Eric McTighe and I met online… through LinkedIn to be exact. I don’t remember the exact circumstances but eventually it led to him subscribing to this substack and eventually a call to meet each other. He’s a spiritually enlightened soul and just so happens to have a similar sales background as myself. Here is our exchange of curiosity, enjoy:
Andrew:
Eric,
Thanks so much for agreeing to do this, I think it will be a blast.
I'll shoot the first shot here.
Both of us have extensive sales backgrounds in very different industries. Sales takes a unique set of skills to be successful, you have to be thoughtful, deeply curious, have high social/emotional IQ, know how to present value, and ultimately negotiate and get things over the finish line to realized revenue.
What I wanted to frame up was all of those skills are outward/external facing - it's thoughtfulness for the potential client and their business, curiosity about them, positioning the value curated to them, and then negotiating & convincing based on their budget and timeline and decision making.
Learning to do that through that lens was great, but I think (I know) I neglected doing those same things introspectively on myself. It took getting laid off last February and then having some financial runway where I didn't have to sell every day to start using those skills to examine and go inside of myself.
How do you think of that paradox? Internal vs external? How do you balance that within the framework or structure of your life?
Eric:
1. First paragraph: I agree that the best, most well rounded, likely very highly successful reps are these things. But I think it is a really unique (and also, likely, very successful) sales leader who is focusing on these traits in either hiring or training sales professionals. If the reps are ultimately a reflection of the leadership, that implies that very few reps are cultivating these traits in themselves, either. There’s no incentive to. In fact, there is an incentive to not be DISTRACTED with these ideas and traits. The majority of reps – hired and trained by the majority of commercial leaders – are only focused on the last item you mentioned. Revenue. What have you PRODUCED. Not “how are you leaning into your best, strongest, most innate traits to achieve all the success in this role that YOU want?”
Imagine that becoming the norm; people might actually start to “like” salespeople. But I digress…
…sorry, guess that one struck a chord! Past trauma. I’m working on it.
And now I realize why I should have read the entire email before I started typing a response (he admits as he reads the rest of said email). But in the spirit of authenticity – you wanted this to be an unfiltered and not-curated exercise, so I’ll just press on.
I guess my long winded rant to open really expresses my thoughts on the overarching spirit of your email/question. Some finer (less opinionated) thoughts:
2. Yes, in sales we are (hopefully) taught that our focus needs to be on the customer. In every regard. At least that’s what good sales leaders are teaching. And yet, we do have to balance the customer’s best interest with our corporate objectives. I won’t elaborate on that other than to say, it is a real dynamic in selling today and it needs thoughtfulness to be handled in the best possible way.
3. How does this paradox of internal and external shape my own experience? That’s a BIG question. Digging into it on a spiritual, philosophical, emotional, experiential level is one of my favorite activities. But for this exercise and format I would summarize several core beliefs I hold with this: As often as possible, and as many times each day as I can, I remind myself of something Ram Dass would so eloquently express; “I am in this world, not of it.” And so what that reminder allows me to do is acknowledge that while I am having this experience; I am “in” this 3D world, “I” exist somehow, in some way, outside of it. And if that’s true, it surely is worth my attention.
This was fun – I hope I met the expectation. If I wandered far off course just nudge me – but again, in the spirit of how I understand this exercise, you’re getting absolutely zero editing or polishing from me (aside from some formatting).
Cheers!
Andrew:
You're living up to the challenge and spirit of what I was hoping for!
People SHOULD like their sales people - especially ones that help them make a great decision and guide you to make a great purchase with tons of value. I have to admit that I have past clients that I sold to in the past and now aren't even in the same industry that I'm friends with and am only friends with now because I sold them something.
Your comment on how leaders should be approaching their sales talent and leaning into them becoming their best self to serve the role is spot on. I think it's rare because it's just harder to do. It takes a leader who is able to be nuanced, caring, empathetic and encouraging to do so. Even if you look at the landscape of coaches across professional sports, it's kind of easy to spot the coaches who have these traits and are also top in their game. All the best ones have these traits and use them to connect and get the best out of their people in a team context.
I'm obsessed with team sports, not to turn this into a classic bro on bro sports debate, I just think team sports in general teach you so much humility and other very important skills. Most importantly those skills translate to the rest of your life. Things like sacrifice, selflessness and selfishness (in a good way), self care, emotional IQ, time management, coordination, fitness, preparation, process, resilience, calm under pressure, decision making, self motivation & determination, and most of all communication. You can get some of this from an individual sport, but it's like 100X in a team sport.
And if a team sport can teach you ALL of that - it means a coach has to be good at doing and teaching those same skills themselves. So again, it's rare to find those people, the leaders, that can live and teach those things. Those people are invaluable to any organization or community.
