Fear

In sales, the most obvious and insidious disruptive emotion is fear. Fear is the root of so much failure in sales. It holds you back from asking for what you want, prospecting, getting through the doors of C-level prospects, being assertive, getting to the next step, and walking away from bad deals; it clouds objectivity and breeds insecurity.

Insecurity

Insecurity drowns confidence and enthusiasm (passion). If we were to strip sales down to its rawest level, we'd learn that sales is simply one person transferring emotions to another person. This transference goes back and forth from the salesperson to the stakeholder and the stakeholder to the salesperson. When you feel and act confident and enthusiastic, the probability that your stakeholder will be fully engaged and comply with requests you make goes up exponentially.

Desperation

Desperation is a disruptive emotion that causes you to feel insecure, make poor decisions, and become needy and weak. It makes you unattractive to other people. You become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions.

When you are desperate, rather than focusing your thoughts on what is required for success, you focus on what will happen to you if you fail. Instead of believing you will win, you assume you will lose, thereby attracting failure.

Stakeholders can sense desperation and are repelled by it. Through your actions, tone of voice, words, and body language, you send the message that you are desperate and weak. Stakeholders gravitate toward confidence.

Need for Significance

The most insatiable human need is the need to feel important or significant. This egocentric need can become one of your most disruptive emotions when left unchecked. Your need to feel important can cause you to be so focused on yourself that you pitch and pontificate, talk over other people, fail to listen, and arrogantly talk about yourself. These behaviors destroy emotional connections with stakeholders.

Attachment

The dark side of competitiveness is attachment. This disruptive emotion causes you to become so attached to winning, getting what you want, looking good in front of others, wanting everyone to agree with you, and always being right that you lose perspective and objectivity. Attachment is the enemy of self-awareness and the mother of delusion.

Worry

Mark Twain once said, “I've experienced many terrible things in my life, a few of which actually happened.” The downside of your brain's vigilant crusade to keep you safe and alive is its tendency to focus on the negative—what could go wrong, rather than what could go right.

From a purely evolutionary point of view this made sense because those who avoided danger in the first place were more likely to perpetuate their genes. But there is a big difference between avoiding something that might kill you and a social threat.

The amygdala, though, treats all threats the same. So, we worry and ruminate and play worst-case scenarios over and over in our heads.

Worry itself can trigger the fight-or-flight response and the stream of disruptive emotions that come with it. It can lead to the Three Ps¹—procrastination, perfectionism, and paralysis—disruptive emotions that hold you back in prospecting and sales.

Worrying about events that have not yet happened plagues salespeople. As you roll through the scenario in your head and see yourself failing, embarrassed, or rejected, you let the air out of confidence, create insecurity where it didn't previously exist, or even avoid the situation altogether.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Fundamental attribution error, sometimes called correspondence bias, causes you to label the behavior of other people based on perceived internal characteristics or flaws versus external factors. Instead of assuming positive intent when attributing⁴ reasons for another person's behavior, you think the worst of other people.⁵

Self-Serving Bias

The self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute positive events to your own character but attribute negative events to external factors.⁶ Essentially, the self-serving bias is a disruptive emotion that prevents you from owning and being accountable for actions that may negatively impact your egocentric belief system and self-esteem.

Self-Enhancement Bias

Humans have a basic desire and motivation to see themselves in a positive light and preserve self-esteem. Therefore, we tend to seek out evidence that supports our view of ourselves.

This can be a positive emotion in situations where we've been rejected or hit a roadblock, because it helps us reframe our self-talk, see ourselves in a positive light, and get back up.

The self-enhancement bias becomes destructive when it inhibits self-awareness⁷ and blinds us to our faults and weaknesses, reducing our drive for self-development and growth; or causes us to avoid coaching and feedback when it might reveal a truth we are afraid of facing.

Optimism Bias

We learned earlier that optimism is a core component of Sales Drive. The dark side of optimism⁸ is that it can cause you to believe that you are less likely to experience a negative event—like losing a deal—than other people (sometimes referred to as comparative optimism⁹). The optimism bias can lead to delusion and blind you to potential pitfalls with buyers, stakeholders, deals, and competitors, leaving you exposed to surprises.

Overconfidence Effect

The key to ultra-high sales performance is an obsessive focus on win probabilities. This requires you to accurately estimate and forecast the potential of opportunities in your pipeline. The problem is that humans, including you, have the uncanny habit of systematically overestimating probability.

You've been there before. You've observed someone complete a difficult or complex task with ease and you've confidently declared, “I can do that!” It's only in the middle of doing it that you realize you've overestimated your abilities.

Likewise, overconfidence can cause you to invest time on low-probability prospects or fail to properly plan for sales meetings.

