Episode 10: How to Strengthen Mental Fitness for Optimum Sales Performance

Hi, everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. As promised, we have Juan Sanchez, founder and head coach of Primely, back with us again today. For those who didn't listen to the last recording with Juan, the last podcast was episode number eight from earlier in this year. Juan is the founder and head coach of primelease. So that's a mental fitness coach coaching business that really celebrates how both mental fitness and sales performance can live harmoniously together. In fact, it really promotes that the best salespeople in this world will often have optimized their own mental fitness as well. So Juan, he's been running primary now for a few years, but prior to this, Juan was an equity partner in a very successful sustainability business where he worked in actually sales management and business development. So he's got the formal qualifications around mental fitness, but he also has, on top of that quite an extended period, 12 years in fact, of carrying the bag in a sales team. So I love it when we get skills that blend together to be able to talk about a topic that can often be seen as quite complex. So Primely is a business that operates across the Americas, Latin America and America as well as in Australia. And Juan actually, on top of that, also volunteers quite a lot in his own time and very much around organizations such as Beyond Blue, which is all about suicide prevention, and essentially men's health across Australia. So he's a crisis support worker there. So love having you back on board. Juan, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Ben. Pleasure to be here for the second time.

Okay, so today, Juan, we're going to focus heavily around how you can strengthen your mental fitness for optimum sales performance. So again, anyone that didn't listen to episode eight from earlier in the year, just a few weeks ago, that was all about what is mental fitness and where does it come from? Come in to be really important in our lives. The really common consensus that came from Juan and the literature that his business is built around is that how you live your life outside of your job is a huge impact on your mental fitness. So if you haven't listened, go back and have a quick listen at that before you jump into today's episode. Otherwise, let's keep moving forward and we'll talk about how we can optimise our mental health to improve our sales performance. Okay, Juan, so we've definitely spoken previously about thinking of our minds in the same way that we think about any other muscle in our body. So if we follow on from this concept, how do we then exercise our mind muscle?

That's a great question. I guess. Firstly, we need to think of our mind the same way as any other muscle does. So when we're not utilizing a muscle, it tends to become weaker and weaker up to the point where we might go all the way to atrophy. Right?

So.

So we need to keep it active. Otherwise it won't be as fit as we want and we won't be able to perform as it is. So, going back to your question, we can definitely build an exercise routine that will be similarly to taking our bodies or ourselves to the gym every day. So I've got three key things that I've learned throughout my years of working in this business. Number one, your mental fitness routine should include any or some mindfulness exercising that could become mindfulness, breathing, mindfulness meditation, for example, or any other activity that makes you and your mind focus on one single thing and be present in that moment. Those activities, they tend to be coined as flow activities. So anything that you really find useful to be present, it could be playing cards or playing Sudoku, or chairs or Rumi cube or exercising. But just focusing on the one thing at a time, those will be my sort of three key components or suggestions to build a strong mental fitness routine.

Okay, so let's say those again. So we've got three things, and this is so important, right, because we're so easily distracted by our phones, by emails, by the television, by radio, by music, whatever else is on, right? So, Juan, so how do we go about exercising our mind muscle? Number one, you said was mindfulness. What else is on that list?

Mindfulness is the first one. Second one is meditation. So you can practice meditation not by being sort of sitting down, looking at a wall. You can simply close your eyes and then just focus on one thing. Most people use their breath, for example, as a way of meditation. That is the second. A third and very generic way of seeing it is by performing an activity that makes you be present while you're doing at it. So some people find playing chess or Sudoku, for example, solving to be mindfulness activities.

Okay, so we've got mindfulness meditation and any other form of activity that really gives you a single minded focus on what you're doing. Great. Makes perfect sense. Okay, so then we've trained our brains or we've exercised our mind muscle. How else can our performance as salespeople improve? By being mentally fitter, by having a really fit mind muscle.

