Ever felt like you're sailing through stormy seas, both in your professional and personal life? You're not alone. Join me as I sit down with Gayle Charach, a seasoned resilience coach, to dive deep into navigating life's turbulent waters.
Ever felt like you're sailing through stormy seas, both in your professional and personal life? You're not alone. Join me as I sit down with Gayle Charach, a seasoned resilience coach, to dive deep into navigating life's turbulent waters.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host Coach, crm co-founder, corey Bray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I've got a special guest for you today Joining me. From Canada, it's recently minted resilience coach after 20 years in the world of sales. Enablement Gail Sharok. Gail, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great, Corey. How are you?
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm great, I'm resilient today, bouncing back from you are. I don't know what I'm bouncing back from, but it just doesn't. Even you can't let things knock you down, and that's why I'm so excited to talk to you today about resilience and some of the things that people can take for themselves and for their teams. When things are hard, how to get them pushing forward in their direction. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:I will make one little amendment. You meant bouncing back. I don't like to think of resilience as bouncing back, because sometimes we don't want to go back to a state that we were in. In my case, I bounced forward, and that's what I like to think of resilience, as is, yes, getting back up again, but then pushing forward, not bouncing back.
Speaker 1:I love that, and that's what happens when we get cute with language and we say, oh, it's alliteration, so we should say bounce back because it sounds fun. No, bounce forward. So we've already got our first takeaway from today. So tell us, out of all the things that you could have done in the world with your life, what drew you to the idea of coaching people around resilience?
Speaker 2:So interesting a question. So I spent 20 years in the field of enablement and after my last layoff, which was my fourth over the course of 20 years, and yet again it was wrong place, wrong time. It wasn't me, it was a series of layoffs.
Speaker 1:It's crazy, because I know people that have worked with you and you get praised by everyone. I've never heard a negative thing come out of anybody's mouth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's amazing. And yet, when you're in a place where things aren't so stable, these are things that happen and it happens to all of us, and especially in the world of technology. I mean, you and I both have watched for the last six months the exit, exit, exit after exit after exit, layoff after layoff after layoff, and I'm looking at all these very sad and very seriously hurt people whose lives were so enmeshed in their work and they can't separate who they are anymore. So a layoff happens in a situation like that. And that was my first layoff, my very first layoff I'll never forget. I was about three months into it.
Speaker 2:I was pouring over job boards, and this is 15, 16 years ago, so the tools weren't as extensive as they are now. But in that time I remember one morning waking up and we had a fridge that needed to be shipped out and another one was being delivered and I had to get up and clean the fridge out and I'm on my hands and knees on the floor. My husband walked into the kitchen and I looked up at him and said I don't want to be a charwoman anymore. And it just occurred to me at that moment that I was so wrapped up in my job, that my job was so who I was, that I had nothing outside of that, and I've lost my identity. And I think that's a big piece of what we're seeing now is a lot of people are re-evaluating and saying OK, in my case, it was my fourth layoff, am I ready to go another round or no? And I just, I just was too tired, corey, I was exhausted, and I realized a few months into my layoff that I was depleted, I mean literally burnt to a crisp. For 20 years I had been riding myself so hard that I didn't stop and take care of me, and I think that was a huge recognition.
Speaker 2:So, as I started thinking about, ok, if sales enablement is not what I want, to move forward with what's out there for me, and I thought about all the things that I'd done in my multiple careers over my lifetime, and they all focused on developing people. So I thought what can I do around developing people? Well, it's got to be something that I deeply know and I'm familiar with. And if there's anything I know, it's being resilient. So that's. I landed on resilience coaching. I love it.
Speaker 2:So what is resilience? Resilience is the ability to bend with pressure and not break under it. So I've got a really beautiful quote that I love, and I love it because I wear a bracelet every day that says be stronger than the storm. And the quote is from Louisa May Alcott and it says I'm not afraid of storms because I'm learning how to sail my ship. And that's what resilience is. If you think of of you as being a vessel in the midst of a sea that's turbulent and stormy, how do you keep that ship upright and not allow it to meet the fate of the Titanic? Right, you are that ship. How do you sail through and become resilient? There's so many ways, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, as you look out into the world, I'm curious do you, do you see a trend with people becoming more resilient, less resilient, and what's driving that?
