Well, here we are again! Who'd have bloody thought it. January the 1st, another year has passed us by. I know how you're feeling. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling hyped up. Yeah, fired up for the start of a new year, a new era. I'm going to hit you with something so strong for January the 1. I hope you're sitting comfortably.

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and which have to do with the choice I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals but within myself, to the choices that are my own. Epicus discourses. Oh, what a start, what a start of the year, what a start.

It's funny, isn't it? Because people who are watching this now, people who are listening to this, you've enjoyed your Christmas break and actually, you probably enjoyed a loss of control a little bit. There's been a bit of indulgence, you've had maybe one too many sherries at the bar, you sat at the table, you've eaten a full turkey, you're feeling guilty. Exactly, and now you've got to show up as a salesperson, put one foot in front of the other, and face the gauntlet of rejection after rejection. And suddenly the brain is going to go into, "Oh my gosh, panic."

So what would you say to those people who are starting to worry about that? I think it's a great place to be. So, you're at the year, and you're looking out on it like an ocean. This is my whole year, so who do I want to be by the end of the year? And I'm only going to focus on the things I can control. So I think when it comes to rejection, one of the big things that salespeople sometimes forget is that actually when you signed up and you applied for that job in sales, you knew that it probably came with 90 to 95% worth of rejection on a daily basis. Whether that be from cold calls, whether it be from discovery calls or emails saying, "Actually, we've chosen to go with another vendor," it's going to happen.

Okay, so I think one of those things is acceptance and knowing that actually, I can't control it. Because if I could control it, I'd have 100% win rate. That is something I do like, I don't know about you, maybe the same. I'm pretty good at sales, so, um, but one of the things that I've told about the circle test before, right? So one of the things that I talk about with my team is this idea of— I think I stole this from a therapist or something like that— but if you draw a circle in the middle of a page, on the side you write down all the different aspects of your job in sales. So the rejections, the yeses, the noes, the dials, the data, whatever it may be, you could literally write a list out of everything that your job comprises of.

But in the circle, you can only put the things that are in your control. What you'll find is it's a very, very small list of things that are actually in your control. You can control the output, the way that you show up every day, maybe the words that you say, but you certainly can't control if you ring someone up and the cat's been run over and they tell you to piss off at 9:00 in the morning. That's not in your control. And suddenly what you're left with is, "Oh, actually this is— I'm quite relaxed in this."

I think often the anxiety and the pressure come from the things that aren't in your control, and you're worried about things that you can't really make a difference to anyway. I know I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and it's probably a great place to think about it at the start of the year, but like this debt that you pay for things that never happen, like the worrying debt, it's awful. You pay a tax before you've even had the invoice. So it's like thinking all these "what ifs," but "what if they don't?" And then you've already spent all that time wasting.

So these thoughts are going to come into your head because you're human, and it's human nature to have the "what if this happens, what if this goes wrong, what if I don't achieve my target x, y, and z?" But they're unhelpful thoughts. So I like to, the way I imagine it, it's crazy, but like a cat with a ball of string, and the ball of string comes in, and I'm just a cat. I throw it out, I hit it out, I get rid of it.

Do you have anything else practical when it comes to getting rid of those negative thoughts and the self-talk? I think salespeople should think of themselves more as a set of habits. You're not your commission, accomplished every time, you're not the drinks are on me. Look, we've all hit target. You're actually that baseline of habits that you fall to every day, and I think that's the turning up with, "Here’s the minimum I need to do today to have a good day," the minimum number of "no's" or the minimum number of conversations that I'm aiming for today.

But then also having just a completely gentle indifference to what the results are. So not getting too high on the wins and not getting too low on the losses. Salespeople are often referred to as having big peaks and troughs in performance, and I think often that's because of an inability to regulate one's emotions.

So keeping that in mind, I think we're going to have a bloody good year. I think it's going to be a beautiful year. Zack Thompson, I'm excited for this. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember, you will die and no shoes in the house.