So firstly, being mentally fitter is also about understanding the relationship between mind and body. As we've spoken in a previous podcast episode, being mentally fit is understanding the relationship between body and mind. In this case, for example, nutrition and sleep play a crucial role when it comes to our bodies and minds performing at its best. So to give you an example, firstly, our bodies are designed to endure strain and stress by recovering through sleep. So if our sleep is out of whack, if, for example, salespeople were spending long times working, working and not enough time recovering, then our performance will be significantly impacted the day after. That tends to happen, for example, with many salespeople that travel for work and that have to wake up really early in the morning. That would be my first tip. So a start from the Americas show that working professionals sleep approximately six and a half hours a day, which is well below the seven to nine hours that is recommended for optimal sleep. Another impressive stat coming out of the country is that sleep deprivation cost employees approximately $2,000 per annum for every employee. So you can see the implications of actually having a poor or bad quality of sleep in the performance of salespeople.

Predominantly.

The second way that significantly improves our sales performance is actually our nutrition. We have the saying, at least in my family, that you are what you eat. So understanding the nutrients of the food that you're putting into your body and how your body and mind is actually fueled by has a significant impact on our performance. So to give you an example, when we talk about being productive at work, research has found that high carb breakfast, like for example, lots of cereal, toast and muffin, have a significant impact on people's cognition. The other thing is, for example, nutritionists and scientists have found that our brain activity peaks when we have approximately 25 milligrams of glucose in our bloodstream. Right? That's the equivalent of eating a banana in the morning. So being able to recognize what amount and what type of food we digest, or we're eating will also lead you to performing better.

Okay, so we've got some stuff here that's pretty common sense, but gee, it's hard to get right, particularly when you're a working professional, you have a family, you have a really busy life outside of work, and you mentioned you're traveling. But I love a couple of the statistics and the bits of science behind what you said. The first one, seven to nine hours, that's the number you've got to get. But working sales people in the US we're getting sick and a half. So clearly there's something not quite right there which is impacting our performance. And the second bit around nutrition, I love that. And look, the scientific fact was beyond me. A whole lot of glucose into your body and you're performing at your best. But eat a banana, eat a banana before a big meeting, eat a banana before a presentation and you are ready to rock at your peak performance. Okay, so those bits of science are great. But for me, I love to work off hacks that help me actually achieve what I need to in life. So for sleep and nutrition, Juan, do you have any tips or hacks that you've helped with your clients? And it can be Latin America or in the us, here or in Australia, it really doesn't matter. But some hacks that you've helped your clients adopt to be better sleepers and better eaters.

Yes, absolutely. And I think those hacks are really the golden nuggets we actually help people with. And I always like to be very clear here, we're no medical professionals, neither you or I. And we always suggest that you go and seek professional medical advice in case you do have a pre existing condition. But first hack would be to understand whether you're a lark or a night owl. In other words, understand whether you perform better in the morning or at night. In my case, for example, I know that the best of me or my most productive time during the day is actually after my little one goes to sleep, probably after 7pm So I try to avoid work or crucial work for probably an hour after that period of time where I know it's gonna, I'm going to produce very high quality results. Obviously based on the above, depending whether you are more productive in the morning or in the afternoon, you can modify lighting in your space where you're working to suit that behavior better. That's called light therapy, for example, and there's lots of devices out there that you can buy online pretty easily. The next hack that I would definitely suggest is to start a journal before sleeping Research has shown that actually writing on a piece of paper with no electronic devices significantly helps you fall asleep quicker and deeper. Another hack would be for example, to practice relaxation exercises while in bed. There's a couple out there. For example, I practice the 4, 7, 8 breathing which is inhaling for 4, maintaining it for 7 and then releasing it for 8.

So let's jump in there. So we're breathing in for 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, we're holding it for 7 and then we're releasing it with a steady flow. Alpha 8. Really a cool technique.

The other tip would be for example, practicing progressive muscle relaxation. That's a very fancy term to literally close your eyes and start scanning your body from head to toes, contracting and relaxing each muscle of the body in an orderly way. So start all the way from the top, from your forehead and go all the way down through your body to the tip of your toes at the bottom.

