Book-Reader-Assist/library/Fanatical Prospecting/Chapter-21-Developing-Mental-Toughness/Chapter-21-source-text.md

Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-21: Developing Mental Toughness

• Source: /library/Fanatical Prospecting/source-file.pdf
• PDF pages: 263–281
• Pages without text: none

---

21 Developing Mental Toughness When the going gets tough, the mentally tough keep going. This is the brutal, undeniable truth. Sales is a tough, grueling, and sometimes heartbreaking profession. The pressure to deliver and the demand to perform in sales is unrelenting. You must deliver results or you will be fired. In the sales profession, it’s not about what you have sold, it is about what you sell today. Fanatical prospectors receive more rejection before 9:00 AM than the average person gets in an entire year. The fact is, most people wouldn’t last a minute in sales. They are so afraid of rejection that they’d rather starve to death than make a single prospecting call. This is why salespeople are the elite athletes of the business world. The employees of your company (even if they don’t act like they understand this) count on you for their jobs and paychecks. 245

The owners and executives need you to deliver on your numbers to keep the shareholders happy. Simply put, no salespeople (elite athletes), no customers, no profit, no growth, no company, no team. If your company were a professional sports team, the salespeople would be on the field playing the game and everyone else would be on the sidelines supporting the you. I want you to stop for a moment and look at yourself in the mirror. See yourself for who you really are, an elite athlete. Just as a professional sports team counts on its players to deliver in the game, your company counts on its elite athletes (you) to deliver in the marketplace. When the whistle blows each morning, you’ve got to be ready to rock it. Like top athletes, you must train hard to deliver peak perform- ance. What research1 tells us, though, is it takes more than training and conditioning to deliver peak performance day in and day out. All elite athletes—in sport and business—train hard and work hard. That is a given. Champions, however, gain their competitive edge from mental toughness. Data from multiple research studies tells us that mental toughness is more important than talent, experience, education, skills, or technique. Mental toughness is why some athletes thrive under pressure while others disintegrate. It is so important that at Sales Gravy we help our clients hire better salespeople with our Sales Driveassessment that tests exclusively for mental toughness. Mental toughness, sometimes called grit,2 is the real reason some salespeople are perennial superstars while others, with the same level of talent, fold up like a cheap lawn chair as soon as things get difficult. James Loehr was one of the first experts to identify the “psychology of winning.” He described seven core dimensions of mental toughness:3

1. Self-confidence
2. Attention control 246 Fanatical Prospecting

1. Minimizing negative energy
2. Increasing positive energy
3. Maintaining motivation levels
4. Attitude control
5. Visual and imagery control More recently, groundbreaking studies like Angela Duck- worth’s study “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-term Goals” are helping us understand just how much mental toughness matters in achievement. This is why, to reach the top of your game, you must develop grit. The good news is, unlike talent and intelligence that are baked into your DNA, mental toughness can be learned and developed. The formula is simple: Change your mindset. Change your game. It Takes Grit—You Have to Grind to Shine In sales you can only control three things: your actions, your reactions, and your mindset. Losing is a choice. Mediocrity is a choice. Yes, I’ve heard the argument—salespeople are born, not made. I certainly believe that some people are born with the talent to be accountants, NFL quarterbacks, leaders, and sales professionals. However, thousands upon thousands of salespeople wash out because they make the choice—yes, the choice—to lose. When you choose mediocre behaviors, you get mediocre results, and once you allow mediocrity into your sales day, you become a bad-luck magnet. This choice is one of the key reasons so many salespeople find themselves job hopping. Despite the training each new company provides, despite the coaching, despite the mentoring, despite the tools, eventually these salespeople wash out. They have everything they need to succeed except mental toughness. Developing Mental Toughness 247

