Paul provides guidance to help you maneuver those mental hurdles that may bring you down in these strange and challenging times.
Show Notes
Acknowledge the tough times, but don’t accept them as final.
“Fuhgeddaboudit.” Experience and learn from your failure, then move on.
Operate with an “abundance” mindset. There’s opportunity all around, but you have to go out there and find it.
It’s critical in tough and uncertain times that you truly believe there is more out there for you.
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How do I overcome mental hurdles?
(Transcribed from podcast)
Well, on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about something very important. We’re going to talk about how to overcome mental hurdles. Right now, I know we are out there, it’s an uncertain time, kind of a bizarre time to be in the business world. And there’s a lot of uncertainty, and this can create some challenges for us. So, on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to overcome mental hurdles.
Before we get into the episode, a quick shout-out to Andrea over at The Creative Impostor Studios. You know, Andrea again—I’ve mentioned it several times—does a great job helping out with the podcast, keeping it going, helping from a production standpoint, editing standpoint. If you need help with your podcast, reach out to Andrea and her team. If you’re thinking about starting one, reach out to her as well. She can help you get started with everything you need. We’re going to have a link over to her website on this episode’s webpage.
Also, man, I am absolutely pumped. Earlier this week, the new book has arrived in our office. I got it! Selling Through Tough Times is almost available. It actually—, the release date has been pushed back to October 25th, but guys, we are getting closer and closer to getting the book over to you. I cannot wait for you to read this book. Selling Through Tough Times is almost available, but the good news is, you can go to Amazon and pre-order your copy.
So let’s get into that question: How do I overcome those mental hurdles?
I’m going to give you three tips today to help you get past the mental hurdles that we face. Now, what’s important with our mental strength and building resilience, we’ve got to start doing things to build mental strength, and we also have to stop doing the things that really cause us to experience mental atrophy. That’s what I call it. You know how you experience muscle atrophy, you can experience mental atrophy as well. So this is about stopping the mental atrophy.
The first tip is to acknowledge but not accept—acknowledge but not accept. Now, when we go through tough times, we can acknowledge that they exist. We don’t want to embrace a tough time with the mindset of a Pollyanna attitude, and we think everything is sunshine, rainbows, and smiles and unicorns. And we don’t want to have a mindset that everything is going to be just fine. We need to be realistic. So we need to acknowledge the tough times that we’re experiencing, but we don’t accept it as current reality. And there’s a big difference between acceptance and acknowledgement.
I’ll give you an example. Right now, I know that many salespeople are struggling to find product to sell, or finding people to service what they sell, or to help implement what they sell. There are shortages all around. A statement of acceptance would be, “Man, this is terrible. When are we going to stabilize these supply chains?” “Man, this is terrible. When are we going to find enough product to sell?” “This is never going to get better.” When we have those statements of acceptance, we need to monitor our self-talk and we need to change it up. We need to acknowledge without accepting.
And how we do that is, when we find ourselves accepting current realities, we need to say, “You know what? I’m going to acknowledge this, but not accept it.” For example, we tell ourselves, ‘Right now, we’re experiencing tough times because there is more demand than there is supply. This will get better. This will pass. And in the meantime, I’m going to get creative on how I can help my customers.’ That is a statement of acknowledgement, not acceptance. So keep that in mind.
The next tip, and this is for my New Yorkers, the Northeasterners up there—the old term, you know what it is—fuhgeddaboudit. Fuhgeddaboudit. What’s interesting about this term, it can mean several different things, like there’s, there’s a lot up to interpretation for it, but what it literally means is “forget about it.” When we experience tough times, when we experience the pain of failure, whatever that may be, realize that it’s only temporary and we need to forget about it. That’s the whole idea. So once you experience the pain of failure, once you experience and learn from your previous failure, forget about it. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t pine over it.
I remember one salesperson, and I was working with him and he said, “Man, I’m in a mentally tough spot right now. I just keep struggling to move forward.” And I said, “Okay, well, what do you think is the root cause of this?” He goes, “You know, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve just been struggling, having issues.” And I asked him, “What’s the root cause?” He goes, “You know, a couple of weeks ago, I just completely blew a presentation. I thought I was ready. I completely winged it. I went in there. It was a terrible sales call. I embarrassed myself, and I just can’t stop thinking about it. For the past two weeks, that’s all I’m thinking about. And it’s putting me in a rut.” And I just said, “Dude, you need to forget about it. Move on.” I go,”There’s nobody perfect in this world. You’re not perfect. If you screwed up, learn from it, but then forget about it.” Once you’ve experienced all the benefits of failure and learn from it, move on. Forget about it.
And the final tip: when we’re trying to overcome those mental hurdles, a lot of the mental hurdles that will put us in a spiral, where we start to struggle, are based on a lack of opportunity. As salespeople, we think that we’re at hitting a dry spell where “Man, that next opportunity, I don’t know where it’s going to come from.” We worry about that. We have a scarcity type of mindset. So, my suggestion is to operate with an abundant mindset. Imagine every day, as a salesperson, you woke up, you plan your day, and you begin your day by telling yourself, ‘Wow, there is so much opportunity in my territory. There’s so much opportunity for my business, I just need to find it.’ What if you viewed the world through an abundant prism, where there was so much opportunity, where you believe truly that it’s just about finding it. It’s there, it exists. You just need to find more of it.
With an abundance mindset, you are approaching your territory. You’re making extra calls. You’re doing more work because you truly know that there is more opportunity there. You just need to find it. So you don’t feel like any of your effort is wasted or that it’s not worthwhile because you truly believe and know that there is more out there for you to find. That’s how we overcome these mental hurdles and that’s what’s critical when we go through tough and uncertain times.
Man, I’m so excited for the new book. It is available…almost. You can still pre-order the copy. It’s going to get there to you probably by the time you’re listening to this episode. In the book, we have several more tips on how to overcome those mental hurdles, so please check it out.
Make it a big day.
