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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on June 4, 2020. It featured entrepreneur and coach Marissa Levin.]
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EPISODE 250: Marissa Levin Shares How GRACE: Grit, Resilience, Adaptability, Connection and Empathy Right Now Can Set Your Sales Mindset At Ease
MARISSA’S TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Make a list of what you should start and a list of what you should stop doing. Focus on the things you can control such as your diet and the food that you’re taking into your body. Are you exercising and getting fresh air? Are you calling people to feel connected to them? What about the content that you are digesting? We all need to focus on bringing in positivity and identifying the things that we must take out of our lives. And, it’s so important to ask for help. You do not need to go through this alone at all.“
Fred Diamond: I’m thrilled to have Marissa here, you are an expert on leadership, culture, mindset, you’re the perfect guest today. There’s been a lot of things, prior to this week all we’ve really had to deal with was a pandemic.
Marissa Levin: That’s all.
Fred Diamond: [Laughs] and 20% unemployment and companies closing, now of course there’s a lot of other things going on in the world. First of all, how are you today?
Marissa Levin: I’m great.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get started, feel free to get started here. GRACE, I’m excited to get your angle here.
Marissa Levin: This pandemic has literally touched every single company globally in every single industry. It’s really unprecedented in the way that we are all in this together and the work that Successful Culture International does is we’re really focused on helping organizations build great places to work where employees feel safe, they feel empowered, seen, heard, connected and ultimately engaged so that the results show up on both the top line and the bottom line.
I came up with the whole idea of GRACE, the acronym came to me actually as I was on the New Jersey Turnpike coming back from a business trip. What came to me was that leaders really need to know how to tap into their own Grit and Resilience, they need to learn how to be Adaptable and they need to know how to show up with Connection and Empathy in every moment.
For our time together today I’m going to walk you through what the GRACE model is and how it addresses the three facets of leadership. We’re going to go deep into Grit and Resilience – which by the way are not the same thing, they are two sides of the same coin but they are not the same thing – we’re going to talk about Adaptability and what that means and then we’re going to talk about Connection and Empathy and how even when you are feeling so stressed and your mindset may not be in a great place, how can you tap into what you need to tap into to make sure that the people you’re engaging with whether it’s your sales team, other people in your organization, your customers, how can you make sure that you’re showing up from a place of connection, compassion and empathy. Then I’ll leave you with some best practices for how to lead with GRACE and a library of additional resources that you’ll be able to use for when you need additional support. Fred will send out this PDF to everybody.
I want to mention that our company, we’re so focused on making sure that companies are stable and healthy right now, we’re providing this training complementary to any business that has any teams. If you have two people, if you have 200 people, it doesn’t matter. We’re doing individual interactive programs for teams and what we’re finding is that the connection that is happening and the level of support that is developing internally as a result of what we’re doing, it really has been transformational and it’s giving people a framework for how to engage given everything that’s going on. A quick introduction of the grace model. As I mentioned, it deals with the three facets of leadership, those are self-leadership, organizational leadership and leadership of others and in every moment of leadership we are in one, two or all of those facets. In every moment of leadership you have to focus on self-leadership, you have to focus on leading the organization and you have to focus on leadership of others.
The self-leadership in the GRACE model will really focus on your Grit and Resilience, organization will be how to be Adaptable, how to be flexible, how to learn how to pivot on a dime to remain relevant in today’s environment and then the leadership of others is how you can really maintain that strong Connection to those you lead and lead with Empathy and compassion in every moment. Never before have we seen such a need for compassionate leadership. Our company has a large online scale academy which is an advanced leadership education academy. One of our courses that we deliver a lot is creating a respectful work environment around unconscious and conscious bias and this is so relevant today because if people are not aware of their biases either conscious or unconscious, it impedes their ability to be a leader who leads with compassion and empathy so this topic could not be more timely.
We’re going to get into the acronym and the first thing is Grit. A lot of people thing that grit and resilience are the same thing, they’re not. I’ll give a personal example: I’m really into fitness and exercise, one of the things that I do is I do a lot of spinning and thank god for my indoor spin bike because if I didn’t have that, I don’t know what I’d be doing. I ride pretty much every morning and when the instructor is pulling us through the course that they’re leading us through, when we get to the place where we have to crank up our resistance and we have to be at a level 26 or 27 on a scale of 1 to 32 and I have to dig deep to get through that mud or to get through that sand or to push through that moment when they’re telling us that we need to keep it at a really high level, that’s when I have to dig deep and get gritty.
