Run Towards the Hard Stuff!

There is a tendency in our society to take the easy way out. To settle for less than we know we are worthy of and deserve. For example, I know this guy who’s initials are Jim Raffel and he has not been posting to his blog as much as he used to. He has been taking the easy way out and using excusing like: I am traveling too much to see customers in this tough economy so I don’t have time, my personal life is very complicate right now, so I don’t have time, I can’t think of anything to write and who has time to look for inspiration. Get the picture?

 Sometimes these blog posts are a piece of cake and fly off my fingertips quicker than I can type. Typically those are the ones that come from the heart, writing about my father’s passing, writing about playoff baseball returning to Milwaukee for the first time in decades, writing about the state of our industry. Other times they are just plain hard and take a great deal of research and I feel like I am back in my MBA program. The last post about sustainability took me the better part of two days to get right.

Here’s the payoff for running towards not away from the hard stuff. I just returned from the IPA Technical Conference. Yesterday at lunch two people sitting to the right of me and one to the left all talked about and thanked me for JimRaffel.com and the Golden Nugget emails that come from it. In total no fewer than ten people over the two days thanked me for starting to send the emails again. I can only speak for myself but that is success folks. Not all success is financial and quite frankly non-financial success is the most rewarding and more lasting.

Now, I would not want my readers thinking I do this for charity. I do not. I do it because five years ago Jeffery Gitomer told me too. It’s his knowledge and his secret so if you want to know what I mean, buy his ‘The Little Red Book of Selling.’ Hell buy all his books each one is simply more fantastic than the previous one. I love the title of Chapter One of the Little Red Book of Selling – Kick your own ass.

We all know what the ‘hard stuff’ is in our business and personal lives. I am issuing a challenging to everyone reading this to pick one hard thing you have been running away from and work on it today. You don’t have to finish, but you do have to do more than think about it. You want an example? I wrote this post. As easy as it was to write (my fingers could not keep up with my brain), it took the discipline to do this and not make sales calls, Twitter, or Facebook. Another example of something hard is that I will ignore the time drains of Facebook and Twitter for one week. I am pretty sure I will still be alive in seven days and anyone who really needs to reach me has other ways. I also suspect there will be more blog posts in the next 7 days than all of this year.

My second challenge, forgive someone close to you. I mean really close – yourself! I have learned over the last few months that we all carry around ‘hard stuff’ to forgive ourselves for. Things we have done, things we have said, things we should have done and things we should have said. Get over yourself you are not alone. Forgive yourself and get on with the hard stuff that matters.