TSE 1160: How To Deal With Stress, Fatigue, Burn Out & Lack of Creativity

08/15/19 • 43 min

Sales is a year-round activity with no off-season and no breaks, so it’s important for sellers to understand how to deal with stress, fatigue, burnout, and a lack of creativity.

Dana Cavalea is the former Director of Strength & Conditioning and Performance for the New York Yankees. Coach Dana, who helps companies optimize performance and productivity, wrote a book called Habits of a Champion: Nobody Becomes a Champion By Accident.

He became a coach after realizing the tremendous difference that coaches made in his own athletic career, and how they helped him overcome bumps in the road.

Opportunity knocks

Dana, who originally hails from New York, chose to attend school in Tampa because he knew it was near where the Yankees conducted their spring training. When he got the opportunity to join the team as the guy who handed out towels and cleaned the weight room, he jumped on it.

Within a few years, he earned a paying job as the director of strength and conditioning and performance, and the team won a championship during that time.

He discovered, through that experience, that many executives, CEOs, and sales teams wanted to know how athletes prepare to compete at the highest levels. How do they deal with injuries and fatigue and the obstacles they face during a season? How do they keep showing up every day in the face of fatigue and burnout?

Individual protocol

People assume that high-level musicians and athletes feel good every time they perform, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re tired a lot, but they don’t tell themselves that. They understand that fatigue is part of life and that you’re going to have days where you don’t feel great. The goal, Dana said, is to have fewer of those days and more of the days where you do feel great.

To do that, Dana coaches people to focus on a couple of simple things that affect performance.

Hydration
Sleep

These factors can inhibit the way you function overall. To address them, you must have an individual routine specific to your needs that helps you perform at your best every single day.

Some players like music that pumps them up, and other players like music that calms them down. Each person must have a routine and protocol that is based around their needs.

But how do you get there?

You get there by testing things. If you sleep for six hours but wake feeling tired, that may mean that you need more sleep, or that you need to understand your 90-minute sleep cycles better. We must perform each day and test different things like the food we eat to determine what makes us feel better.

How do I feel?

Begin by asking yourself the question, “How do I feel?” Phrased that way, the question takes you out of yourself and gives you a moment in the midst of all that you have going on to consider how you feel. People listen to a million different podcasts and listen to two or three books at a time, and we’re so busy that we don’t take time to think about how we’re feeling.

We’re working to create a self-awareness that is super important to determining the strategies that will help you overcome your struggles.

Sometimes we underestimate the impact of stress on our bodies. Sports are very competitive, as is business. Sales is extremely competitive. You must prepare and train to compete.

Energy wins. You might be a more talented salesperson than I am, but if I have more energy, I’ll continue to show up every day while you take a day off. #SalesSuccess

The key is to keep your energy up by hydrating, sleeping, fueling, and training. Then, fill your mind with good stuff to crowd out the doubt and fear.

Sports have a defined starting and ending point, but sales continues all year, quarter after quarter. There’s no break because each year leads into another.

Expectations

If we do well this year, what will the people around us expect from us moving forward? They’ll expect us to do better. So now we’re constantly trying to push our threshold. Although what we did last year was good, it’s not good enough for this year. Expectations shift.

Some people, though, get comfortable playing things safe, and doing “just enough.” They don’t want to do more than they’re already doing because they know it will simply shift the expectation higher.

People fear success almost as much as they fear failure. Sometimes, they sabotage themselves in order to avoid the pressure of accomplishment.

Leaders can help their sales teams overcome these struggles by being honest. If a salesperson has hit his numbers for the month and he has a pending deal that he could close this month but he’s holding it for the next month, ...

Sales is a year-round activity with no off-season and no breaks, so it’s important for sellers to understand how to deal with stress, fatigue, burnout, and a lack of creativity.

He became a coach after realizing the tremendous difference that coaches made in his own athletic career, and how they helped him overcome bumps in the road.

Opportunity knocks

Within a few years, he earned a paying job as the director of strength and conditioning and performance, and the team won a championship during that time.

