Episode 14: How To Build a Wellbeing Routine That Works For You

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. And today we have our third podcast in our series with Juan Sanchez. For those who haven't listened to Juan's podcast with us before, he's the founder and head coach of Primely. Primly is a mental fitness coaching practice that fundamentally believes sales performance and mental fitness are mutually inclusive and go hand in hand together in for successful salespeople. So Juan's been running Primly for a few years now. Prior to this, he was an equity partner in a very successful renewable energies business and also has significant experience, 12 years in fact, in sales management and sales BDM roles. And for me, I love it when we have guests on board who not only have experience in their specific field, in this case mental fitness, but also some related sales experience because it's just so important to understand our industry and what we do to then be able to give advice on exactly how we can improve other areas of it. Juan's also a volunteer for quite a few not for profit organizations, but particularly beyondblue, where he's a crisis support worker and I'm very much focused around suicide prevention. So Juan, seeing the good and the bad of mental fitness, which I think is a great position to be in when we talk about mental fitness in the workplace. So, so welcome Juan. Thanks again for joining us.

Thanks, Ben. Pleasure to be here for the last time.

Excellent. Okay, well, today we are talking about how to design a wellbeing routine that fits your lifestyle and work schedule. So for those that haven't seen the previous podcast from Juan, jump back to episode eight, which was all about what is mental fitness and its importance in your performance in the workplace. And we really focus there around how mental fitness is predominantly about preparation and some of the tips you can use to improve your preparation. The second episode with Juan, also jump back to it, if you haven't listened to it yet, was all about how we can improve our mental fitness for optimal sales performance. So it was a whole lot of tips and hacks as to what we can do as individuals and as leaders of our team to make sure that our performance is improving in line with our mental fitness. Today we are talking about how you can design a routine that works for you. Because it's all well and good to know what good mental fitness looks like. It's all well and good to understand the tips and the hacks and the science behind how you can improve your mental fitness. But today we're going to talk about actually real world practical advice that says, how do you build something that works for you? Okay, so Juan, we're going to jump straight into it. What I'd really like to know is of any wellbeing routine, regardless of who it's for, what are the foundations of a successful impact for your wellbeing practices?

Great question, Ben. And to answer it, the foundation for any well being routine must, and I stress that must include all the different areas and aspects of any human's well being. In the coaching practice, we utilize a very well known tool called the wheel of life. But long story short, the wheel of life is a concept that incorporates those six key components of our well being, which are the emotional part, spiritual, financial, professional, physical and relationships part of our life. So it's a wheel because the diagram sort of tries to portray that if it's not balanced and if it's not round, it's not going to roll as easily as it would. So if you think of your well being in terms of a shape, you'll be at your best when all those six different components or areas are properly balanced. So it makes a wheel and that way it poses the least friction when it's actually going on the road. If that makes sense.

Yeah. And a circle is a really commonly used tool to describe lots of models around the world and particularly important because it has no start and no end. So we're talking about getting balance between all of those six elements of your life is critical in any wellbeing routine. And hey, by the way, we'll drop that wheel of wellbeing into the podcast show notes so you can jump in and have a look yourself. Great. So how do we then start designing a personalized wellbeing routine around those six things?

So three key steps. Number one are defining your negotiables or non negotiables. So for example, in my own personal case, I prioritize Physical activity pretty much daily. Regardless whether I'm running late or I'm under a lot of stress, I try to at least exercise, even if it's just for 15 minutes. Defining what those negotiables and non negotiables are in a very similar way that you would do with any sort of sales pitch or negotiation where you have to meet the other party halfway in between. That's step number one. Step number two is understanding what works for you. In other words, there might be some tools or techniques that work magnificently on you, but for example, in my case, they won't be as useful or as productive. In other words, it needs to be aligned with your lifestyle. And third step, set smart objectives. Specific, measurable, accurate, realistic and time bound. If you set those objectives with those criteria or those indicators in mind, it's more likely than not that you'll be able to achieve a nice wellbeing routine for yourself.

