39: Feeling Overwhelmed and Getting Out of a Negative Tailspin

Thanks for listening to the Make It Happen podcast. If you have any topics or questions you want me to cover in future episodes, hit me up on social, at John M. Barrows. That's John M. as in Michael, Barrows. Make it happen. Hey, everybody, it's John Barrows with J. Barrows Consulting. Thank you so much for chiming in. It is Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully, you all had a fantastic weekend. My weekend was pretty solid after a crazy day of travel. I went from San Francisco Monday, Tuesday last week all the way over to Dublin, Ireland on Thursday. Came home late on Friday. Shut down on Friday because I got a whole bunch of stuff done on the flight back. And that's part of what I'm going to hear to talk about is prioritization and everything else.

And then just had a good weekend with the family and also watched the Pats smoke the Titans on Saturday night. So one more step to number six here. I know you all hate it who aren't Patriots fans, but suck it. I'm going to keep bragging about it until the end. So we'll see what happens. They still got to earn the next one. Jacksonville is going to be a tough one. But anyways, today, what I wanted to chat about briefly is feeling overwhelmed and or getting into a negative tailspin. Because last week, I sat down and I thought I had everything pretty well mapped out. I actually didn't have a lot of stuff to do on my flight from San Francisco to Dublin. Usually, I pile my flights with a lot of projects and stuff that can wait until non-selling hours, if you will.

So I chilled out a little bit, watched a movie, got some stuff done. But then when I landed and started prepping for my next day, I kind of got hooked on my calendar. And I started to, because I color-coded all my calendar. I'll show you what I'm about to do here. But one of the things I started to just get overwhelmed because I started looking at Q1 and realizing I'm booked solid all the way through March and with training days. And I don't mean just a couple of training days and I'm leaving fluff in there so I can have some flexibility. I mean, I am absolutely booked solid. You know, usually Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, at least. If not, sometimes Mondays and Fridays with training days because it's sales kickoff season.

Excuse me. And, you know, this is the time where everybody wants to get going pretty strong in their year. And I train prospecting. That's a big part of what I train. So everybody wants to do prospecting at the beginning of the year, get things off right, and then go from there. So right now, it's by far my busiest time. And I can always tell how my year is going to do based on how my Q1 goes. My Q1 is really strong. The rest of my year, I know, is going to be strong. So obviously, for now, obviously, I think I'm going to have a pretty good year here because, and I'm going to share my screen. I know on the blog, you can't really see this, but this is what got me a little bit overwhelmed here.

So this is this week. Actually, I'll take a look at last week again. Last week was San Francisco, twice, and then all the way over to Dublin. And then this week is, let's see, another place in California, then Orlando. Next week is Vegas, Washington State, Indy, Jacksonville. Week after that is Boston a couple of times, D.C. a couple of times. Week after that is Dallas and Vegas and Pleasanton, California, and so on and so on. And so I started looking at this and going, whoa. And I don't know about you guys, but every once in a while, based on as much stuff as I have going on, I'd say about once a year, I have somewhat of a freak out in the sense where my brain starts going and all of a sudden one thing leads to another.

And I start freaking out about all the different things that I have on my plate. And I almost have somewhat of a nervous breakdown. Usually it's in the shower, which is why sometimes I'll stay in the shower for a solid half hour, 45 minutes. Just to try to get my shit together. And that kind of happened last week. I mean, I wasn't overly freaking out about it, but I definitely had one of those moments like, holy shit. And it was because a lot of clients were calling me asking for time on my calendar and I'm looking for time on my calendar to either just have a phone call, nevermind, do some more training. And I couldn't find any times. And so after that somewhat brief freak out moment, because I think we can all get overwhelmed here.

I think we can all, there's so many things being asked of us to do, specifically in sales, juggle clients, prospect, close, whatever, that it is easy sometimes to feel overwhelmed with what you're doing. And I just wanted to chat about that today and just kind of walk you through what happens to me and what I do. And also then sometimes how that being overwhelmed tends to get into a negative tailspin and you start moving in the wrong direction. Because what I found is sales specifically, a lot about sales is about momentum, positive or negative. You know, it's when things are going well, they seem like they keep going well. So, you know, you close that contract, that next client calls you that you weren't expecting and they're asking for your business, that inbound lead comes.