That's the classic military technique as to how to fall asleep when you're out in the battlefield and away from your bed. I like it. Sorry to cut you off. Keep going Juan.

Some very easy or some other hacks that are very easy to implement, that might sound relatively logic to some people, but another one is avoiding blue light and phones before sleep time. So we have in our house a room with my wife that no phones go into the bedroom, so we leave our phones outside and we just use a very old style alarm clock and we try to remain away from any blue light devices just before falling asleep. Another very common is exercising daily and avoiding caffeine, probably after 2 or 3pm depending on how tolerant you are to caffeine and thinking about how you can make that sort of sleep environment the best environment possible you can get. So making sure that it's at a consistent temperature of about 18 to 90 degrees, you don't want it to be very hot. Making sure that it's dark or as dark as possible. And when we think about sleep is not focusing on how many hours of sleep. Yeah, you need to have at least a seven and a half to nine hours of sleep, but also focusing on sleep consistency, which is crucial. So it's having similar sleep time and awake times during the day. Back in my day working in the sales field, I found it really difficult to maintain that sleep routine when we had to catch early flights. So we had to modify that. And there's things that you can do to actually counteract the impact of those early flights in your day to day habits. Last hack that I always suggest is to focus on hydration, we need to be having at least two and a half liters of water per day to make sure that we're properly hydrated.

Some great tips in there. There's a couple actually that I really like using consistency as such. Big one. I generally go to bed around the same time each night, but for me is three hours before bed. If I can avoid it, I ditch the alcohol. So sometimes not avoidable. But I know that I sleep better when it's about that three hour mark before bed that I stop drinking. And the other one, I don't know if you've heard about this, but I've been doing a bit of reading. There's a product out there called a chilli blanket and it actually goes under your bed, keeps your bed chilly, right? If you get too hot when you're sleeping, it actually cools it down and gives you a very consistent temperature that you're sleeping in. So for those who are really into biohacking and those type of products, jump online and have a look at the chilli blanket. So most of us, we know the concept of taking a little break in the workplace, right? Having a moment where we just get to zone out, focus on something else and then come back to the work that we're doing. However, for me, my experience says that most salespeople, they either just don't get time to do this or they forget to take that little brief pause to look after themselves. Huge culprit of it, constantly not slowing down and moving ahead a million miles an hour. So, Juan, in your research and the people that you work with, does this have any impact on our performance and wellbeing?

Absolutely. If there's one big contributor towards underperforming is actually not taking active pauses in the workplace. And I've used a very recent study done by Microsoft back in 2021, which is called the WTI Polls Report. I highly recommend you sort of read the top level findings that it had. But it clearly shows the impact of back to back meetings without no interruptions or without no breaks, and the impact it has on the cognition and output of people.

That's an amazing one. Back to back meetings essentially reduce your ability to focus. Kind of makes sense. But are there any stats out there that give you an indication as to just what the magnitude of the decrease in your capability or your capacity to concentrate is?

Yeah, there is. So there's an indicator called the frontal alpha asymmetry, which is a fancy term for the ability for the brain to be able to focus and engage in one single Thing. And research shows there's a six fold increase in in your ability to focus if you take pauses between meetings.

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so that's significant. So, Juan, I love real world practical advice. It's what our business and our podcast is all about. Giving people chunkable action items that they can put into their repertoire of their team leadership, their team management, or their own personal performance. So have you got any advice on some really easy to do pausing activities when you simply are just pausing back to back, busy, busy and don't actually have time to take breaks?

Well, the first thing is using the tool that came out of this Microsoft research, which is a setting in your Outlook that can pretty much set pauses in between meetings or doesn't allow you to take calendar invitations without having X amount of minutes between meetings. So that's the first thing is using that setting. The other thing would be, as we've spoken previously, practicing some mindfulness, breathing, some restorative meditation, or even better, which is easier in the workspace, is listening to a short song with short music, which is called restorative music listening as a technique.