Overconfidence has three dimensions: overestimation of one's actual performance, overplacement of one's performance relative to others, and overprecision in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs.¹⁰

False Consensus and Confirmation Biases

Take a short spin on Facebook and you'll get up front and personal with the false consensus bias. This disruptive emotion leads you to believe that your values, beliefs, opinions, and habits are normal and therefore naturally shared by everyone else.¹¹ If people do not believe the same as you, they're labeled as abnormal or defective.

The false consensus bias can be extremely damaging in sales.

• It impedes empathy and causes you to project your beliefs on other people.
• When you assume that stakeholders are on the same page with you, you ask fewer questions and become less curious.
• Stakeholders who do not share your views are considered flawed and you tend to talk at them and pitch in the attempt to argue them into believing that they are wrong.

Salespeople whose objectivity is clouded by this bias are often surprised when stakeholders don't buy. Instead of looking inward for where they may have failed, they blame the stakeholder or label them stupid.

Humans also have a nasty tendency to form a belief and then seek out information that supports and confirms that belief while ignoring any evidence that refutes it. This is called the confirmation bias.

The confirmation bias obscures the truth. You can observe the confirmation bias in full force at the end of the quarter as salespeople miss forecast, blindsided by deals that did not close because they ignored contradictory evidence that was staring them in the face the entire time.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Most of us believe that we make rational decisions about investments based on our self-interest and a future state we desire. The truth is, in many cases, these decisions are influenced more by what we have already invested.

Once we have invested, time, money, and emotion into anything, humans have a bad habit of throwing good money after bad, believing falsely that they “can't give up now.”

This sunk cost fallacy can cause you to become attached to a low-probability deal once you've invested time, effort, and emotion into it—even though the evidence is clear that it will never close. Average salespeople usually have a pipeline full of sunk cost deals.

Know Your Emotional Triggers

There are situations, words, types of people, and circumstances in your sales day that trigger disruptive emotions.¹²

Some emotional triggers, like getting cut off in traffic or being confronted by a rude person, occur without your consent. Others, like allowing yourself to walk into potentially stressful or anxiety-inducing situations when you are tired, hungry, or already experiencing an overwhelming cognitive load, are self-inflicted.

Many triggers, like facing rejection on prospecting calls, giving presentations, and dealing with upset customers, are part of the job and unavoidable. Awareness of these triggers makes it much easier to avoid, plan for, anticipate, or respond to them appropriately.

Learn to anticipate triggers and become aware of both your physiological and emotional response leading up to and at the point of the trigger. With awareness, you gain the control required to consciously regulate the disruptive emotion in the moment, and still accomplish your objective.

Preparation and Practice

Stressful situations, say an important presentation to a C-level stakeholder while your manager observes, may trigger disruptive emotions that derail you. Your nervousness can spill over into insecurity, causing you to look and act as though you lack confidence or stumble over your presentation.

The most effective way to manage disruptive emotions in these situations is through advance preparation and practice. Take time up front to prepare yourself by researching the people involved, anticipating the questions they may ask, stepping into their shoes, and considering their viewpoint.

Then practice. Roll through the demo or presentation several times in advance or role-play the sales conversation with your manager or a peer. Play out all the worst-case scenarios so that you are prepared for any eventuality.

On my team, when we are doing a group presentation, we practice together and talk openly about where our disruptive emotions might derail us. For example, one of the big problems with team presentations is the disruptive need to feel important. This manifests itself when team members jump in and talk over each other, or feel like they need to make their point after another team member has made a point—one-upping one another.

We agree in advance who will say what and who will answer which questions. We practice shutting up, and we develop signals to help each other become aware, in the moment, when a disruptive emotion is causing our behavior to run amok.

Preparation calms the mind and builds confidence. You'll find that when you take the time to practice, the actual situation, when you are in it, seems much easier. Your mind is prepared to anticipate disruptive emotions and rise above them.

Pre-Call Planning

Average salespeople wing it. They leave sales call outcomes to chance and their emotions drifting in the wind. Ultra-high performers plan for sales calls in advance by asking and answering four questions:

1. What do I know?
2. What do I want to know?
3. What is my call objective?
4. What is my targeted next step?

Pre-call planning allows them to consider multiple scenarios, develop an agenda, build questions in advance, and determine the commitment for which they'll be asking.

Positive Visualization

We learned earlier that our minds are hardwired to think about the worst. When faced with an emotionally unpleasant task, we begin creating negative outcomes in our mind—outcomes that don't exist. Without intervention, these internal narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies.

For instance, Lisa expects to encounter resistance on a prospecting call. This negative visualization makes her feel insecure. Lacking confidence, she approaches the call with trepidation. When the prospect answers, she stumbles over her words, sounding weak and pathetic. The prospect bulldozes over her. Lisa is shaken and expects she'll get even more resistance on her next call.