Last year we hired a sales rep to sell advertising for Sales Gravy. We gave her training, guidance, support, and leads. When she started, I had a heart-to-heart conversation with her. I explained that the first 60 days would the hardest she would face. She would have to work hard to build her pipeline. Along the way she’d get lots of rejection, make mistakes, and become embarrassed from time to time as she learned to present a new, unfamiliar product. Our new rep worked hard for exactly 29 days. Then I got the call. She was quitting. There were lots of excuses: The job was overwhelming, she didn’t feel like she was having success, maybe advertising sales wasn’t the best fit. I explained again that these feelings were to be expected with something new, and if she just stuck with it for a little while longer, her efforts would pay off. But her mind was already made up. She quit. We jumped on the phone and followed up with all of the prospects she’d put into her pipeline. She did a great job in her first 29 days of getting qualified prospects into the pipe. So good, in fact, that we closed almost all of the opportunities she had developed. Her commission on these sales would have been $7,000. Instead she received zero. Quitting is a choice. Most people when faced with challenges quit too soon—often right as they are on the cusp of success. This is especially true with salespeople in new sales jobs. Starting a new sales job and taking on new challenges is frustratingly hard. There are many dark days when you feel like all you do is fail and there is no hope. As you get closer to breaking through, things actually seem bleaker. You are tired, beat-up, and worn-down. It is at this point that mental toughness in the form of faith and persistence takes you the last mile. Winston Churchill said that “when you are going through hell, keep going.” Faith is crucial. Faith that by doing the right things every day, the cumulative impact of these actions will pay off. Faith keeps you focused on your goal when no tangible evidence exists that the hard work you are doing will get you there. 248 Fanatical Prospecting

Persistence is the fuel of winners. It is the tenacity and deter- mination to keep going in spite of self-doubt, roadblocks, failure, embarrassment, and setbacks. Persistence picks you up off the ground, dusts you off, and sends you back into the game. Persistence gives you that last, final push across the finish line. The fact is, sales is a grind. Prospecting is a grind. But you’ve got to grind to shine. Everybody wants the glory of the close, but most people are unwilling to grind—to pay the price for success. In any endeavor, success is paid for in advance with hard work. In sales, success is paid for in advance with prospecting. You will never excel at anything if you don’t put the hard work in first. Mental toughness is the one trait that defines all top performers. Mental toughness is the ability to get back up when you’ve been knocked down and be resilient in the face of rejection, adversity, and failure. It is the ability to accept pain and sacrifice today for a win in the future. It’s the ability to block out negative self-talk, manage disruptive emotions, ignore people who tell you what you can’t do, and put singular focus on a desired goal. This grit is the foundation of faith, persistence, tenacity, resil- ience, hustle, and a winning mindset. The top people in business, sports, sales, and every other walk of life hit the same walls and face the same mental and physical suffering as everyone else. What makes them different is their ability to lean into their challenges and disrupt the desire to quit. Mental toughness cuts through any delusion that things will be easy. It embraces the “suck”—and in our case, what sucks is prospecting—and keeps grinding. In their book Never Hire a Bad Salesperson again, Dr. Chris Croner and Richard Abraham describe mental toughness in sales- people using three dimensions.4 ■ Optimism: When you get knocked down, optimism tells you that if you can look up, you can get up. Optimism is the mother Developing Mental Toughness 249

of perseverance. It powers a positive belief system and attracts positive energy. ■ Competitiveness: Do you hate to lose or love to win? The drive to avoid losing is what keeps superstars working longer, harder, and doing whatever it takes to win. Competitiveness is the mother of persistence. ■ Need for achievement: Psychologist and researcher Henry Murray defined the need for achievement as “intense, prolonged and repeated efforts to accomplish something difficult. To work with singleness of purpose towards a high and distant goal. To have the determination to win.”5 The need for achievement is the mother of self-motivation. Four Pillars of Mental Toughness in Sales What does it take to develop and maintain mental toughness in sales? How do you incubate optimism, competitiveness, and need for achievement? What steps can you take, starting today, to reach peak performance and become an elite sales athlete? Over the course of my career, while working with thousands of superstar sales professionals, I’ve discovered that there are four pillars that make up the foundation of mental toughness in sales. Desire The great Napoleon Hill said that “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.” Likewise, my good friend Brian Stanton says, “Desire is the mother of sales activity.” Desire is the singularity of achievement. Anything truly worth achieving must begin with desire. Otherwise you’ll fail. It’s the key to tapping into the motivation you need to get past real and self- inflicted performance roadblocks. It’s just easier to develop mental toughness and self-discipline when you have a goal. 250 Fanatical Prospecting

For example, if you desire more than anything to buy a house but you need a down payment, then you’ll do what it takes to earn bigger commission checks. If you desire to go on your company’s elite sales trip, you will find the will to wake up early every morning and hit the phones. If you desire to be promoted to sales manager, you’ll find a way to excel as a sales rep so that you stand out. Desire, though, is just the beginning. It’s a spark. To ignite, you need a clear definition of what you want and where you are going. This requires you to answer three questions:

