Have Faith & Trust the Process

My family and I are going through a difficult time right now with a personal situation. Thankfully everyone is healthy…but we have been dealt a blow.

After I shared the situation with a close friend, who knows me very well, they challenged me to trust the process. And, oh man, did that hit home. You see trust the process is one of my favorite pieces of advice to give when I’m coaching people.

Closing the Big Deal

As just one example, I was recently coaching a sales professional who’s working to secure a large deal. This individual is world class at what they do…literally one of the best sales professionals I’ve ever known. They also have a very detailed sales process that’s proven to be successful far more times than not.

What was baffling me was I noticed this person being a little more anxious than normal due to the size of the deal. I simply said, “Listen, you have a great process. Trust it.”

As with any piece of advice…it’s very easy to tell others what to do. But when it’s our turn to use the same advice it’s not so easy.

Faith Required

For my family and I our ultimate process is grounded in our Catholic faith. And while trusting this process challenges us to do our very best, which we have and will continue to do, it also means surrendering control and giving the situation over to God. That’s hard since it requires that invisible thing called faith.

But, if you think about it, we need faith to trust any process. In order to trust their process the sales professional must have faith it will work. If they don’t…they need to improve the process until they do.

My friend’s advice to trust the process was yet another example of how the things we practice as continuous improvement practitioners extends to all facets of our lives.

Sure, we should trust the process in our professional lives. But trusting the process doesn’t stop there…we should all work to define the process for every aspect of our lives. And, once we have the process in place we need to trust (and continuously improve) it.

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