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. It's a great question actually, and am I seeing a trend? What I'm seeing is, again, if I, if I use LinkedIn as my barometer right now and my circle of people, which spans sales across any number of industries, I'm seeing a lot of people looking really weary. I'm seeing the messages that are coming through on LinkedIn as sounding really exhausted, like are we here again? Do we have to do this again? So, if you ask me, I don't think people are showing extreme resilience. I think there are many that are, but I think there are many, many folks that are getting caught up in that swirl and they're really struggling to write the ship.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get it. It's hard too, because I think right now, as we talk, it's July of 2023. Yeah, and there is a bimodial, is that it? I don't know, I'm probably going to sound dumb.
Speaker 1:Anyways, there's some groups that are doing really really well, like some things are just doing incredible right now. Nvidia right now might be doing better than any company's ever done in the history of the world, and they're in tech. Apple's doing great. The big tech folks are doing phenomenal. And then at the lower end of the tech market, people are really struggling and they've got zombie companies that have raised more money than they're actually worth right now. A lot of companies that get to their next milestone and then in other sectors of the economy, etc. Miss some. Healthcare is doing great because people are getting older and people need healthcare and we're innovating and things like that, and so it's not bad for everybody like it was in 2009. There's no pockets of negativity, and I think that might even make it harder. If you see your neighbor doing really well and you're over here struggling, what kind of impact does that have on somebody?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that's part of getting caught up in that swirl of turbulence, right Is well, wait a minute. How come Corey's sailing right beside me on the same ocean, and yet his ship is upright and he's moving forward. And here I am struggling to write it. What is Corey doing that I'm not doing? That's what I want to know, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think I mean for me. What I'm seeing is that people and again you know, look at the color of the hair on my head it's silver, and every one of these silver hairs holds a lesson learned. So I've been around a long time, really long time, and I've seen a lot of transition, I've seen a lot of transformation. I've seen a lot of change. It's really a struggle for people right now when you think about everything that's going on around us the economy and all the struggles with that and then you get a layoff notice in the middle of a South economy and you're worried about tapping your savings, and I mean there's so many things that are so overwhelming. So it's easy to get caught up in that turbulence all around you instead of focusing on the ship. What is the ship need in order to stay upright?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we focus a lot on the turbulence around us and not a lot on the us.
Speaker 1:Let's look at this from the perspective of a sales leader that's got its team that's in a tough spot. Yeah, teams not hitting their numbers. You got expectations, lead flows down and there's no room for excuses. What advice would you give somebody in sales leadership right now who's got that situation and their team is frankly not not being as resilient as they could be?
Speaker 2:So I think the first question I would ask a sales leader in that situation is have you talked to the ships right? What conversations are you having with the people on your team? Are you aware that there could be undercurrents of things going on that you're not aware of, that are outside of the work around, that could be impacting these people's productivity? And I think that's a big miss that I see a lot of management teams make is that we look at everything. This is my workplace, these are my work people. Therefore, anything to do with work is okay. Anything outside of that, no, we can't touch that.
Speaker 2:Well, guess what? I'm not. I don't have a face that I put on for work and a face that I put on when I come home. As a matter of fact, I had this exact conversation with one of my clients recently who said you know, I didn't know how to respond when managers asked if we were okay, given that we just had layoffs and I wasn't sure how to respond. And I said but well, did you just come out and tell them what you know? Why didn't you say what you're saying to me?
Speaker 2:Well, because, and again, a lot of people are feeling like there's not psychological safety in the workplace for them to be able to open up. So who is it to come incumbent upon? Not upon this employee who's shaking and shivering in her boots because she's an individual contributor who doesn't have power, right perceived in her mind, doesn't have power. And and when I asked why didn't you say what you said to me, the answer I received was well, gail, I have an eight to five face and I have a six o'clock after face, and my response to that was that must be exhausting. I can barely manage one of me, let alone. If there were two of me, I couldn't imagine it.
Speaker 2:So stop, let's stop for a second and understand that we are not machines, so we are people, and people have all sorts of things going on in their lives outside of the workplace. So sometimes, as leaders, we have to do a little digging to figure out is this a workplace issue or are there other things that are are happening in this turbulent sea around this person who is the ship on trying to help remain upright? And if I don't take that leap of faith and try to tap that in this person, then I'm never going to make a change. So I say to managers who are seeing things that are not working. Is it all work or could there be undertones of things that are going on that you're not aware of? That? Maybe have to probe a little bit. For yeah, because we are humans and we bring our whole human selves to work. No matter how hard we try with the masks, we are still human.
