This is a guest post by Paul Archer

For anyone who has had building work done, you know what the aftermath looks like. Ours is no different – outside of the new conference room, it looks like the Somme battlefield on steroids. Builder’s rubble in every nook and cranny, old bricks, cement, plasterboard, tangled metal. A sight for sore eyes it is.

But following a 2 hour blizzard, the mess had all disappeared. The field looks brand new as though construction had never happened. It looks beautiful with the white snow glistening in the sunshine.

And it struck me then that in life, we all have set-backs which beat us backwards and these issues can affect us all. Some dwell on them – some move on. We need a way to cover them up and move on otherwise our self motivation will take a battering. We could do with snow to cover them up for us.

Whether you’re in sales or sales coaching, we have to be self motivated to succeed in what we do. Yes, we can be motivated externally with targets, rewards, success and recognition but these don’t happen continuously so we have to have inner self motivation to pull off our goals.

We all have knock-backs, we all make mistakes. The trick is to learn from them. Extract what you learnt so you don’t repeat it, jot it down somewhere. I have a pocket diary where I jot down all my learnings and ideas when they crop up. If I make a mistake, I note down what I learnt from it and then try to wipe out the memory so I can move forward.

Now that’s the hard part.

So when we make a mistake, remove what you learnt, note it down, cover up the mistake with a snow blizzard, pick yourself up and move on. Don’t let previous mistakes bug you as this serves no value. That way your self motivation will carry on unhindered.

And if you do drift back to the mistake, imagine a beautiful white snow blizzard rolling in from the east which will cover up any blemishes on the landscape with minutes. But be quick as snow will melt to reveal the builder’s rubble once again.

Looking outside now, the snow’s gone reminds me to order a skip, and spend a weekend getting rid of the rubbish permanently. And with the warm weather on us, I bet Claire is just waiting to ask me too. Can’t wait!

Paul Archer is an international sales speaker, sales trainer, author and coach based in the UK. He specializes in rapport selling and rapport coaching and can ignite his audiences large or small. For more information on Paul and his training courses, visit www.archertraining.co.uk or his sales  blog at www.paularcher.com