THE A, B, C’s of OVERCOMING STRESS FOR SALESPEOPLE and OTHER HUMAN BEINGS

Trick question: Is STRESS an?external?or an?internal?factor???Some folks I ask respond with?external?as their choice, in other words, it is something that happens to us?from the outside?caused by people, places or things outside our control.??Others reply that stress is an?internal?factor, meaning it is something we do to ourselves not really connected to the external realities of life.??

I called it a trick question right up front because stress actually is both.??Unless you are medically psychotic and thus you are making up the stuff in your head (it’s ONLY happening in your mind and nowhere else), it would be foolish to deny that as humans we do react to our world around us.??Let’s call this “stuff” in the world that occurs?stimuli; experiences that stimulate our senses in some way.??

Yet just because this “stuff” is happening around us, this does not necessarily mean we need to react in some particular way, or frankly, even react at all.??As a matter of fact, at a subliminal or subconscious level we are already picking and choosing to what stimuli in our environment we value enough to warrant a reaction.??There is just too much going on and it would overload our nervous systems if we humans responded to every little stimulus at every single moment of our lives.???

For example, consider a common activity of modern life, driving a car.???There are so many hundreds of experiences and feelings about them that drivers must?FILTER?as they proceed down the road in their vehicles, determining in real time what warrants a reaction and what does not.??We need to process most of these potentially stimulating events and feelings while driving?in the background, at a?subliminal?level.??Although there are many things going on as possibly dozens or even hundreds of vehicles speed on around us, they may not be a potential danger, or at minimum the behavior of these other drivers is not particularly important or relevant to us in any way.?

We do not exactly ignore these stimuli; we just do not elevate it to any level of importance, kind of like a program on your computer that runs in the background protecting the computer from a virus that only alerts us when such an event occurs. When it comes to any of life’s experiences, any level of stimuli as I call it, either deliberately or unconsciously we humans are?first?choosing to what warrants a response and?second?how therefore to respond to it.???

So back to my “trick” question, there are countless?external?experiences daily to which we could or could not respond?internally?at all.??And if we do respond, the range of reactions can be anything from the slightest, most mild recognition all the way along the “continuum” to a full-scale emotional blowout of anything from the utmost positive joyful exuberance to powerful negatives such as anger, fear, worry, disgust, or grief.

By the way, this “choice” of most appropriate emotional response happens in less than a second, far too rapidly for you or anybody else to short-circuit, derail or redirect the reaction in progress.??It’s a reflex like the old-school family doctor hitting your knee with that little hammer to test your nervous system during an annual physical.??We will come back to this split-second stimulus-response loop in a minute, but what about these filters, as we call them?

One reason for what seems like an instantaneous reaction is that the experiential filtering process is happening almost all of the time at a level below our conscious perception.??Consequently, the filter works like a computer?program,?sorting our experiences, deciding which stimuli is worthy of a conscious response and what kind and intensity of a response to have.??Just like a program, the “processor” (our brains) is super-fast, evaluating and deciding on the appropriate way and intensity of this mode your brain selects as the “right” response.

How do these filters get in place???Well, our filters are mainly developed slowly over time based upon our life experience.??Sometimes a very intense incident can create what is known as “single trial learning”.??This is where what happens to us is so powerful that an immediate emotional response is more or less “hard-coded” at a neurological level; it is learned at one time and sticks with us forever.

In general, though, whatever happens in our lives teaches us something that builds upon each consecutive similar occurrence as patterns are recognized and categorized for future use.???Everything we learn is “filed away” someplace in our minds so that when another related experience happens, the current response can be correlated to the previous experience.??Similar to a computer’s relational database (originally created by humans to resemble our way of organizing knowledge), our minds sort our experiences, catalogue the reactions we have tried, and then organize this incident “loop” into a canned, pre-recorded response to be “played back” later when what appears to be the same request comes from our nervous system.??This incident or reaction loop becomes one of the?filters?we have been talking about.

So how do our filters relate to stress, or frankly any and all of our emotional responses to what is happening in our life????Every event activates a response, which is the behavior we have learned to initiate upon one particular stimuli or another.???This behavior is automatic and happens in that?less-than-a-second?time frame we mentioned earlier.???If we have learned somehow from life to “freak-out” because we have been unemployed for longer than our expectation and consequently become all “stressed out” among our family and friends, then that is virtually an unstoppable course.??

Influential psychologist Albert Ellis, with whom I had the pleasure to chat over dinner together many years ago in Las Vegas, broke this high-speed behavioral process down into an easy to understand formula:

A + B = C

Activating Event + Behavior = Consequence

In other words, although the activating event (A) is typically totally out of our human control, the behavior (B) we exhibit directly afterwards is not set in stone for all time, despite that fact that it may absolutely “feel” that way.?Certainly, the behavioral response has become “hard-coded” as we described earlier, but it is NOT inevitable, and therefore and most importantly, neither is the consequence (C).

So, if we only have a split second before our behavior responds to stress or any other activating event, what can you do to “short-circuit” this response to avoid suffering the consequences of stress???It would be attractive would it not, to assert control over the consequences of our behavior by first and foremost attaining total or at least partial domination of that behavior that we know now is not predestined by the stars.

There is a way to gradually achieve this power, and that is both comforting and encouraging to know.??However, the path to behavioral change, as with pretty much any worthwhile change, is a bit of an unpaved, gravel road at first; meaning an investment in time is required to achieve results before the route to a new behavior wears into our brains and a new habit replaces the old habitual action.??Thus, there is a need for repetition to slowly but surely turn the rarely traveled dirt path into a well-worn, paved road.

Inspiration and instruction are available in both the worlds of arts and sports.

For example, think about how an actor or musician gets ready for an upcoming live performance.???They rehearse, right???Over and over, time after time, the artist of one kind or another must prepare their brains before the show.??Actors provide an ideal model to follow as they actually must “get into character” to produce a really convincing portrayal of another human being, whether live or recorded.??Thus, the actor uses repetition to teach or train both their minds and bodies to behave in a new way.??

A martial artist, or anybody pursuing athletic excellence, also offers easily observable proof that practice does indeed make perfect, or at least takes them in that right direction.??Imagine all the times a practitioner of any sport at a professional level must have repeated a particular game- or match-winning “move” to later impress the audience during an event or competition??

In fact, if you think about the word “practitioner” itself, no matter what area of expertise is being described, the connotation or meaning connected to the word reminds us that “practice” is the main component of expertise in any field of endeavor.??This of course applies to sales and the sales process, too.

So, there you have it, a fairly simple formula, A+B=C that is, which any of us can use to create a behavior change within ourselves, including a reduction in stress.??

There are two key moving parts to activating the formula: First, to have the courage to jump into uncharted territory with something new, and all the emotional and physical discomfort that will likely bring.??In other words, you must go and sign up for that exercise class you have been wanting to take and purchase the particular clothes required if you don’t have them. Second, and more difficult, you must keep showing up long enough to allow time and practice to slowly but surely turn the uncomfortable feelings from negative to positive, so the distress can eventually dissolve into a new physical and emotional state.??

What I cannot tell you is how long it will take.???What I can promise you is that if you practice, you will achieve a life that is less stressful and more satisfying as you progressively train your mind and your body to respond in new and healthy ways.?