In 2010, US businesses alone spent nearly $53 BILLION on employee training, which works out to approximately $1,050 per employee (40.1 hours) spent training employees to learn more about their jobs. . 29% of this $53 billion was allocated to sales training. Corporate sales forces attend workshops, seminars, and conferences on how to improve their effectiveness, yet measurable improvement is short-lived, if at all. Why is this? No one will argue that it is imperative that employees receive adequate training in the skill set required by their position and in the standard operating procedures of the corporation in which they work; Yet why do companies continue to invest their valuable training dollars in an attempt to change behavior by teaching employees to KNOW more? The fact of the matter is that salespeople know how to sell, they KNOW exactly what they have to do to achieve record levels of sales, they just don’t DO it. Customer service representatives KNOW how to provide top notch service to their customers, they just don’t! The problem is not in the depth or breadth of knowledge of our country’s workforce, but in the gap between what they know and what they actually DO.
What causes people to behave contrary to what they know they should be doing? The answer to this question goes back to the conditioning we received as young children: the habits, paradigms, and self-image that formed in each of us walking this planet before we had any awareness of what was happening to us. . us. The answer is in how our minds work. Our mind is divided into conscious and subconscious. The conscious mind is our thinking mind, it’s where our intellect resides, it’s where all those corporate training programs dump all their information so employees KNOW more about how to do their jobs more effectively. It’s what traditional school systems are concerned with filling in books, facts and figures. In our conscious mind, we have the ability to create thoughts and accept or reject any idea that comes our way, whether it be from our own thoughts, a co-worker, the evening news, wherever.
Our subconscious mind is our emotional mind. It is a storage unit for everything that has happened in our life. It stores our memories and our beliefs consisting of our emotional connections to the past, like a scrapbook containing all our past experiences. What you feel, think or do forms the basis of your experiences, which are stored in the form of underlying impressions in the subconscious mind. That’s why it’s so hard to break free of our old self-defeating thoughts or self-defeating behaviors. Our subconscious mind is the repository of all our habits and paradigms, the things we do or the feelings that are evoked in certain situations without even thinking about them, like brushing our teeth or feeling apprehensive in an elevator.
It is the subconscious mind that drives our body into action. It works non-stop, 24 hours a day behind the scenes, inciting our behavior. It’s so automatic to us that we don’t even have time to realize it’s happening. It doesn’t really matter what we KNOW in our conscious mind – we may KNOW all day long that we should have a salad for lunch, but when we get to the restaurant, if we FEEL (in our subconscious mind) the urge to eat a cheeseburger, chances are we will! Have the cheeseburger!
As you can see, traditional training and corporate development programs are concerned with filling our conscious mind with more knowledge. And we may actually LIKE that knowledge and really WANT to apply it to our jobs and maybe even our lives in general, so we can actually modify our behavior over a period of time, but without addressing the CAUSE of our behavior, that lies in our subconscious mind – there will never be a permanent change. We perform at a level that is aligned with our self-image and conditioning. The image we have of ourselves is actually like a thermostat in our homes that is set to a certain temperature: if the room gets too hot, the air conditioner turns on until the room cools down to the preset temperature. If someone accidentally leaves a window open and the room gets too cold, the oven turns on and reheats the room to the preset temperature. In the same way, our self-image, that collection of habits and paradigms that make us who we are, keeps our performance at a preset level. Let’s say I’m a corporate sales position and I sell an average of $100,000/mo of product, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, but long term the average is $100K/mo. That sales figure is aligned with my own image. Now, suppose my sales manager sends me to sales training that gives me all kinds of great information about generating new leads and negotiating contracts, and I come back to work raring to go and go out that month and sell $ 300,000 in contracts. . I’m excited, my sales manager is ecstatic, but the next month my sales are only $50,000, just like the air conditioner in my house, my self-image kicks in and manipulates my behavior until I’m back. on that average of $100,000 in sales per month. The sales training gave me great information, but it did NOTHING to change my self-image, so any changes to my bottom line will be temporary at best.
Am I suggesting that corporate training programs are worthless? Hardly! What I AM emphatically shouting from the rooftops, however, is that for practical training to have a lasting impact, it is essential to train the subconscious mind as well as the conscious mind. There are very few corporate programs on the market that address this issue. However, I am fortunate enough to be a certified facilitator of the most transformational personal and corporate growth and development program available.
Thinking about Results.
Thinking about results combines more than 50 years of research in the personal and professional development industry and more than 20 years in corporate and merger acquisition law. Bob Proctor and Sandra Gallagher have come together to create the most powerful transformation program of its kind. Tea Thinking about results The program is an extremely effective program for people who are genuinely interested in progressive personal growth. Similarly, it provides leaders with the best information available on how to get the most out of their people, the leader’s greatest untapped resource. It teaches leaders and teams how to bridge the gap between knowing and doing and, in the process, create more meaningful and purpose-driven lives as results, organizational culture, and customer loyalty are dramatically improved. Thinking about results is an extraordinary program that presents twelve logical, simple and practical lessons that ensure a prosperous and success-oriented culture that translates into an exceptional return on investment for any leader. Contact me today and let’s find out how to close your know-how gap!