It truly is the commitment to persist when you are in a difficult place, it’s digging deep and Angela Duckworth is one of the most renowned experts on grittiness. What she has found in years of research from people of all demographics, all levels of education, all socioeconomic levels is that grit trumps talent and intelligence all the time. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how skilled you are, if you don’t have the mindset to dig deep when things get tough, you’re not going to be as successful. I’m sure every single person on this call today knows really smart people and knows people who have tremendous potential and tremendous talent but when the going gets tough and you have to rely on them to dig deep, they crumble. It’s your grit, it’s your ability to stay excited and enthusiastic about things are difficult when you are in the throws of an obstacle or a challenge. We are all in the middle of a challenge right now and we don’t know when things are going to change, we’re getting comfortable in uncertainty, we’re getting comfortable in discomfort, we’re getting comfortable with the pivot that we all have had to make. It was just a few months ago that we weren’t wearing face masks everywhere, it was a few months ago that we were planning to send our kids to camp or we were planning for our sports during the spring and summer months.
We didn’t think we were going to have our college kids living with us and literally on a dime, things changed. The people who are going to be able to move forward are the people who are going to be able to dig deep and not lose their enthusiasm even though things are hard. That’s the grittiness. The flip side of grittiness is resilience and the reason that I used this picture with the tree is because this is the question that we always have to ask ourselves when things get hard. “Am I going to bend or am I going to break?” It’s a choice that we make, it’s a path that we choose. When we’re in the middle of all of it and we are pushing through it, the resilience develops because of what we’re doing. We don’t develop resilience when things are easy, we don’t develop resilience by sitting on a webinar or attending a workshop, we only develop resilience by going through hell. There’s no other way to get it so it’s important for us that when we’re in difficult times we have to really reach back and think about all of the other experiences that we’ve had.
When has life brought us through our knees? When has the rug been pulled out from under us? When have we been hit with curve balls and then gotten back up? It’s the ability to get back up after we’ve gone through the difficulty that builds our resilience muscle. The grittiness happens while we’re in it and the resilience is the result of the grittiness, it’s a trait. Those are the two sides of the coins for self-leadership. When we are leading others, when we have to show up with strength, enthusiasm and excitement about what we’re doing or how we’re connecting, this is where we tap into our grittiness and our resilience.
Fred Diamond: Marissa, you talked about how we were living our lives in February and March planning for the spring and planning for the summer and vacations and graduations and things like that and all of a sudden we were sent a curve. One of our attendees asks, “Marissa, I know you work with a lot of teams. What was the biggest issue for teams pre-COVID and what will be the biggest issue for teams post-COVID?”
Marissa Levin: Biggest issue for teams pre-COVID I would say the normal course of life, balancing our priorities, navigating different personalities on your team, making sure that you are doing what was required of you, the normal things that anyone would expect from a team member. Dealing with change management, dealing with leadership that perhaps you didn’t really agree with or didn’t get along with, just the normal things that occur in organizations. That was the pre-COVID, what we’re finding out with current COVID and post-COVID is that people now are separated, they’re all in their homes, they all are siloed, they’re not feeling connected to one another, they’re dealing with a lot of distractions.
A lot of our clients have employees that have either college students at home and they’re dealing with that, they have younger kids at home so they find that all of a sudden they’re doing learning online, they are home with other spouses and significant others or other family members, they’re dealing with family members that might be ill. We have clients that are in really difficult situations that are dealing with abuse, they’re in domestic abuse situations and they’re home with very difficult circumstances. All of this ends up coming into the environment of an organization because people are literally figuring out how to go moment to moment.
Fred Diamond: Great, thank you.
