Twyla Tharp is an award winning choreographer whose ideas on creative habits provide, in my view, a wonderful blueprint for how B2B salespeople can find their groove and perform at their peak. In this recent interview, Tharp discusses how she coaches dancers to get them to do incredible things. Her approach to choreography is, in my view, a wonderful blueprint for how B2B sales coaches can guide their teams to perform at their peak:
– slight realism matters. Not too much, but just enough. Be realistic about what people can accomplish.
– raise the bar of what you can achieve. Demand you and your team accomplish more than is easy
– shared belief in the goal is crucial. You + your players have to believe what you want to accomplish is important.
– motivate your players with empathy, drawing on their possibilities.
– coach with a curiosity to learn from straight-talking conversations as early as possible.
– create environments where discipline comes naturally. It has to. You can’t enforce discipline.
– 1st key to doing so is training (which delivers consistency)
– 2nd key to doing so is improvisation (which delivers confidence to perform under any circumstance)
– shrink the ‘pick-up time’ it takes to recover from a mistake and get back to your game.
