Growing Up To Be Mentally Tough
I grew up in the entertainment industry and booked my first show when I was ten. I will never forget my first day on set. I thought I had prepared, I was doing incredible practicing in class with my acting coach. But I walked on set and it was like something I had never seen. People were building sets and drilling. The director was yelling, people were scurrying around with clipboards. I quickly discovered my least favorite person on the set who was called scriptie. Her literal job was to listen to me deliver my lines and if I got a single one wrong she kept track and make us re-take the scene. The director came up and let me know that because of the train that was in the scene and all the extras it was going to cost him almost 10k dollars every time we had to re-set.
Now, this was a lot of pressure for a 10-year-old. As you can imagine without my permission my brain started going in on all the what if’s "Uh oh. What if I forget the words? What if my voice cracks? What if I'm not as good on set as I was in the audition? What if? What if? What if?"
I got so caught up in the negative what-ifs that I completely forgot about the whats. Like what I'm supposed to be doing.
When I noticed I was about to be cued, I realized... I couldn’t remember my line.
I hear the director yell action. I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
Instead of focusing on giving a great performance and focusing on what I needed to be doing, I was so focused on all the things that could go wrong that that's exactly what happened.
100% Focus
Tony Robbins gives a great example of this. He says "Where focus goes energy flows." He said when he was first learning how to drive a race car, the very first thing that they teach you is don't look at the wall. Because the second that you turn your head to look towards the wall, your hands will turn ever so slightly and you'll smash right into it. So as you can imagine, after this experience, I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to control my focus. Learning how to control your focus is one of the keys to success in any area of your life, but especially in sales.
When you have to make a sales call but you got in a fight with a family member before work and the whole world is distracting you. HOW DO YOU STAY FOCUSED?
Dealing With Rejections
How can you get on the 50th call with the same enthusiasm that you got on the first?
And how can you stay in a confident great mood no matter what is going on in your day?
Your brain will usually focus on the most emotionally triggering thought. You must be able to decrease the emotionality behind the thoughts that don’t serve you and infuse emotion into the ones that do.
The Principle Of Framing
When I give this talk live, I usually start by doing a quick demonstration. I have people raise their hand because I tell them that I need a volunteer. Sure enough, usually, there'll be about a fourth of the room that raises their hands, and everybody else kind of sits there quiet. I call somebody up on stage. I ask them their name, and then I let them go sit down. I let them know that the experiment has actually already happened because the purpose of it is to see what went on in your mind. All of our minds are going to give an answer to whatever question that we pose it. For some people as soon as I say, “do you want to volunteer”, they go into their heads and think, Oh no, what will she ask me to do?
Is she going to ask me to do something embarrassing or are people gonna make fun of me? And obviously, the answer to that question is that it's possible. So they're going to sit in their seats very quietly and not raise their hand.
Whereas the people who ask themselves the question, “I wonder what I can learn from this.” Those people took action and raised their hand. You have to be able to recognize and control the autopilot default of your subconscious and begin to become aware of it so that you can make more conscious choices. You have to learn how to ask yourself the right question. The right question will get you to take massive action and the right action. Now there's always going to be fear, right? But the trick is to get the fear to work for you instead of against you.
How do we do that? By changing the type of questions that you ask.
The question of "What happens if I fail?" is obvious, it's, "I'm going to be embarrassed." And that fear of embarrassment is going to cause you to sit in your seats and not take action.
But if I change the question to “what happens if I don't take action?” Well, then the answer is that I’ll probably never accomplish my dreams. All of the vision that I have for my life is going to go to waste. And that fear of embarrassment is going to seem like nothing compared to the fear of regret.
Get FEAR To Work For You, Not Against You
So you have to exchange that question of what happens if I fail for the question, what happens if I don't try? Your fear of regret will far outweigh your fear of failure and you will take action. For an example of this, when I was a kid, I loved sugar. I did not so much like brushing my teeth and going to the dentist. So when I did finally go, I found out that I had 12 cavities. Yes, this is possible. I had numerous holes on each tooth and I was so afraid of needles at that point in my life that I decided that I was going to get these cavities filled with no Novocaine. You can’t imagine how much it hurt. This was probably the most traumatic childhood experience of my life by the seventh one, my parents and the dentist convinced me that I had to get the shot.
And you can imagine my anger with myself when I realized that the pain of this little baby shot was nothing compared to the hours of torture that I had just endured with all this drilling.
It's the same concept when you start comparing what is more painful when you start seeing, this little bitty pain of going after my goals and dreams and possibly being a little embarrassed is nothing compared to the enormous weight of pain that I will feel if I don't try, then it will cause you to take different action and the right action.
So I want you to write down this acronym for fear. You can either forget everything and run or face everything and rise.