Trust the Process

How long do you stay the course when results are slow to come

The legendary and infamous professional boxer Mike Tyson once said something to the effect of:

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

That is not exactly what he said, but the point was clear. When adversity hits, your best laid plans might not mean too much.

You have two choices. You can scrap your plans altogether and come up with an entirely new plan of action. The other choice is to see where the plan went wrong and tweak it.

Trusting the process versus starting on a new path, how do you decide?

When chaos ensues, it sometimes feels as if the best path is to choose the first option. We are experiencing our flight or fight response which senses danger and tells our mind to scrap logic and plans and critical thinking.

I want to make a case for the second option. It flies in the face of the urgency we feel to throw our plans out with the bath water. Our short-term minds gravitate to short-term actions. By relying on experience, data, and patience however, the better course of action is sometimes to stay the course. Below I share an excerpt from my upcoming book “Community-in-a-Box” about a time when trusting the process made the most sense.

Launching the Boston Enterprise Sales Forum felt like the proverbial punch to the face. I had bold dreams about how Boston could be as large and vital of a community as NYC. Then I woke up from those dreams to a rude awakening.

As an aside, the Enterprise Sale Forum was a community I started the year prior in NYC. It was an opportunity to bring startup founders and salespeople together to learn from each other, collaborate, and learn what is working in sales from expert practitioners in sales. The group grow from tens of people to hundreds, and then over one thousand when I started getting messages from people to start a community in their cities.

Boston made a ton of sense as the next city launch for the Enterprise Sales Forum. It was a reasonable drive from NYC; there were many tech companies growing in downtown, which was a core demographic for the community; and several people reached out specifically about launching a community there. As an added bonus, I already…