1. What do you want?
2. How do you plan to get what you want?
3. How bad do you want it? That’s it. Begin with defining what you want, building a plan, and writing it down. Not empty promises. Not fleeting wishes and or vague hopes. Real goals that mean something for your career and life. Here is the brutal reality. If you don’t have a plan, you will become a part of someone else’s plan. You can either take control of your life or someone else will use you to enhance theirs. It’s your choice. So start here: Define what you want and write it down. This means gathering up the discipline to stop what you are doing, sit down, and actually think about your future. Writing down your goals and plan makes you unstoppable. When you write down your goals, ink on paper, you tap into a powerful motivational force. A written plan forces action. Some- thing inside of you begins to drive you forward, pushing you toward your destination. It is there, written in stone, and it cannot be ignored until it has been accomplished. Prospecting creates adversity. There will be hurdles, roadblocks, disappointment, and loads of rejection. There will always be a mountain you’ll have to climb and an uphill battle you’ll have to Developing Mental Toughness 251

fight. There will always be a temptation to slack off. There will always be an excuse for why you can’t do something. There will always be something more pleasurable in the short-term than sacrificing in the long-term for what you really want. This is why tapping into desire is so powerful. A set of written goals with clear steps to success leads to action. Action creates forward momentum. As momentum shifts into overdrive, you’ll hurtle past and skip over the quicksand of procrastination, perfec- tionism, and paralysis. To help you design your goals, I’ve developed a Goal Planning Workbook that can be downloaded free at FreeGoalSheet.com. Mental Resilience A few years ago during a storm, a large tree fell down in my back yard. It left a huge mess, but I was thrilled because this was my chance! I’d wanted to purchase a chainsaw for years—probably some man/machine thing in my DNA. Thing is, I’ve never had much to cut up. At the time I lived in the city and my fireplaces were all natural gas. With my entire backyard covered in fallen tree, somebody had to take care of the problem. I ignored the rational pleas from my wife to just hire someone to remove it and marched right down to the hardware store and purchased a new chainsaw and all of the accessories. Urban warrior personified. ■ Gloves? Check. ■ Safety glasses? Check. ■ Chain oil? Check. ■ Fuel? Check ■ Brand new leather tool belt just so I’d look bad ass? Check. ■ Fourteen-year-old son to haul the branches I cut to the curb? Check. 252 Fanatical Prospecting

I pulled the cord several times to crank the machine and finally it fired up. The engine rumbled. It felt awesome in my hands. Power! I hit the throttle several more times, just to let the tree know who was boss, and then got down to work. The smell of burning fuel filled the air, sawdust was flying, and defeated branches crashed to the ground. I worked through the tangle of limbs, taking the small branches off first. The new saw cut through the wood like a hot knife through butter. Man versus tree and man was winning. An hour later, the tree was getting the best of me. Drenched in sweat, I struggled for what seemed like hours just to make a single cut through the trunk. Looking at what remained of the tree, and doing the math in my head, at the pace I was going it would take days to finish the job. Exhausted and frustrated, I turned the saw off and sat down on the back steps to rest, ignoring the “I told you so” look I got from my wife as she handed me a glass of iced tea. My son, who had been doing the same calculation and realizing that at this pace he would never get back to his video games said, “Daddy, maybe you need to sharpen the saw.” Ishookmyheadnoandexplainedtohim,“It’sbrandnew;itshould be plenty sharp. I think the wood in the trunk is just harder than in the limbs.” I didn’t say it out loud, but I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of driving to the hardware store to get a saw sharpener. An hour later, again exhausted and getting nowhere, I reluc- tantly took his advice and took the 10-minute trip to the hardware store to get a rasp to sharpen the chain. After 15 minutes of sharpening, the saw was once again going through the wood like it was butter. I shook my head in disbelief. If I had taken the time to just sharpen the saw when it started bogging down, I would already be finished with the job. This got me thinking about other areas of my life where I was bogging down and getting nowhere. Honestly, there were dozens of opportunities to sharpen up. I realized that with all of my focus on building my business, I’d ignored investing in myself. Developing Mental Toughness 253

