Wow. Ainsley Harriot once said something, didn't he? He said, ready your mental shield. I think you're confusing that with ready, steady, cook. Which is what you are. Anyway, let's jump into it, shall we? I've got one today. It's April the 6th. I've got one from our friend, Marcus Aurelius. Marcus! When you first rise in the morning, tell yourself.
I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don't know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that these wrongdoers are still akin to me, and that none of them can do me harm or implicate me in the ugliness, nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them, for we are made for cooperation.
Mm Like the way you said busy bodies. Did you? I like the way you said busy bodies there, love. I'm going to bring it right back down to earth now. All right. OK. Right. So the Stoics used to have this thing where they would imagine the worst and actually lean against the worst. I'll give you a few examples. Moxley used to stand over the cart of one of his children and imagine that the child didn't make it till the morning. Sounds very morbid. Moxley famously lost half of the children that.
He was father to during his life. He buried, I think, six children in his life. And Seneca, when he went to bed at night, the last thought he used to have in his mind was that he wouldn't be awake in the morning. And the Stoics used to always imagine the worst. And in letters from the Stoics, Seneca says that one of his friends is struggling because his town burned down. He's really struggling. He's really stricken with grief about his town burning down. He's got no home anymore. The problem is not the town burned down.
problem is that he wasn't prepared for the worst. He'd never imagined himself there. So there was no mental fortitude in that area. Now, modern day, hopefully we're not out there having to worry about things like that anymore. But when we go into our sales roles, we can often be faced with there's potentially going to be worst case scenario here. There's potentially going to be no meetings on the board. That client's going to say they don't want to renew with us. That prospect's going to say they don't want to sign with us.
This person's going to come with a competitor. My boss is going to grill me about this deal that I should have got over the line by now. Whatever it may be, there'll be worse case scenarios. Now, if you're a practicing Stoic salesperson, how can you prepare for that joke? So I think that the key thing is to imagine the worst, but not worry about the worst that could happen. So
There's a fine line, isn't there, imagining, laying in bed at night and thinking about all the things that could go wrong, but then actually going into a spiral and really worrying about it and letting it keep you up like all night. It's okay to meditate on it because actually you're preparing for those rainy days. So this is probably like a really nice place to talk about the first aid kit. So we talk about like, can you do to prepare? So if you are imagining what could go wrong or you could miss target.
You could have a deal that doesn't go through. You could not book enough meetings in the year. Okay. Well, these are all things that could happen to you in sales. So what could you then do to avoid those? Well, I could put more input in. I could book more meetings. I can make sure there's more opportunities on the board. I could just have more of everything. So all of a sudden you go from focusing on what could be a potential pain point in the future to, well, what can I do to prepare?
the storm and it's about having processes systems in place that are going to get you through those rainy days. You don't want it to rain and you'll be scrambling around saying where's my umbrella? You want it to rain and say, hold up. This one's made of ducks feathers. Wow. Because water off a duck's back. Nice. I like what you did there. And we had the author of Beyond Stoicism on the We Have A Meeting podcast recently, Massimo Piccoluccio.
Pick a Very good. I actually didn't want to butcher that. For a bloke that can't say aurelius. He did all right then. Yeah. And so he was talking about this idea of meditating on the worst. And the challenge I had is we're always told to have this positive mindset and then almost meditating on the worst feels like a negative mindset. And he was like, no, no, no. That's where a lot of people get it wrong. If you were to actually practice this in the way the Stoics did, you would either talk to yourself or write a letter to yourself like you were your own friend.
talking about the events that have happened. So in the case of the salesperson, it might be you've got to the end of the day, unfortunately, despite your best efforts, you haven't booked the meeting that you thought you were gonna meet, or you didn't close the deal that you thought you were gonna close, and then talk about the next steps after that. And when you get onto the next steps, this idea of cognitive distancing comes back in. So in talking to yourself, you're going, maybe it's not that bad.
then you start to move yourself away into like, what would be next? What would you do differently? All those types of things. There's that separation that grows. But the key thing here is to talk to yourself like you're your own friend, not like you're your own enemy. Yeah, I love that. And we always say like the first step in self developing self awareness. But then the second step is that self compassion and not being too hard on yourself, because actually if it was you opening up to me.
No, actually that's a bad example because I'd probably be awful to you, but if it was two friends opening up to each other, two friends, two friends opening up to each other, one saying, I'm struggling with this. The friend would be there for them. What's something you could struggle with that I wouldn't want to help you with? My shoelaces earlier. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Dogs. How would I struggle with a dog? Because you don't like them. It's not that don't like them. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you will die. Never trust a man that doesn't like dogs. Remember your dog.