And then all of a sudden, things just start happening positive. You know, you hit every green light on your way to work. You know, somebody opens the door for you. Those types of things, that positive energy definitely moves in a positive momentum, which is why you've heard tips before. You know, whenever you get off the phone, for instance, and you close that big deal, don't take a victory lap. Hold off on that victory lap. Make a phone call. Like with that positive energy and that positive vibe, make a phone call immediately afterwards to your most difficult client or your hardest prospect or something like that because that transfer of enthusiasm. You know, you've heard me talk about this before where sales, somebody told me this early in my career that sales is about the transfer of enthusiasm.

And I firmly and I absolutely believe in that. And I believe it's a positive thing. It just leads to positive momentum. But the same holds true for negative stuff. So once all of a sudden things start going bad, you lose that contract. A client cancels the meeting on you. You didn't get the contract by the end of the year. And then all of a sudden, you know, it starts just to be negative. And you hit every red light on the way to work. And your boss pulls you in and talks to you about something. And somebody has a problem at work. So again, it's negative momentum and more positive momentum. We got to do everything we can to continue to move things in a positive direction when they're moving in that direction, but do everything we can to stop negative momentum.

And so I'll walk you through a little bit of a few things that I did. And by the way, as always, just ask questions. Feel free to hit me up on the Facebook chat thing here. This is really for you, not really for me. So don't be shy on questions. And I'll talk about anything as it relates to sales or business or life. But this one specifically, I thought, hit a mark for me personally last week. So first things first is you just got to recenter yourself. One of the things without goals, without a guiding light, if you will, you tend to get lost. And I'm a shiny object guy. When something comes up, I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool. Let's go over there. Without goals, without something to drive towards, it's almost damn near impossible for me to stay focused and also stay centered.

So one of the things I went through a while back is with the Gary Vaynerchuk. I went to his 4D session. Some of you have heard of me talk about this before, where I went to Gary V's office, sat down with all his department heads. You know, it was about 15 of us, 15 entrepreneurs. And every one of them gave us a pretty big presentation on what they talked to their biggest clients about. And then Gary comes in at the end and does like a two hour Q&A session. Got a ton of value out of it. But one of the things that really struck me and reminded me was you always have to be remembered. Remember the why. Why are you doing what you're doing, right? And from a business, what's your why? And that essence of what's your why is really important to figure out, especially if you're going to start a business.

But also, I don't care, even if you're just a rep, even if you're somebody who's just going through the day to day, why are you doing what you're doing and what is important about it that makes you feel better than just collecting a paycheck, for instance. And a lot of that also has to do with setting that goal or that vision of a few years out, where do you want to be? And I used to laugh a lot at that, you know, where do you want to be in five years question that I always used to get in interviews. And, you know, I think it's stupid to think about that in the context of your company. You know, they have default names. I want to be a manager and leadership role in this organization. Whatever.

That is, I still kind of roll my eyes at that. But what I don't roll my eyes at is asking yourself that question of where do you want to be in five years? And I mean that personally. Like, what kind of, and I don't mean what kind of money, that'll get to that later. But literally, where do you want, what's that lifestyle look like for you in five years out? What kind of car do you want to be driving? House do you want to have? Family do you want to have? Time do you want to have to do certain things? Whatever. What does that lifestyle look like? And pin that down. And why do you want that lifestyle? Just because it sounds cool or because there's something to it. And then from there, back into what you need to do to get there.

So for instance, you know, want to live this type of lifestyle for me, it's to have a 50-50 split between, I know exactly the dollar figure that I want to hit. I've already hit that. But for me, it's more the combination or the percentage of on-site revenue that I'm driving to hit that number versus online and passive income that I'm using to drive that. Right now, it's a 70-30 split. 70% of my revenue I generate through flying around all over the world training this stuff. 30% is driven online. You know, my goal for the past three or four years has been to hit the revenue mark that I'm hitting but flip over those percentages. So 30% of my time is flying all around doing my thing and 70% is being generated through online.

Now, I put a whole bunch of things in place to try to address that in the past few years. And this year, I decided none of those were really working the way I wanted to. And that's why I decided to hire Morgan. It was to help me achieve that goal. It was to get him out there delivering a lot of the content and really going out there and being all over the place on flights and travel and everything else while I ratcheted back a little bit and focused a little bit more on the business instead of in the business. And so that was kind of my realization that the goal that I wanted, I had to figure out a different strategy to get there because I did everything I could but I thought to get there wasn't able to do it over the past couple of years.