Speaker 1:We are. We are what. This goes along with what Helminoi says coach the player, not play.
Speaker 2:Exactly, you guys have that nailed. It is about coaching the player and not the play, and especially in sales, it's really difficult as a leader to separate yourself from that. As a leader, it's scary to be vulnerable and to tap into someone else's vulnerability. So you know, to lead what I say. I mean I just went through this extreme burnout situation where I was literally the only word I could come up with to describe it was depleted. I was literally so depleted.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I realized through my own healing which, by the way I went out and sought coaching because I knew that I was this rudderless ship swimming in a storm and I needed some help to keep up right. So I went out and sought coaching and through that I learned for me. You know, again I took it back to the core and said there's been so many changes in my life, changes that people at work don't necessarily know about. Do they know that I moved to another city to take care of my parents, that my recipe has changed, that I'm no longer responsible just for me and getting up in the morning and going to work, but now I have an elderly father that I have to take it? And if there's all these things that change in people's lives all the time and that upsets Apple Cards and it upsets our emotional balance, I knew I couldn't help other people, I couldn't be a coach unless I put my own damn oxygen mask on first, right? So I think that's an important lesson for all leaders to learn is what are you doing to keep your ship up right? You managing to cope with the turbulence around you and do you think you've got it right? If you've got a right, great, go and help your people. If there's something that you're missing, go, take care of that.
Speaker 2:And as this is the thing that bothers me, corey, is that we've all gone through workshops like this in our lifetime, where you know we talk about our feelings or emotions. We tie that back to our unmet needs and figure out ultimately what is our purpose, what is our passion. The recipe is changing. How do you keep track of knowing? Is this still? Am I still? Is this still my core passion area? Or has that changed?
Speaker 2:Because, again, with all these silver hairs on my head, what interested me at 20, didn't interest me at 30, and the same thing did not interest me at 50, right? So as we get older and we're exposed to more things. Things change, we change, so why are we not going back to the basics and making sure, every few years, has our recipes changed, that we're going back to the basics and understanding? Are my core values still the same? Great, is it aligned? Or is all that aligned with my passion? Do I have a purpose? Is my purpose still the same? Has my purpose changed? And when you think of it from a leadership perspective, this is all going on in your people as well. Put your oxygen mask on, make sure you're okay and then coach the player.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So here's the tricky part. Sometimes the things that people on the team are dealing with are pretty extreme, so you've got a manager who might not know how to deal with that. There might be some serious things going on at home or in other aspects of life. How have you seen managers lean on other folks, be it HR, senior leaders, someone else, when you've got an employee? I've heard several examples over the last year where things aren't good at home, things aren't good with the extended family. Maybe somebody gets a little on the wrong side of the criminal justice system.
Speaker 2:A little.
Speaker 1:Potentially.
Speaker 2:Is that like being a little bit pregnant?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Things like this pop up you're a sales manager. What the heck do you do about that?
Speaker 2:You know what this is. One thing I've always said to sales leaders is yes, you're a sales leader and you have to manage a book of business. But guess what, when you become a leader, you also have to manage people, and if you don't know thyself, you cannot manage people. So who do you turn to? I can tell you for years in my role in enablement if you've got a good enabler, who you're walking shoulder to shoulder with, those are good sounding boards. Your enablement people are really good sounding boards for you, good people to go to, to tap on the shoulder and say you know, this is the situation I'm in, this is the situation I'm dealing with. At least, at the very minimum, tell me where to turn.
Speaker 2:Right Enablers are people who are dot connectors. We've got all kinds of contacts in all sorts of parts of different worlds and undoubtedly we'll have something, some recommendation, to give you. Same for your HR person, right? I mean, if it's a delicate situation where there's a life in the balance or God forbid, something really serious, that's when you get with your HR person, obviously. So, yeah, are we looking at an opening cans of worms as leaders? Yes, but that's a responsibility we took home when we agreed to leadership.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's not just about the pipeline report.
