Skills

Being a chaplain requires certain credentials, skills, training and experience. I possessed those things in the spring of 2003.

Consequently I took a job as a hospice chaplain. I was assigned a group of patients already on service to provide spiritual care. As more patients came on I provided care to them as well. In the course of my duties I was asked to conduct worship services, funerals, weddings, baptisms and various other tasks of the clergy. It was a job I had spent years developing the skills necessary to conduct.

I did not have to think about drumming up business, finding customers or selling people on my offering. When I took the job more than enough opportunity was given to me. As I continued to work and became known in the community the ancillary requests increased as well.

I stopped working as a chaplain In the fall of 2009. I longed for adventure and competition. Two things being a chaplain did not provide. I went into sales.

In sales the goal was specifically to drum up business, increase market share and find new customers. I am not sure how good I was at sales. However, I did possess a skill for getting sales jobs.

I was good at applying, getting interviews, being offered positions and moving up in salary and rank. From the time I left being a chaplain to the spring of 2017 I had tripled my salary and held executive leadership positions.

Now I scribble blog posts and advocate for objective focused growth. I was paid a salary as a chaplain and as a sales leader. I made money because my skills were seen as valuable. I was paid a regular salary in exchange for my loyalty to the company and cause.

How to I survive doing this?

I am an introverted person. My writing is personal and reflective. Does it appeal to anyone else? How do I consistently share it in a way that is mutually beneficial to the writer and reader?

“It can’t be done”

The market is too saturated we don’t have the right features, I wasn’t trained. If you have worked in sales you know all the excuses for failure.

I know. I have managed many sales people. I have heard all the excuses. I have also been a sales person. I have used the excuses.

In the end there were only the jobs I hit my objective and was rewarded and jobs I missed my objective and was dismissed. I have been fired many times. I haven’t to use a baseball teen batted 1.000.

In sports the objective is clearer. You can say the defense was too hard or you didn’t have a good scheme but in the end you still didn’t score or win the game. Emotionally we naturally gravitate to excuses because they relieve the tension.

Even as you are reading this you are thinking he is a hard ass, he is too narrow focused I don’t like this all or nothing attitude. You are going back to the squares and seeing what is easiest to see and accept. And if you do what you have always done you get what you always got.

Don’t look at life as an emotional have and have not. Identify your objective, strive for it, achieve it or not then set the next objective. In your career and business life you will be much more focused and stress free.