With my chainsaw lesson firmly in mind I registered for a seminar, ordered a book, and subscribed to several blogs focused on the areas in my life that needed some sharpening. The techniques I learned made an immediate impact on my mindset. I felt more energized and focused, and my drive increased exponentially. Over the next few months, my already successful business doubled in size. We had to open a new office to make room for our growing team. It was a direct result in an investment in me. So how about you? Where are you bogging down or expending lots of effort but getting nowhere? When was the last time you sharpened your own saw? When was the last time you slowed down and invested in yourself? The most successful people are constantly investing in them- selves to increase their knowledge, gain insight, and sharpen their skills. They understand a principle that was true with my chainsaw and true in life. Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. It is not always about trying harder. Sometimes it is doing or thinking differently. And though in the heat of the moment, you may feel that you don’t have time to read a book or attend a seminar (or run to the hardware store to purchase a sharpener), more often than not, slowing down and sharpening your saw will actually help you move faster, with less effort, and generate far better results. Outlearn = Outearn Cicero said, “The cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food to the body.” Gandhi said, “We should live as if we will die tomorrow and learn as if we will live forever.” In sales, and in life, when you outlearn your competitors (and peers), you’ll outearn them. People who invest in learning are more motivated, develop a stronger belief system, and are invariably more successful than their peers. 254 Fanatical Prospecting

Want to become an elite sales athlete? One of the keys is to have more knowledge about the sales profession, your industry, and your products and services than any of your competitors. Learners invest their own money in books, seminars, and workshops to keep their skills updated and sharp. They subscribe to newsletters, trade magazines, industry publications, blogs, and sales publications to stay current on their own industry and the sales profession. They follow top experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. They listen to podcasts, show up for webinars, and watch educational videos online. They read books. Everything you ever need to know about anything is contained in a book. Everything! If you want to learn something or become an expert at anything, all you need to do is read. Yet, I am saddened at how many people tell me that they don’t like to or just plain won’t read. I’ve got limited patience for salespeople who don’t read. There is absolutely no excuse for it. When you decide not to read, you are making the conscious choice to limit your growth and income, and I have zero sympathy for you. Reading helps you think more thoroughly. It helps you see the world differently. It makes you a better resource to your customers and company. It helps you become a better conversationalist. Reading gives you insight. Improves your writing skills and vocab- ulary. And because so few people read, reading can help you become an expert whom people—including prospects—who don’t read seek out for advice. Reading programs the subconscious mind to find answers when you need them. There has never been a time in human experience where books were more accessible or affordable. With mobile devices, you can read anywhere. I’m a fan of Kindle and Audible, but you’ll find dozens of outlets, including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Oyster to buy books. I buy hardcover, digital, and audio books. With just a click on my smartphone, I have access to millions of Developing Mental Toughness 255

books in an instant. With Audible, I am able to plug my phone or tablet into my car and listen to books while I drive or while I walk my dog or work out at the gym. The real secret is breaking reading up into small chunks of just 15 minutes each day. Fifteen minutes a day of professional reading adds up fast. Most people are shocked at how many books they go through. Here’s how it works: ■ There are 52 weeks in a year. ■ Let’s assume that you get in professional reading (nonfiction) only on weekdays and that you take 2 weeks off for vacation. ■ You are left with 250 days for professional reading. ■ That 250 days multiplied by 15 minutes gives you 3,750 minutes, or roughly 62.5 hours of professional reading in a year. ■ The average business, sales, or personal development book requires between 2 and 3 hours to read, depending on your speed. That’s around 250 pages or 50,000 words, with the average adult reading between 300 and 500 words per minute. ■ Do the math: 62.5 hours divided by 3 hours per book, and over the course of a year, reading just 15 minutes a day, you will read approximately 21 professional books. This is an astounding number of books. Reading just 15 minutes a day will change your life and your income. On your lunch break, when you are waiting for a customer, on the train or plane, or when you have a moment to spare, pull up your reading app on your phone and knock a few pages out. Use drive time wisely. The average inside salesperson has a commute of one to two hours a day. The average outside sales rep spends between four and five hours a day in a car. Why not spend it learning rather than listening to music or talk radio? The late Zig Ziglar called this “Automobile University.” Listening to educational and personal development audio pro- grams in your car can give you the equivalent of a university 256 Fanatical Prospecting

education many times over. It’s easy. Add the Audible app on your phone and download audio books. Add the Podcasts app (Apple) or Stitcher app (Android) on your phone and listen to podcasts. I am a huge fan of podcasts because they are F-R-E-E. Many of the world’s preeminent thought leaders and authors produce incredible podcasts that help you grow and develop. Be sure to subscribe to my podcast (the most downloaded sales podcast in iTunes history) while you are out there. For salespeople, the key to building mental resilience is using every spare moment to invest in yourself. Physical Resilience In sales, the mental discipline to put yourself out there and be vulnerable to rejection requires a tremendous amount of mental energy. Your mental energy will always be limited by your physical resilience. You won’t win consistently if you lack the endurance to outwork and outhustle your competitors. Keeping yourself in great physical condition improves creative thinking, mental clarity, and optimism. It makes you more nimble and adaptive, and helps you gain the discipline to maintain emo- tional self-control in the face of endless rejection. It also boosts your confidence and enthusiasm—the two most important emotions in sales. Physical resilience is built on three foundational pillars. Regular Exercise Sales professionals spend an inordinate amount of time sitting and staring at screens. With the increase in inside sales roles and the advancement of technology like video calls, e-mail, and social media, salespeople spend less time on their feet than ever before. Developing Mental Toughness 257