So now Morgan's a piece of that. And that really helped me then back into the other goals of, okay, now what do I need to be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis to be able to hit that revenue target or that revenue mix that's going to allow me the lifestyle that I want to live in the future. And so first and foremost, that why is really important. If you haven't gone through that exercise for yourself, I really recommend you do it and that five-year plan of where you want to be because if you don't have goals, if you don't have something you're driving towards, then you're just along for the ride and somebody else is dictating the path. If you have goals, now you're driven. Now you're like, okay, now I got a guiding light and I want to be there.

That book, Think and Grow Rich, I think I've talked about it before, but that's a book by Napoleon, somebody Napoleon, something like that. And they talk, they give a bunch of stories of super successful people and what they've done and their story. And they say, look, I'm not going to tell you the secret to success in this book, but we're going to give you a bunch of stories and through these stories we'll be able to figure it out. And it's pretty evident right out of the gate that every single one of those super successful people had goals. And then they set that goal and they said, and they didn't let anything get in their way to get there. And that's what I would recommend looking at yourself about five years out.

Yeah, Napoleon Hill, that's what it was, about where do you want to be? Because you can eat a shit sandwich if you need to, if it's going to get you to that next role. So for instance, you know, a lot of people are like stuck in an SDR role or a BDR role or something like that. And they're like, oh man, you know, I don't like this because I'm doing the same mundane things or my boss isn't really treating me the way I should be treated or whatever. And then they go pop over to another SDR role or another SDR role, always looking for that short-term satisfaction, but they don't have that long-term vision. And I'll tell you right now, once you have that long-term vision and you back into it, now you can look at whatever your role is and say, look, as much as it sucks right now, I'm doing this role for a purpose.

It's helping me get to that next level. It's helping me get to that next stage. And so, like I said, I'll eat a shit sandwich for a year if I need to, if it's going to get me to that next role. So have those goals in place because it helps you stay centered as far as why you're doing what you're doing. And that was really important for me to take a recap last week of why am I doing this? I love doing what I do. You know, sales done right is my why because I really do believe that when sales is done right, it's the greatest profession in the world. When done wrong, it's the worst. But the bigger why for me is what is most important for most of us is my family and spending time with my family and allowing my family and myself the lifestyle that we want to live to enjoy our time here on earth as short as it is.

And that's why you'll see, you know, a lot of my videos and for those of you watching this, you know, I always have my bracelet on when I travel to remind myself and my daughter it's a bracelet my daughter put together for me says I love Daddy Charlotte and it's to remind me the ultimate why of why I do what I do is to give her a chance in this life of being successful and putting her in a position to be successful while balancing the act for me as far as staying home and spending time with her and helping guide her but also, you know, going out and developing my business and my revenue to show her first of all give her a good example but also drive enough money and revenue so we can live a certain lifestyle so that's my ultimate why and then, you know, from a business or from a personal standpoint my wife and my daughter and then backing into that the why of what I do is to elevate this profession so that other reps can do this right and really get to the point where sales is respected at a level that every other profession is I think it's getting there but it's still one of those things where people still roll their eyes when they say you know, what do you do and you tell them you're in sales and it's mainly because of the perception of the movies like Glengarry Glen Ross and all that stuff so with that understand your why stay focused write down your goals to write them down on a daily basis of what you want to get accomplished that day so that you know what you're doing and you have that you know, the shiny object syndrome is easier to address when you have those goals right in front of you I know you can't see it here but I have a whiteboard in front of my desk where I write down my goals of every single week what do I want to get accomplished this week and then I prioritize things so going back to trying to figure out how to be not as overwhelmed as I felt last week now it's sitting down and saying okay, what's really important based on my why based on what my goals are and what I'm trying to get accomplished now help me prioritize my activities and really ask yourself is this really important to be done right now and does it support where I'm going or can this be done later same thing with customers same thing with follow-up same thing with projects and everything else some small things I do if you're not using like I use Salesforce I don't understand how people don't use CRM to track everything that they do because that CRM is my you know, Salesforce is my memory, right?

