Mind-Set Set-Up: Finding the right mindset to work, and work-well
Lara Khanafer, co-founder and CEO of Kara.ai, speaks to Tiffany Monahan on this episode of the Hypergrowth Podcast about confidence, courage, believing — as a salesperson, as a founder, and as a leader.
Who is your work role model? I have quite a few actually. Although, they are not the role models you can google. They’re usually sitting across from me at the virtual desk, and not regularly plastered on the front of the Wall Street Journal.
After my interview with Lara Khanafer, Co-founder and CEO of Kara.ai, I have a new addition to my role-model-rolodex. She succeeded in her role in sales (regularly exceeding quota), became a founder as a single mom and she approaches problem solving like a developer. With all of this, she has mastered something many of us are trying to figure out: our mind-set set-up. First, with a tactile approach to thinking through next steps and problems. Secondly, with confidence, courage, and believing.
Tactile Mindset
Lara is thinking like a developer. The need to think differently, for Lara, arose as a way to balance personal life with the demands of being a salesperson for a software company. She was serving clients and managers monitoring sales pipeline.
For Lara, getting organized meant turning a number-outcome driven process into a task-outcome one: turning deal closure count into steps she needed to do. To figure this out, she turned to the people within the software company who seemed the most organized: developers.
Developers have mastered toolsets; they know the value of automation. They have frameworks for just about everything. The mindset tactics Lara adopted to increase her deal close rate were:
- Sprints to set deadlines and show up for reviews (with herself)
- Agile mode to work within guidelines (of the task) but without boundaries (of how you achieve it)
- OKRs committing to three main tasks to perform a day
This shift in mindset sparked her idea to found Kara.ai: the productivity tool for the sales teams that helps CRM users to manager their targets, time and teams better. But the tactile mindset is only half of the picture.
Confidence-Courage-Believing Mindset
It’s difficult to have a name for this mindset. Is it “Growth-mindset”? “Good-mindset”? Needless to say, the other half of the mind-set set-up we are talking about is the fusion of these three pillars: Confidence, courage, and believing. In this episode of the Hypergrowth Podcast, Laura deep dives into each of these aspects of a positive mindset and how to strengthen them.
To give you a teaser, she highlights:
- Confidence: how to exercise this muscle
- Courage: why nothing would happen without it
- Believing: how to believe in yourself and others believe in you
These are some pillars that resonate with what I see in my rolodex of role-models.
They’re also traits of successful founders…
Give a shout-out to your work role-models! What mindsets do you look for?
Listen to this episode:
Shownotes
00:56 — Lara intro & origins of the idea for Kara.ai
05:50 — Thinking like a developer: agile, sprints, OKR for sales
09:22 — Designing & researching seeing your peers as clients
14:42 — Confidence is a muscle linked to courage
20:00 — Healthy doubts are pointing you forward
23:24 — Trust and hiring for your startup
27:38 — Getting people to believe in your idea and vision
32:15 — leading an all-male team
37:10 — Kara.ai and how the team has FUN
