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Today’s show featured an interview with Frame of Mind Coaching® process creator Kim Ades.
Find Kim on LinkedIn.
KIM’S TIP: “Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down these two questions. Question number one, what do you really, really want right now more than anything? There’s two reallys there for a reason. Think about what you truly, deeply want. Not what is expected of you, not what somebody else wants for you, not what you think you should want, but what do you truly, deeply want? Question number two, what’s stopping you from having it right now? What’s getting in the way? Write down all the reasons, and that’s your first exercise. Start to look at those reasons and understand that they are your beliefs.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Kim, we have listeners all over the globe, sales professionals typically, B2B, business to business, a lot of business to government. I’m based in the Washington DC area of the United States. You’re up in Canada. We have a lot of sales leaders who are listening. We approached you because we want to talk about coaching today. We want to talk about how the sales leaders listening to the show can become better coaches to their sales professionals. We’re doing today’s interview in the mid-summer of 2024, and we also want to talk about how the sales professionals listening to today’s show or reading the transcript can become more coachable, so sought you out. We’re talking today with Kim Ades, Frame of Mind Coaching. Kim, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction?
Kim Ades: Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. I am very honored and excited to be talking to you. I’ve been coaching leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, sales professionals for the past 20 years. We have a team of coaches in Canada and the United States, and I would say I have a very unique approach to coaching that I’m happy to talk about and share. I live in Toronto. I have five kids. I got my hands full.
Fred Diamond: I want to comment on a couple things. In doing the research for the show came across a lot of what you do, and for the listeners, we also did a conversation ahead of time just to get things in sync. When you go to your website, you say that there are four areas where you focus on coaching. I want you to explain these to us. You talk about isolation, strained relationships, chronic dissatisfaction, and slippage. Take us through what those mean. I also want people to understand what it means to be a coach as compared to a friend or a leader or a mentor. I also want people to understand what it means to be coachable. Take us through the four things. Isolation. What is that?
Kim Ades: Over the years of coaching, those are the four areas that we find most leaders struggle. Those are them. The first is isolation. What we find is a lot of leaders have quite a bit of responsibility. They have a huge burden that they carry on their shoulders. They’re not super good at sharing that burden. Yeah, they are delegators. Yes, they have other people around them who do the tasks. But on an emotional level, on the feeling of leadership, they often feel like the buck stops here. There’s not a lot of people that understand them. Not a lot of people they can talk to, and they can’t always share what’s going on inside or their true struggles. A lot of times what that boils down to is they’re in it alone, and they look around for people that they can relate to or really people they can trust, and they’re not easy to find.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about strained relationships. Why is that something you focus on?
Kim Ades: Strained relationships, I would say, are the greatest cause of stress for leaders. We see two types of strain. We see outward strain, the kind where if I yell at you, you’re clear that I’m not happy, but there’s an internal or a quieter strain that is more common where you upset me, you do something to aggravate me, but I don’t say anything. I hold it in. What we see is leaders are often in that state, they’re in this state of a slow simmer, boiling kind of state, where inside they notice that people aren’t necessarily rowing in the same direction as them. Or they’re not feeling the same sense of urgency in terms of getting things done, or they’re just not as efficient, not as productive, they’re not as smart, whatever it is. These leaders always have this friction. Again, sometimes it’s external, but a lot of times it’s this internal friction with respect to others.
Fred Diamond: Chronic dissatisfaction. What does that mean?
Kim Ades: Chronic dissatisfaction is the state of feeling like you should be further ahead. A lot of times leaders look at where they are and they say, “Why is this so hard? Why is this taking so long? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t other people understand? Why aren’t people helping? Why am I not where I think I ought to be?” There’s this feeling of, yes, I accomplished that, but it’s not enough. What I did in the past doesn’t mean anything today. They have this itch where they need to be further ahead. What also that leads to is a feeling of self-doubt. No matter how much they accomplished, they still wonder whether they have it, whether they’re good enough, whether they can make it to the next level, that feeling that’s constantly hovering about them.
Fred Diamond: Before we talk about slippage, I want to talk about that for a second, chronic dissatisfaction. A number of years ago I did an analysis of what was causing me stress. I know we’re going to talk about journaling in a little bit. I used to keep a lot of journals. I went back and I read every journal that I had, and I also recorded a lot of voice messages on my phone. I went back and I listened to all these voice messages, and I found three key themes. I just want to talk about one of them.