There is mounting evidence that sitting all day is extremely hazardous to your health6 and impacts your mental capacity. Turns out when you sit too long staring at a computer screen, “everything slows, including brain function.”7 Reams of research8 indicates that 30 minutes to an hour a day of exercise keeps you healthy, reduces the chance of disease, and develops physical resilience. Most people can find 30 minutes a day to exercise. You’ve just got to commit and sometimes get creative. Maybe you don’t have time for 30 minutes all at one time. That’s okay. Studies9 indicate that 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there can be just as or even more effective than a single long session. You can go to the gym, take a walk at lunch, or ride your bike when you get home at night. Supplement this with 50 sit-ups and 50 push-ups. On the weekends, play sports or go for a hike. Carry your bag on the golf course instead of riding in a cart. Park at the back of the parking lot, walk the stairs, walk to the next terminal at the airport rather than taking the train. Work in your garden. Stand up while you are making prospecting calls and walk on your breaks or between meetings rather than sitting in the break room or in a conference room gossiping. There are literally hundreds of ways to build a 30-minute-a-day workout routine into your busy life. It doesn’t matter what you do; it just matters that you do something that makes you sweat, for at least 30 minutes every day. Sleep Nothing impacts your health and mental well-being more than sleep. When you get plenty of sleep, your physical and mental energy is at a peak state. You are more creative, more disciplined, and agile. You are more confident, can think on your feet, are more apt to push past adversity, and frankly, look and feel better. 258 Fanatical Prospecting

Humans need between seven and nine hours of sleep every night for optimal performance. In today’s society, though, it has become a badge of honor to live on little sleep. All sorts of ugly things happen to you when you are not getting enough sleep.10 Over the long term, you become more susceptible to immune deficiencies, obesity, heart disease, and mood disorders, and it reduces your life expectancy. In the short term, sleep deprivation has a profound impact on your cognitive ability. You’re grumpy, mentally unfocused, and stressed out; your memory fails you; and you become susceptible to breaks in discipline. It is very, very difficult to maintain the mental toughness required for prospecting when you are not getting enough sleep. Eat Healthy In the hectic, fast-paced world of sales, it can be difficult to eat well. Field salespeople swing into fast-food joints to fuel up and inside salespeople reach for the bag of chips or candy bar hidden in their desk drawer and wash it all down with sugar-laden sodas and energy drinks. Eating poorly is like putting low-grade gasoline in a high- performance race car. To gain the mental toughness and resiliency to work at your peak throughout the sales day, you need to fill up with high-test rocket fuel. Healthy eating is a conscious choice. It is a commitment that is easy to break when you are not getting enough sleep or exercise. The good news is that these days, even fast-food restaurants have healthy choices. With just a little discipline and planning, you can easily find nutritious food on the road, and you can certainly prepare healthy meals at home. There is one cardinal rule for salespeople and food. No matter what, eat breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the sales Developing Mental Toughness 259

day. It kick-starts your metabolism, energizes your attitude, and helps you muster the discipline to start your day with a high energy prospecting block. Feed Your Attitude You are what you believe. Your beliefs either attract success or push it away. Your beliefs drive your attitude. When it comes to prospecting and sales—attitude is everything. When you feed your attitude the fear and reluctance associated with prospecting starve to death. Therefore, an investment in a strong belief system is founda- tional to mental toughness. In my travels around the world, I’ve discovered that people with a positive attitude share two common beliefs:

