I Know What Needs To Be Done, But My Thoughts Prevent Me From Doing It!

Let’s say that you’re an entrepreneur, and a friend introduces you to a huge opportunity. He introduces you to a partner of his, whom he believes would be a good fit for your services. This prospect happens to work at an organization that is large and well-known. Your business will do amazingly if you can pull off the presentation.

So you begin to prepare. You want to impress this prospect and win the deal.

You know that sales is not one of your strengths. So you spend time searching for tips and looking for courses in order to train specific skills. But the more you search, the more you feel overwhelmed. You begin to think that you have no special talent for selling. You also begin to doubt yourself. You ask questions like “What if I screw up this opportunity with a terrible presentation? What if the customer is not interested in the service? What if … and what if …” and on it goes.

What starts out as idle thinking eventually affects your feelings. You feel like you’ve been punched in the gut. Your heart beats faster whenever you think about the upcoming meeting. You feel numb. The confidence, enthusiasm, and passion you have at the beginning begins to fade away. You begin to dread the deadline.

And so you procrastinate. You can’t concentrate on your prep, so you watch Youtube for a while.

You want to practice the presentation but you don’t feel like it.

You delay by cooking dinner. And then you push it off to the next day.

Your productivity is low. Because you’ve procrastinated so much, you don’t make progress on prepping for the sales engagement.

And now, as the meeting draws ever nearer, your thoughts turn from dread and into blame. You blame yourself for your uselessness. You are annoyed that you are not good enough at sales. You are frustrated that you can’t control your actions.

Let’s pause here.

Does this sound familiar?

How do you feel? What do you think?

You seemed to have such a good start at the beginning: you were confident, enthusiastic, passionate. You rationally assessed your lack of sales skills and you took action to compensate for it. But now you’re stuck.

So what happened?

Is it because you lack sales skills?

Is it because of your weak will?

Is it because of the negative spiral of doubt that you find yourself in such a situation?

But let’s imagine that you didn’t have this problem. Imagine that the next time you faced a similar challenge, you could access your weaknesses and act without your feelings getting in the way. That you could direct your thoughts and emotions into action in a more fruitful manner.

I know how you feel. I’ve had to grapple with exactly this problem so many times over the course of my career. And after I left my role in sales and became a coach, I’ve seen this behaviour again and again in the 500 or so hours I’ve spent with my clients.

The solution here is to fix your thinking before you fix your actions.

But in order to manage your thoughts, you need to be aware of them first.

This is difficult. It is difficult because thoughts are quick and difficult for you to grab a hold of. And there are many layers to our thinking.

So what thoughts to catch and how to watch out for them?

Here’s a simple exercise you can use to start with catching some of your more obvious negative thoughts. It should make an impact on your actions relatively quickly.

Step 1: When you feel that discomfort in your gut, or when your heart beats quicker when you’re thinking about something bad; ask yourself: “how do I feel now?”

Step 2: When you’ve identified the feeling, ask yourself: “What causes me to feel that way?”

Step 3: Observe your mental state, pick up the specific thoughts that cause you to feel that way. Then write them down. (Or make a voice note if you’re lazy).

This sounds incredibly simplistic, but it works! And it works because it takes what is buried in your head and brings it out into the open as explicit problems to look at and then later work on.

How you work on these thoughts is an entirely different exercise. But I’ve found that merely learning the skill of thinking about your own thinking is a significant first step to increased performance.

And so you should try this exercise the next time something similar happens. You can also try to work this into your daily routine. One thing that I like to do is to simply look at my unwanted reactions at the end of the day, as I’m winding down, and apply the three steps above to them.

The more frequently you pause and check in on your feelings and thoughts, the sooner you can diagnose the unhealthy ones that need work.

I hope this is helpful to you in your journey to achieve your goals.