Yeah, I'm a huge routine person. For me, exercise is also very important, but some days you just can't get it in. So for me, something is better than nothing. And I really try to prioritize doing it early in the morning because it just allows me to get to work sharp. But the other thing that I do from a professional point of view is I work really hard on keeping my emails or slack messages or any form of communication that's non verbal and written down. I try and get through any new messages before I finish my day. I then know that when I come in the next day, I can start really fresh and keep working on what I was doing without distractions from the day prior. Okay, so we're defining the non negotiables and the negotiables. So those things that we will and won't flex on, we're working out what works for me and my family and then we're setting some smart goals. Cool. Makes perfect sense. How do we then embed that routine into our lifestyle? Right. So how do we make it a habit? I love talking about habits. Juan, tell us how we can do that.

So that's a great question, Ben. And that's probably the most difficult part of building that routine is actually implementing it or making it a habit in our lives. And I refer to the model developed by a very famous author by the name of Charles Duhigg, whom he wrote a book by the name of the Power of Habit. So the first thing that you got to do when leveraging the learnings from that particular model is, is that we need to have a trigger to set A specific behavior. So, for example, if I want to make my physical exercise a priority and make it a part of my routine, in my case, for example, I set an alarm 30 minutes before my usual wake time that will make me then get out of bed, make sure that I have enough time to do that physical activity routine that I've said to myself for, then to have a reward at the end, which is feeling revitalized or feeling energized. So just going back on that model, it's made up by three different components. There's got to be a trigger as a first stage. Secondly, there's got to be a behavior or an action that will be part of your well being routine. And thirdly, there's got to be a reward. In this case, feeling perky or re energized or revitalized.

Great. Okay, so what we're saying is habit breeds results. I'm a huge fan of taking 21 times to build a habit and then three lots of 21 to really reinforce it. I live by it and I really try to infuse it into every part of my life. So I love how that's going. Juan, so for you, any hacks that worked really well for you in embedding habits into your lifestyle?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll share, for example, my personal morning routine. I'm waking up usually 45 to an hour before my family wakes up. I take that time to do three key exercises, which is breathing, cold, exposure, and a quick meditation. How do I do that? Simply by implementing those triggers. The trigger for me is when the sun starts shining and my alarm sets off. I have set myself that time aside to be able to do the things that I wanted to do ultimately, because at the end, I feel much better. If I hadn't done that at the.

Beginning, I didn't think we could get through three podcasts without you talking about the WIM HOF method, which I think you referenced there as your second one. No doubt we'll come to that in a minute. But how can you tell if that habit or routine is having a positive effect on you? What are some of the signs or the systems, the symbols or the norms that you can look out for in your team or yourself?

Look, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone out there whether you're looking internally at yourself or you're looking at someone else. Very easy to pick up. Firstly, your energy levels as a whole will significantly increase. You'll feel more energized, more revitalized. You'll see your productivity as well, increasingly at work and away from it, you'll feel a lot more grounded, surrounded and balanced as a whole. And as time progresses and you keep sticking to your well being routine, ultimately you'll start to see your results increasing or improving. In this case, you'll start to see your sales results hopefully reaching target or exceeding target at best case.

I'm going to share an example here that's a little bit different to a personal wellbeing routine. It's one which we can apply to our team. And I saw this work so unbelievable, unbelievably, powerfully. In a business I was working with about eight or so years ago, this was a business that had sales meetings every week. Every Monday morning the team would come in, sales meeting had happened. I think There was about 18 to 20 in this commercial team and it was a typical sales weekly meeting. But what was coming out of this meeting was lots of questions from the sales teams. How do we do this? Where can we improve? What's missing? I've had this feedback from a customer. Our competitors are doing this and and training used to be later in the week. There was still a habit of training. But what happened was this business, it actually brought the training and the sales meetings together as one. So it'd roll the sales meeting straight into training. Very, very subtle change. But the very powerful result that came out of that habit was that we saw that sales teams took the energy from the sales meeting straight into the training. So we're actually able to have an increased level of focus because they weren't distracted by anything else during the week. They were all in there together. They had their couple of minutes of laughs and stories and everything else they needed to before the training meeting. So what resulted was the retention of the information from this team was incredible. And one part of that team went from it, performing the kind of low seven figure per month sales result performance. They actually saw them over the next three months. They more than tripled over that period of time. Incredible result. And of course it wasn't all down to this, but certainly the habits that they built around running sales management into training gave some significant improvements in their concentration and focus which then obviously increased their retention levels. So no doubt had a huge impact. Okay, let's keep moving on. I love to digress and tell a story, but what's one component that you think of? Well, being routine, Just one thing that every wellbeing routine should incorporate.

