My wife and youngest daughter are both teachers. My wife teaches Kindergarten and my daughter first grade. I make it a point to go to their classes several times a year to volunteer and help out in any way I can. Every time I go to one of the classes and work with the children, I learn something.
What I learned the other day when I went to my daughters’ class is, children will always find someplace to play and something fun to do no matter where they are.
Watching kids get creative and seeing them make up games and things to do that are fun for them was amazing.
Then I started to think, when do the kids lose this ability to create a fun time for themselves and start letting their environment dictate what is happening?
Having had 2 daughters who went through the public school system, along with my wife being a teacher for the past 16 years in our local schools. Added to the fact that my wife and I were both very active Band Parents (stop laughing) for not just the 8 years my daughters were in the band but the two years in between also (I didn’t want to lose my edge) I have gotten to know just about every administrator in our school cluster. I left my daughters elementary school and went to the middle school. After checking in, I went to a classroom of one of my daughters’ teachers and watched her kids. I was watching 7th graders, kids almost twice the age of my daughters’ kids, and I started to see that they were having fun but it was not as obvious. My next stop was the High School, I decided to go to the room I was the most comfortable in (I said stop laughing) the Band Room. I saw the kids interacting, and having fun, but it was so different to what I saw in my daughters’ class.
My conclusion, as we get older, as we take on more and more responsibility, we start to lose our willingness to have the amount of fun we had as kids. Not as much of a mind blowing conclusion as I was hoping for.
But let’s think about what we do as sales reps every day. How much fun did you have when you first started your career in sales? I know I had a ton of fun. Every day was exciting and filled with adventure. Even the prospects that said no created a fun experience to learn from. Then as I started to become a little more successful in sales (Like the middle school) I was still having fun, but nowhere near the amount I had as a rookie. Finally as a seasoned rep (Like High Schhol Kids) I look back and realize that I forgot to have fun.
As we grow in one area of our lives, we sometimes shrink in another. We get really good at selling and we forget about what it is to have fun while doing it.
Zig Ziglar once said, “Make making money your hobby instead of your job and you will enjoy it a lot more”.
The kids in High School were already starting to look at learning as a job, a task, a project. They have started losing the feeling of excitement while learning something new and the adventure of doing new things. By the time these kids graduate collage and get into the workforce they will forget how to have fun altogether.
As professional sales reps we need to re-teach ourselves to have fun. We need to go back to the days when everything we did, everything that happened to us was an adventure. We need to be able to create a fun atmosphere in our customer’s places of business when we arrive and have the customer look forward to our next sales call to them.
As adults, we have a lot of responsibilities that fall on our shoulders. We have a ton of pressures placed upon us from all aspects of our lives. We get stressed out over all these things and when we are stressed fun usually isn’t the first thing on our minds.
But now let’s look at things through the eyes of my daughters’ kids. It doesn’t matter if you are doing inside sales, phone sales, or outside sales. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product or if you sell a service. It doesn’t matter if you have been selling for 6 months or 60 years. Look at sales through the eyes of a first grader, and play by their rules;
Rule #1) EVERYTHING IS A GAME.
Rule #2) EVERYPLACE IS A GOOD PLACE TO PLAY AND HAVE FUN.
Rule #3) EVERYONE YOU ARE WITH BECOMES YOUR PLAYMATES.
Rule #4) THERE IS SOMETHING TO LEARN EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY.
If you will follow these simple rules, you will know the answer to Cat Steven’s question, WHERE DO THE CHILDREN PLAY?
The answer is, EVERYWHERE.
Lorin
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