“Just Sack him.”
“What?”
“Just sack him.”

My sales director leans forward on his elbows, his gold Rolex shining in the sunshine, and his handmade suit falling open to show some fancy tartan lining and looks right into my eyes. It is clear from everything about him that he has the necessary Mental Toughness for sales.

I look down. “Sack him. What do you mean?” I ask nervously.
“Sack him. Can him. Tell him that you don’t want to work with him anymore. Tell him that he is taking the piss. Tell him that you don’t like working with him. Frankly, I do not care but you have to sack him.” He is getting animated.
“But I can’t,” I say, “He is my biggest client.”

As I look back now to that me twenty five years ago, I realise just how scared I was in that moment. I had been working for months to build up my accounts, I was one of the top performers in the business, and I was, for the first time in my life, earning decent money, and here was my boss telling me to get rid of my best client; a client who represented over 50% of my sales; a client who worked solely with me; a client who, from my perception, single-handled kept me in a job.

I keep my head down.

“Gavin, look. All clients are not created the same. All clients are not the same. How much time do you spend on him in an average week?”
“Pretty much all of it,” I say.
“How much?” He demands. He is not going to let this go.
“Probably, 90% of my time,” I whisper.
“And you tell me you want to double your sales this year?”
“Yes,” I say. I don’t like where this is going.
“Can you work twice as hard?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go. Sack him. Gavin, you need mental toughness for sales.”

I gulp, make some excuses and head for the door.

It took me six months before I sat down and spoke to my prima donna client. It took me nine months to really learn that lesson and start to action it. It took me over a year until I “walked away” and started to build the business that I wanted and deserved. It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing well, it was just that my reality was holding me back; I had not yet built my mental toughness for sales.

Your future is created by your actions, and if your actions are the same as what got you where you are, then it is lunacy to expect them to get you anywhere else.

Most people are victims, trapped by their own mindset, trapped by their own interpretations, trapped by their own expectations, trapped by their own limitations. And if you’re satisfied and happy with that you have, that’s great, but if you want to Be More, Do More, & Have More in business and in life then you need to change… and that might mean making some difficult decisions so that you can smash it in the next year. And that’s where my mental toughness programmes come in to help you to be a better leader, a better salesperson, a better business partner, a better husband or wife…

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