This is a continuation of Three Keys To Emotional & Sales Mastery – Part 1
Where we discussed the 3 keys to managing your emotional state and turning yourself on, as a quick reminder they are:
Physiology – Your physical body, and how it feels at this moment.
Mental Focus – What you are paying attention at any time effects how you feel.
The Language You Use With Yourself And Your Clients – How do you frame things with your language?
In this post we will discuss Physiology specifically and the different tips and tricks I’ve used throughout the year to build a healthy lifestyle and build sales success.
One major lesson I learned or relearned from attending Tony Robbins seminars is that emotions are created by motion and how you move your body.
One of the questions that Tony asks the attendees is that If you look at someone who is depressed what are they doing with their body ?
If you look at someone feeling depressed it’s easy to identify them because they are going to be looking down, they will not be taking up much space, they won’t be making eye contact, they will be breathing shallowly and they will be frowning.
Most people believe that you feel an emotion and you then put your body into a certain posture, you make your face put on a certain expression that goes with that emotion.
The exact opposite is true. You are first making the changes with your posture, how you breath, your facial expression, where you look at and then you get the result of feeling depressed.
You make the change in your body first and then the emotion is what follows. If you want more of the science behind this check out this great Ted Talk – Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are.
The body is a biofeedback mechanism and the way you position your body and how you hold your body will drastically change how you feel.
And how you feel will absolutely effect your behavior.
I’ll repeat this again because it’s extremely important with regards to sales.
How you feel will effect your behavior.
How you feel will also effect your clients behavior because it will effect how they feel.
A big part of how you feel at any given moment directly is related to your body.
Changing the way you move your body is easy if you are aware of it.
So if you are in an un-resourceful state, change the way you MOVE! This is the quickest way to change the way you feel! Change the way you MOVE your Body. Move your Body in a different way!
To truly take charge of your physiology you must be in line with your body and aware of your body.
How deeply are you breathing right now?
How are you standing or sitting?
What is your posture?
What is your facial expression?
Are you smiling?
Remember emotions are feelings, you feel them in your body.
True emotional mastery starts with how you use your body. And if you really want to be a true master you must be able to adapt your body to get yourself into peak energy at any time.
Imagine your dream client walks into the office and you are not feeling so great, how valuable would it be if you could shift your emotional state instantly and handle the presentation?
How I came across emotional fitness and emotional mastery initially began because I was studying energy.
The questions I was obsessed with at the time were:
What is energy?
How do you get more energy?
Why do some people have more energy than others?
My thought process was this:
If you have unlimited energy how difficult will your problems seem?
If you had unlimited energy, what would life be like?
The emotional state you are in at any given time, effects the amount of energy you have.
If you are in a un-resourceful emotional state it can be difficult to even get out of bed.
When I was overweight and not working out on a consistent basis, it was far more challenging to get the energy I needed to achieve goals.
Goal achievement and sales achievement absolutely require a high level of energy. And having a high level of energy requires that you are in a resourceful emotional state.
Now that I’m fit and healthy I have much greater resources to pull from and much more energy reserves to draw on.
When I was Living in New York I started training in Muay Thai kickboxing. Eventually I fell in love with trail running and running Ultra Marathons here in the Bay Area. At one point I was a even NASM certified personal trainer. All because I was obsessed with endurance and energy in the body.
Physical training translates into mental training. If you put high physical demands on yourself the mental demands don’t seem nearly as challenging or daunting.
Google’s Eric Schmidt the former CEO of Google mentioned on Reid Hoffman’s new podcast Masters of Scale that when he was hiring for Google’s Sales Department he would look for people who were former Olympians or NFL Players because he believed the physical discipline and determination it required to excel at a high level physically would translate directly into the sales context.
I agree with this and can verify it from first hand experience, anyone who’s excelled at a sport has a huge opportunity to excel in sales. The sport itself does not matter, I’ve seen people with backgrounds in tennis, water polo, football, marathoners, and athletes of all kinds excel in sales and I believe a big part of that is the physical disciplines they learned in their sport of choice.
The key take away is this: The training be it mental or physical, must never stop. You’ve got to consistently put yourself in a place where the training is on-going. This is how you truly get control of your emotions, through training them.
After getting into Marathon’s I transitioned into running Ultra Marathons (Distances of over 26.2 Miles). I’ve completed a number of 50Ks and 50 Milers and I am currently training for a 100 mile race in November 2017.
I look at Ultra Marathons as Mental, not just Physical Training. It’s a great lesson for sales because sales is very much like a marathon.
Being active physically, making specific demands on the body makes sales easier.
Your body is the vehicle for your mind and your spirit. Your body is what is moving you forward. Now if you neglect your body, your sales will on some level suffer because your health with suffer.
How healthy you feel will influence how many sales you make.
If you feel like crap, it’s going to be much much harder to pick up the phone.
In the words of Jim Rohn, your body is a Temple…. not a Wood Shed. And some people treat their body like a woodshed.
Another thing that Jim Rohn said that really resonated with me is this: If you want to be healthy, study health and if you want to be wealthy study wealth.
I took this to heart and decided that I would take my health into my own hands and make it a consistent and on-going study and I encourage you to do the same thing. Anything you want in life, make it a study.
Now I’d like to share with you what I’ve discovered in my almost 10 years of studying health to save you some time.
The more I learned about energy and the body the more I realized that the body is capable of miraculous things if you treat it well and provide it with what it needs.
My philosophy is that your health is your wealth. And my top value is health. Health is what I value most.
Here are a few different health habits that have helped me to dramatically increase my health and as a result my sales and emotional fitness. You don’t have to adopt all of these as they are what work for me they certainly may not work for everyone out there. In my opinion any behavior or habit is worth trying on for a few months or weeks to determine if it works for you. I use this methodology for sales as well as health practices.
