Be Appreciative, It’s Important.
Appreciation is the feeling of being grateful for something or someone, acknowledging their good qualities. While it may seem straightforward, in today's automated and AI driven world, it has become a more common conversation in leadership team meetings.
Recently, I’ve had some experiences that have left me bewildered. In one instance, I dedicated time to help an intelligent, well-educated, and composed individual. Help defined in this case is time, energy, and financial investment. While I did not anticipate an immediate return on this investment, I did expect the individual to show appreciation. That did not happen - it was like it was expected. Another time, I was asked for advice from a young founder looking for sales mentoring who kept having to reschedule last minute, then showed up late. Both highly driven and intelligent individuals failed to used the two most important words in business once. Those words are thank you.
How Appreciation Can Impact Future Business Leaders
Let's digress a bit, shall we? Where is appreciation learned? Perhaps, it is taught at home, sports teams, religion, mentors/coaches, and self-education. Why is this not a course taught at school? Schools cover subjects such as languages, history, holistic health, gender studies, global awareness, STEM, and pottery. Why isn't Appreciation a stand-alone topic in school curricula? The course outline could include:
Communication
- How to express your feelings of gratitude.
- How to improve communication effectiveness with peers and adults
- How to be thoughtful and thankful.
Culture
- Appreciation for the arts, musicians, and sports.
- Appreciation for different perspectives, personality types, and choices.
- Appreciation for cultural experiences and differences of opinion.
Relationships
- Maximizing the value received when learning from mentors, coaches, teachers.
- How to be constructive and positive instead of destructive and negative.
- How to practice empathy and positivity in your daily life?
There is so much that could fill up the class curriculum. Fast forward to life after school, being appreciative will help fast track our future leaders and better prepare all of us for navigating the many challenges that are part of life, running a successful business, and building cohesive teams and high-performance cultures.
To accelerate future success, whether it is as a business owner, entrepreneur, sales professional, employee, student, or just in general:
- Please appreciate all that you do have and remember while you can always achieve more, you can always have less.
- Please say thank you and truly mean it.
- Please stop complaining about what you don’t like or you are too busy, and fix it.
- Please proactively call or text someone who has helped you - a mentor, customer, friend, family member, employee, investor, etc. and check on them.
- Please make your customers look great and appreciate that they trust in you to help them achieve their goals, whatever those may be.
In the words of Zig Ziglar, “The more you are grateful for what you have the more you will have to be grateful for.”
Thank you for reading. We appreciate you visiting our Sales Growth blog posts and hope you find them valuable. Happy Selling!