Happy Sunday Everyone:
My team and I had a great week. We brought in 9 new clients, all locked, all very happy to be working with us. I should have had 10 but one client decided to go another direction because I couldn’t match what another bank was offering. Truth be told I thought our execution and involvement throughout the last 6 months was worthy of him sticking with us but he felt otherwise. I was angry. The day I lost the client, I was driving to San Jose for my nieces graduation party, sitting in traffic for an hour and all I could think about was this one client. When I got to the graduation, I was less present than I should have been, thinking again, about the single client I lost.
As I was driving home from the party, something clicked, which probably will seem very obvious to most of you, but wasn’t to me at the time. I had 9 other clients who were very happy to be in a relationship with my team and I. Those 9 other people, truly embarrassing for me to write this, didn’t come across my mind once for more than a minute, yet here I am allocating all of this negative energy and time to the one person who chose to go a different direction. As I think through this, I’m trying to find the balance between having a competitive spirt, which I’m glad for, and not being a complete ungrateful moron who then freezes all positive thoughts from entering my brain when something doesn’t go my way. More important, just focusing on the folks who want to have a relationship with us vs. the folks that don’t and pouring our time and energy into them.
Although this has something to do with finding the gratitude in our clients, it’s not my point. My point is more about the mental stamina that I need to work on to get my head out of the gutter sooner than later when this stuff happens, and it’s always going to happen. Reframing my head to focus on the wins and not get dragged down by the single negative event. Being able to not take things personally but instead do a quick analysis of what went wrong, adjust, and move on. As important, it’s not always what went wrong, it’s what went right. A mental pep-talk of “I’m doing something right” given last week, is a good thing. A recipe of genuine humility and confidence is the winning formula for me. The more these events stock pile up on me, the more I take time to learn from them, the faster I’ll change in the future. My biggest take away, which works for so many scenarios, business and personal, is the simple fact of reflection to get better but then moving on quickly and getting back to the folks that want to be in relationship with you, and that bring you energy. When I think of the people I know who live the biggest lives all around, they have a great balance of caring about what is important and not getting wrapped around the axel on what is not.
Have a great rest of your Sunday.