Let’s all ‘Be More Bruce’ – By Siobhan Ellard

By ILX Team | 5 December 2023

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, like many organisations, the ILX team’s way of working has evolved to a hybrid workforce model, with the entire salesforce working the majority of their week from home. Whilst this has many benefits, such as the ability to recruit the best people irrespective of location, it has impacted the junior members of the team by reducing the opportunity to gain valuable ‘on the job’ knowledge and skills from the more experienced team members.

In response to this, a new role of Sales Performance Coach was created to enhance the skills and performance of our junior Business Development Executives and new hires through group and individual coaching, training, and mentoring.

Adopting a positive mindset

My first task as Sales Performance Coach was to put together a series of workshops covering a different theme each month.

It soon became clear to me that having a positive mindset would be extremely important for individual members of the team as they tackle the daily challenges that come from being a part of a distributed workforce. So, this formed the basis of my first workshop.

Through this discussion, I defined what it means to have a positive mindset and shared a toolbox of techniques and strategies that the team could refer back to when they were struggling.

The seven strategies we focused on were:

Positive self talk

Optimism

Resilience

Solution orientated thinking

Self-believe

Surrounding yourself with positivity

Gratitude

As a group, we completed a series of optimism and solution orientated thinking exercises, as well as sharing our own experiences of how many strategies we currently use, or plan to adopt in the future, and examples of how this helps us personally in our role at ILX.

The birth of ‘Be more Bruce’

Through this session, we also discovered that there is a lot to be learnt from how dogs think, in particular one of our team members dogs, Bruce!

Dogs have something called an associative memory, which means they remember events based on associations, and not actual memories, e.g., the lead means a walk! The river equals fun! Whereas humans have an episodic memory. This allows us to reflect, remember, and relive moments which can be a positive or negative!

We can learn from dogs, as they don't (…and can’t) hold onto the past and live each day to the fullest, highlighting that we should remember the importance of living in the present and accepting the past.

A dog’s associative memory embodies the philosophy to “live in the moment” and so ‘Be More Bruce’ was born!