How did you feel when you woke up this morning? What were some of your first thoughts? For salespeople, one of the most common morning emotions is stress. And why shouldn’t it be? We have to take more risks, we manage our own and everyone else’s uncertainty, we’re constantly processing rejection and if we find ourselves getting farther from our goals instead of closer, we can bust a mental spring before we even drink our coffee. For those of you who are riding high on your success, we certainly salute you and all that you have earned. But for the rest of us, some days we are so far down in the valley that the day feels like nothing more than a long march to our impending defeat and doom. It’s one thing to manage the stress of tasks that motivate us and keep things moving forward, but it’s another to manage compounding stress that makes us want to quit.
To be clear, when I say sales stress, I am speaking about the circumstances where our motivation is being so adversely affected that we feel stuck, helpless, and hopeless. If only we could overcome those defeating and stressful thoughts in the morning. If only we could act against the triggers that send us spiraling during the day. How can we stop digging this depressing hole deeper and start climbing back up to where we belong. Recovery is always a long journey with several steps in the process, but at the very least when can get the first step right by correcting one simple behavior. Stop doing a stress scan and replace it with a bless scan.
Stress Scan – This is what you are doing wrong. You wake up and take a mental inventory of things that you feel are not right and then you start creating your daily to-do list based on those emotions. These tasks instantly become something that we think we can’t do, don’t want to do, or are too afraid to do. Your brain is already sorting all aspects of both your day and your life and putting it into the wrong bucket because we started with a stress scan. Then throughout the day, we rescan our stress and compound the emotions that we first felt when we woke up. If there is one thing that stress loves to eat it more than anything is more stress so you must stop feeding it by stopping the stress scan and feeding it a bless scan.
Bless Scan – A bless scan really works the same way as a stress scan, only it is more intentional than reactionary. The moment you feel a stress scan starting you must identify it immediately and counteract it by taking inventory of things that are going well, things you are proud of, or anything that makes you smile in general. Yes, it is that simple if you just try it. However, don’t make the mistake of comparing your stress scan with your bless scan with ‘but’ statements. In other words, don’t say, “I’m far off from my sales goal, BUT I have a plan to better this quarter.” Eliminate the first part of the sentence altogether. A simple statement like, “I am excited about my new sales plan for this quarter” is all that you need. Remember, stress eats stress and you must starve it wherever you can.
