I was in my mid-30s when Dean and I co-founded Sage Presence, and this was after about 10 years of me working for an employer. After a couple of years of Sage Presence being in existence, a certain metaphor formed in my mind for what the difference was between co-running a business of my own and working for someone else.
So what I started to tell people was when I was working for somebody else, it kind of felt like I was shackled to a cafeteria table, and periodically, somebody would bring me a tray of food that I could just kind of mindlessly eat, whereas now, now that I’m co-running a company and 100% responsible for the income of the organization, what I would tell people was that it felt like me and my family huddled around a campfire, and I’m periodically going off to find an animal to bring back to the campfire and cook for all of us to eat.
So one of those was safe and predictable; the other one was absolutely unsafe and unpredictable. But what I would continuously tell people was there was so much more life in that latter one. And I’ve come to recognize that this metaphor is not just about being an entrepreneur but it’s about presence itself. Presence requires a certain amount of discomfort. Being in the present moment means not living in the past, not living in the future.
What I recognized was back when I worked for someone else, I didn’t really have to be in the moment. I was just kind of nowhere in particular. I don’t know; maybe I was in an alternate future because I was always hoping to be in a different situation, or maybe I was in the recent past because this moment felt like the recent past. It didn’t feel like anything special.
So, the real-life translation of this is, now that I was responsible for my income, I had to get out and network. I had to meet prospects and sell myself and sell Sage Presence. And at the beginning, I was super uncomfortable with it because I really didn’t know who and what we were yet. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t know how to sell us. It was extremely uncomfortable.
And after a while, I got better at it with more repetition, with a greater understanding of what our value proposition was, with a greater understanding of what to say to engage other folks and to build relationships with my prospects. I got more comfortable with it. And over time, I got to a point where occasionally I would experience what I would call too much comfort. I wasn’t really in the moment because you know this sales conversation or this networking conversation is just like the last dozen I’ve had. There’s nothing new here.
So that’s a mistake; you can actually get too comfortable out there. And I’m sure we’ve all been on the receiving end of conversations with folks where they weren’t really interacting with us; they weren’t really seeing us; they weren’t really hearing us; they were just kind of on automatic.
The bottom line here is going back to my metaphor; you don’t want to be too hungry, too uncomfortable when you are selling yourself. You also don’t want to be too comfortable and too satiated. It’s really, really valuable to be kind of hungry. You want to be not quite sure what’s going on right now. You want to be not quite sure what to say to somebody else. You want to be not quite sure what they’re going to say to you. You want to push yourself to be somewhat uncomfortable because when you are uncomfortable, you’re in the moment. You are present.
As a representative of your organization, I want to invite you to pursue that. And if you are a leader of other representatives of your organization, I want to encourage you to start talking like that to your team. I want you to talk to them and encourage them to pursue a certain amount of discomfort, a certain point of being just on the edge of too uncomfortable. If they can manage that, if they can choose to be a certain amount of uncomfortable, they will be in the moment.
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