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How to Find Happiness at Work Again

Many people are feeling disconnected and disheartened at work.

You may be one of them.

You’re tired and looking for more.

You’re questioning if you should stay or if you should go.

You’re wondering how you could bring back that spark, connection, and enthusiasm you once had to your work.

I’d like to offer you an empowering idea to solve this challenge so that you can bring your best, add value to your team and clients, and walk away at the end of each day feeling fulfilled, knowing you made a difference.

A little over ten years ago I found myself in this same place, again. This feeling of disengagement and discouragement wasn’t a one-time event. It was a feeling experienced frequently throughout my two-decade career in financial services. At times the contributors were things like a bad boss, intense sales target pressure, a mismatch of personal values with the company, or executing on an incongruent sales strategy.  Sometimes I’d push through it, knowing change was inevitable as long as I was patient. Other times I’d bail and move on to another role, department, or team, hoping the grass was greener on the other side. But, the most rewarding moments were when I stayed and figured out how to just be with it. Let me explain.

Over my long tenured career at the bank, there was never a shortage of hearing things like, “no we have not done that before,” or “no we can’t do that here,” or “no that won’t work.”  Most times I’d shrug it off and lob out another idea at the next team meeting. But there was this specific moment during a leadership meeting when we were discussing how to increase sales and market share for a campaign we were running.  My team had implemented a strategy that was working, and we were seeing positive results.  I raised my hand to share this idea.  As soon as I voiced it, the manager running the meeting immediately dismissed it.  A few moments later I chimed in again, telling the room of twenty leaders about this idea.  Once again the manager, with growing impatience in his voice, shut it down.  I could have left it, but I had something I knew that could help this group that was struggling with their sales.  It wasn’t in me to drop it.  So once again, I expressed this idea.  This time the manager turned his body towards me, put one hand on his hip, while the other reached out pointing his finger, as if he was speaking to a toddler, and sternly said, “that is enough, I said no.” I sunk back into my seat with my face flushed and body engulfed with the heat of being mortified in front of my colleagues. I sat there quietly for the rest of the meeting, bewildered, and dejected.

I’ve had my fair share of these kinds of experiences, not feeling seen, heard, or understood.  You can relate, right?  Over time, I started to attribute meaning to these events. If the ideas were bad, if they were wrong and invaluable, then maybe there was something wrong with me. I started to make up a story that perhaps this work, team, and industry weren’t for me. Alternatively, I’d work hard to contort myself into who I thought I needed to be for them to accept and value what I brought to the table.  Neither route was working. It wasn’t until I decided to stop running and hiding that things began to shift.

A fundamental leadership rule is ‘know thyself’. Understanding who you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are, how you communicate and connect with others, how you solve problems and process your thinking, are crucial in today’s work world.  According to a Harvard Business Review publication written by organizational psychologist and NYT best selling author Tasha Eurich PhD, 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10-15% of people actually are. You don’t know what you don’t know, is a place where many get stuck.

I desperately wanted to solve this conundrum, so I dove deep into the world of personal development, reading ferociously, taking courses and several personality assessments.  A specific assessment hit a nerve.  It told me I was a ‘Trendsetter’, a forward thinker with big ideas that challenge the status quo.  In that moment it was as if the sky opened up and the sun shone through, I could finally see.

All these years, it wasn’t that something was wrong with my ideas or broken with me.  Picture a ‘trendsetter’ working in a bank, right? Square peg, round hole.  We manage people’s money. They need to trust us, they need to feel safe and secure, have peace of mind that their money will be there to meet their needs. As an institution, of course we would prefer to safeguard it with reliable and familiar methods. It all made sense why ‘no’ was a default response.

Now you’d think with this newfound insight, I’d leap out of banking and find another industry or fintech that would appreciate my ‘trendsetter’ qualities. Even though the bank leaned into the tried and true, I knew they needed the new and innovative.  What I also discovered was that I had room for improvement.  People didn’t see the world the way I did, and when I was presenting my ideas, often I would lose my audience. My brain goes from A to Z very quickly and as a result, I miss steps, leave out details, and forget to connect the dots. Sometimes I don’t even know how to connect the dots, because I don’t know how I got to the solution.

Instead of taking my empowered ideas and insights elsewhere, I stayed put to figure out how to convey them in a way that people would hear them, understand them, and say yes to them.  A short time later, I found myself in front of two executives pitching an initiative to help them improve talent retention, increase engagement, and advance their high potential employees into leadership roles.  Within twelve minutes of the meeting start, they were asking how to implement the initiative — not only to the employee segment I was proposing as a pilot, but to all of their 350 employees across their region.  They got what they wanted – a way forward to engage and empower their employees, while I got to experience the impact and value of bringing what today I call my Brilliant Difference.

Your Brilliant Difference is the special gift you bring to make this world a better place. Your work and your career are one of the best places to exercise and deliver on your Brilliant Difference. Your Brilliant Difference is unique to you; it’s a compilation of your strengths, experiences, and expertise.  It’s also not about you; it’s about the people who will be impacted. Your Brilliant Difference is about the ways in which you, uniquely, will solve big problems and help clients get more of what they want.