Speaker 2:No, it's not, and that's the thing you know. The mistake that so many people make is promoting people into management who have been great reps. Well, that's terrific, but have you given them the skills and the tools to know how to manage the other part of their job? Because now you've added a dimension that they didn't have. They were really good at managing books of business before, but now you've asked them to manage people. Have you prepped them and primed them for that? Have you given them the skills, the tools to do that? If not, are you really promoting the right people?
Speaker 1:Many companies haven't. And if your company has not trained your managers on how to coach, send an email to Free Stuff at coachcrmcom and we'll send you a free copy of the coaching salespeople course. Gail's seeing it. Gail, what do you think?
Speaker 2:Amazing. You guys have absolutely nailed the coaching, and the fact that your moniker is Coach the Player and not the Play is exactly where my head is at and has always been at. It's about the people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that email address is free stuff at coachcrmcom free stuff at coachcrmcom. Back to the show. So, gail, when we're thinking about becoming resilient on the team, how do we set a short-term goal to show that we're getting some kind of leading indicator of success? So, for example, right now we're recording this, July 17th Many teams have just closed out their second quarter or they're about to. In the next 14 days, someone's down, they're not heading it. How does the manager and the rep work together to come back from something that might be looking really, really bad and at least start pushing forward, not bouncing back?
Speaker 2:So, again, I think, do a little digging. If you're a manager, you have to do a little digging, and you have to make that digging go a little bit below the surface of where you would normally play, which is at that business level, right, try to uncover is there something else that's going on underneath the surface that is happening, and then work towards finding a solution for that with your person. Is there some additional coaching that might help them? Is it that they need some therapy? I mean, these are things that we need as people leaders. We need to be cognizant of knowing when to turn people towards another path. Right, yeah, you know, in terms of, for me, the framework for resiliency overall is about finding the joy and the passion in life, understanding our emotions so that we know which of our needs are being met, what's not being met, setting boundaries and that's really important too, and I think it's a big miss that a lot of managers don't plumb onto is, you know, we're continually adding to our employees' tasks, but what are we taking away to give them the balance? And when you think about this world that we're in right now, in technology, where there's been a lot of layoffs, your remaining employees are sitting stewing over the fact that they've got now added responsibilities because those bodies that were doing those things are gone. So boundaries are really important. Understanding what voices are playing in people's heads. How are they coming down on themselves? How are you encouraging a positive growth mindset right, and ultimately, are you accepting of the fact that your people are going to show up as their whole messy selves to work right?
Speaker 2:It's not just about the business, it's about the people. So a metric I'm not sure that I can say that there's a metric. I think, again, engage with your team, your HR team, your enablement team. I think those are two good starts that managers can start to work towards. How can I solve this bigger problem of people? It's not just my business. My business is suffering because there's something broken with my people and I need some help. So first, be the first to stand up and ask for that help. There's no shame in that and being vulnerable and sharing yourself. Hey, guys, when I'm really having a, I'm going through a shit time right now, my dad is calling me all day. I'm trying to focus on work. This is what's going on. I mean, share a little bit of what's going on in your life, being a little bit vulnerable is actually a strength.
Speaker 1:And you don't need to be a hero.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:Nobody's looking.
Speaker 2:I don't want a hero. I want someone who's going to help me take a step forward. I don't need heroes.
Speaker 1:That's a great Bonnie Tyler song.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 1:I love that song when I'm playing poker. Sometimes I'll be listening to podcasts. I'm going to listen to Bonnie Tyler. I might be the only person in the entire poker room that's ever thought that before, but great song. I love it, you don't know what song I'm talking about Tyler hero and Spotify. It's phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Yes, I just think really, you know leaders have such a hard job. You guys are. It's, it is being a leader today of people is so multifaceted and it's no longer the luxury of just dealing with the business side.
Speaker 1:Well, and the interesting thing is that this is it's something that I've seen come up over and over again. It's people talk about this as a new thing. There's a cover article, cover story Harvard business review, january 2016. I just looked it up. They talked about the collaborative overload, where your best people are being overloaded, and the image that they use on the cover of this Harvard business review Magazine is an electrical socket that looks like Kurt Klerp Griswold's from family vacation, where he's got 20 plugs into one outlet and it's going to start a fire If you take your best people and have them be responsible for everything.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I think that's another another. And then think of your your least productive or your least. You know the person you're struggling with the most. What if you gave them a little added responsibility but coach them to that right, you're increasing that self, that person's self worth, and you're alleviating the burden on something. The question is, can they manage both? Well, do you have the right people?
