Family again

5:20pm, pacific standard time, hotel in San Bernardino, California, USA, Wednesday evening, September 14, 2022. Today was a better day than yesterday; definitely not as stressful. Mostly it was a day of training and meetings. On a personal note I decided to go to Dana Point tomorrow instead of staying another night in San Bernardino. I want to see my family again.

I am drained

5:49pm, pacific standard time, hotel in San Bernardino, California, USA, Tuesday evening, September 13, 2022. Today started with me conducting an emotionally charged meeting. By the time it was over I felt exhausted. But with no time to regroup I went to the branch office and did one-on-one training for seven hours. Now I am drained. The rest of my evening is dinner and sports television followed by reading a new book.

Ego

The ego will roar to be fed. Achieving the objective seldom happens on the first effort. Failure leads to assessment of what went wrong. We don’t know what went wrong so we take the “facts” of what happened and determine an alternate course. Maybe the first two or three times we remain confident.

Then it happens again and again. The objective isn’t achieved. We start to doubt ability.

We can give up and not try but it is still new so we don’t do that. But we look for patterns. We see shortcomings and others don’t fix. Blame them. Blame situation. And since they have been identified we are hyper aware of them. We see failure, we see the perceived reason. We associate them.

The situation runs out, we give up or we are removed.

I worked sales on business consulting. Completed training, did ride along, practiced my pitch. I was raring to go. They sent me five leads. I failed. They sent me five more. Nothing. Four. Four. Five. It my last one had a good talk. Got farther than I ever had. I felt I was figuring it out.

Come Monday I didn’t get any leads. They said sorry. Next day sent me two. I didn’t make a sale. No leads. No leads. Complained. 2 leads. Nothing. Next Monday nothing. Tuesday nothing. Wednesday I get an email I won’t get any more leads. I didn’t produce.

I had a week where they really fed me.

Then just a couple more. Why waste the leads?

So you know what I did? I started cold calling to make my own leads.

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?