One of them was, I would say something like, “Hey, you just got Microsoft as a client today. How come you didn’t get IBM and Oracle?” Or, “Hey, you just made X thousands this month. How come you didn’t make a million?” It was always like acknowledging a success, but then piling on with three or four bad things. I realized that my self-talk was just horrible. I have shared this numerous times on the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
I went to a friend of mine who is a coach, does similar things that you do. I told her about this, and she said, “I don’t talk about you that way.” She listed four or five of our friends. She said, “Mike doesn’t talk about you that way. Beth doesn’t talk about you that way. Why do you talk about yourself that way?” I totally switched. I totally started, instead of saying, “Hey, you got Microsoft as a client. What’s wrong with you for not getting IBM and Oracle?” I would say, “Hey, you got Microsoft as a client. What do we now need to do to get Oracle and IBM?” Or, “Who can you talk to to get IBM or Oracle as a client?” How much of changing self-talk is a part of your coaching?
Kim Ades: It’s a lot of part of our coaching, but your self-talk is a function of your beliefs. I use an analogy and when I hear people do what you just described, I say, “Put down the stick.” People have this stick that they hold figuratively in their hands, and they’re constantly beating themselves over the head. I say, “Put down the stick. Stop. It’s not helping you.” When you beat yourself up, do you feel more confident or less confident? Do you feel more empowered or actually weak? Your self-doubt actually increases when you say, “I did this, but how come I didn’t do that?” What you’re saying is, “Something’s wrong with me. I’m not all there. I’m not good enough. I should be better.”
The minute we catch you in a should-be statement, and a should-be conversation, that’s when we see that your beliefs are not actually lined up with your goals. When that happens, it becomes very hard to achieve your goals.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the four things. Slippage.
Kim Ades: Slippage is a term I invented. I made it up. It refers to when leaders, sales professionals, let a lot of important things slip through the cracks. What am I referring to? They don’t sleep well. They don’t eat properly. They don’t exercise. They don’t have fun. They don’t talk to their family members. When they are around their family members, they’re distracted. They’re just not really able to pay attention to the important things in life. They get tired, they’re exhausted, and that’s their lifestyle.
Fred Diamond: Today we’re talking to sales leaders about how they can become better coaches. Kim, one of the challenges we see at the Institute for Excellence in Sales and our Women in Sales Leadership programs and our Big Stage programs is a lot of people are still struggling with “coming out” of the last four years. Again, we’re doing today’s interview in 2024. One of our leaders used the word malaise recently. I think that might be a little too strong, but there’s like a quicksand type of a feeling, someone else used. It’s like, how do we restart everything? How do we really get going here? We noticed that there was a struggle with leadership because it’s still a different challenge than most people were used to.
Prior to the pandemic leadership was, I’m not going to say it was simple, but it was clear. Here’s our goal. What do we need to be doing to get to our goal? What’s stopping us from getting there? Now there’s all these other challenges that have arisen over the last couple years. I’m going to put you on the spot with a very easy but hard question. What can sales leaders be doing to become better coaches knowing that their people, even successful senior sales professionals, are still struggling right now with a lot of things that we’re all new to?
Kim Ades: Let’s go back to what you just said because there’s a treasure in your statement, and we’re going to unpack it for a minute. What you said is, what we used to do is if we had a goal, we would say, “Here’s what we need to do to reach our goal.” Okay, nice in theory, but it’s a little let’s say misunderstood or misguided, is the word I was looking for. What do I mean by that? Because right now, especially now, after the past four years, we’re still trying to use that approach. Here’s the goal, or here’s what we think we should be focused on. What do we need to do in order to reach our goal? The issue is that we’re focused on action, and we are like, “Well, what’s wrong with that?”
What’s wrong with that is that thought precedes action. When we’re only focused on action, and we don’t really try to get the thought lined up with the action, what we get is malaise and poor action, poor productivity. We get sluggishness, we get maybe temporary bursts of action, and then a slide back. Sound familiar? What we’re really talking about is, hey, we need to begin the process before action. What does that mean? Is over the past four years, our brains have been scrambled. Our brains have been seriously impacted by COVID, and right now a lot of other strange things going on in the world. We’re disoriented, let’s call it that. The first thing we need to do is get oriented. How do we do that? We need to actually slow down a minute in order to speed up. We need to examine our thinking and how our thinking is impacting our motivation, our actions, our outcomes, all of that.