Discovering and naming your Brilliant Difference falls on you to figure out. It’s not up to your employer, manager, or colleagues.  If your work is about more than having a job and collecting a pay cheque, then you will want to use your strengths, bring value, and have more meaning in your life. Your Brilliant Difference is your way forward and I encourage you to invest the time, energy, and effort to get clear on it.

I want you to stop running and hiding. Instead, figure out how this situation can help you become more of who you want to be and the impact you want to be having.  

There you have it: discover your Brilliant Difference to find more happiness and fulfillment. I believe what makes you unique will make you successful.

Now it’s over to you. Reflect on your current situation: how is this happening for you and not to you? In what ways could you use this to learn more about your Brilliant Difference?

Check out my new book coming March 7th!  Transformational Selling: A Playbook for Financial Professionals where you will learn how to become a Transformational Seller so you can deepen client relationships and grow your business.  Join the waitlist here and be the first to learn about upcoming special bonuses.

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Sell From Love Academy

For Coaches, Consultants and Advisors.

A new way to sell with ease, grace and integrity for a profitable business you and your clients will love.

Identify your Sales Gap

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Module 07Design a Marketing Strategy that Feels Good

The goal of this module is to make your Brilliant Difference and Most Important Thing Offer – VISIBLE.

There’s a saying, build it and they will come. We wish that it worked this way, rather fear does; because then we wouldn’t have to put our selves out there, up for judgement and rejection. Sharing your work, your services and expertise can be scary. But when we come from a place of love, as author Susan Jeffers says we “feel the fear and do it anyway.”

That is how we sell from love. We acknowledge fears presence and at the same time we take action that is aligned to our deepest desire and highest potential and possibility.

In this module we talk about the journey of making you and your offer visible to your clients and the milestones along the way, that will ultimately get you both to a place of saying YES, to working with each other.

Visibility is an option you decide on. My hope after this module is that you make a decision to be visible, in a way that feels good to you and is on the edge of your comfort zone. We need more of you, your Brilliant Difference and your work out in the world. Let’s help your ideal clients find you by showing them where you are.

In this Module you will:

Module 06Craft a Compelling Offer

The goal of this module is to clarify and confirm your most important thing – your offer.  In essence, it is what are you selling that you will use to serve your clients with and help facilitate the transformations they are seeking.

There are two important parts of the offer conversation we need to highlight here –

  • What are you offering to your clients – what are they getting?
  • What your clients are offering to you – what you are receiving for extending that offer?

Fear as a tendency to get in the way when we get to this part of the selling process.  But, not anymore, because you’re seeing that your offer is not about you, it’s about your clients and what they will get as a result of working with you.

In this Module you will:

Module 05Define Your Clients’ Transaction to Transformation Story

The goal of this module is to help you identify what is really happening when you sell. There’s the thing you are selling, and then there’s the thing your client is buying. What are the differences? And how do you not let selling from fear interfere and water down your transformation to a transaction.

At every stage of selling, fear has an opportunity to enter, this is even more prevalent when we are engaging and enrolling a client into our offers. This module is all about getting you aligned to what you are really selling – a transformation and giving you the tools to communicate that to your clients. This way you and your client are on the same page with what you are selling and what they are buying.

In this Module you will:

Module 04Discover Your Essential Client Conversation Skills

The goal of this module is to help you learn and understand how to create an environment that facilitates trust, connection, and confidence with your clients.  You play a critical role in making this happen for yourself and your clients, so fear does not get in the way of your intentions and impact.  In this module you’ll learn how to create a safe space for your clients that help them choose you as their trusted adviser.  You’ll also walk away with the most important conversation skills you need to that will help you do that.

In this Module you will:

Module 03Use Love as a Sales Strategy

The goal of this module is to help you move from your comfort zone and into your courage zone with love. Selling is filled with opportunities for fear to poke its head up inevitably holding you back from sharing your work and making the impact you know you are here to make. This is why we need to acknowledge that fear will be there, especially in times when you’re doing something you’ve never done before or reaching for goals you’ve never set out to accomplish before. This module is all about equipping you with the right tools to move forward with confidence, elegance, and ease.

In this Module you will:

Module 02Claim Your Brilliant Difference

The goal of this module is to help you discover and name your Brilliant Difference. This uniqueness you bring is here to add value and make change in the world. It’s here to make the word a better place. Focusing on who you are and finding the words to articulate your Brilliant Difference is fundamental to loving yourself, the first pillar to sell from love.
In this Module you will:

Module 01Unlock the Power of Love

The goal of this module is to increase awareness of when you are selling from love vs. fear and how embracing a new definition of selling will help you move closer to love.  Plus, you’ll learn all about how to manage the fears you face every time you market yourself and your business, make offers to sell your products and services, start on a new project or business idea.

In this Module you will: