Stop Changing Your Schedule In Your Mind [Academy]

Stop Changing Your Schedule in Your Mind

Do you know that during my seed selling career I was my own worst enemy? That’s right. Speaking from experience, I was the poorest planner in the world. Too often I would fly by the seat of my pants, base my daily schedule on the weather, on whatever customers wanted me to do and even how I felt on a particular day. For several years I believed because I was in agriculture it was impossible to plan ahead and follow a calendar. Something was always going to interfere and change my plans. I did what every ignorant sales rep would do, plan in my head according to what came along or needed to be done that day. My mind controlled my schedule and it wasn’t a very good system.

The problem with letting your mind do the scheduling is, nothing is ever permanent. When you don’t have a fixed plan in writing, THAT’S when the real interference takes place. I was doing it all backward. I eventually discovered that when I developed an actual calendar in advance, and followed it throughout the season, the interference was much less because I was in control of how I spent my time. I surpassed every sales goal and not by a little, but by a lot. That’s because the calendar told me what I needed to do and when I followed it, I made progress. I no longer followed the whims of my mind but a real schedule.

The other thing I learned was when I DID create a calendar, my fear of not being able to stick to it went away.  95% of the time my calendar never changed during the season, and when it DID CHANGE, it impacted only a few days out of my entire year. Hard to believe isn’t it.

But in the minds of many seed sellers it’s a much bigger problem because that’s exactly where their planning lies, in their minds, and not in writing on paper or in their computer. They have a vision like I did, that making a calendar in our business and trying to stick to it is a waste of time. They keep thinking about some crazy week, month, or year in the past when the calendar got screwed up, and it was usually due to bad weather. You’ve heard me say many times that even when the season is delayed, you never delay your plans accordingly, you stick to the original schedule...