You know it’s been said that a great boxer knows the fight is never won in the ring.
If you had a fist fight scheduled in a week from Thursday, would you prepare? Would it make sense to not study your opponent? Would it be a good idea to just arrive for the fight and wing it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to practice, prepare and study before stepping into the ring? As a professional, you can either learn from your experience or the experience of others. Learning from your experience is expensive. It takes a very long time to to accumulate any real wisdom. I see this in companies I coach all the time. You’ll see a guy with years or “experience” under his belt who has essentially been surviving by making it up as he goes along for years. In that same company will be an individual who is thriving. Same customers. So what’s the difference? One of them is willing to study, observe, and create experiences in order to learn how to handle situations before they happen for real. One learns lessons beforehand, the other by trial and error. This reactive type of learning results in huge transactional losses and not to mention the mental toll this approach exacts.
This very example of proactive learning is why I built the QuickFix solutions element in my On-Demand platforms. A sales person should be able to prepare for a sales call and go into that call with the confidence of knowing exactly what he or she will do to satisfy a prospect or client. A true professional anything would never have to “wing it.”