1. They expect to win.
2. They believe that everything happens for a reason. When you internalize an expectation that you are going to win and are supposed to win, you’ll win far more often than the person who expects to lose. You’ll ask confidently for what you want, achieve your prospecting objectives more often, and close more deals. When you believe that everything happens for a reason, your perspective on potentially negative events will be optimistic. Instead of complaining, “Why me?” when you face a setback, you ask, “How can I learn from this?” In other words, when you choose to believe that you are in control of your own destiny, you no longer fear failure and rejection because you believe that failure is the path to learning, growth, and improved performance. Because you are human, your beliefs will tend to wax and wane. Sometimes you’ll get caught up in “stinking thinking” without even 260 Fanatical Prospecting

realizing it. Some days other people see it in you. They may even tell you that you need an “attitude adjustment.” The most obvious place a deteriorating mindset shows up is in your sales performance. When your attitude loses altitude—you lose your winning edge. The key to keeping your attitude tuned in to the right channel is self-awareness. When you start to feel uncentered, your language turns negative, or other people start pointing out that your attitude sucks, it’s time to take action. Change the company you keep. Misery loves company, and it wants you on its team. Hang out with people who have poor attitudes and they’ll destroy yours. Make sure the people you are hanging out with build your attitude up rather than tear it down. Change your self-talk. There is a little voice inside of you and it jabbers away 24/7. Self-talk, what you say to yourself internally, manifests itself in your outward attitude and actions. Stop and listen to what you are telling yourself. If you are drowning in self-pity, blaming the world for your problems, and telling yourself what you can’t do, then it is time to change your language. You cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought. Change your input. What you put into your brain is what will come out. If you are reading, watching, or listening to negative things, it will impact your attitude. Take a break from the news. Turn off talk radio. Start feeding positive messages to your brain and your attitude will gain altitude. Change your focus. Yes, you lost. You had a setback. You failed. When confronted with failure, some people waste all of their energy dwelling on it. They play the tape over and over again in their head. Change your view. Embrace the gift of failure. Leverage that hurt to become stronger and more agile. Harness the energy you are wasting playing the defeat tape and use it to drive you toward your next goal. You are not defined by what happens to you but rather by how you deal with what happens to you. Each time you face adversity or when things don’t go your way, you have a choice. You can either choose to whine and complain, or choose to learn and grow. Developing Mental Toughness 261

Be grateful. Gratitude is the cornerstone of a positive attitude, the spark that ignites self-motivation, and one of the true keys to happiness. It is an appreciation for what you have, what you have been given, your opportunities, lessons learned through failure and adversity, and the help others have given you along the way. Elite salespeople are thankful to have a career that allows them to outearn almost everyone around them. Grateful for the roadblocks and challenges that help them learn and make them stronger. Grateful for the customers and prospects that generate their incomes. Grateful for the companies that pay their commission checks. Grateful for the bad bosses who help them learn what not to do and the great bosses who inspire them to stretch and become more. The good news is you can deliberately cultivate gratitude and the positive attitude that comes from it by reminding yourself to be thankful. When You Are on Top, Attack Yourself Maybe you’ve crossed the finish line first, raised your hands in the air, pumped your fists, and celebrated. Maybe you’ve just come off of a big year, quarter, or month. You’ve been given accolades, a trophy, a President’s Club trip, the admiration of your peers, or a huge commission check. You may wonder, “How much better can I get?” While you are cashing that big commission check, relaxing on the beach, or walking onstage at your national sales meeting to pick up your trophy, remember that just because you are a winner today does not guarantee that you will be a winner tomorrow. When you have worked this hard, singularly focused on one thing, it is natural to believe that you have reached an apex, a peak, or a mountaintop. Now that you are sitting at the top on that 262 Fanatical Prospecting

mountain, you feel you can rest, take in the view, and be content. You can breathe a sigh of relief and allow yourself to believe, for the first time in a long time, that it is all downhill from here. Take a moment, celebrate, congratulate yourself, bask in the spotlight, but do not slip into the false comfort of contentment or the delusion that it is all downhill from here. Here is my advice: When you’re in second place, attack the leader. When you’re in first place, attack yourself. There is no time for complacency. You cannot afford the luxury of comparing yourself to those behind you. Achieving by dumbing down your expectations is just plain stupid. Create new goals for yourself and new challenges. Raise the bar so that you keep reaching higher. There is no time to rest—the 30-Day Rule will get you. It is easy to look back at poor performance or a failure with 20/20 vision and find all of the areas where improvement can be made. But it takes loads of self-discipline and the heart of a winner to break down a brilliant performance and then take action to make small adjustments and improvements that keep you ahead of the pack. The great NFL quarterback Steve Young said that “the princi- ple is competing against yourself. It’s about self-improvement, about being better than the day before.” This is what all elite athletes and elite sales professionals do. Real winners constantly attack themselves. They pick apart each per- formance and seek ways to improve. They view each victory as a small step toward new goals. It is this unwavering focus on constant improvement that separates the good from the great and makes today’s winners tomorrow’s champions. Developing Mental Toughness 263