Speaker 1:Well, maybe, or just this this sounds a little more aggressive but or should you fire your least productive people and just not spend any time with them at all and reinvest the time, the energy and the resources into the remaining people? Cause I think nothing disengages an employee more than watching leadership and resources go into somebody that's underperforming.
Speaker 2:I agree, I agree. So I'm not suggesting that everybody take their weakest performers and give them a whole, much more responsibility, but think about it in the context of somebody who, where their self worth might be at risk, right yeah, and they're not going to be able to act where they're. And sales is the hardest job for that. I mean God, if you don't make your number, you're not worth anything, right, you're going to get let go. I mean, we bash salespeople all the time. It's probably the worst profession for the whole notion of imposter syndrome, right being something that I'm not. It plays itself out so much in the world of selling and it's a constant stream of pressure, of quote, of meeting numbers, of right. And when do you take stock? When you stop and take a breath and say am I whole? Am I whole? Am I able to give everything I've got because I've got what to give, right, or do I need to fix me a little bit?
Speaker 1:Well, and fix me could be a couple of things right. So it could be fix me in the context of this job. Or ask the question am I bad at job picking? True, yes, because if we all know the people that aren't that good, but they're at the right company and they're crushing it, yeah, yeah, there's the folks that are really, really good and they're in a tough spot. One of my friends told me one time he said the best thing he ever did was his first job at a college. He worked for the worst company in the market and he said that he learned so much from that that that really helped launch this career.
Speaker 2:Anything else could only get better, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, when people hate you by default, you've got a big hill to climb, and that's a way to find resilience, and one of the things that might impact somebody's ability to be resilient is have they had to be resilient before?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that's a really great question, especially when you've got young up and coming sales people were hiring kids that are straight out of college and this is their first job and where, you know, get on the phone and start calling and hammering and then they fail that first round, but they were a students in college. So what happened and how do you think they're dealing with that? How do you think that person who was the A student and ace their college education and came out with a 3.98 grade point average, is dealing with the fact that they failed the quarter?
Speaker 1:Right the added thing they've never hit on a romantic person potential. I'm trying to say this without offending people. They've never attempted to date in person and been told no to their face thousands of times, like when you and I were coming up because they got their apps now and if the other person doesn't swipe right on them, they don't get a ewe gross.
Speaker 1:No, get out of here. Look at their face 10, 15, 20 times in one night, whereas when I was 20, sure, rejection all day long. Just you, just that's fine. And then all of a sudden, nothing matters, and just this is part of the game. But if that's never happened to you, if humans haven't stood in front of you and literally rejected to your face thousands of times, then you're put in a different position. I think culturally that's just something that's changed with different generations throughout the years.
Speaker 2:For sure, for sure. And I think those are things that we need, especially when you've got a young team, young up and coming, who don't have life lessons learned really hard ones. Most young people have nuclear family still or some form of family right. They haven't lost parents at a younger age. There's a huge blow. What about your middle age people who are dealing with having to manage now, elderly care on top of keeping a full-time job and at the same time they've got kids going to college? So you're juggling like think about where your people are at in their lifespan and what they might have. You know what strength they and I've got a great tool called my resilience plan. If anyone wants to tap me on the shoulder for that, I'm happy to help with it, but that's it Give me your email address.
Speaker 1:Once you're in your email address, good, gail.
Speaker 2:Plot done.
Speaker 1:GailSharac at gmailcom and Sharac. It's spelled differently than the beverage.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is C-H-A-R-A-C-H. It's kind of like character without the T-E-R, because we're characters the Sharacs. So I think that's something that managers need to keep in mind is, look at your people where they are in their lifetime and from a resilience perspective. Are they too young to have experienced so much that they need to have developed that resilience? Are they in their early stages of developing it? Are they people in their middle sort of age world where they have suffered loss? It could be job loss, it could be people loss, but there's pet loss, right?
