Brian Tracy argues that complacency (the 'comfort zone') is a major obstacle to continued success, especially in sales. To grow, he advises deliberately moving out of the comfort zone by raising one’s self-concept and setting much bigger goals (he suggests setting a written goal to earn 50% more). He supports this with an anecdote about a sales manager who forced new hires to trade up to Cadillacs to change their self-image, cites Warren Bennis’s Leaders on leaders avoiding comfort, and closes with a Shakespearean reminder that past success is merely prelude.
Questions this video answers
50% more
Leaders by Warren Bennis
Cadillac
Chapters
Perhaps the biggest single obstacle that salespeople have, especially when they start off and then even later, is they get into a comfort zone. They get into an area of complacency. In fact, we say that success is sometimes the greatest enemy of, of further success because people say, well, I'm doing pretty well, I don't need to be doing better than this. And they just start to coast. But unfortunately, there's only one direction in which you can coast. So the key to becoming more successful, to making more sales and making more money, is to force yourself to move out of your comfort zone. What this means is that you have to raise your self concept, your idea of yourself as a salesperson, for example, whatever you earned last year, set a new goal to earn 50% more and write it down as a number, be very specific about it, and start to think about yourself as earning that amount of money. Think, if I was earning that amount of money, what would I be doing differently today? What would I be doing from morning to evening? What would I be doing differently all day long if I was earning that kind of money? In a book called Leaders by Warren Bennis, which is a very popular book, at one time, they found that leaders like yourself have five qualities in common. And the one that he talked about was that leaders were aware of the tendency to fall into a comfort zone and to sort of start doing things the same way over and over again. And they deliberately forced themselves out of their comfort zone by setting bigger goals for themselves. And when you set bigger goals, you create a self image of yourself as doing far better than you're doing today. I'll give you an example. A sales manager I worked for, whenever he hired a new salesperson, he'd say, do you have a car? I said, yes. Well, come with me. He would take them down to the nearby Cadillac dealership, he'd force them to trade in their car on a Cadillac and the first payment was due the next month and drive home in a brand new Cadillac. Well, many of the salespeople were really, really tense about this and their wives got really upset. But you know what happened? Every one of them became a great success. They started driving around in a brand new Cadillac and seeing themselves as if they were top salespeople. They spoke with greater confidence. They had a different self image, they had a different self concept. So you can do the same sort of thing yourself, see yourself as the best in your field, set big goals for yourself that move you out of your comfort zone and never be satisfied at any level of performance. Remember, as Shakespeare said, the past is merely prelude. Whatever you've accomplished in the past is only a fraction of what you can truly accomplish in the future. If you move out of your comfort zone.
