•You will hear a business presentation about accepting responsibility for sales success. •As you listen, for questions 1—12, com

M: Good morning everyone and welcome. Thanks for coming. My name is Dave Kahle. Today I will talk about accepting responsibility for your sales success.  That we live in a  time of relentless and pervasive change is no longer news  to  anyone.  There  is  one  important implication of this situation that continues to be a challenge. That is that our employees need to continually change their behavior to adapt to the world around them.
   My work of helping companies develop more effective sales organizations always involves making changes in the company. And sooner or later, that means that some of the employees must make significant changes in the ways that they think about and do their jobs. This is particularly true of the sales people, who must decide  to  change  their  behavior  and  to implement the best practices that I teach. Beyond that, ultimately, helping people change is the  work of every executive,  manager, consultant and trainer.
   Which brings us to the heart of this article? What is it that empowers some people to change smoothly and effortlessly, while getting others to modify their behavior seems like moving a mountain? What is the fundamental building block for individuals that, more than anything else, equips them to successfully implement change? It is something that is becoming increasingly rare — a motivating sense of personal responsibility. That is, a deep belief that one is responsible for one’s own behavior as well as the consequences of that behavior. It’s far more popular to be a victim. We have all shaken our heads sadly over some newspaper account of someone who commits some act of irresponsibility,  and  then  successfully  sues someone else. In our litigious world, being a victim often pays.  That is an unfortunate consequence of an unhealthy belief.
   As long as we view ourselves as victims, we’re unable to change ourselves or our circumstances and achieve better results. It is not our fault that we’re not doing better, we tell ourselves. Someone else caused it.  And because it’s someone else’s doing, the power to fix it and make it better is with someone else. We’re powerless to fix it. While few people admit it, or even realize it consciously,  this "victim attitude",  the  direct  opposite  of  personal responsibility, is very common, and embraced to some degree by most of us.
   My wife is a crises counselor.  One of the biggest eye openers for her occurred when she realized that she was counseling the same people over and over again. You’d think, as she did, that a crisis would be an isolated event.  Not so.  Many of her clients find themselves lurching from one crisis to another. Why? Because they don’t make the changes in their behavior and character that got them into the crises in the first place. At some deep level,  they see  themselves as victims,  not personally responsible for their own character, their own behavior, and the consequences that behavior brings. Where there is no sense of personal responsibility, there is little hope for positive change.