For my day job, I’m currently working in sales. I do this to make sure that my bills get paid while I pursue purpose, Today was not my best day in sales but it’s one in which I learned a valuable lesson about how counterproductive stress can be.

For context, I’ll go ahead and say that I’m in my 3rd week on the sales floor for this position. During my 1st week, I was stressed out and didn’t believe I could close anyone so…. I didn’t. 🤷🏾‍♂️

In week 2, I closed one person. I immediately started stressing out about not having more because the people who had been in my training class were way ahead of me. I started to beat myself up for not performing to the same level as everyone else. At best, this was counterproductive. At worst, it was anxiety inducing. On Friday, I had a conversation with my manager and he told me what I already knew. I was being WAY too hard on myself. I had a head knowledge of this but I was not sure how to control the stress of it all. I spent the weekend thinking about this and figuring out how I was going to be on top of my game on Monday morning.

The answer I found was simple. I remembered the words wise people I’ve known over the years and the uniform message that worrying does not fix anything. If anything, worrying will cause you to be worse off because the energy you could be placing on doing your best in every moment, is being channeled in a negative direction.

But how to apply that in the workplace?

Take every project, task, call, etc, one at a time.

I did this today and what could have been a day in which I closed 0 interactions, I was able to put points on the board by taking the job one sales call at a time. It was almost time to get off, I was exhausted & I didn’t want to be in the office anymore. I wanted to spend the rest of my shift killing time (something that is tempting for sales folks to do) but I chose, instead, to make a few more calls and give each call 100%.

The 1st caller was not interested. Nobody picked up on the 2nd. The 3rd call was one that I closed. I didn’t do anything special I the interaction. I just put forth the effort and decided that I was going to deal with each interaction with a mindset of doing the best that Bash could do. This eliminated stress because I was only focused on what I had control over. I couldn’t force the people I was interacting with to be nice to me. I couldn’t force them to be interested in what I was offering. I could, however, show up in the interaction with my game face on and exhibit excellence in my behaviors.

It wasn’t a great day for numbers but it was a great day for my confidence.

Thanks for stopping by,

~Bash ♥️