By Jenny Lukas, AVN
Someone once said to me ‘you aren’t going to win if you don’t show up.’ It’s stayed with me ever since.
You can interpret that in several ways of course. Below I talk about not showing up physically but also not showing up emotionally. And that’s what I want to focus on. By that, I mean not being there, not giving it your all, not taking the action that you need to when you want to make a difference.
We recently ran a recruitment evening at our offices. Our process for recruiting a new team member is a bit different to the norm. We put out a job advert and then invite all candidates to come along to a recruitment session where we tell them a little about the business to see if they are inspired by our story. These sessions always run at 6pm to allow people who already have a job to get there after work. This particular job was a great opportunity for someone to work with us, to enable them to grow as a person and develop their skills. I have been at AVN for a long time and I have to say that I love working here and I know how much we can offer to the right candidate.
Around 30 people applied for the job and we then called each and every one of them to invite them to the recruitment evening. As expected, many of those calls went to answerphone and we left messages. More than half of those people didn’t bother to return the call – i.e. they didn’t ‘show up’.
In the end 11 candidates confirmed they would attend the session – great! We’d be able to choose our new team member from a good group of people. So we were all ready to get to know them and find someone with the right fit.
Just 3 candidates turned up. And none of those were right for the job.
So 27 people suggested that they wanted to improve their lives by making a change – and 27 people didn’t bother to ‘show up’.
How many times do you not ‘show up’?
I have been speaking to accountants for 22 years now. Many of them have had their business for a number of years, continually working silly hours and hardly earning enough to pay the bills, let alone to be able to live their lives to the fullest.
I spoke to someone last week who was in this exact position. He told me, “Within a few years I’d like to be earning double the amount of money and cutting my hours down to 40 a week.” This accountant had been in business for 12 years and had not managed to grow his business or cut his hours during that time. But he was hoping and expecting things to somehow change in the future.
This just does not happen. Things will not miraculously get better. You won’t suddenly get that amazing new opportunity or those new clients who will pay you a higher fee. You can’t double the size of your business without ‘showing up’.
Nothing will change without you making it happen, without you taking that action and pushing for things to get better.
So how are you going to do it? What opportunities are you letting pass you by, while you sit back and don’t show up? What action do you need to take to enable you to win?
Image by Tim Tersluisen from Pixabay
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