I like that. So as leaders, we're often leading meetings that we are in during the day. Roll a bit of music into your meetings, a 30 second play, your favorite music breakout before you jump into your meeting. And hey, I know everyone loves the music on my podcast, so just crank up my podcast music and away you go. Okay, great. So staying on that topic of easy to do kind of pausing activities and recovery right between meetings and between your day, what else can sales professionals do to be on top of their game?

Yeah, well, it's important to note here that there's two types of different or two categories of different pausing activities. They're passive, which we've been speaking quite a lot of. But there's also active pauses, which involves a lot of movement. So you can take walking meetings, for example. We used to do those quite a lot in my previous role when I was doing sales. You can also do some quick stretching at your desk. So yoga and a lot of workplaces these days have specific spaces or areas where you can actually go on and perform those active poses throughout the day.

So cool. So be that person who stands up at your desk and does back bends or hamstring stretches or curls. Thigh curls. Right. Be bold, be proud. Do those stretches because it is helping you your mental fitness and your sales performance. Okay. Anything else, Ryan, where salespeople can do to stay on top of their game?

From a pausing point of view, it's pretty much Bringing awareness and knowing that you have to stop to be able to perform at your best. That's the first thing.

Great. So we've got a few practical techniques there. A lot of people that I work with, they like to know a little bit more about the science behind this. What's the science behind this taught you?

In primary lots, actually. And I've taken as a foundation or base the work developed by a scientist by the name of Ernest Rossi back in the 90s, which he introduced a concept that is very, very applicable to the sales arena, which is called the ultradian performance rhythm. In short, ultradian means taking place many times a day. So what ultradian rhythm means is a rhythm that happens several times within the one day. So if we take that and we consider our bodies as a whole, our bodies are designed to function on a rhythmical way. We think about it, we have brainwaves that oscillate and undulate every couple of milliseconds. Our heart rate, for example, pumps blood and contracts every probably 80 times per minute. Our breathing as well is rhythmical. So the same way our body designed to work our performance as salespeople or professional athletes has got to be rhythmical. So in other words, we cannot think to be performing in a linear way when we know that our bodies are not designed to it. So the ultradian performance rhythm suggests that we should be taking pauses at least every 90 minutes so our body has enough time to deal with the stress and the strain that it's been going through, recover to then go back at peak performance for the next batch of stress.

Okay, so what we're saying is give ourselves a break, give ourselves a chance to recover and acknowledge that we cannot perform at our peak levels consistently the entire time. We will have ebbs and flows and give ourselves the chance to be able to recover when we feel that we're moving away from that optimal performance. Great spot to end today, Juan. Plenty in there about how we can employ some hacks, some tips to improve our mental fitness and therefore our sales performance. But also a little bit of science behind some of these recommendations that are now coming out quite consistently into the sales world. And for me, that gives me some confidence that if I'm to go and employ more breaks in my day, more active pauses, that I'm actually doing that based on some evidence based research out there that supports that philosophy or process in my day. So cool. So that's finished. Our second in this series. I mentioned at the start pen that we have. Episode eight was our first recording with Juan, which was all about defining mental fitness and how it actually can impact your performance in your job based on what you're doing outside of work and your preparation in particular. Today we've spoken about how you can actually improve your mental fitness for better sales performance later on the next episode. The third and final with Juan in this series is we're going to look at how we can design a wellbeing routine that fits your lifestyle and your work schedule. It's all well and good to understand what mental fitness is. It's all well and good to know what the hacks and the tips are to improve it. But the third in this series is actually going to look about how we can actually implement a schedule or a routine that works for us. Fantastic. So thanks everyone for joining us today. Thank you Juan for being on board. Can you let the team know where they can find more about you?

Pleasure, Ben. If anyone would like to know more about what we do at Primely, they can Visit our website primele.com au that is P R I M E L Y.com or you can also look us up on LinkedIn. Primely as an organization, you would find us excellent.

Thanks very much Brian. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks. And for everyone listening, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks everyone. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favorite social media channel. We're ongerngersalesteams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.