Welcome to the "What's Your Problem?" Community!
July 7, 2022

TSL Moments: Your Hardships Are A Privilege.

TSL Moments: Your Hardships Are A Privilege.

TSL Moments are my fondest memories from earlier episodes. This one was inspired when Andrew called me to tell me that he was starting his own business. We'd worked together many years ago, and he'd hit rock bottom and felt like leaving town was his only option. With no money or connections, he drove his beat-up car to Florida to start over. For years I didn't hear from him, and then one day, Andrew popped up on my Instagram feed. We exchanged "likes" on each other's posts, and then I got the call one day. 

He even gave me a shirt with his new logo on it :)

I can relate to this episode because it speaks to my hardships only after this phone call caused me to put pen to paper and reflect on how what seems like a discount now pays off in dividends much later. 

How can you relate to this episode? I'd love to hear from you at www.marshbuice.com. In the bottom right is a mic from you to me. I'm no hair, but I am all ears. 

What moment from which episode speaks to you? 

Thanks for listening! 

For more of The Sales Life go to www.marshbuice.com

Help grow the show by sharing with ONE person today!

Tell others why you listen to The Sales Life by leaving a quick review https://www.marshbuice.com/reviews/

Buy Me A Coffee! ☕️ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thesaleslife

The greatest sale you will ever make is to sell you on you. You're more than enough. Never settle. Keep Selling. 