Marissa Levin: You’re welcome. That was the discussion about grit and resilience and hopefully I answered the question, Fred, the way the listener wanted to have that addressed. I put this quote in, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” The reason I put this in is that it’s really important to know that we have a choice, we can either focus on the negative and all of the suffering or we can focus on the good that is happening around us and the overcoming of it. The choice is ours, what we focus on grows and what we ignore dies so we have the opportunity in any moment to decide what our mindset will be. I’ll talk about some strategies on how to stay positive in such a difficult environment when we have so much negativity coming at us.
Typically what we do in this presentation when I work with the smaller teams, we’ve worked with leadership teams like I said from 2 up to 200 and we’ll split this presentation into teams of about 15 and then they will go away for a few minutes and work on these questions. I’m leaving these in here because when you get this PDF, I want to encourage you to take some reflection time because if you’re having difficulty accessing your own resilience and your own grit, this type of introspection will help you take a pause and think about when you’ve had difficult situations happen in the past, how have you moved through them?
Thinking of times where you had to really dig deep to stay on course. How did you motivate yourself? What are some messages that you tell yourself when you feel overwhelmed? What are your own strategies for grit and resilience? This question is really important: what do you add to your life and what do you remove from your life in order to stay strong, focused and positive? Personally as a mindset expert I’m really intentional about what I call a content diet. I am very focused on not allowing any of the negative stuff that’s out there, any of the inflammatory information, the click-bait, I don’t watch press conferences, I don’t keep the TV on in my house. When I’m out walking I’m always listening to positive podcasts, I’m reading a lot of positive things, I follow a lot of positive people on social media. I’m really focused and intentional knowing that the negative content can really mess with our psyches. We have control over that, that’s a really important question and I would encourage all of you to make a list of, “What am I adding to my life to make sure I stay strong, focused and positive?” Healthy diet, exercise, connection with loved ones, absorbing positive content. “What am I removing?” Work on that list and keep that in front of you.
Fred Diamond: Marissa, we have a question here, someone just asked, “What has Marissa added to her life in the last three months that she will keep in her life?”
Marissa Levin: I love that, that’s a great question and I want to mention that I do a wellness series on LinkedIn and this is one thing that I added. I believe in the quote that the best way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves in the service of others. I came up with a wellness series on LinkedIn and it broadcasts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for five minutes. Mondays is Mindset Mondays, Wednesdays is Wellness Wednesdays and Fridays is Fearless Fridays. In under five minutes you will get strategies and tips not just from me but from guests that I bring on, on experts in wellness and mindset. Me doing that knowing that I’m doing this small part to be able to help others move forward and stay positive and give them strategies, for me that’s been really fulfilling.
Fred, I’ll tell you, I actually received a message – and I get a lot of messages about the content that I put out – a week and a half ago through LinkedIn from someone who is anonymous, they didn’t want me knowing who they were, they’re not engaging with my content but they are really suffering from severe depression and they said that my messages are really helping them hold on and giving them hope. Knowing that I’m helping others move through this difficulty, that’s a really big thing for me. The other thing that I added was I’ve always been a fan and a big writer of hand-written thank you notes but I really double down during this whole thing because so many people are suffering. I write a minimum of five hand-written thank you notes a week that I send out to people just letting them know that I love them, that I’m thinking about them, that they’ve got this and I really like to send liquid sunshine through the mail to people who are in my life. Those are the things that I’ve added to my life through this whole thing.
Fred Diamond: I just want to comment on two things you said. One is we’re doing a webcast every single day and we’re talking to sales experts such as yourself and sales leaders. One of the key takeaways from me over the last three months was that sales really is about service and the way you’re going to shift your career is to thinking about others before you think about yourself. There haven’t been a huge amount of transactions in most industries, most salespeople are challenged with things that we talk about every day here on the Sales Game Changers and the other webcast that we do, but if you make it about others, sales is really about servicing.
The second thing which is what you just touched on as well, I doubt if anybody who’s watching today’s webcast is going to come up with the vaccine to cure COVID-10 or the Coronavirus. We’re not going to make those monster massive changes, we’re not going to fix the airline industry but we can do some of the things you just talked about. We can help somebody who’s in stress, we can produce a document, a blog, a post that may give some inspiration to people, we can make a phone call. You’d be amazed how a simple “how are you?” phone call – not a text, texts are good too, but a phone call can make such a huge difference. Those are great ideas and I’m excited about that. Once again, we’re talking about GRACE, we talked about Grit, we talked about Resilience, now we’re going to talk about Adaptability.
