The Feeling of Giving

When I was an insurance agent many lifetimes ago, I never ever dreamt of becoming an agency manager.

As a top sales agent, it just didn’t make sense to me.

Why should I be responsible for other people’s irresponsibility?

For every hour I invested training another agent, I could use that same hour meeting a prospect or a client.

The difference?

I know my activities with my clients will bring in the dough.

But I never know whether the people I train will even bother to arrange an appointment.

So, for the longest time, I convinced myself that the only person I can trust and depend on for my career is myself.

The Lonely Road

To be frank…

Striving to achieve a goal on your own is a lonely and empty journey.

For a few years, I hardly made time for my friends, and I rarely spent time with my colleagues – other than the occasional company events.

It didn’t help that my manager then didn’t have the habit of creating a cohesive working environment for us.

After a while, despite bringing home a nice pay cheque month after month, there was this lingering feeling creeping up within me…

I needed to do something more.

Not just for myself but for someone else.

A Whole New World

Little did I know then that I was starting to undercover for myself one of the 3 key career urges I should have listened to a long time ago…

What I truly wanted in a career!

Perhaps it is also a stage of life, but that small step I took led to a tremendous change in not just my career perspective, but also in life.

I did the absolute unthinkable…

I agreed to mentor a group of inexperienced introverts in sales!

And let me just start by saying it was NOT easy.

Things that were second nature to me were crazy, impossible milestones for them.

Here’s an example…

When I want to approach a potential prospect to pitch an idea, I simply walk to the prospect, open my mouth and talk.

That’s it. Nothing special to it.

But when I gave this same challenge to this group of introverts…

They froze!

Their mouths hanging there in the middle of the street as they glared at the passersby conveniently ignoring them.

Truly it was quite a spectacle but nothing I said or did would get them to even step forward or do so much as wave at this people.

Close to Giving Up

The truth is, I don’t blame them.

When I first decided to go into sales after leaving SIA, I was in a somewhat similar position.

It was a particularly vulnerable point in my life as I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. Heck, I didn’t even know what I wanted in my life.

There was this big imaginary wall blocking me and stopping me from moving forward.

And for this mentees of my mine, I knew their personal limiting beliefs were nudging them, tell them they couldn’t do it.

It happens. Even to the best of us.

Thankfully I’m not someone to take no for an answer.

And I was determined to help as many of them succeed.

Because they chose to push themselves and get out of their comfort zones, and because they chose to put their trust in me.

I couldn’t let them down.

Not as long as they were willing and continued to push themselves.

Big Challenge. Baby Steps.

There was only one thing I could do…

I had to go back into the field and bring them with me.

One. By. One.

Did this process take up a lot of my time?

You can bet it did.

But was my time investment worth it?

I believe a picture paints a thousand words, and here’s what one of them sent after our first session together…

Let me just add that this was unsolicited, I did not ask her to write this.

But I was nearly at tears when she posted that simple text in our Whatsapp group.

It meant the world to me.

Because for the first time, I truly felt that I had made a big difference in someone else’s life.

And if I were to speak honestly…

This is a feeling that money can never buy,

It is the feeling you can only get from giving.

Slowly making a change,

Shann “I’m Not Crying” Wong