Transcript

Today on the sales life, three effective methods to regulate your emotions so that they always work in your favor using the power of acceptance, reappraisal, and expression. You'll find more personal and professional success and you're gonna live longer too. But before we roll out with today's episode, we've got some new listeners. My name is marsh B and I'm the host of the sales life. And I created the sales life because sales is the only profession that so closely resembles life. One minute, you're on top of the world. And the next minute the world's rolling back on top of you. And somehow some way you gotta figure it out. Selling is more than a profession. It's a life skill you can transfer these five skills into every area of your life. To embrace uncertainty and be ready for anything. Those five skills are communication, curiosity, creativity, continuous learning, and action and productive confrontation. These are skills you already have within now. I'm gonna help you develop 'em so you'll never go without, so if you're trying to get back up after life has slapped you down. or you're trying to move up? Cause you feel like life is kind of stalled out. If you wanna have more, do more, be more, then you're gonna have to sell more. Welcome to the sales life. Let's roll out what today's episode. What better book to use to regulate your emotions than the book called emotional, how feelings shape our thinking by Leonard Mlodinow. I believe the key to personal and professional success in life is the ability to keep your emotions in check, letting your emotions run wild. Like an unbridled horse will sabotage your personal and professional life, but also poor emotional regulation will lead to a shorter life as well. The author notes that In a study of older men, those with poor emotional regulation have a 60% greater chance of cardiac disease. You know, I'm big on simplicity. So a few things, a few points that I can check down to, to help regulate my emotions in the heat of the moment. Without having to go back and listen to an episode or find it written down or anything like that. Just boom, boom, boom. If I can check down to those things. Man that's right up my ally. . And so I want to pass these things on to you. Those three effective methods are acceptance, reappraisal and expression. That way. When you feel the vengeance starting to kick in, when you feel you're about to say the wrong thing, when you feel that you're just about to torch something, check these points, acceptance, reappraisal. And expression. So let's unpack these methods. I think you're gonna find a lot of use out of these. The first effective method in regulating your emotions is acceptance. It's controlling the controllable simp. And the author references to acceptance and stoicism, and many times when you hear about the stoic and acceptance, many people interpret that to be that, oh, I can just get run over in life. And I'm just supposed to be okay with it. Well, that ain't me. That ain't gonna happen or you're not supposed to be attached to anything. So if something just blows up in your face, it's just, just, you know, keep on moving. Yes, the, keep it moving part is, is correct. But acceptance does not mean that you have to agree with it. It just means that you simply acknowledge what is, because there are gonna be moments that the ball doesn't always bounce your way. There are gonna be moments that is unfair for you. You it's it's unjust and you were blindsided and acceptance is when these moments hit. You're gonna be left to pick up the broken pieces and acceptance is figuring out what to productively do with those broken pieces control the controllables. It's seeing a situation and saying, this is bad, but then also it's determining what your next move is, control the controllables. What can I control in this moment? And if I can't control everything, what are some things that I can do to heavily influence a better outcome? See that's different. So like for me in sales, I can't control the ultimate decision for a customer to say yes or no and buy for me. I can't, but I can heavily influence it. And however it falls, whatever their decision is. I have to accept that. And then I gotta keep it moving from there. So it's looking at things and asking yourself, what is it I can control. What is it I can do to heavily influence it? I can't control the shortage. I have no control over microchips. I can't control. So why sit there and talk about something that I have zero control over? Why sit there and try to talk about policy. And if I was, I don't own a chip manufacturer, so I don't know what to do. So why even talk about that? Acceptance is in those situations, you just say, okay, this sucks. I'm gonna have limited inventory now, what is it I'm gonna do with this? And that's the reappraisal part that we're gonna talk about? , there are gonna be recessions that we walk into and when we hit those recessions, I can be like 99% of other people and throw my hands up and say, oh my God, this is bad. We're never coming outta this blah, blah, blah. I could do all that. Or I could just accept that and then say, okay, this is tough. Things are gonna get tightened. What is it I can do from here? See, that's acceptance. It's not sticking your head in the sand and acting like it doesn't exist. And it's not, I don't wanna talk about this. You don't wanna hear it? No, it's saying this is a bad situation. Hmm. What are my options? See, everything has an option. You can have the option to do nothing at all. Or you can say somewhere somehow, and this is, you know, through acceptance. You've read of people. That were in dire situations and somehow they popped out on the other side it's because they accepted it. They didn't sit there and just park and like, this is it. No, they said, well, if I'm gonna go out, I'm gonna go out in a bang. Right. And so through the power of acceptance, they saw it was a bad situation, but they figured, okay, what are my steps from here? What else can I do from here? The second way to regulate your emotions is reappraisal the power of the spin man, Appraisal is making sense of what just happened. You've probably heard the old saying. Nothing's good or bad. It's just your interpretation of it, right? It's just the label that you put on it. , that's what appraisal is. It's a label that you put on it. Reappraisal is interrupting that negative thought pattern and changing the narrative. And putting a different spin. So for instance, in sales, I could be working with a gnarly mean rude customer. That's the appraisal. The reappraisal is putting a different spin on it, where instead of me going down the rabbit hole with their emotions and matching their negative emotions. If I reappraise it, I put a spin on it. I say to myself, you know what? These people are just scared. They've probably had some bad salespeople in their life. Now I gotta change that. I gotta make sure I understand what their needs are and I fill those needs and make sure they understand all their options and let 'em make a decision from there. That's acceptance. See, I used. the reappraisal and acceptance a couple, those two things together. See how powerful this is. Or what about Linda? You've been beefing with her since high school. and you got her on the phone and she snaps again. Well, your appraisal was already, we've been beefing since high school. And then when she gets on the phone and she's terse . She ain't all warm and fuzzy, uh, I tried to give her the benefit. Here we go again. No, it's delivering whatever the message is, whatever you called for. And then reappraise it, get off the phone and say, you know what? I've heard, her mom is really sick. She's probably going through a tough time. I don't even have to agree with it. I don't have to agree with her being rude and nasty with me. I, I don't have to agree with any of that. It's just, I refuse to go down that path. So instead I'm gonna put a different spin on it. Instead of saying, oh, that's good for her. No, Just reappraise it and saying, you know what, she's going through a tough time. The author's note, train yourself in such a way that leads to the emotions that you want. Listen to that carefully, train yourself in such a way that leads to the emotions that you want. And many times I I'll have sales people and they're just going on and on and on and on and on about the customer that they just spent days with. And they bought somewhere else. Can't get 'em on the phone or they spent hours with, and they're not qualified to buy or they'll say, man, I, I can't, I can't get anything going this month. Stop. 