“Because the brain's focus on threat and danger far outperforms the reward capacities of the brain, it is important to keep a deliberate eye on positive possibilities,”¹³ advises Scott Halford in his book, Activate Your Brain. Had Lisa approached the call with confidence, her demeanor alone would have reduced resistance and generated a more positive outcome.

It is for this reason that elite athletes¹⁴ and elite salespeople employ visualization to preprogram the subconscious brain. When you visualize success, you teach your mind to act in a way that is congruent with actualizing that success.¹⁵

Begin by focusing on your breathing. Slow it down. Then in your mind's eye go step-by-step through each part of the call. Focus on how it feels to be confident. Imagine what you will say, what you will ask. Visualize yourself succeeding. Repeat this process again and again until you've trained your mind to manage the disruptive emotions that lead down the dark path of failure.

Manage Self-Talk

There is an endless and ongoing stream of chatter inside your head, shaping your emotions and outward actions. The conversation you are having with yourself will either build your attitude, strengthen your belief system, and generate a winning mind-set or trigger disruptive emotions that destroy you.

Unlike emotions that are activated without your consent, self-talk is completely within your control. You make the choice to think positively or negatively. To pick yourself up or tear yourself down. To see a glass half-full or half-empty. To be aware or delusional.

Sit quietly and listen to the conversation in your head—the words you are using, the questions you are asking. Then resolve to change those words to support the image of who you want to be, how you want to act, and how you want to feel. Make an intentional decision to remain tuned in to your inner voice. When it goes negative, stop and change the conversation.

Change Your Physiology

Studies on human behavior from virtually every corner of the academic world have proven time and again that we can change how we feel by changing our physical posture. In other words, internal emotions may be shaped by your outward physiology. For example, when you slump your shoulders, lower your chin, and look at the floor—physical signals of insecurity—you feel less confident.

A change in physical posture not only elicits a change in emotions,¹⁶ but it also triggers a neurophysiological response.¹⁷ For example, we know that the hormones cortisol and testosterone play a significant role in creating the feeling of confidence. Research by Amy Cuddy of Harvard University demonstrates that “power posing,” physically standing in a posture of confidence, even when you don't feel confident, impacts testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, influencing confidence.¹⁸

Moms know this. They've have been giving us this same advice for years. Sit up straight and you'll feel better. Keep your head up. Most inside sales trainers teach salespeople that putting a smile on their face will transfer that smile to their voice.

Act as though you are enthusiastic, think enthusiastic thoughts, and use enthusiastic language, and you will begin to feel enthusiastic and eventually become enthusiastic. Even the simple act of saying “I'm awesome!” when someone asks you how you are doing can lift your mood and cause you to feel awesome—even if you don't.

We know that when you dress your best, you feel your best. When you put your shoulders up and chin up, you look and feel confident. Use assertive and assumptive words, phrases, and voice tone, and you will be more powerful and credible—and more likely to get a yes when you ask for what you want.

Obstacle Immunity

The noncommissioned officers who had served overseas in combat nodded and laughed in acknowledgment of the uncomfortable truth. They'd rather take live fire than make cold calls to 18-year-old recruits.

These military recruiters were struggling to make their mission, but not because they lacked talent or passion. Rather, interrupting people and dealing with potential rejection were such daunting emotional obstacles—at least in their minds.

When the military brought me in to speak to the recruiters, those calls felt easy to me. In my mind, the recruiters were doing the high school kids and their parents a favor: giving the kids a job, college tuition, and amazing benefits. The soldiers, though, felt fear. They could only see rejection.

For the soldiers, cold calling recruits in an environment that they could not control and did not understand created, what felt like, an insurmountable emotional obstacle.

In training, the military had run them through endless live fire drills, conditioning their minds to become immune to that fear before sending them into war zones. Most people, placed into a situation where an enemy is shooting at them, might freeze or run, potentially getting other people killed. These soldiers, however, controlled their natural fight-or-flight response and raced headlong into dangerous situations.

It was only when I drew the parallel between how they had been trained to overcome the obstacle of fear in the face of live fire and how they could apply the same methodology for overcoming their fear of calling 18-year-old recruits that the lights clicked on.

You must teach your rational brain to tell your emotional brain that the obstacle that seems so big in the moment is actually quite small. This begins by putting yourself in position to experience the perceived obstacle and the accompanying emotions again and again.

Self-control in the face of obstacles is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger you get.

Once you begin intentionally facing fears and emotionally uncomfortable situations, you'll learn to anticipate the anxiety that comes right before the obstacle. You'll begin shifting your internal self-talk and outward physical reaction to that fear. Soon what once seemed an insurmountable obstacle becomes routine.

Push Pause

We've established that the initial physiological fight-or-flight response is involuntary. The adrenaline rushing through your bloodstream occurs without your consent. In this state, with your body and brain drunk on neurochemicals, it is hard to think and keep your composure.