Look, as we said, this is not a one size fits all scenario because what might work for me might not work as well, for you. But I'm yet to find a person that says that journaling doesn't produce positive effects on their well being because it's something so easy to do, it's actually relaxing at night. And it's also something that creates accountability and that triggers our reticular activating system that really brings significant improvements into our daily life. So in a nutshell, journaling, I would say every single well being routine should incorporate that technique.

Wow. I tell you what, if you hadn't given me a chance to guess what your answer would have been to that question, Journaling was not in the top five. So super powerful to hear that something so simple and something that many of us have done at different points in our lives, even if it was as a five year old child learning their way through the world. Journaling.

Cool.

I like it. Okay, so Juan, would love to hear from you then. We've spoken about why it's important to build a routine. We've spoken about different types of activities that we can do within that routine and how to work out if it's actually working for you. So personally, I know that you love the WIM HOF method, so let's talk about that for a minute or so because I couldn't go the three podcasts without asking you, how does it work for you?

So the WIM HOF method, as its name suggests, it's a method or a technique developed by a very famous Dutch president by the name of WIM hof. But in a nutshell, its method is based in three key components or pillars. Number one is breathing or mindfulness breathing. The second one is exposure to cold. So going into either having a cold shower, a cold dip in the ocean, even in an ice bath. And thirdly is having commitment towards the practice. So those are the three key pillars in terms of benefit. There are significant improvements in terms of mental health, physical health and well being. And most importantly, this is something that science has been able to prove over the last few years. They've run some really cool scientific experiments with him and Peter that practice his methods and they've seen improvements in terms of their immunity levels, how much energy they report, the level of stress that they're able to cope with, etc, etc, etc. So that's something that I practice every morning I get up, I do his mindfulness breathing, then I have a very cold shower and that sets up a great sort of way for me to start my day.

Easier said than done in the middle of winter having a cold shower. But what's really interesting from Today is that in fact, our series of three podcasts is that controlled breathing seems to come up really regularly as something that can impact our mental fitness. So that's anything from the 4, 7, 8 method that you've spoken about last podcast through to taking mini breaks where you get to focus on your breathing, through to meditation and even the slightly, I'm going to call it still left of field WIM HOF method. Amazing how much importance we should be placing on breathing to improve our mental fitness. Fantastic. Awesome. So what we'll do today, Juan, is you've talked about quite a few models like the Habit Loop. We've spoken about the WIM HOF method, the Power of Habit, the Wheel of Wellbeing. We'll make sure all of these get into the podcast notes. So for those who want to read a little bit more, you can, I think it's really powerful to find, to be able to access some of the data behind what we're talking about. That brings to a close our mental fitness series with you. We've spoken back in episode eight around what mental fitness is and the importance of having some perspective around your life outside of work and how it can actually impact so significantly what you do at work. And really importantly, that it's actually a lot about preparation when you're coming into work to be able to really nail your performance. The second podcast series we had, this was all about how to improve your mental fitness and thereby optimize your sales performance.

Right?

So there's some hacks and tips about how you can actually get better at your job if you improve your mental fitness.

Cool, right?

Because everyone wants to have better health. Amazing that it can actually improve your sales performance so specifically. And then today we've spoken about a few hacks and tips about building your own mental fitness routine that works within your lifestyle. So, Juan, if people have questions, I know you operate through kind of Latin America, through North America. What's the best way for people to find you if they'd like to know more?

If you'd like to know more about our work, you can visit our website. It's PrimeLead.com that is P R-I-M-E-L-Y.com or you can also visit our LinkedIn page, PrimeLee.

Okay, fantastic, Juan. Thank you. No doubt some questions will come along if people want to get you back on board, reach out and try and get you involved again. But that's it. That does bring to a close our three podcasts on mental fitness. We got some amazing stuff coming over the next few months some really cool free resources that I'm going to be making available to our podcast listeners. So look out for them. I'll certainly let you know that they're coming, but between now and then, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what can happen. We'll see you next time. 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 favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams 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.