****I am also not a doctor so please consult you doctor before trying out any of these habits.*******
The Key To More Energy – Alkalize and Energize
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” – Hippocrates
You can think of your body as an ongoing biochemical process. The quality of those biochemicals at any given time is going to be the quality of your life and they quality of your emotions.
In my quest to get more energy naturally I discovered the power of an Alkaline diet. Your blood PH level is supposed to be slightly Alkaline. If you look at someone with major health problems and you test their PH levels they will typically be highly acidic. An acidic environment is an environment where disease can grow.
One way to ensure your creating a biochemical environment that is disease preventing instead of disease creating is to eat more Alkaline foods and limit your intake of acidic foods, here is an easy chart that outlines what foods are acidic and what foods are alkaline.
Join A Group Fitness Class
If you are looking to get back into shape quickly and easily one of the most powerful things you can do is join any kind of group fitness class. (If you live in the Bay Area – Specifically the East Bay – I’d recommend Pacific Ring Sports if you are interested in getting into martial arts.) Really any group fitness class will provide:
- Accountability – A group fitness class naturally provides more accountability because you are accountable to the group not just yourself. People will typically do more for other people than they will for themselves.
- Variety In Your Exercises – One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen with people working out consistently is that they get board or they go to the gym and they leave early or they figure out some excuse not to push themselves harder.
- Friends – You can make a lot of friends by joining a group workout class, you might even get some Referrals!
Do Physical Challenges That Push You To Grow.
In the end the kind of exercise is not important. What is important is that you make it a habit and make it consistent. Once you have that down, pick something that would be a challenge for you to do. It might be a marathon or it might be Tough Mudder or it might be climbing a mountain or doing an iron man. When you pick a physical goal that challenges you the benefits are tremendous in the type of character you will build in yourself.
Determination, grit, and perseverance are key personality trains that all top performing sales people possess. A physical challenge is another great way to train for this ability that pays countless dividends over time.
Get A Standing Desk
When I was a studying to become a NASM certified personal trainer I learned a lot about movement imbalances that are created from working in an office. If you look at the majority of people who work in an office they have poor posture and they are hunched over their desk. Over a long time working in an office this can cause your hip flexors to be tight because you are sitting down all day. It also can cause the top of your back to be rounded.
Long term sitting will take years off your life check out this study for more information.
If you stand while you present you are using your entire body this will make your presentations more effective and you’ll live longer. You can thank me later. This is a game changer. If you don’t have a standing desk at work, build your own like I did by following this life hacker article, all for under 25 dollars! EASY!
If You Are Standing All Day – Don’t Wear Dress Shoes with Heel on Them
Another major movement imbalance is caused by wearing dress shoes with a heel. Find a good looking dress shoe that doesn’t have a heel and you’ll prevent a lot of ankle sprains and injuries. Simple change but it makes a huge difference.
Limit Caffeine Intake, Give It Up, Or Cycle On and Off
I’m currently cycled off of caffeine. In the past I’ve drank my fair share of red bull, coffee, and even chewed caffeine gum. I think the important thing to remember about Caffeine is that it’s a drug. Caffeine is a stimulant and stimulants effect your bio-chemistry and your emotional state.
What I noticed is that for me personally caffeine amplifies the specific emotional states of anger and anxiety. If I had a really big presentation coming up, being in an anxious state is not super helpful. And when you are stuck in traffic having a little irritation get amplified into anger is not super helpful either.
I am not saying that you have to give up Red Bull or give up coffee but you may want to limit your intake for a few reasons or at least cycle off of it for a few weeks every few months.
- If you stay on caffeine for years and years with no break you risk adrenal fatigue.
- If you never cycle off you’ll have to increase your dosage to get the same results. (You know your in trouble when 3 espresso shots does not effect you in any way)
- You harm your sleep cycle. Ever hear people complain about all these different thoughts racing through their head before they go to bed and they just can’t get to sleep. 9 times out of 10 this is probably due to the amount of caffeine they consume.
If you are interested in giving up caffeine for a while or cycling off I’d recommend going to whole foods and getting a bottle of L-Thyrosine. L-Thyrosine is an amino acid if you take it when you are cycling off caffeine it gets rid of the caffeine withdrawal. ( Thank you to Tim Ferriss for this one!)
Limit Alcohol Intake
As you already know, alcohol is going to effect you the next day, if you are hung over you are not going to deliver your best work. It also effects your sleep cycles and your emotional states.
The Key To Being Extremely Effective – Get Great Sleep
Getting a good night sleep has a huge effect on your emotional state. If you’ve heard that phrase someone has gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that person getting poor sleep risks squandering an entire day and loosing sales. Getting great sleep is a secret to being extremely effective.
- Get a Great Bed – A wise person once told me. Get comfortable shoes and a really great bed. You are going to be on your feet all day and you are going to spend a third of your life sleeping. The rational is this if you spend a third of your life on a bed you might as well invest in a good one because you are going to be spending a lot of time there. You are going to spend at least 1 third of your life sleeping you might as well get the most out of your bed and your sleep.
- Get a Black Out Curtain – Have a completely dark room to sleep in does wonders for the quality of sleep you get. This small investment has literally transformed the sleep I get.
- Unplug From Your Devises – Cell phone buzzing next to you at night? This has been shown to interrupt your sleep. Unplug for a while, you’ll feel better.
My Favorite Books On Health and Exercise:
Why make the money if you don’t have your health?
If you take care of your body you’ll feel great! And you’ll make a lot more money!
Stay tuned for the next installment in this series on emotional mastery where we will we discuss the power of taking control of what you focus on. In the meantime, stay healthy my friends!
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