look for the singles always, you know, what are the deals that I can get done that I know that are real that can make happen. And get rid of that swinging for the fences mentality. I guess I guess my question, you know, the CEO for life, I love the I love the analogy that you have to run your life like a CEO. So, how do we solve how do we solve for that? How do we remove the work life and the and the personal life because there's things that I'm sure like this is ingrained in people. You have to act one way at work and they and they act differently at home. So what are like the actionable steps you can start doing or it's just a matter of finding the right organization that also recognizes that they want a certain authenticity and who they hire. How do you fix that's great. That's a great conversation. It's a super conversation. So, the first thing is you have to work your road map to make sure that your your life and your work who you are maps to what a CEO is right. Do you have a, okay, first thing you got to know is do you have some level of self awareness. Listen, if you're a dick and it ain't going to work no matter what you do, right. I mean, you know, or if you're a bad person or whatever whatever label you want to call it in terms of being a jerk or had been working difficult with people, you have to some have some level of self awareness. Once you have some self awareness from there, you can decide, okay, well, what is the vision for my life and what I tell people is their vision is never big enough. Well, I sit down with clients and I talk to them, tell me about your vision for your life. It's never big enough. It's never big enough. It's always, it's always well this year. I want to do this or, you know, we're looking to buy this house or, you know, we're, you know, one of my kids, kids to college. Well, I talk about in the book is dream generationally, you know, a CEO doesn't, a CEO measures in a year or a quarter, but when they look at casting vision for the company, they're thinking five years, 10 years, 30 years, where, where are we going to turn this ship and take it to, you know, Elon Musk is looking at Mars. He's not, he's not just thinking about trying to get this thing to go up and then come back down, right? I mean, he's so dreaming generationally is super important. So self awareness and making sure you have a big dream. And then from there, you can to begin to put your roadmap together. Okay, so what are the goals that are going to get you there? What values are going to keep you in line, right? You're not going to cross any ethical barriers, those kind of things. Then what are the people that you're surrounding yourself with? Who are your shareholders? Listen, it's, it's cliche, but it's truth. I guarantee if you look at the people you spend the most time with, the five people you spend the most time with, you eat where they eat, you listen to the same music they do, you dress like them, you talk like them, you drink the same beers or wine. I mean, that's just what we do, right? It's funny because I have a six-year-old daughter and it is so apparent in her boyfriend. All the boys in high school, they dress the same, they have the same beaver haircut, they all miss the same music. They all drive the same trucks, they all, it's all the same things, right? And it's so apparent in high schoolers that, but it never leaves us. We're always there. So who are you leveling up in your sphere? And then from there, you can then begin to say, okay, now that I have all these pieces in place, how am I, how am I learning to work within that? And that comes with having this firefighter mindset is, I was told a long time ago, you live your life in three states. You're either in a storm, coming out of a storm or going into a storm. That is life, period. And so you better be preparing today for that storm that you're either in, going into or coming out of and every day be a good firefighter. So those are the things that are wrapped up in the book and they'll have practical exercises around it. And that's what I'm trying to help people find is that direction for their CEO. And do you find those are good lessons and so the context of the books book makes sense. Excuse me. Do you find that that's similar to what people reach out to you for when they look for business, business advice or coaching advice? Are those, is that the core problem that they're trying to solve or what other types of coaching do you actually work with people on outside of this CEO work life balance? Sure. And so it's, you know, coaching is so interesting to me is because it, I guess the easiest way to say it is everybody that I coach already knows what they need to do. We all do. We all know we need to lose weight or we need to exercise or we need to do this or I need to pick up the phone and make those phone calls or, you know, I need to get my accounting and everybody knows what they need to do. But what they need is someone to speak that truth into them so they can, they can then release themselves to go do it. And that's really what coaching does. It allows a person to release themselves into what they know they need to do. Because what happens often is we get caught up in this mental chatter right we talk to ourselves in our head four times more than we talk to a person verbally. So you're having a conversation your head four times more than you're having a conversation with someone else. And so we get lost in that but sometimes you need that person to have that verbal conversation with make some accountability good. So that's what I spent a lot of time with people is we first start at what is it that you're not doing that you know you should do. And from there everything else unravels we put a plan in place we execute on that plan and my normal coaching time is 12 weeks at the end of 12 weeks. I mean they've they've gone way beyond they ever thought they would have been from the beginning. Thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one.