But adrenaline is short-lived. The fight-or-flight response is only meant to get you out of trouble long enough to allow you to consider, rationally, your options and next move. The secret to gaining control of disruptive emotions in the moment is simply giving your rational brain (neocortex) a chance to catch up and take control.

In her book Emotional Alchemy, Tara Bennett-Goleman calls this the “magic quarter second”¹⁹ that allows you to keep the disruptive emotions you feel from becoming emotional reactions you express.

In fast-moving situations, to effectively deal with disruptive emotions you need only a millisecond for your logical brain to wake up and tell the amygdala to stand down. This allows you to regain your poise and your control of the conversation.

The most effective means of giving yourself this moment is simply to pause before you speak. When you feel emotions taking over, slow your breathing and count to five. This simple pause allows time for adrenaline to dissipate and your rational brain to catch up and hold you back from rushing headlong onto the emotional roller-coaster.

In this brief pause you consider the unintended consequences of a potential response and instead focus on the outcome you really want.

Another strategy I use is called a ledge. It works well when facing a difficult question, an objection, or a direct challenge from a stakeholder. The ledge has the same effect as a pause—giving your rational brain the magic quarter second to catch up and take over.

Instead of stumbling through a nonsensical answer—coming off as defensive, weak, or unknowledgeable—or arguing, simply ledge with another question:

• “That's interesting—can you tell me why this is important to you?”
• “How so?”
• “Would you tell me more?
• “Interesting—could you walk me through that?”
• “Just to be sure I understand your question, could you elaborate a little more?”

The question keeps your stakeholder talking, giving you time to think and gain control of your emotions.

Focus on What You Really Want

“This damn unit is a lemon. I want a new one and I want it today!” Wayne's customer was screaming at him on the phone. It was July and the air conditioner his company had installed three months earlier was broken again. It was the third time, and his customer was livid.

Wayne, the second-generation owner of the HVAC company, could feel his blood begin to boil. He didn't like being talked to this way. He was trying to get a word in, but this guy wasn't even giving him a chance.

“How many units have I bought from you over the last year?” the customer screamed. Before Wayne could answer, his customer filled in the blank.

“Six. Six units and almost seventy-five thousand dollars. Plus, we have seven more on order for the renovations we have under way now. You'd think our business would mean something to you and you'd take this situation seriously!”

Wayne had had enough. How dare this asshole treat him this way! He hated it when customers threw how much they were spending in his face. He didn't like being trapped.

“If you aren't willing to stand by your equipment, I'm going to pull all of my business and take it to a competitor. Then I'm going to post it on social media and send a letter to the Better Business Bureau.” His customer was barely taking a breath between assaults.

Enough! Wayne exploded. His last words ended the conversation: “If you don't like the way we work, then take your business somewhere else!” When the dust cleared, he'd lost a customer.

In the moment, it felt good to let this customer, who had crossed the line, have it. Shortly thereafter, though, there was the headache of responding to the Better Business Bureau, dealing with the guy's rant on social media, responding to the manufacturer to whom the customer had lodged a complaint, and explaining to his father how he'd managed to lose a high-value customer who had been doing business with them for more than seven years.

In retrospect, he wished he'd kept his mouth shut and listened. Overall, it had been a good and profitable relationship. The customer was just upset and having a bad day. But Wayne lost control of his emotions and caused irreparable damage.

During intense conversations, when you are hurt, angry, and frustrated or your ego has been bruised, you dig in, stand your ground, and argue your point—even when your point is irrational. Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the argument digs in, too.

In this intractable situation, called psychological reactance, both people argue, neither being willing to back down. You become attached to winning, to being right. Emotions escalate and words become personal or biting until something is said that rips the relationship apart beyond repair. It's human, and it happens every day in person, on the phone, and via text, e-mail, and social media.

To emerge from these and other emotionally charged situations unscathed, you must rise above them and avoid responding in kind. Of course, in the heat of the moment this can be difficult and challenging—just ask Wayne.

There is a technique, though, that when employed will help you maintain your objectivity and perspective, and help you detach from the need to win the argument. The key is focusing on what you really want. The technique revolves around a simple question you ask yourself during the argument:

“Do I want _____ or do I want ___?”

For instance, if you are having an argument with a spouse or family member, you might ask yourself, “Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?”

The question that might have helped Wayne avoid losing a valuable customer is: “Do I want to be right or do I want to keep this customer?”

When you are meeting with a stakeholder who brags on and on about how much he knows about your product, you want to show him how much you know, too. But, before you interrupt and talk over him, ask yourself, “Do I want to feel significant or do I want to get this stakeholder on my side and move to the next step?”

Emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman says that this deliberate, top-down process of putting the rational brain in charge is the key to self-control in emotionally charged situations.²⁰ It's about thinking about the consequences of acting on your disruptive emotions and then consciously choosing how you will respond rather than indulging in the luxury of allowing your emotional brain to run free.