A short two-minute motivational drill by Jim Johnson (head coach at Contractor Coach Pro) reminding contractors they control their reactions and mindset. He advises turning negative events into opportunities—using an example of a homeowner upset over a broken patio table—to improve leadership, crew morale, and systems. The piece encourages deliberate responses and process changes to avoid compounding problems.
Hi, I'm Jim Johnson, the head coach here at Contractor Coach Pro. And today we're going to do our two minute drill. We do these once a week to give you some things to think about throughout the week and hopefully to help you get better as a contractor, a salesperson, a manager, whatever you might be in our industry, hopefully you find this helpful. And today we want to talk about the fact that you are the one that's in control. What I mean by that is the way that we handle things, the way we react to things, the way we think about things, we're in control of those. Our choices, our opinions, the way we react to outside factors that affect us during the day and throughout our weeks is in our control. And we tend to be the type of people normally that lend towards the negative. When something bad happens, we just compound it by thinking even more negatively. Whether that's somebody cutting us off in traffic or a job goes bad out there in the field and a homeowner is frustrated with us, we tend to take that and make it even worse by the way that we react to that action instead of looking at that obstacle as an opportunity. And so, for example, you have a homeowner that's upset about something that happened on a job site, maybe a hammer fell off the roof and hit their patio table and broke it. Instead of reacting in a way that is negative by getting onto your crew and yelling at everybody and telling the homeowner how bad everything is, react in a way that allows you to create an opportunity out of this obstacle that's come up. Maybe it's an opportunity for you to get that person a new patio table and to do it out of the kindness of your heart, because accidents do happen. Maybe you don't even charge a crew because accidents do happen. And that crew then sees you as more of a leader and wants to be a part of your company a bit more or less. Look at it as an opportunity to maybe change the way you do things. Maybe you change the way that a hammer is held or the way a hammer is used. Maybe it's a situation where you decide, hey, we're going to remove the homeowner's property away from any work zone areas and make that a part of your system. That's something that you sell as an added benefit. So think about this, that you're in control of your own actions. Your mind is the thing that's going to tell you whether you're going to be successful or you're going to be a failure. It's a powerful thing. Think about that throughout today and the rest of your week and see what you can do to get in control of your own mind, to make obstacles into opportunities.