What we need to do for starters is make sure our beliefs are lined up with the goal we have. If let’s say you have a goal, and the goal is, “Okay. I need to get Oracle, Microsoft,” all the great, but in the back of your mind, you’re like, “Yeah, well, likelihood of that is low.”
“Why?”
“Well, COVID happened. Nobody really wants to buy from me.”
That’s the problem. It’s not the 50 calls you’re going to make, or 12. It’s the conversation you’re having in your head. A lot of that conversation is actually probably unconscious. You’re not even aware you’re having that conversation. That conversation reveals the beliefs you have, and those beliefs you have will determine what you achieve and what you don’t achieve. Very often when we think about how do we get people jump started, we say, “Okay, well, here are the 10 things you need to do to get to your goal,” and you create a plan. It seems all very logical. What leaders do is say, “Okay, well, they have a plan. I’m a leader. I’ll hold them accountable. It’ll be great.” But what they don’t do is start at the beginning. They start at the middle because we need to start with thought. If people are having a plan, but they’re not believing in the plan, if there’s any doubt in that plan, whether it’s personal doubt, environmental doubt, whatever it is, that plan isn’t going to get executed as per our expectations and the results will be poor. Where do leaders fall down when they’re coaching? They focus on action instead of beliefs.
Fred Diamond: Take us to beliefs and take us to managing your thoughts, as you said. I don’t know if you said managing your thoughts, but whatever the word would be to controlling your thoughts. That’s difficult. What do we get? Like 10,000 different thoughts an hour?
Kim Ades: We get a lot.
Fred Diamond: We get a lot. Like you just said, there’s a lot of stuff in the world, of course, so let’s push that off to the side. But then there’s internal beliefs. I’m not going to say it was easy four years ago, but like I said, there was constricted plans and it was clear, how do we get things? Maybe we’d be a little more creative, if you will. Sales is always hard, so it definitely wasn’t easy. Talk about that first stage then. What would you be telling sales leaders to get in more control of their thoughts? I know you call it mental clarity, rock-solid resilience. Talk about that stage before it comes to haunt us.
Kim Ades: Well, if I’m struggling with a problem, if I have an objective I want to reach, and I feel like it’s hard to reach that objective, the first thing I want to say is, “Okay, so what makes it hard?” If I’m working with you, Fred, I would say, “What’s making this hard?” You would give me all the reasons why it’s hard. Underneath all of those reasons are your beliefs. If you have a belief that it’s hard, guess what? It’s going to be hard. That’s the first thing we need to address.
Usually, what sales leaders do with their teams is they skip that part. What they do is they say, “Okay, you need to reach this goal. Let’s mobilize. Let’s have a plan. Here’s what you need to do.” But they’re not really addressing the driver of those actions, which is your brain, your head, the way you think, what you believe to be true. That’s what sales leaders need to learn when they’re coaching their team members. They’re like, “Well, that sounds like psychology to me.” A little bit, yeah.
Fred Diamond: Well, I think it’s a lot of psychology. One of the keywords that we talk about a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and at the Institute for Excellence in Sales is mindset. In 2015, we had a conference and we ended it with a panel discussion with six of the top sales leaders on the planet at the time. I said, “Just summarize in one word, what should people here focus on?” All six of them said, mindset, mindset, mindset, mindset, mindset, mindset. I remember that. It’s 2015, it was nine years ago. What can you do? Can you change mindset?
Kim Ades: Of course.
Fred Diamond: Well, tell us how.
Kim Ades: The way that we do it when we coach individuals, is first of all, what we need to do is understand the current status of the mind. What’s going on now and how do you view it? What do you believe to be true about what’s going on in your world right now? Then we bring that to the surface and we show you, “Okay, here are your beliefs. Do your beliefs line up with your goals?” Let me give you an example. It’s unrelated to sales, but it’s relatable or easy to understand.
Let’s pretend I’m an Olympic athlete. Let’s pretend I’m a long sprint runner or something like that. I’m at the starting line and I look to my left and I look to my right and I’m like, “Oh my God, these competitors are incredible. They’re going to crush me.” Before the gun has even gone off, I’ve lost the game, because what’s the belief? “I’m not cut out for this.” What’s the belief? “I’m not equipped?” What’s the belief? “I’m not good enough?” What’s the belief? “Everybody else is better?” That is what kills my competitiveness. That’s it. That concept applies everywhere, just that we’re not dealing with it in the workplace, because we weren’t taught to do that as leaders. We weren’t taught to coach.