I do need to address the whole "I am in this world, not of it" piece. It's brilliant, I've actually never heard/seen/read that before, it's new to me. (I'm almost ashamed to admit I haven't dug into the Ram Dass stuff at all yet. I know it's coming my way soon, it's inevitable, but it's just not time yet for me to dive into it.). I think what that concept means to me is that I am experiencing this world, mostly through my body and being in it, being embodied, but my consciousness is not, it's unbounded by the concept of matter or being material.
Which does bring to question - what should I give my attention to? What do I want to be aware of? How do I want to be embodied and IN this world? It presents an incalculable amount of choice if it's true that I, and only I, can choose how to answer and live those questions out.
How hard do you think it is to embody that principle? Hardest thing ever? Is that just the game we are playing?
Eric:
You’ve jumped straight into the deep end of some BIG questions; for the sake of simplicity, I’ll refer to them as “spiritual” questions. And for what it’s worth, they happen to be my favorite kind!
As a precursor to my reply I’ll share this context; from the moment the idea of being “in this world, not of it” took root in my mind it has continued to grow, unrelentingly. I’d say it is probably one of the most core principles that has shaped my experience over the past two years and it continues to do so. I suppose I’m past the point of context and instead I am giving you my answer, but I promise to get a bit more granular. All of that summarized in this thought; for me, the idea that Ram Dass presents is true, and knowable. But the more we try to know it, the harder it is to know.
And that, I believe, frames up my answer to one of your questions: “how hard do you think it is to embody that principle?’ In my experience it is both effortless and challenging. Why? Because when we allow the truthfulness of the statement to simply ‘be’ our experience, the experience of it’s truthfulness is effortless. We simply observe it and become aware of it and it is unmistakable. We ‘did’ nothing. But the moment we try to have the experience (which insinuates ‘doing’) we find ourselves unsuccessful. And why is that? Because we are operating from a place of belief of being of this world if we think we can manipulate it or ‘do’ to it. This creates a very difficult paradox for the human mind. The mind is conditioned to believe it can take in information (observe the world around), process it through whatever lense or filter is appropriate for the moment (it can think about the information within a specific context) and then take action to create a specific outcome which the body can then experience, or engage with (which also implies being of the world in which we engage). That is a poor man’s overview, but I think it works well enough. The mind is conditioned to think and then tell the body to ‘do.’ That only works when the perspective is that the mind and body are ‘of’ the world in which they believe themselves to be standing.
So, in order to experience the other side of that coin – being in the world and NOT of it – requires a detachment of sorts; from doing in order to experience, to observing in order to experience. And yet, if there is no doing there is nothing to observe. So, this implies a detachment from the expectations of doing and a shift to the acceptance of doing in order to simply be able to observe, with indifference to that which is observed.
How hard is it to embody that principle? Well I’d say it depends entirely on the individual. And in my experience the line of distinction is between those who believe the world happens to them vs the world happening for them. Do things happen and we have to react to them (in order to control the experience of what comes next) or do things happen so we can observe and experience them (and not fear what might happen next). Everyone sits (primarily) on one side of that line or the other. And in my experience, that is the biggest determinant on being able to embody the principle. Clearly that is an oversimplification and I could interject and poke holes in it myself. You can likely see that it also walks us up to one’s core belief of existence, death, etc. when we start talking about fear; it’s clearly harder to embody this principle if you believe that at any moment you could die, at some moment you WILL die, and at that moment all is done, you either lived well or you didn’t, and somehow that matters even though you no longer exist. Like I said, pulling these threads leads to…I don’t know, a lot of unraveled thread, I suppose.
But the other important point of note is that what you wrote earlier is also true; it presents incalculable choice. It does, indeed. And maybe that’s the right place to wrap us up. “I am in this world, not of it,” lends itself to a seemingly endless pool of inquiry for anyone curious. It set me upon a journey that has been all things; wonderful, painful, enlightening, confusing, fulfilling, lonely. It’s given me moments of feeling a safety and security and love and wholeness that I could never describe, and it has brought me to places within myself that were embarrassing, horrifying, shameful. The journey has been all things – but only as I have allowed it to be. And the less attention I give to thinking about the ‘right’ thing to do (implying I can be OF this world and control my experience of it through force), the wider and more vast and more full the experience becomes. And I simply love observing it all.
How important is it? I’d say for me it's been no less than everything. And yet, I struggle with it daily. But truthfully...I even enjoy the struggle.
Andrew, this has been fun! I apologize for typos and poor grammar and the like, but I hope the sentiment and insights met the call.
Thank you, I appreciate you,
Eric
Andrew:
I actually have nothing to add, this was the perfect ending. I’m grateful for your participation in this exercise and in our budding friendship.
With love and deep appreciation,
Andrew