Best Practices For Professionals: Attitude, Self-Image, And Self-Discipline
By Gary Pica, President and Founder, TruMethods LLC
In his last series, Gary Pica focused on increasing managed services practices sales. In this four-part series, he shifts the focus to best practices for individuals that will make a positive impact on your businesses. Each week of this series, Pica challenges you to examine your own systems, methods — and habits — and consider changes, if needed, for the better.
Attitude, Self-Image, And Self-Discipline
I love sales because it’s the purest application of how attitude, self-image, and self-discipline impact results.
Here’s what I mean: in sales your results are measurable, you sell or you don’t, you make quota or you don’t. This is why sales impact your self-image so dramatically in a positive and negative way.
Attitude, self-image, and self-discipline impact the results of every role in the company in the same way, but because the relationship between you and your results might not be seen as directly, you may not recognize the relationship. It doesn’t matter what your job is: support, management, accounting, or business owner. As a business owner you may sometimes feel removed from your results. There are so many moving parts to a business — employees, customers, vendors, technology — it’s easy to dismiss this truth. Make no mistake about it, your success is directly related to your attitude, self-image, and self-discipline. You can embrace this truth, ignore it, or run from it.
Some people never make this connection. An example would be a sales person who is not selling and blames everyone and everything but themselves for their results. Or maybe you are a business owner who feels that your team just doesn’t get it. I am suggesting that that maybe you are the one who may not get it … it’s your team after all.
There are people who realize and embrace the truth. They have the courage to say, “I am as happy and successful at whatever I do because of me.” Rather than being crushed by this responsibility, they learn to revel in it. This is not an easy truth to confront in business or in life.
Where we are today is a result of who we are, whether we like it or not. The great news is that we have enough control over who we are to change our results.
To read other articles in this series, begin here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Pica is the go-to expert for growing MSP sales and profitability. His company, Dynamic Digital Services, was “early to market” in the MSP arena and quickly became one of the fastest growing MSPs in the country. Pica’s company was acquired by mindSHIFT Technologies, and he has since launched coaching and mentoring company TruMethods. The TruMethods business transformation community has provided training and support services to more than 1,000 MSPs in the areas of sales, service delivery process, business planning discipline, and financial benchmarking. Pica is regularly a featured speaker at IT solutions events.