Fred Diamond: Let me give you a scenario, and I’m curious about this. About 10 years ago, I was invited by a company with a large B2B, business to business, sales team to give a lunch chat about sales careers, my advice on what they should do. Most of the participants, it was 30 people in the room, they were all in early stages of their sales career. I said in front of the sales VP, this was a noon thing. They brought in food, and they knew me, so they respected me, they respected the IES, and I was their father’s age for most of the people in the room. I said, “How many of you think you’re going to be in sales a year from now?” How many hands do you think went up, Kim, out of the 30 people in the room?
Kim Ades: Maybe five.
Fred Diamond: Very good. The answer was five. You’re the first person to ever get it exactly right. I was astounded. I was befuddled. I was bewildered. I said, “How come you’re not going to be in sales a year from now?”
“Well, it’s harder than I thought it was going to be.”
“How about you?”
“Well, I really don’t like making phone calls and they tell us you have to make a lot of phone calls.”
“How about you?”
“Well, I think I’m more suited for a career in a not-for-profit.”
Meanwhile, the five people who said they were going to be in sales were in front of me scribbling whatever I said. “Mr. Diamond, how would you handle this?” I went to the VP afterwards, I said, “Are you kidding me? Did you know that 25 of your 30 people are not going to be here in a year?” He said, “Yeah, we know it, but we still need them to make phone calls right now, because we still have some lower end accounts. If three of those five guys nail it, then we’re going to have a great year.”
My question for you is, if you’re a sales leader, would you do the same thing? Would you say, “You know what? We’re going to lose those 25”? Or would you try to work with them to shift their beliefs?
Kim Ades: Well, I would look at my recruiting process for starters, and say, “Why am I hiring people who aren’t committed and aren’t interested and aren’t driven and aren’t aligned?” That’s the first thing I would do. The second thing I would do is I would probably sort through all of this crowd and look at who demonstrates potential. I would focus my energy on those with potential. I wouldn’t focus necessarily my energy on everyone because not everyone is a fit for sales. I would eliminate a whole other chunk, but maybe I can take five and turn that into seven and a half or 10. That’s where I would focus. It’s on who is demonstrating some level of skill, some level of potential, and actually bringing home results, but still have beliefs that aren’t lined up with the goal? That’s who I would work with.
Fred Diamond: Let’s go back to the sales leader and take your advice that we have to get to the beliefs of the people on the sales team. What are some ways that they can do that to help their sales professionals understand what their beliefs might be right now?
Kim Ades: Well, I would start with one simple question. What do you believe to be true about salespeople? What do you believe to be true about the sales function or job? When you hear it’s hard, it’s all of these things. Those are the things that need to be addressed.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk practically for the sales leaders listening. Do you take people aside? Do you take them off for a day? Hire someone like you to come up with 10 questions?
Kim Ades: Of course, you hire someone like me. But no, what you do is, I’m a huge fan of journaling. We get our clients to journal in a private and secure online journal. But leaders can use the journaling function too. How does that work? Pretend you are working for me or whatever, you’re my direct report. The other way around, you know how it is, and we are scheduling a meeting. What happens is, I ask you, “Fred, before you come to the meeting, I want you to write down a few things. I want you to write down your wins. I want you to write down your losses. I want you to write down perhaps your goals and your struggles.” Because that document helps me understand how you think. Now I have it ahead of time.
Meetings that don’t have anything to work with ahead of time are not useful meetings, because then you’re not getting into the minds of those people you work with. Now I have this document that I’m able to look at, like, where are you actually struggling? Now I’m able to ask you some questions about what those struggles are actually about, and that helps me drill in. That’s a one-on-one meeting. That’s a coaching conversation right there.
Fred Diamond: Is the journaling online typed versus handwritten into a journal?
Kim Ades: Yeah. We use an online journaling platform. They type, we think that’s perfectly fine. You’re still typing at a slower rate than your brain works, so it’s very useful. It’s private, it’s secure, and we can see it together.
Fred Diamond: This is fascinating. Let’s talk to the sales professionals. Not the sales leaders, but the people who are either individual contributors, maybe they’re managing a small team. It’s their first stage of leadership, if you will. Tell the sales professionals listening how they can become more coachable.
Kim Ades: Well, how you become more coachable is you identify, you notice where you have resistance. What prevents someone from receiving coaching? Their resistance. Your resistance is also your beliefs. They come from your beliefs. What you resist persists. What you want to start to pay attention to is where do I feel resistance? What is that resistance actually about? What do I believe right now about what I’m resisting? Because my beliefs run the show. They determine what I achieve, how I achieve it, but also how I experience everything in life. The good, the bad, the ugly, everything. Everything is filtered through your beliefs. When you experience resistance, ask yourself, slow down and say, “What do I believe to be true about this subject, this offer, this suggestion right here, right now? Why do I feel resistant?”