Individual protocol

To do that, Dana coaches people to focus on a couple of simple things that affect performance.

Hydration
Sleep

These factors can inhibit the way you function overall. To address them, you must have an individual routine specific to your needs that helps you perform at your best every single day.

Some players like music that pumps them up, and other players like music that calms them down. Each person must have a routine and protocol that is based around their needs.

But how do you get there?

How do I feel?

We’re working to create a self-awareness that is super important to determining the strategies that will help you overcome your struggles.

Sometimes we underestimate the impact of stress on our bodies. Sports are very competitive, as is business. Sales is extremely competitive. You must prepare and train to compete.

Energy wins. You might be a more talented salesperson than I am, but if I have more energy, I’ll continue to show up every day while you take a day off. #SalesSuccess

The key is to keep your energy up by hydrating, sleeping, fueling, and training. Then, fill your mind with good stuff to crowd out the doubt and fear.

Sports have a defined starting and ending point, but sales continues all year, quarter after quarter. There’s no break because each year leads into another.

Expectations

People fear success almost as much as they fear failure. Sometimes, they sabotage themselves in order to avoid the pressure of accomplishment.

Previous Episode

TSE 1158: The Actions High-Growth Coaches Use To Motivate Their Teams

While proper mindset is important, the actions high-growth coaches use to motivate their teams allow those teams to succeed in sales.

Sarah Wirth works for EcSell Institute and studies sales leadership. Along with her team, they look at the coaches in the organizations they work with knowing that great coaches help teams to achieve better results.

Sarah travels the globe studying different teams and applying the best practices they can teach to sales leaders. Their research-based teachings on best practices are grounded in fact rather than opinion.

Misconceptions about coaching

One of the common misconceptions about coaching relates to the timing of team meetings or sales coaching. Most sales leaders do team meetings weekly thinking that getting everyone together via phone makes the team effective. Based on the study, however, the best sales leaders have their meetings once a month rather than once a week. The monthly meeting is much more interactive and educational than the weekly kind of communication.

Sales reps want an interactive educational team meeting where they can hear what the other departments are doing. They also want to hear and learn the best practices used by others in the company. They don’t want to sit and hear all the updates of what’s going on, because those things can be sent and read via mail.

Instead, sales reps want a certain level of engagement and content to share during meetings. This content is difficult to achieve when you meet every single week. A longer time frame gives birth to more stories and more experiences to share, which results in meaningful and substantive conversations where everyone on the team learns things.

Learning from experience

Sellers like to learn the best practices, so they listen to podcasts. They want to learn from people from different fields who bring radical and neat insights that they’re not aware of.

The interviews and surveys of salespeople reveal that they don’t want to hear the biggest deals. Instead, they want to hear how to get big deals. They want answers to the objections they encounter and tips to make presentations that help them win deals. They want to hear and learn the stories of how others became successful.

It’s more of knowing what they did and how they did it.

Salespeople want to be the best version of themselves. They aren’t into sales because of charity. They are in sales because they want to help their families and their clients.

Most sales leaders are promoted to their position because they were good salespeople. They go from the bottom to the top without getting any formal training, education, and information on how to become good sales leaders. They learn from experience, and that’s why they become successful. Unfortunately, they don’t know how to transfer all these learnings to their peers so their team can be successful and achieve better sales.

Motivate the team

There are three actions high-growth sales coaches use to motivate their team:

Team meetings done in the right frequency and format
One-on-one meetings with each of the team members
Feedback on what they’re doing well and what they can improve

These three are effective ways to help salespeople grow and improve their skills.

One-on-one meetings

One-on-one weekly meetings with each team member are as effective as doing one-on-one meetings every other week. Aside from the frequency, it is also important to follow a consistent structure.

The best sales leaders start their meetings with personal updates in the life of the salesperson they are talking to. They talk about how their family is doing, and if they’re working from home, sales leaders ask for updates on their projects. Sales leaders spend a few minutes connecting with their team members as people. They show that they care not only as a sales producer but also as a person.

