I ran into a longtime colleague over the weekend that happens to be in Sales. He is pushing a leading-edge replacement product and was inevitably bemoaning the difficulty in getting customers to purchase. Interestingly, this is pretty much the same problem we all ultimately own; we are all selling something (skills, products, talent, ideas, etc.) and need someone to buy.

It’s the age-old theme of, how do we get people to take action and buy what we are selling? The following reflection is a little different from my regular content, so please bear with this intriguing discussion.

There are many books written about establishing sales of new products . Ultimately, the challenge is getting folks to act and invariably, they do so only when they feel the pain and thus are forced to take action or face worse consequences.

It seems there’s a common and reoccurring theme, here. I have previously repeatedly written that people don’t act because they:

• Don’t want to
• Don’t know how to
• Have become lazy; sometimes called the “fat Rep” syndrome

Although there’s few strongly relevant statistics, much evidence says that when the logjam is broken and people buy, it’s because they feel the pain. Then, normally because the old method, approach or product they’re using has become a recipe for likely failure, so they are ultimately forced to change and act. Suddenly we see the laziness will now evaporate and “don’t want to” (as mentioned above) changes to must do. As a result, people then willingly accept the associated switching costs they must pay to get the new product/approach and make changes. Only then, do they seize the obvious value, presented.

So it is with self-development, in general. Even though folks need to make changes they fail to do so until they must. Clearly in this day and age anyone expecting to enhance their career needs to invest in proactively developing themselves. Yet how many people do we actually observe energetically working on real self-development skills that can directly help their cause? I am in the business of management career self-development and must confess that most folks I meet aren’t making much-needed personal upgrades.

Many materials exist to help with personal skill development, but a huge amount of traffic and interest in the development space centers upon softer subjects: more discretionary, personal or philosophical points than material focused on the development of what we might refer to as hard skills. There’s obviously often much value in studying this (less tangible) material as it does seem to reasonably satisfy general human appetite, curiosity and importantly, improves our self-awareness. However, such investment is normally not as clearly and immediately valuable as time spent on hard skills that upgrade your Time Management, Planning, or Organizing abilities, as an example.

It is well published that when people focus on difficult skills and commit to disciplined practice they will achieve a high level of personal excellence, regardless of the professional discipline involved. Again, this plays to the theme, ”no pain, no gain.” Also, such focus to achieve excellence (practicing harder tasks and relentlessly) is more demanding and proves to be the path less followed, even by performers acknowledged as competent in their fields.

Upon reflection we notice that the theme of pain seems to stand out as an important factor in human improvement, as it is a:

• Baseline for development (no gain without pain)
• Fundamental in achieving excellence (practicing the difficult things relentlessly can make individuals truly exceptional)
• Key motivator in accepting and making changes

I would not recommend anyone blindly focuses upon pain as a path to personal success! However, acknowledging the role it plays in our psyche and commitment to self-development is worthy of consideration. After all, being more aware of our underlying motivators can only help.

Let me ask, are you setting clear goals for yourself? Do you have a clear vision of what and who you want to become? If so, perhaps you need to reconsider action on those tougher (for you personally) areas of self-development that you just might have been unknowingly delaying, to avoid the pain!

Ian R. Mackintosh is the author of Empower Your Inner Manager Twitter @ianrmackintosh