what may you be? what's for your tea? Sausage mash jacket potato. Your name is Jack it. Jack it is the 10th of January. Hopefully you see what that was clutching at straws. It might have been. So I'm to kick you off with our friend in yours, although sometimes you struggle to say his name. Epictetus. Epictetus. Sorry.

Steady on, easy for you to say. The essence of good is a certain kind of reasoned choice, just as the essence of evil is another kind. What about externals then? They are only the raw material for our reasoned choice, which finds its own good or evil in working with them. How will it find the good? Not by marvelling at the material, for if judgements about the material are straight, that makes our choices good.

But if those judgments are twisted, our choices turn bad. I like it. about the way I read it? The way you read it was maybe five out of ten, but the quote was ten out of ten. I like all this stoic stuff. Thank you. So should we have a conversation about stories? Yes, I think that's what this one's really talking about, isn't it? It's talking about the stories that we tell ourselves often completely change the picture.

You've got a very black and white objective painting that you're then adding color to. And sometimes it's not for the best reasons, is it? So there's a, there's a lovely little, I call it a tidbit, but, um, there's a river and there's a man on one side of the river and a woman on the other side. And the man shouts, how do I get to the other side of the river? And the woman shouts, you're on it. Wow. Yeah. Or an American woman walks into a bar in Glasgow.

She says out, no, no, sorry. That's not the joke. She walks in and she starts talking to all the Gladwagens and she says, huh, your guys accents are so funny. And they go, we don't have accents. You've got the accent. Wow. That's good. What about guy goes up to someone in Ireland and ask for directions and he says, where does this road take me? And the guy says, anyway you want. Wow.

Okay, get this guy a crown because he's the next Aurelius. Yes. But stories that we tell ourselves are so interesting. Can I start you off? Yeah. How many times have we heard someone in our sales team or one of our sales teams, sorry, one of our sales teams say, everyone hates me today. Yeah. So many times. And what's the impact of that?

Everybody hates me. It's going to have a negative effect on them individually because nobody ever wants to be hated, rejected, died, blah, blah, beheaded all of Henry. but it, it's one of those that I saw a study and it's really interesting and I'm going to butcher it I'm going to make up the facts to make it sound better for what we're doing right now. But if you have somebody negative within your team, I think it will have a negative like.

It brings their results down by like 80 % or something like that. But if you've got someone positive, it brings out by like 120%. We'll do a fact check and we'll get the real numbers in there. it sounds good. But you can understand why that would be true. It's a story. But you could understand why that would be true of actually it's like, there's a brilliant picture and it's like a moldy apple that's next to all these other apples. And the really moldy one makes the other one moldy.

But it has that knock on effect that if you're negative and I come in, we, I'll share a story with you and I don't know if you'll remember this, but I came down to the Bournemouth office for a couple of days, a a couple of years ago and I got off a call and I think it was like raining outside and just got over a cold and I just said, everything's a bit shit at the minute. And you went, what is, and you put me on the spot and that availability heuristic I was like,

Well, not, not, I can't really think of anything. Just, you know, everything. Well, yeah, but what is, well, it wasn't, but because I'm British and I've got a negative bias and a lot of the, brain is wired for 60 to 80 % of negative emotion. It's just like a default sometimes to say everything shit was actually you've got to catch yourselves and that negative self-talk isn't helpful to anyone. And it's about maybe gratitude in the moment of, I get to do this, but

being careful with the story that you tell yourself with, which links nicely. Yeah. You know, Julian Treasure. We know him. Julian Treasure said that he said to his mum once, it's October 1st today. I know, isn't it awful? And just people have that ready to go bias in there. So let's let's talk about some of these then. Right. So salespeople, let's say they say everyone hates me. What could you say instead? I haven't spoke to anybody that loves me yet. What?

Okay, and the data is bad. I haven't spoken to the right person yet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how many? Yeah, exactly. But you can often bypass it with logic, can't you? Everyone hates me today. How long are we into today? An hour. Yeah. Right. How many of you spoke to two? Right. So does everyone hate you? Or did you speak to two people on a Monday morning who had a bad day or just didn't really have a need for what you were talking about? yeah, that's a bit more like it. Have you seen Aladdin?

Yeah. Yeah. Michael Barrymore. He's got this genie and you ask the genie and it will give you whatever you want. I'm just explaining the plot line to Aladdin there. Thank you. But your brain, whatever questions you ask it, it will find reasons to answer that and it will answer those questions. So why does everyone hate me today? Because you sound bad. da da. Ask yourself better questions. Do you know what I mean to how many people have I spoken to today? You've spoken to two people.

Okay, so does everybody hate me? And it's rewiring your brain to kind of confront those ugly statements and that negative self-talk. Yes. There are no facts on the opinions. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Facts are boring as dirt. Yes, they certainly are. What do you think is the knock on effect if you've got, let's say, a team leader or someone in leadership who comes in and it's a, everyone's going to die mentality. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will flock.

Wow. Is that a sign? Yeah. Do you know that? I heard that It's Robert Green, 48 Lords of Power. Wow. So basically in these situations of like negativity, it's usually like, like we say, a fish rots from the head down. So if you remove that negative person, well then all of a sudden you're going to see a change within the room. And we've seen that over the years and in previous jobs as well, that you remove one element and everything changes in terms of culture and stuff like that, because culture comes from

down. If I'm coming in every single day, like I know you do a massive commute and if you came into the office every day and was like, I've done an hour commute today, I've been stuck behind a tractor, I've been up all night with the babies, you're not going to have a team that performing well, that want to be there and be motivated. it's so important that you are your own morale beacon. And it's like a little lantern. And you have that question with yourself on a daily basis of how bright do I want to shine today? Because what I do

internally is going to have a knock on effect with other people. And if I bring them up, then they'll shine brighter. And as a tribe will shine bright together like a diamond, like a diamond. I am took one of our old team leaders aside. He's no longer with us. And I said, what you've got to imagine is you're in the trenches, but you're leading the way. Right. So everyone's coming in every day to get in the trenches with you. Do the, do the Mucky word, the hard lifting.

And you've got a choice. You've got a choice to say, come on, we can do it. Push on and give them the right story. But at the minute, what you're doing is you're screaming their face every day. We're all going to die. And that's going to have a knock on effect, isn't it? And they were like, Oh yeah, that's right. And it worked for about a week, but they're going to have that shell shock. Like, and I also think like you've got to be careful with like information that, especially if you're, if you're a sales leader watching this information that you share, like

There's being honest and transparent, one million percent. like, what is, before I say something, what is the knock on effect that that could have? Because there's no point saying just before like, right, okay, we're all in the trenches. We're going to march forward and we're going to start this war. But just, you know, we're all going to sign a peace treaty. So you go out and do all your work and die, but actually it doesn't mean anything because it's over by the end of the day. So like, be careful with the information that you give when you're trying to lead and motivate other people.

Beautiful. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you will die. Shh. Those knees are weak.