and I am a task-oriented person I schedule myself activities every single day and that's how I start my day so again, I'll kind of jump into my screen here if I can do it real quick but if you look at my if you look at my Salesforce screen the first thing that pops up is all my activities that's my first view of the day let me see if I can share this with you guys share screen yep and so you'll notice there it is all my activities and I prioritize them too high, medium, low there's a simple thing in here let's see develop blog posts I got to do that today and you can go in there and just it's a high, medium, or low I've made blog posts of high priority on Mondays because I need to make sure I'm consistently putting out good content out there and then I look through all my other activities and I mow through them based on high those are things I absolutely have to do medium are the ones that I should do and low is the ones I can get back to so goal setting prioritization focus those are things that helped me kind of get back to saying okay I can handle this even though I looked out at my calendar I said I'm probably not going to be able to do trainings now until April May time frame and it's going to be hard for me to squeeze in calls with clients and everything else it was something that helped me stay grounded and also the why of my family and my wife and daughter it forced me to go into my calendar and block off days Saturday I'm sorry like Fridays and Mondays and forced to take a vacation no matter how busy I am because if I can't take time with my family if I can't take time with my wife and daughter or vacations or something like that what's the point right what's the point of what you're doing I would say Gary you know Gary V I follow his philosophy on this where you know goals don't have to be you know the amount of money you want to make or you know success isn't dictated by cash alone success is dictated by lifestyle if you're out there making $40,000 a year and you're living an awesome life with a great family and you get to spend the time with your kids and do what you want go to the you know games and stuff like that you win you know there's plenty of people out there that I know that make tons of money that are miserable people and you know you wonder they have all this money why aren't they happy with their life well it's because they're not living the lifestyle for some reason that's not really allowing them the lifestyle that they want to live or they're chasing the money instead of chasing the lifestyle I chased the lifestyle early on in my career my 20s I chased the money and tried to make as much money and work as hard as I could well I'll take that back I chased success I chased being the best and I still chase that absolutely but my priorities have definitely shifted with wife and daughter now and it helps me again stay a lot more grounded and be a lot more satisfied with my job and my career so that's one thing to make sure that you come back to center but you need some things to help you do that and your vision of why your lifestyle goals and then your goals of how to get there will help you do that the other thing I wanted to hit on is getting into a negative tailspin because I could have easily seen and it's happened to me before where good question here on the chat which is how do you prevent your tasks from snowballing you don't you don't overcommit it's a great question because a lot of times I'll get 70-80 tasks sometimes what I'll do is because of my schedule and how nuts it is as far as traveling I'll constantly book activities for like Monday like the following Monday it's like oh let me just put that off till Monday and all of a sudden I look at Monday and I say holy crap I have 150 activities that I have to get to on Monday and I start again freaking out about it but I think that that high medium low thing is really the way I do it is I prioritize my tasks saying okay again what absolutely has to get done and what should get done and what probably if I look if I can get to it I can get to it and also look for times during the week that you can pile stuff into to do so for instance I travel all the time I'm going on a flight between you know right after I get off this they could have a Monday broadcast I'm I got 10 other phone calls but then I jump on a flight to LA that's six hours of me sitting on a plane usually without a phone obviously and hopefully with internet so that I can start piling through tasks if you will or projects if you will and so that's what I keep pushing everything off until that like all the things I can wait until then I push I put into okay now I'm going to spend six hours humming through those things and again really just understanding what's helping you achieve your goals I've had to go through the exercise before of going through and just saying no I get a lot I have a big problem with saying no to stuff because I'm always like oh that kind of sounds interesting let me go check that out or yeah that's a good idea let me try that but you'll notice on my board behind me you know I went to with my team through this exercise of sitting down and saying why are we doing what we're doing and then moving forward let's come up with some criteria to align all of our new ideas around to say okay when we come up with a new idea let's bump it against these four things and if these four things if it helps us achieve those four things then okay let's put it on the list if it doesn't put it on the idea list and so that's how I've forced myself to not get overwhelmed with my tasks and not get have too many of them pile up is by constantly going through that cleansing exercise of high medium low and then pushing stuff off to later times that really I can segment out and then I'll spend for instance I'll block off a whole Friday afternoon one day to just get to that stuff that I haven't got to in a little while that I know I should but you know it wasn't a priority at the time and again to translate that into that negative tailspin because sometimes those activities pile up and your anxiety hits in and then all of a sudden you know your phone crashes you crack your phone and you know you get stuck in traffic or whatever and it starts to snowball in the wrong direction so how do you get yourself out of that and the biggest thing I can recommend going back to momentum is that momentum is a killer it's a good thing and a bad thing but when it's going negative momentum is brutal so you have to do something to stop it and one of the things I recommend is to try to find those little wins now I'm going to translate this also a little