Success Through Commitment: Behavior Drives Attitude

“Success Through Commitment: Behavior Drives Attitude”

Sandler Trainers: Karl Schaphorst http://www.karlschaphorst.sandler.com/

Behind the Business: Jonathan Cardella https://www.getventive.com/

Entrepreneur Radio: Keith York https://executiveforumsidaho.com/

~~Summary~~

Karl Schaphorst from Omaha, Nebraska moved from an engineering tract in life into a sales tract. Karl showed up and had no exposure to professional selling, and he struggled early on his career before getting his feet wet and coming up with a way of doing things.

Karl spent 15 years in heating and air-conditioning and felt like he was on his way. In year 15 Karl experienced Sandler and entered the training with a bad attitude. It turned Karl’s life around, even though not everyone responds to Sandler the way that he did. Karl then dove head first into the material and installed the system as a hiring, sales, and onboarding process. This allowed for growth in accountability and business creation.

Karl says, “If you want to change an organization, it doesn’t matter what performance is. You get rid of the managers to bring in your own culture. In my biggest year ever I left and had offers from large HVAC companies, but I was in love with Sandler, and even though I felt like I wasn’t an entrepreneur I loved Sandler.”

Karl’s daughter was a gifted swimmer and was talented to the point that she didn’t have to work hard at it. Karl’s feeling watching his daughter excel in swimming and his enjoyment and pleasure in their development motivated him toward the business of training and engineering growth and personal development in his clients. To Karl, he felt that this would be an ordained move by God, and he was worried, but he took a risk and trusted in God’s ability to build his business and watch over the city so that he could sleep at night.

The business and large accounts that Karl has received has all called into his Omaha business. He feels that this is an act of God honoring his business intention. Karl is fired up between his business and his relationship with development. The Sandler process is a deep, emotional change that changes who you are as a person. If that augmentation is positive and moves you into a better place then the change is positive and you want more of it.

Sandler isn’t about providing a buzz, but meaningful change for business and life to help individuals grow and develop to their full potential.

The Sandler system uses its success triangle of attitude, behavior, and technique.

Charles Swindoll once wrote about attitude:

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes. "

Success is defined by the world as money, as recognition, as location, as surname, as friends, as cars. Success is connected to the materialistic parts of the world. The Sandler components of success are technique (how we do things), behavior (the movement that we do), and attitude (our thoughts and how we see ourselves) is at the top. All three of the elements of success in the Sandler triangle are controlled by the individual and does not depend on outside influences. These techniques are ones we can control and decide what to do with. Success is not something restricted to the elite few: success is open to everyone.

Success is an emotional feeling when you’ve done it, you’ve changed lives, you’ve helped create something in the community. A vast majority of people get their days done and shut off and repeat over and over again. They show up; they don’t work at it. Too often people’s behaviors start in resignation mode and allow them to shut off. This resignation of our attitude causes our technique to stagnate. Instead of trying new things or testing our skills we don’t have the energy to do things, so why bother? Our technique settles into reaction. Once this settles you create a limiting belief system that sabotages any thoughts or desires that you might otherwise have to do or try to do great things. Human potential is huge and the tragedy of human experience is that we leave without accessing it at all.

If we reverse the energy flow and focus on our behavior then we can facilitate people feeling because they’ve done something. Generally, people do because they feel—if you feel like today is an ordinary, lousy day your behavior is ordinary and lousy. When people control their behaviors based on attitude and your attitude tanks then it is really difficult to find success. Its important to identify the difficult things you should do and do them independent of your attitude.

If you do things without submission to your attitude then the behavior will transform how the attitude feels. Behavior is the one part of success that always must happen. These behaviors need to be measurable—and for us we in sales, we need to focus on the key performance indicators that we can qualify and evaluate action.

Being consistent in behaviors independent of results will lead to a transformation of attitude. The rule is: behave your way into a new attitude. Commitment connects behavior into a new attitude. Commitment is the thing that is impossible to achieve success without it. But if you want success you must remain committed in your behaviors because attitude doesn’t often support it.

The optimized life position is having energy flow from behavior to attitude. The people are the largest expense that a business has in its day to day, year to year functioning and yet business owners are reluctant to invest in this valuable and expensive commodity. Owners want to know the rate of return—the return is the lowest hanging fruit that comes out of investing in your people. The reason to invest in your people allows them to foster loyalty to you and your brand and the inverse is that attrition and replacement can be very expensive; sometimes the cost of a new hire is equivalent to their salary.

In training and specifically reinforcement, we want to make sure that technique is embedded in behavior. This allows reaction to become a proactive piece of the puzzle in deal making and creating the opportunity to allow customers to invest in you as a trusted adviser. During training we need to have faith that what we’re doing will make us better and this flow of energy from behavior to attitude to technique allows us to replace our subconscious responses with proactive strategies to optimize a life position and lead to high performance regardless of what career or industry that you are in.