Don’t get discouraged!
So I’ve been talking about the 8 Key Business Skills, and as people work on these skills, sometimes it gets very discouraging.
There is so much to learn. It takes so much time.
Surely there are some shortcuts.
But when they try those shortcuts, they oftentimes find out that there are no shortcuts. Those are just traps in disguise. (I’ll be talking more about those traps in other videos,)
Today is focused on why not to get discouraged,
- The importance of learning these new business skills
- and what investing to learn these new skills looks like.
The Return On Investment You Get For Learning Skills
In a business, we only have so much time, energy, and resources to deploy.
It is very important that everything we do has a return on investment.
If it’s not giving us something back, we should just be NOT doing it at all and saving those resources.
The return on investment for skills can get very complicated.
Sometimes it’s very clear.
- I worked on becoming a better manager. I have better retention. My employees are happier. The business runs smoother.
- I worked hard on sales and marketing. I’ve doubled my revenue. Things are looking really good.
But sometimes you’re doing the work, and you’re not seeing the results right away!
Lagging Indicators
You can feel the growth, but it’s not showing up
- On your Profit and Loss statement
- Your blood pressure measurements
- Or how you’re feeling about your life
That’s when learning new skills can get discouraging.
You can see how vast the need for growth is.
You can start to get discouraged in taking the path going forward that the investment might not give you the return you’re hoping for.
Case Studies Show The Hidden Power Of Skill Development
I want to give a few examples of ways that you’re going to get a return that might not be the return that you expected.
Again, if the return is very linear, you did the work on sales, and your sales are better, that’s rewarding. It’s easy to stay motivated.
But as you work across these eight key business skills, I guarantee there will be some where you’re not feeling that return right away, and getting discouraged is very, very easy.
Here are just a few stories and examples of case studies I have seen in the past.
Case Study #1
I had one client in the past who had a number of businesses, none of which were massively successful, and this particular person oftentimes would struggle in some of the Sales and Marketing side of each business.
But with each iteration of a different business, they got better and better at it.
At the very beginning, they almost avoided having a sales conversation whatsoever.
Later on, they had some, and they had some success.
Later on, they even helped run a little bit of a sales team and pushed even harder to have more and more success in sales.
But ultimately, they decided that they were maybe not in the mood to have a business anymore, which is totally a fine choice, and they shuttered that business.
I recently talked to this client, and what might seem like a “failure” in acquiring business skills actually is an impressively important tool right now.
This individual is currently looking to move overseas currently into another country, and this other country has a very low cost of living and a very easy entry point for American citizens.
The only requirement is that they have their own business, and that can be set up overseas there, and it brings in a certain fairly low amount of dollars per month in income.
So this person can now take all of the business skills that they had acquired, and relaunch a business overseas that will basically use those skills to allow them to live their dream life in this new country.
Their bar for success has massively changed. Where they decided maybe “not in the US” as far as the business goes, overseas was a great fit!
If they hadn’t put in that work on sales and marketing, this wouldn’t even have been a choice. They might have gotten eliminated from the possibility of even getting to start a business overseas and live their dream life!
Case Study #2
For myself, I decided to leave a corporate job years ago.
In that job, I had a lot of sales experience, and I thought, well, I’m no longer doing that job. I no longer need that experience. But actually, it’s transitioned very nicely into helping me teach others more about sales and learning them myself.
So what I thought was possibly a “wasted skill” actually has come in useful in a more roundabout way.
Case Study #3
I’ve had other people who have worked with me who ended up deciding being a business owner wasn’t for them, but in doing so, they actually have grown those skills to where they’re much better employees and become managers, and hold much higher-level salaried positions they ever could have before.
The Indirect Path To Success
So even if the direct path isn’t obvious, there are other surprising benefits down the road.
I wanted to remind you of that before you get too discouraged that the return might not be direct, but it will be indirect.
That is one the biggest benefits we get from working on skills is they’re always in our back pocket.
They’re always in your toolbox. Once we have them, no one can take them away from us.
They exist.
We can actually combine them in new and really powerful ways.
That’s on the Return side to not get discouraged.
What about the Investment side? (We are looking at a Return On Investment (ROI) after all!)
The Investment Required
Most people think of investment, they think right away, of money. “I have to pay a lot of money for these skills.” But in actuality, that’s not the case.
When I think about learning business skills, there’s actually an order I think of.
- Openness
- Focusing
- Critical Thinking
- Money/Time
An openness to input is the number one piece to learning business skills.
If you’re close-minded and not willing to learn new information or see other viewpoints and just assume you have it all figured out, it’ll be hard to pick up a new skill!
If you have that, openness to input, and if you have focus and do some critical thinking and spend the time and energy and a little bit of money, usually you can successfully acquire almost any skill.
That’s the input that’s required.
Potholes On The Path
I find that the focus, the focusing on a thing that we’re not good at can be very discouraging, especially whenever there are other things we can focus on. That can be a derailing point.
The need for critical thinking is one of the other biggest derailing points I’ve seen.
We want it all to be easy and come to us right away, but with these skills, there’s a deep level of knowledge that’s required.
Remain Patient and Don’t Get Discouraged Improving Business Skills
If we go slow and build a strong foundation, we can go much, much faster later.
The faster we try to go early on, the more likely we are to get tripped up.
Being patient and not getting discouraged as we put in this time early on – thinking critically through the components of the skill. That’s what allows it to have that return later in whatever form it may come.
So for many, learning is fun on its own.
I encourage you to learn and build these key business skills so they are ready in your toolbox when you need them for your business.
If you’re starting to feel discouraged, like maybe it’s not totally paying off, maybe it’s time to shift your focus to another skill for a while.
You can come back to focus on that skill again later. Or maybe it’s time to remind yourself that the benefits of this skill might come in a roundabout way to remind you the investment is worth the return.
So keep it up.
It’s very important to learn new skills. Once you’ve learned the they are always yours!
Have a great rest of your day.
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