In this Q&A video, sales coach Ryan Dohrn answers a listener question from Reba about the sudden surge of excuses that hinder her goal‑setting. He opens with a personal anecdote about his wife’s weight‑loss journey, emphasizing that eliminating excuses is key to achieving results. Ryan outlines a two‑step approach: (1) identify and repeat what already works in one’s professional life, and (2) pinpoint what isn’t working, then create a small, concrete plan to remove those obstacles. He illustrates this with a story from his early career where constant interruptions were curbed by time‑blocking, calendar scheduling, and communicating unavailability to colleagues. He stresses the importance of “managing up” and honest communication, noting that most people will support the effort once boundaries are clear. Ryan frames the method as the “Tom Brady principle” – repeatable patterns of success – and encourages listeners to keep sending questions, reminding them that sales is challenging and requires disciplined effort.
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Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales marketing coach, and we're answering your listener questions sent into ryan@ryandohrn.com. D-O-H-R-N, ryan@ryandohrn.com. First question's coming from, uh, Reba in Fort Worth. Hey Ryan, I am pretty good at goal setting, but all of a sudden I'm having a lot of excuses that are popping up in my life and I'm having trouble getting control of those excuses. What should I do? All right, Reba from Fort Worth, big fan of Fort Worth, by the way. Good question, happy to help. Now, some of you heard me talk about my awesome wife of 27 years, and what happened with her is she lost actually 100 pounds. How about that? And she's kept it off for 8 years. And what she said to me, I said, hey honey, what is the secret? People ask me all the time, what was the secret to your weight loss? Was it the diet, or, or what was it? And she said, well, Ryan, once you lose your excuses, that's when you will find your results. So how do you get rid of those excuses? And I think that's really what Reba is asking here in her questions. All right. So there's 2 sides to it. First, Reba, identify things that work in your life. Your professional life is where I'm talking. Identify things that work, make note of those things and repeat those things. Then what you want to be looking for is looking for things, look for things in your professional life that are not working or not working to their optimum, and then create a plan to remove those things or remove those obstacles. All right, let me give you a little bit of an example. There was earlier time in my early career where I was constantly being distracted by people, and the reason is because I was really available. So what I started doing is I recognized that wasn't working out, so I built a plan to correct it. First, I blocked off very specific times of my day that I was going to do certain particular sales tasks. That was the first thing. Second thing, I put it on my calendar, those time blocks. Third thing, I told everybody around me that during these 3 time blocks, I absolutely was not going to be available. So I used— I figured out what wasn't working and I put a little plan in place to implement removal of those things and created a different plan. Now, a lot of times people abusing your time, excuses that pop up, those type of things, a lot of times it's because you haven't communicated to those around you. So remember, you've got to be great also, Reba, at managing up and then managing the circumstances around you as well. I call it the Tom Brady principle: repeatable patterns of success. Identify things that work and repeat them. Identify things that don't work and create a miniature plan to fix them. To get rid of those things. A lot of times also, Reba, though, it's a lot about being honest with those folks around you. And you'll find that most people will support you in your efforts to get rid of excuses and then to move on to other things. Reba, great question. Keep your questions coming in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Don't forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either crazy— it's possible— or we found careers, friends, that'll feed our families for a lifetime. All right. We'll see you next week for another listener question.