'em see. All they're doing is they're ruminating the initial appraisal. So they're going on and on and on and on, on about the same thing. Which is only going to lead to emotions that you don't want. So I'll tell 'em why are you talking about something that all that does is stirs up more negative emotions and is gonna actually pull you away from the direction that you wanna go, because you gotta understand something. Your emotions can either empower you or disempower you. They can empower you through acceptance and reappraisal and expression. They can lead you to your goals or they can disempower you you could stay stuck in this situation and not do anything productively and just go deeper and deeper, deeper, and they pull you further and further away from your goals. The third way in effectively regulating your emotions. So to recap, we've had acceptance, we've had reappraisal and now we're gonna end with expression the power of the words through expression, you can either dig a ditch or you can build a bridge. You can dig a ditch and make your hole deeper, or you can see the hole for what it is. And say, Hmm. How can I build a bridge over this? Being able to express your thoughts is so powerful. And if you took one of the three and started on, I would start with the expression because through the expression is going to help you accept and reappraise. So a few ways that I use the power of expression. I write, I use a mic and I have confidants. And let me drill each one of these down for you. The first one is I write, I write every single day, have a legal pad. Every single day I write some of 'em I using a mic and put on an episode and others just get stored in a big bin right behind the camera here. Writing has literally saved my life. It did. And I wasn't a guy that was the traditional journaling kind of guy. I wasn't that guy. So what I did is I started writing word for word, powerful words that I was reading to help get my life back on track. I didn't have those words to express and put on paper. And I didn't want to just sit down and write a bunch of negative things over and over again, because what would happen is I would stay on that wheel. I needed something productive to actually kick out one of the side walls in that wheel. So that way I could go off in a different direction. I was sick and tired of living the way that I was. So by writing. Word for word out of a book and then rereading those things. It began to change the narrative in my mind. And as I began to write, I began to get more creative and see things differently in life. And that's when the sales life came about in October of 2017. And I decided to record these words. Now. Lemme tell you about the podcast. The podcast is for me because as I write the words and put my expressions on paper, because I have a microphone, it. Forces me to be more concise with my words, concise with my thinking and deliver it in an effective way. And because I've recorded these things they're archived. That way I can go back and listen to episodes that I recorded years ago, but there there're references for me and I can listen to it in the moment and say, man, I've gotten away from this, or I forgot about this and apply it to my life. That's the first reason why I have the podcast for me to reference to. Because I'll forget these things, I'll get away from these things. The second reason why I record the podcast is so that my children have something that when I'm not around or no longer here, they can listen to dad and say, wow, they can come to me for advice. And I don't even have to be there. And they can take it for generations to come. And the third reason is for the friends that I know and ones I haven't met yet, people like you. And so now you can listen to the sales life and some of the things that I'm going through, you can relate to. And you can say me too. And develop some new thoughts and ways of being more effective in life. And then I have confidants people that are close to me that I can express my feelings. Now here's the thing about expression. Aside from writing aside from a microphone and side note on the microphone part. Even if you don't publish it, just record it, it'll help you speak better and you can just archive it. Just have it recorded. It could be visually. Or it could just be audio doesn't matter, it's yours and if maybe one day you wanna publish it, maybe one day you wanna share it with someone, maybe nobody ever sees it. It's fine. It's, it's expressing yourself in a more formal nature. Now, the last part confidant, getting back to that, the confidant. Is that inner circle where you can express yourself to other people. Now, let me tell you this about expression. It doesn't mean that you get to talk about the same thing over and over again with them. You're not allowed to, you're not allowed for that other person to just become a public dumping ground. And all you're doing is talking about the same thing over and over. You've had people like that. Right. And they call you with the same stuff over and over again. You're like, bro, when you gonna get things together, man, so expression is cool. Get it out, talk about it. But then also begin to build a bridge. And if you build the right inner circle, they're actually gonna use all three methods with you. Expression means that they're gonna allow you to talk and they're not gonna spin it and make it all about them. You ever have those. friends that you've talked to and the minute you start sharing something that you're frustrated with or dealing with and they immediately spin it. Yeah. And let me tell you about, and then they like, man, can you listen? Do you even want to know what's going on in my life? , so if you develop the right inner circle, the right confidants will allow you to express yourself. They'll listen to you. They'll let you get it out. And then. They'll help you build that bridge by acceptance. Number one, this is a bad situation. What you're gonna do? Yeah, it's bad. Okay. What's your, what's your choices here? So they'll help you with acceptance and they'll also help you with reappraisal. They'll help you spin some things in a different way. They'll offer some new ways of looking at it too. It's what a good confidant does. I'll wrap up with this. If you remember at the beginning, I said that you should regulate your emotions. So that way they always work in your favor. And for weeks after I read that, I interpreted it as, so that things always go your way. But as I've sat on these thoughts and really swirled 'em around in my mind, It's regulating your emotions so that they always work in your favor. Through the power of acceptance, controlling the controllables through reappraisal, the power of the spin and through expression, building a bridge. So that way, no matter what happens in your life, the results may not always be in your favor, but regulating your emotions will be more favorable. Thanks so much for being here for more on the sales life. Go to marsh buice.com that's M a R S H B U I C E. And there you will find the blogs videos and of course, podcast episodes in the bottom, right. Is a mic from you to me, let me know what's going on in your world and how I can help. I'm no hair, but I'm all ears. Remember. As we always close out the greatest sale that you will ever make is the sale you on you because you're more than enough. Stay amazing. Stay in the sales life.