I heard a story the other day about a retail shop here in town that burned out its customer base with too much hard selling.
As I heard it, the roughly 3,000 middle managers that are needed to run 18 retail stores were extremely upset by this outcome.
Why would the staff do something like this to their own customers?
Turns out that a year ago, the same crack management team decided that the floor staff weren’t bringing in enough revenue. After a year of pushing for revenue, revenue, revenue, this brain-trust got exactly what they asked for.
If you put people on notice that they have to sell or else, then ride them like a tired mare in late summer heat to make them do it, they’re going to sell. If that means high pressure hard-close selling that burns up all your customer good will, so be it.
Since this was an easily foreseeable outcome for anyone with an IQ over 105, naturally the management is now stunned and bewildered that their decisions had consequences.
Eating the seed corn and then yelling “how could this happen??!?!” when everyone starves in the spring is a well-known phenomenon whenever the idiots with spreadsheets get involved.
One reason I detest bureaucrats is their inability to see beyond the right-now numbers. As long as the pretty graph goes up and to the right, nothing could be wrong.
The only problem? Reality doesn’t care about forecasts and graphs.
“Look at the data” indeed.
I confess to feeling a powerful glee whenever I watch Mother Nature cheerfully obliterate the designs of a cocky desk jockey.
That said, there is a genuine lesson here.
If you only focus on the Right Now, you aren’t seeing the patterns unfolding around you.
This is why I shake my head watching people lose their minds about whatever’s making people mad in the news today. They respond to one single event without any context from the past or the future.
Actions have consequences, yes, but we’re going bigger than that.
Whatever happens is part of a pattern of behavior that happens over time.
What happens today isn’t important without a sense of what happened in the weeks and months leading up to Right Now, and what’s going to happen in coming weeks, months, and years as a result of this choice.
There can be a long lag-time between the decision and the outcome.
And just what the heck does this have to do with removing fat from your stubborn bee-hind?
It’s very easy to train and diet in a way that sabotages long-term gains.
This is all the more true if you’re over 40.
Why? Because the message preached to you by ever advertisement and every fitness influencer is “No pain no gain!”
In my world, we do things exactly the opposite. Going too aggressive and expecting to suffer is the main reason that workouts and diets fail… or never get started.
Aggressive training and dieting is middle-manager thinking that eats up the seed corn and pretends surprise at the famine.
Go hard, go aggressive, right now, and consequences? What are those?
The pattern over time is what matters, not the feeling you get in the moment from an aggressive workout or fad starvation diet.
They “feel like you did something” but at the cost of what you need for long-term consistency.
If you’re over 40 and “doing everything right” but aren’t losing fat or seeing any improvements in your body composition or your energy levels, you would probably benefit from the kind of low-stress training and nutrition systems I use with myself and my clients.
If that’s of interest to you, use this link:
Matt Perryman