Fred Diamond: I remember about 12 years ago when we started the Institute for Excellence in Sales. We had a whole potpourri of things we could offer. We did a lot of in-person programs, we did a Women in Sales program, and people were shooting ideas. Someone said, “You should create a coaching program.” We looked into it. We had a couple of great sales coaches, and one of our coaches said, “You shouldn’t do it because most people aren’t able to be coached.” This was like 12 some odd years ago, so we never went ahead with it. We put mentoring programs into place. It’s pretty easy to be mentored. You could do what they advise or not do what they advise. Maybe they’ll motivate you for a little bit. But the whole concept of being coached is much more powerful.
Before I ask you for your last action step, is there anything we missed here? Is there anything that you want to bring up that would truly help the sales leaders listening to today’s show become more effective as sales leaders?
Kim Ades: I think, honestly, if you are a sales leader, your instinct is to create a system where you’re holding people accountable, where they’re answering to you, “How many calls did you make?” Really getting into the nitty gritty. The accountability model in terms of coaching is really, really flawed. Why is it flawed? Because if you hold me accountable and it works, I actually get all the stuff done, what you’ve done is you’ve created a modality of dependency. I need you to hold me accountable for me to reach my goals. What you really want to do is create independence for me. But if it doesn’t work, then it’s detrimental. If you hold me accountable and I’m still not reaching my goals, like, I felt bad before, but how do I feel now? A whole lot worse. When we think about leading and we think about accountability, instead of holding people accountable, think about breeding accountability, which is people are accountable for themselves. That’s a very big shift in thinking, but it’s very critical to long-term sustainable success.
Fred Diamond: I have to ask you to go a little bit deeper into that before I ask you for your final action step, because it’s such a powerful notion. As a matter of fact, three years ago in 2021, my word of the year was accountability. Then halfway through the year, it changed to service because of a whole bunch of life circumstances. Tell us a little more, if you don’t mind sharing a little bit more about how the individuals, the sales professionals, can truly become more accountable to themselves.
Kim Ades: You become more accountable by following through, keeping your word. When I make a promise to myself or others, I must follow through. I want to make sure that I am making promises that I can live by, that I can put my honor on, if that makes any sense. My word is gold. We want to breed that kind of thinking instead of a kind of environment where people are hiding or ducking, being held accountable by someone else. That’s a bit of a change in approach that a lot of leaders aren’t used to. What do you mean I don’t hold them accountable? Isn’t that my job? No, it’s not your job. Your job is to develop individuals who are self-sustaining and show up in an accountable way. It sounds the same, but it’s really not.
Fred Diamond: I can see it being completely different. I could see building that responsibility through an organization, it can lead to massive transformation. I can also see it leading to massive transformation for not just their sales professionalism, but their life and how they raise children and how they be in a relationship with a spouse and how they are committed to the community picking up trash along the way.
I was thinking recently, I’m trying to get into a little better shape. A lot of times people say, “Okay, my goal is to lose 20 pounds.” Well, I kind of made a shift and I said, “My goal is to exercise every day.” If I do the two or three types of exercise, and if I do it every day, the results should be losing some weight. Now, I can’t be eating pie at night and running three miles if I want to achieve those goals. I need to have that type of integrity in where I want to get to.
Wow, this was a great conversation. I want to thank Kim Ades from Frame of Mind Coaching. Kim, you’ve given us so many great ideas. Give us a specific action step people should do right now at the end of the show or after reading today’s transcript to take their sales leadership or their sales career to the next level.
Kim Ades: I’m going to give you a journaling exercise. Anybody who’s listening, grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down these two questions. Question number one, what do you really, really want right now more than anything? There’s two reallys there for a reason. Think about what you truly, deeply want. Not what is expected of you, not what somebody else wants for you, not what you think you should want, but what do you truly, deeply want? That’s question number one. Question number two, what’s stopping you from having it right now? What’s getting in the way? Write down all the reasons, and that’s your first exercise. Start to look at those reasons and understand that they are your beliefs. If you really want a challenge, send me your journal and I will give you feedback directly myself.
Fred Diamond: I will do that. Once again, I want to thank Kim Ades for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo