Last week I hit the road to capture video testimonies from Mazda dealers in Atlanta and Orlando. Along the way I dropped two of my kids at Point Guard College in Lynchburg, Virginia for a week of intense study on the game of basketball. While I traveled to learn about success stories from Service Managers and Consultants, my kids were learning things that I thought were only taught at sales seminars.

The reality is that being successful in sports or in business is really about learning to be successful in life. Some of the things my kids brought back were a nice refresher for me, so I thought I’d share a few little gems with you:

Positive Thinking

The PGC Director is Dena Evans, an All American and former professional point guard. She’s only 5’4” tall, so you can imagine how skilled she must have been as a player. During one stretch of her career she got into a personal rut and sought help from a sports psychologist who simply asked her one question: “What do you spend time thinking about?”

Dena learned that when she focused her mental energy on negative things and on her failures, she was conditioning herself to more failure. So she made the decision to focus on the positives and to read uplifting and positive information, and as a result, her game turned around. In the dealership, we often spend time focusing on how bad conditions or circumstances are. Or we spend time with people who have nothing but negative things to say about the boss. Avoid those things like the plague, and you’ll find your path to success more quickly.

Practice Makes Perfect?

We’ve all heard the saying "Practice Makes Perfect". As trainers, most of us have taken it to a different level by saying, "Perfect Practice Makes Perfect". Dena Evans prefers to say that "Practice Makes Permanent".

In most cases we find that people in the dealership rarely practice their presentations, and when they do, they often give little effort. By practicing poorly, they cement the incorrect behavior into their presentation and make it permanent. This is why it’s vital to get coaching from others who can provide an objective opinion, and help you cement a productive and powerful presentation into your process.

My kids also learned about making a plan and working it, learning to become a better team player, and how to “sell” using body language. They also learned that failure to be a powerful communicator is the number one shortcoming of most point guards. Evans simply called this negative trait, “shyness”. And if there is one thing we can’t have in sales, its fear to deliver the message to our customers.

In retrospect, I think what stuck in my mind during this past week was simply this: It doesn’t matter what you do in life, what matters most is how you choose to do it.

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