Every year as the company approached its financial year end one of my tasks as the HR director was to sit down with the head of sales and review the performance of all the sales people.
Who would become members of the Gold Circle an invitation that only the best received?
Who would receive a supercar financing bonus?
Who would be put on a performance improvement plan?
And sadly, who would I be asking to continue their career with a different employer?
One year I remember my sales colleague telling me how everyone, customers, prospects, and colleagues liked a particular sales person, but they just couldn’t close a door let alone a sale.
Their problem was quite straight-forward, they were said the head of sales as frightened of a customer saying yes as they were of them saying no.
This poor sales person spent their time sitting on the fence, procrastinating, unable to decide which of their prospects they should take to the next stage of the selling process.
In 1989 Neil A Fiore wrote a book that identified the entrenched habits which people in all sorts of jobs use to avoid having to make decisions. Their procrastination he said resulted from a fear of both failure and success.
Fiore has updated this first book as The Now Habit – A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play. It is packed with twenty-first century case studies, and strategies that readers can explore.
Using well thought-out exercises Fiore has created a structured approach understanding the triggers that drive your personal procrastination, because we all sit on the fence every so often.
As with most mental health issues it is not possible to wish or will yourself out of procrastination. Neither is procrastination always a bad thing. It can serve you well sometimes not to rush into a decision.
In advice that is focused on the needs of people in a work environment Fiore deals with the insidious cycle of negative behaviours that procrastination creates and the closely associated issues of anxiety, unhappiness, and alienation.
The Now Habit, A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play is this week’s free getAbstract book summary.
It a book that is packed with proven approaches that will help both individuals, who have jumped off the fence, deal with procrastination, and managers who want to help their teams and individual subordinates address procrastination.
You might think that you have to jump off the fence first, but that is a leap that doing the exercises that Fiore recommends will give you the confidence to take.
In, The Now Habit, A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, you will learn:
- Why you procrastinate,
- How to recognize the “insidious cycle” of procrastination, and
- How to manage your time while enjoying your life and accomplishing your goals.
Download this week's free getAsbtract book summary from the Work Place Learning Centre at this link
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