Chickens

I was once sent for a sales training course a few years ago with my previous job. It was more of a motivational refresher course than a sales technique training. The course was for 3 days and I enjoyed myself quite a fair bit because besides getting away from office for a few days I also get to meet other sales people from the various industries and learn a little more about their business.

I also truly believe that it is important for sales people to go for some motivational course every once in a while because for most sales people there will come a time when their morale will be rather low or they may simply lose that motivation and the drive that they initially possessed. These motivational courses are like fuel to keep their mind and heart going for another period of time.

During this training we were taught to think of ourselves as eagles and in order to fly high and far we need to dissociate ourselves with the chickens. The analogy is we are all born as eagles but if we stick with the chickens then they will influence us to think that like them, although we have wings we will never be able to fly. In other words we will never reach our full potential.

This is also the reason why the rich and successful are getting richer and more successful because they always associate themselves with one another. They learn and encourage each other instead of getting discouraged and disheartened by receiving all the negative feedbacks and pessimism from those who dare not even try.

You can tell the chickens from the eagles in your life rather easily. If you have an idea or business plan, the chickens will be the ones to discourage you and instead of being supportive and look at things in a more constructive and positive manner, they will tell you 1001 ways why your idea will fail and you should just be happy and contented with what you have and where you are now.

I do not know about you but I have come across many chickens in my life. One example was two of my ex-colleagues. We were all at our annual sales conference and this time the company invited a guest to talk to us on people and their different personalities. He generally broke it down into 4 categories and identified them by colours. We termed this the colour training. I am sure some of you readers have been through this before. A person will usually have all 4 colours in them but we were taught to look and identify which is his primary one. Once we can identify that then we will know how best to sell him.

Anyway the company arranged for the speaker to come to our office to coach the remaining staffs that missed out on the sales conference because they were not required to attend. Now these 2 ex-colleagues tried so hard to discourage another colleague from attending. They were telling him it will be a waste of his time (even though it will be conducted during office hours) and not useful etc. So this person made up some excuse and missed the training without realizing that it could have been useful for him. Clearly this person is a chicken too for being dissuaded so easily.

Personally I do not think these chickens are necessarily bad people. To me they either do not have the hunger to succeed in life or are too afraid of failure to even try. They can be good buddies when it comes to recreational stuffs like a beer or a game or two of golf and tennis but it should really remain just that.

The reason I bring this up is because over the weekend the Mrs told me that recently she has been hearing too many negative stories of mishaps during childbirth which resulted in the babies being hurt.

She is in the service industry so she deals with many people on a daily basis and some of them are very nice and genuinely excited for us being pregnant. These people will share with her their experiences, first hand or otherwise and will tell the Mrs to take care and not overwork etc.

Then there is the other group of people. It is not that they are not nice because they are also genuinely happy for us. Unfortunately they do not know the negative impact their stories will have on a pregnant lady.

One of the stories goes like this. A friend’s friend (aren’t most stories related in this way?) was all good and fine during the entire pregnancy period. All the scans and tests came back alright. Gynae has no reason to believe that there should be any concern for both mother and baby. Unfortunately during labour, something went wrong (story teller doesn’t know what was the problem or complication) and as a result the baby had chest infections.

Another story from another person; this lady and her baby were both doing good that is up till labour where the mum’s waste somehow went to the baby resulting in his brain being damaged.

Now my question is this, since both the incidents are not preventable by the mummies in the first place why bring it up? To me unless it is something that we can learn from and take the necessary precautions otherwise these people should not be mentioning such stories. Their intentions may be good but all they achieve are leaving the mummies to wonder will the same happen to their babies.

I have told the Mrs to stop them from continuing as soon as she can sense that it is another negative story. Politely tell them that she has been hearing too many horror stories and it is directly affecting her and our baby so unless it has a happy ending she is not interested.

Did you know that people in general seem to like sad and negative stories? You can try this on your own. Take the daily newspaper and mark in red any stories that are negative and you will realize that today’s newspapers are selling us negative stories.

Perhaps this is the reason why most people like to share and relate only the negative stories. Do give it a little thought before you relate any story to the next person.