One of the most important aspects in terms of psychological performance is being able to face the brutal facts in front of you.
This isn’t always easy. As soon as we have some victories or things go to well, we can easily become blindsided to negative facts or problems, and our performance immediately goes down.
Removing Your Sense of Security
A great first step to facing harsh realities and brutal facts is removing your sense of comfort and security. If you think you’re well off, that you don’t need to work more, make more sales, become in better shape, you have to be willing to smash that (usually false) sense of security from yourself.
You have to realize you probably must need to keep proving yourself in order to keep achieving great results.
Creating Urgency
The next step is creating urgency. Not to necessarily stress you or make you anxious, but to make you realize “Hey, this has to be done ASAP”.
I’m one of those types of people that don’t believe in doing things in the near future. There is only “right now” or “never”. When I have a list of tasks, either I perform them right now, or I completely remove them off of my mind.
This is a very healthy mindset for me because it removes having that “shadow” in the back of your mind. As soon as a pending task is bothering me, either I make it happen right here and right now, or I completely forget about it.
Identity Sliding
As we become successful, it’s easy for us to forget the effort that we really had to put in to make things happen and think, retroactively, that it was all cakewalk all along. You spend dozens of hours in the trenches making sales, but then, when you look back at it, the process seems to have been very streamlined and easy.
Many times, it’s only when we check the diaries, logs, documentation of our past work that we realize it really wasn’t that easy. And that’s good. Because it’s easy to slide into an identity of not having to do a lot of effort, because the past was so simple anyway, it’s important that we smash that identity and come to terms that it was never easy anyway. And that’s fine. Because it means that it wasn’t easy before but you made it anyway.
Conclusion: Towards Facing Harsh Realities
There are many ways of bringing yourself to facing harsh realities and brutal facts. The ones outlined in this article help with this process. But in general, it’s all about realizing things are not that easy, that you have to keep proving yourself, and that it’s very easy to trick yourself into thinking you don’t need to work or make any effort anymore. Don’t let that happen.
This is also a great complement to your activities to better face rejection in sales.
