Mental resilience is quickly becoming a popular topic within sales teams, but most sales reps and leaders are taking the wrong approach. This becomes clear when we look at how the average salesperson is using “recovery” periods to manage stress within their role.
To see the pitfall in their approach, we need to understand the interdependence between stress, resilience and recovery. To do this, we can ask ourselves a simple question:
- Day 1 – $1
- Day 2 – $2
- …
- Day 7 – $64
- Day 8 – $128
- …
- Day 15 – $16,384
- Day 16 – $32,768
- …
- Day 21 – $1,048,576
- Day 22 – $2,097,152
- …
- Day 29 – $268,435,456
- Day 30 – $536,870,912
Compounding Mental Resilience
This exercise will likely get any elementary school student excited to start saving and investing their money, but the same compounding effect should get any adult or company excited about something called:
Compound Mental Resilience: The benefit in performance and overall well-being that is created by investing time into restoring and protecting your Mental Health daily, rather than occasionally throughout the year.
When a salesperson relies too heavily on taking vacations to manage their stress levels, or companies lean on Wellness Days (of late “Summer Vacations” trend) as their Mental Health strategy…
This is similar to taking the $1 Million up front.
They provide a ton of value and offload stress across the entire organization, but they require more vacations and wellness days (more time) in the future when the “$1 Million” runs out; AKA when stress levels build back up and another lengthy recovery period is needed.
Between vacations and wellness days – sales performance is also steadily declining as elevated stress levels chip away at Mental Health.
Instead, when organizations and individuals invest “$1 of time” into supporting their Mental Health on a daily basis, their mental resilience to stress compounds overtime to raise baseline well-being and performance levels.
Mental Resilience Training & Support
This is what any good Resilience and Mental Health training program should help you do. Teach you how to invest and maximize that “$1 of time” each day by showing you how to self-regulate your stress levels.
Show you ways to become more resilient to the unique stressors you face EVERY day in sales that are impacting Mental Health and performance.
About The Author
Jeff Riseley is currently the Founder of the Sales Health Alliance and Mental Health Advocate. With over a decade of sales experience – Jeff understands the importance of Mental Health in achieving peak sales performance.
Jeff combines his sales and Mental Health expertise to improve sales performance through mental health best practices. His strategies have helped sales teams become more motivated, resilient and better equipped to tackle stressful events within sales.