The coaching and mentoring from one-on-one meetings change a salesperson’s motivation and attitude towards his work. It ignites a fire in him that helps the team meet its sales goals. Even books can’t do this because no matter how good the contents of the books are, the pages can’t hear their ideas or challenge them with questions. There is no substitute for talking through what’s going on in their sales territory or getting their input on the strategies that they’re pursuing.

Asking imploring questions during one-on-one meetings breeds in-depth conversations that are helpful for both parties to grow.

Do one-on-one meetings with your salespeople either weekly or bi-weekly depending on what works best for your team.

Give feedback

Give your team members feedback on their selling skills regularly. After successfully closing an important deal with your salespeople, deb...

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TSE 1161: How To Run Better Meetings

Meetings serve an important purpose in business so we must learn how to run better meetings to avoid the feeling that we are wasting our time.

Reshan Richards is a career educator who launched an app — targeted for use in schools — that ultimately became a software business. He has seen a significant intersection between things that are effective in both business practices and the classroom. Together with Steve Valentine, also a career educator, he is collaborating to articulate and pinpoint the specific moves that can be borrowed from the teaching profession and implemented in business. Steve has studied leadership and its application in order to work with young people and help them understand basic leadership.

Meeting mistakes

The problems that plague corporate meetings often mirror those of ineffective classrooms. Primarily, the transmission of information isn’t right for the audience who is meant to understand it. People often go back to their defaults or their own experiences to measure what is right.

If, for example, you get called into a meeting where one person is doing all the talking or all the work, it isn’t a good use of anyone’s time. It wasn’t likely called for the service of the people who are meant to share the information. In education, a difference exists between the transmission of information and the building of knowledge.

Reshan and Steve believe that the best kinds of meetings are those that leave people feeling like they couldn’t possibly have had the same great experience without the meeting. In other words, there’s no substitute for the meeting, and people are glad they went.

Unfortunately, that’s a rare occurrence in both business and education.

If you think about the amount of time and effort it takes to secure a face-to-face meeting with a customer or client, it’s important to be respectful of that person’s time, energy and attention. Never leave him doubting why he was called into that room. #BetterMeetings

Bad meetings

Reshan’s company, Explain Everything, worked with a Fortune 100 company to help them run better training for new-to-title employees. As he evaluated their structure, he realized that 90 percent of the time during a week-long seminar was spent sitting watching PowerPoint presentations. The other 10 percent of the time was application of what they learned. The following week, those employees were sent into the field.

The meetings were efficient and easy to plan, but retention was low, so he worked with them to rethink their time together. He encouraged the company to think about how it might best utilize the experts in the meetings as well as how the information should be delivered.

They also found that they were teaching concepts on Monday that the employees wouldn’t get to apply until Thursday. The distance between the lesson and the application meant that the employees had to learn the information twice.

For Steve, the very best meetings are those that are allowed to be messy and those that permit people to drop their status. He measures the quality of a meeting by the extent to which people are treated as learners and the extent to which they actually learn something they didn’t know when they walked in.

That information doesn’t have to appear as a revelation. Rather it can simply be the chance to build knowledge together in the temporal context they share.

Internal meetings

Planning a great meeting looks exactly the same as planning a great lesson or learning experience. Reshan and Steve think in terms of three motions, or phases.

Before the meeting
During the meeting
After the meeting

These stages parallel the stages of sales, where sellers engage in pre-call, during, and then follow-up.

As the meeting facilitator, you should have a really good awareness of the prior knowledge participants have prior to the meeting.

Meeting prep

Often times meetings get scheduled by those who have the authority to do so, but the attendees don’t know the agenda until they arrive. Those that get the agenda ahead of time either get it too far in advance or too close to the meeting time.

Meeting prep also varies greatly among the attendees at meetings. Some people dutifully prepare for the meeting while others never even look at the agenda. The facilitator often has to go to the lowest common denominator because a percentage of people didn’t prepare. In the end, that holds the entire organization back because it means that instead of starting at level 7 in the dialog, you’re starting at z...