Within a matter of weeks, the holiday season and, hopefully, the busiest season of the year will draw to a close. Of course, everyone wants 2015 to be the biggest success in the history of the company!
The inventory is coming in faster than the scenes with Lucille Ball in the candy factory! The holiday new hires are being trained to be productive members of the company! The staffing patterns are at the ready, prepared to flow with the increases in foot traffic throughout the store! Attractive displays of merchandise are arriving or are being created internally! The tempo of the staff and the details of the season are quickly gliding into place! Ahh! Perfection is at hand! Gotta LOVE it!
Or not…
What about attitudes? When you (yes, YOU) got up this morning, did you greet the day with a sense of frustration with the number of, and complexity of, the tasks of preparing for the next several weeks? Did your mind greet the day robotically – creating tasks and ticking them off your To Do list? Were you focused on the mountains of minute details that haveto be accomplished by quitting time?
S.T.O.P.!!! Freeze-frame on that little task-organizing portion of your brain! No, seriously. STOP!!! Take five whole minutes (minutes, not days) to breathe, to stretch those muscles that you will rely upon to accomplish everything, to focus on the opportunities in your path to create the successful holiday season you desire.
One of the first creations for you is a sense of JOY! You are alive! You are healthy! You are employed! You have the privilege of serving the customers who look to you to make their holidays wonderful! (Remember why you started doing this business? You could be Mike Rowe and be doing Dirty Jobs).
The next creation for you is RELAXATION! You know, the sense that everything is flowing smoothly and just the way it is supposed to go! Adopting this attitude frees up that harried, stressy Bessie part of yourself that makes Every. Single. Task. A. Giant. Mountain. Creating a calm, quiet mind-set diverts all that stress energy into productive thought, which in turn, allows for planning! And yes, that includes “Contingency Planning,” for those times when things don’t exactly go the way you would like.
Another creation for you is FUN! Imagine if your days are filled with everything containing elements of good, old-fashioned fun! The arrival of your freight is overwhelming? Make a bit of a game of it to see how rapidly and efficiently your team can rock through that! Scheduling a nightmare? Consider that it’s a puzzle, with a number of pieces to fit together and the whole is an interesting and complete picture! Sales projections a figment of some Troll’s revenge? Visualize (hourly, if necessary) you and your team easily blowing past your stretch goals! Most importantly in the FUN department is to create the camaraderie and teamwork that spills over from you to your co-workers and is contagious to your customers!
No matter how this holiday season comes together for you and your staff, we wish you JOY, RELAXATION, FUN, and, of course, SUCCESS!
Author, trainer, consultant, and speaker Brad Huisken is President of IAS Training. Huisken has authored several books and training manuals on sales and produces a Weekly Sales Training Meeting video series along with Aptitude Tests and Proficiency Exams for new hires, current sales staff and sales managers. In addition, he publishes a free weekly newsletter called “Sales Insight” For a free subscription or more information contact IAS Training at 800-248-7703 or info@iastraining.com. Visit his website at www.iastraining.com.