bit to management so say you're a manager this kind of Jack Welch has this distribution of talent right where 10 to 20% you got your 10 to 20% A reps and your 50 to 60% B reps and your 10 to 20% C reps give or take every company has that if you lined up 100 reps on a team they'd usually fall into those buckets and as a manager you know what you should do is over communicate with your A's and almost treat them as rented space because you realize they're going to go get promoted or go find another job making money making more money so over communicate with them and try to try to make sure that you're on the same page with them the B's that's really your job as a manager is to work with your B's and coach them to become a bench for your A's right move that big part 50-60% up a few notches and then your C's your C's the problem is most managers specifically focus on their C reps or you know their worst reps and that's actually a bad thing because what you're doing there is you're first of all you know most C reps aren't really ever going to become A's and when you focus most of your effort and time and energy on your worst reps what you're telling your A and your B reps is look I have to suck in order to get your attention and you don't want that right but what you need to do with your C reps and this is something that I learned was that I your C reps are your C reps for a reason is because there's a habit of momentum and quote unquote losing right so you don't get that deal you don't get those meetings so there's there are unfortunately a lot of ways used to losing what you need to do as a manager is you need to get them back in on the winning track and so with your tier with your A reps what you do is you set very long-term goals and you actually let them set the goals like all right this year if you hit your quota on top of you're getting your commissions and your bonuses what else do you think you know if you hit 120% a quota 150% a quota what would you like to do oh well I want to drive a Ferrari or I want to you know have an extra vacation day or something like that cool you set those goals go keep me updated as we go the B reps is what you should be doing is really focusing on you know working together and a little bit more short-term goals so monthly or quarterly type goals but your C reps you should be setting daily goals with them and they should be setting daily goals with themselves and ones that are attainable as well so for instance you know hey say you're going to make 50 dials today and the rep has struggled making 50 dials up until that point to hit their numbers well hey can today can we hit 50 dials let's just anything no matter what happens today let's hit those 50 dials and then celebrate that did you have 50 dials good job tomorrow out of those 50 dials can you have you know can you get through the gatekeeper five times see if you can do that celebrate that win and then after that okay now can you get a meeting or have a conversation with an executive that turns into a meeting just one out of those 50 good job and you just set these very small things that start to build in a positive way and start to change your lens on the negativity a friend of mine a while back was going through a hard time and she was really in a tough spot and so what I had her do and she was really negative everything about her oh this sucks and that sucks and I said hey do me do yourselves a favor I got an exercise that I wanted to go through and it was I wanted her to take a notepaper and for that day just one day to write down every single positive thing that happened to her and I don't mean like big things like sign a contract or whatever I mean any little thing you could possibly imagine somebody opens up the door for you somebody says thank you somebody greets you with a pleasant smile at the teller or whatever it is somebody calls you that you weren't expecting whatever just write it down and come back to me and we'll talk the next day and it was amazing how that just shifted her lens and she came back to me with a whole list of positive things that had happened to her that day and that moved her in the right direction because she just started to look at things a lot differently so my point is for us who are in that negative tailspin start to look for the small easy wins that can start putting you back on track in the right direction so that momentum can start to take over in the right way so hopefully this was helpful like I said I thought it would be worth talking about because when I did write that blog post of how to get out of a negative tailspin it really got a lot of great feedback and a lot of great comments so I could tell that there's a lot of people out there who are struggling with that and also just being overwhelmed I mean if you're overwhelmed then good for you and if you're not stressed out good for you but sales is one of those professions that if you don't come back to center every once in a while you start to get burned out real fast and that's no good for anybody so anyways make sure that you're getting back to center and keeping your mental health as good as your physical health sometimes even better and be thankful for what you got as a matter of fact I just want to end today with being thankful for today is Martin Luther King Day and I know this is kind of one of those half holidays for people but I really encourage everybody to take a step back and just pause for a minute and be thankful for today thankful for MLK who he was but more importantly what he represented if you ever want to be inspired and remind yourself of the power of words and why it's so important to be strong with what you say and eloquent with how you write and what you say go read his I had a dream speech every time I read that I get chills up my spine so pause today thank be thankful for where we are and try to make somebody's day a little bit happier because you never know they might be going through a bad spot all right and you might be the reason that you can pull them out of that negative momentum okay so onward and upward here is my former boss chris kelly used to say which I love and again as always hit me up on snapchat hit me up on any of the social channels if you have questions any of this stuff I'm happy to answer anything you got through any medium email snapchat instagram you name it I'll help I'll help you out all right let's all elevate the game here and do sales right make it happen everybody thank you you're welcome I'll help you out and do you're welcome to the next time to the next time to the next time next time to the next time next time you're welcome