Speaker 2:I mean any of the things are going to upset someone's emotional apple cart enough to cause a follow-up of something. It could be a lack of productivity, lack of focus. How are they? On the burnout scale? I mean there's a terrific tool that Jeff Reisley has put out there from the Sales Mental Health or Sales Health Alliance. He's got a burnout tool. I actually went in and I did the burnout test and I love it because it's not just a standard five questions. He's got them well-weighted so that you've got a little bit more. It just felt more real to me. So, on his scale of thriving to unwell, I had like flashing red lights of unwellness, yeah, from I think it was 70 to 92 or something is unwell, and I scored something like an 89. It was that bad. But did any of my managers along the way, any of my leaders along the way, stop and say Gail, what's going on? Gail, you're looking like you may need a little bit of a vacation. No, no, Gail had to figure that out all by Gail's self.
Speaker 2:Which is okay, but guys, if you're-.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's another life lesson, Nobody generally nobody cares about you.
Speaker 2:That's it. You have to care about you first and you have to put your own oxygen mask on, and that's why I left sales enablement, because I was so burnt out that I realized I had nothing left to give in that respect.
Speaker 1:Now, let's think about how we can use this to our advantage, though. So if I'm a frontline manager and I'm under the impression that you have to put your own oxygen mask on first, well, what if I report to the vice president? How do I help them so they're not feeling the same way about me in terms of communications?
Speaker 2:So walk me through this again, Corey.
Speaker 1:How can I push information to as a manager? How can I push information to my manager to help them have more confidence in what I'm doing, to help surface coaching opportunities for me and manage up really well? Because if I'm feeling something about my team, the assumption should be that, well, what could my manager be feeling about me and how do I mitigate the fact that I'm feeling that they're feeling about me in the same way that I'm feeling about individuals on my team?
Speaker 2:That's a great question, and my coach actually tells the story of how she was feeling a little bit under the gun and a little bit very much imposter-like, and she actually was in a workplace that she felt relatively safe in and she brought it up at a manager meeting and, to her surprise, every one of those managers said well, I feel that all the time. Yeah, again, I think it's about open communication. Right, it's about being able to share and understand that sharing is not and that vulnerability of sharing is not a negative thing, it's a positive thing. So in my case, if I were the manager sitting with a team that's not being productive and I'm having some challenges, and I want to push upwards to my team to say, are you aware Like I need some help over here? Hello, it's about open and honest communication and if we can't have that, then we can't be leaders. Yeah, I mean, you've got to be able to be. You've got to be able to open the kimono a little bit and share. Yep, love that and that goes both ways.
Speaker 1:I heard something on a podcast the other day that I thought was really interesting, and they said that when someone has a problem, there's two different ways that we can react to it. We can either say how did that make you feel and say what are you going to do about it, and the commentary yeah, I love your take on this.
Speaker 2:I think both questions are equally important. I think I first want to understand how you feel about it, and once we've processed that, I'm going to move you forward.
Speaker 1:So you're going to? When you say moving forward, are you going to? Are you just getting the feelings out of the way so I can feel like I got them out of the way?
Speaker 2:No, it's not about getting them out of the way. It's about understanding Again, if you're feeling something, it's going to be an indicator of a need that is being met or unmet, right. So let's figure out is there something that's not being met for you? Is it an emotion that is tied to an unmet need? And then let's solve that right. And so, what is that unmet need? Is it that you're not sleeping well? Are you? Does your diet need some change? Do you need an appointment with the doctor? I mean, let's figure out what unmet need is causing that emotion. Once that's being acknowledged and dealt with, then the next question becomes and now, how are you going to move forward?
Speaker 1:So I don't know one or the other.
Speaker 2:I think it's both.
Speaker 1:I like it. I just lost 50 pounds. I feel way better.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:I should have done that sooner.
Speaker 2:That's right, and I know that I need to right, but am I doing anything about it right now? No, I'm caught up in my own.
Speaker 1:So, but the cause the reason I did it is because in just like in sales, nobody's going to change unless they have pain. Yeah, I got gout twice in one month and I couldn't. I was in. I was in Southern Spain, at the beach, 24th floor apartment overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and I couldn't leave for four days because I couldn't fricking walk. So I was ordering Indian food and eating there at the table. I had to go down the elevator to get it and I had to take a cane to do that and I could barely walk on a cane. And then I said I shouldn't be doing this anymore and I used a slightly different language to myself. But that's the gist of it.
Speaker 2:But why do we wait that long? Why do we wait until we're in the unwell phase to do something about anything?
Speaker 1:Here's my thing and I think I can tie an analogy in here is when I was growing up, I played basketball and I played basketball probably 25 hours a week. Well, when you play basketball 25 hours a week, you burn a lot of calories, so I overate by habit. I was eating two, three dinners, eating a lot at lunch. I was an overeater and I love food.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now I'm in my current athletic adventures where I play pool and chess and these things that burn lots of calories and I have the same diet. All of a sudden it says well, maybe have a salad for lunch and don't eat dinner.
Speaker 2:Your recipe changed right.
Speaker 1:Get the four-counter Chick-fil-A instead of the time 25 hours of basketball.
Speaker 2:You're now doing things that are far more sedentary. Your recipe changed, so you had to change your diet, yeah, To accommodate. Well, why wouldn't we change things in ourselves when our recipes changed? That's what I'm saying. If we don't take stock every time there's been some kind of upheaval in our life, even something as simple as moving from the apartment on the 25th floor to an apartment on the 10th floor, that's stress. And if we're not taking stock and stopping to say, all right, I've had a series of cumulative big events that have caused a lot of pressure. What impact is that having on me? And that's where I wanna understand how my feeling because how I'm feeling is gonna tell me what needs of mine are being met and not met.
Speaker 2:Corey, there was a huge, huge eye-opening surprise for me in my own depletion and healing when I was going through the coaching process and it came time to evaluate my values. If you would have told me, even five years ago, let alone 20 years ago, that my second top, most value, after authenticity, would be self-care, I would have laughed at you. Who's time for self-care? And I'm not talking about manicures and pedicures. I'm talking about the really the deep dive inside, the meditation, the walking, the movement. I mean all the things that we do to make our bodies work. If our body physically isn't working, then nothing else in it, around us is going to work.
Speaker 2:And that was the problem that I had when I recognized how burnt out I was. I had no capacity for anything If I had five minutes of focus at a time. That was a lot. And I'm now? How many months away from that. It's been over six months of healing for me and, quite frankly, I'm still maybe at a 60%. I'm not 100%, but it took me 20 years to get here. So it's going to take time to work on that and I think that's part of the resilience pieces Taking stock. I started I had been listening but not hearing, and when I started reading job descriptions and felt a physical, visceral reaction, I realized that my body wasn't up for another stint of exhaustive job hunting and being positive. I knew I couldn't do it. So it's recognizing our limitations and then working to fix what's broken so that we have that whole self to go back out there and move forward with.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the hard part, because you've got all of these things that are more personal, and then you've got things around Are they asking a discovery question, setting next steps, doing effective demos, keeping their talk time down so the prospect can actually talk? And that's where zooming out coaching the player, not the play is absolutely critical. If you wanna learn more about how we do that, check out coachcrmcom. We've got a free version.
Speaker 2:Free version and I have to say, having been in that tool, having learned the lessons, having been through the courseware, there is no other tool on the market that I am aware of that manages coaching like you guys do. You have nailed it. So it's true, and I'm not just. It's not just platitudes, because I'm on your podcast, corey, you know that.
Speaker 1:I know you've told me that before. I appreciate it. Gil, thank you so much and tell folks about what you're up to and how to reach out to you.
Speaker 2:So I am now reinventing myself as a coach. I am coaching to resilience. What does that mean? It means coaching people to be stronger in any way. It means coaching people who are looking to transform themselves in some way, develop themselves in some way personal, professional, anything like that. Tap me on the shoulder. If you're right now feeling all of those feelings of heaviness and overwhelm and I just I feel like some days I can't put one foot in front of another, that's when to tap a gaol on the shoulder and you know, for everyone out there I mean, we work with you know therapy, therapists work in the past to get you to a sort of better present. Coaches will take your present and help move you to a better future. And that's what I at my heart. That's what I want to do is just help people move forward in their lives.
Speaker 1:If you want to move to the future, tap gaol. If you're enjoying the salesman, if you're enjoying the sales management podcast, subscribe to it on Apple or Spotify. We're producing new episodes. It'll be out twice a week at least. Maybe we'll do something special. I don't know If you know anybody that should be a guest. We're always looking for guests. We can do interview format, we can do debate format and if somebody wants to propose a handful of folks to come on and really get into a topic, we can do a WWE style Royal Rumble. That would be fun. Haven't done one yet, looking forward to doing one, and we'll see you next time. Sales management podcast Corey Gray, ob God.