Marissa Levin: Adaptability by far is the single most important trait to ensure longevity of an organization but I want to also talk about it at the personal level. I actually did a whole mindset series on Mindset Mondays specifically about adaptability. If you think about adaptability, it really is a spectrum. Some people when they have to face change they’re like, “Bring it on”, lean into it and they are ready. They’re like, “I am ready to let go of the old, I am ready to lean into the new” but then you’ve got a lot of people who are on the other end of the spectrum and these are people, quite frankly, that if they could still have a rotary phone in their kitchen hanging on the wall, they would still do that. They hate change, they crave stability, they love predictability and the fact that they cannot control anything and have complete uncertainty is killing them right now. Most people are somewhere in the middle in terms of their feelings about adaptability.
Adaptability is a mindset and we have to look at it as an opportunity for growth, creativity and ideation. The thing about adaptability, I’ll make a connection that a lot of people don’t talk about. Those that are least adaptable are also the ones who are often perfectionists because if they’ve mastered something, they want to hold onto it. I personally have become a master of the pivot, I’m all about trying new things, throwing them out there, if they’re not working I’ll tweak them, if they’re not working at all I’ll stop doing them. I’ve released attachment to the outcome and I focus a lot more on the journey and I really believe that when we have the opportunity to lean into change, there’s so much growth that will happen as a result of that both on the organizational level as well as on the individual level.
My first company, Information Experts – it’s an education and training firm – when I started that, the world for training was all about paper-based training, it was all classroom-based, paper-based, instructor-led, there was no e-learning, online learning at all, this is going back 27 years. When John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco one day announced that e-learning was going to be the killer application of the internet, my entire world turned upside down in 24 hours. All of a sudden everyone wanted online learning, web-based training and this is before it was actually easy to develop online training. It was very cumbersome to develop online training when it first came out so I had to pivot my entire organization or I would have gone out of business.
The thing about being adaptable is you can’t be so in love with your own idea or what you’re doing that it holds you back from being able to pivot. That’s the crux of adaptability, releasing your attachment to what you’re doing. As soon as you can release your attachment to what you’re doing, you’re able to make room for what is able to be but until you’ve released your emotional attachment to what was or what you were hoping for, you’re not going to be able to make room for the possibilities. This is really important and I know it’s hard but if you can master the adaptability, not only are you going to have less emotional struggle, you’re going to lean into so many more possibilities. I hope that makes sense.
Fred Diamond: We have a question here from the audience. We have a couple sales leaders watching today’s webcast, we have people from all over the globe. One of them asks, “How should I be engaging my team right now to get their advice on how we should adapt?” It’s an interesting question. You work with a lot of leaders, you work with a lot of CEOs, you’ve sold a couple of companies as well. What would be your advice today for a sales leader on getting not just the outward communication to his or her team but how should they be getting suggestions or how should they be getting their people to participate so that the adaptability may happen?
Marissa Levin: That’s a great question and Fred, I’m going to say that we’re happy to come into their organization and lead this workshop pro-bono for them so that we can introduce the idea of a mindset of adaptability. The whole thing starts with introducing the idea of adaptability, we can’t expect people to be adaptable if they’re not even consciously aware of what adaptability is and most employees aren’t waking up thinking, “I need to be adaptable today.” They’re thinking, “What is happening in my life? How am I going to get through today? Why am I continuing to be in survival mode?” They’re literally in survival mode so the leadership team has to coach them and bring them along on the idea of adaptability and that’s what we do when we work with the teams that we work with. This is the first time they’re really hearing about these mindsets of grit and resilience and really unpacking what this means, unpacking the idea of adaptability. This is new for them so once we can get them on board and help them embrace the idea of adaptability and that it’s truly an opportunity and not an impediment, that’s when they can release their creativity and everybody can work as a team to figure out, “How can we all move forward collectively and individually?” That’s what I would recommend, bring us in and we’re happy to do that.
Fred Diamond: Prior to March 12th when everybody was invited to stay home we would do a mindset session once a year, you were actually one of our first speakers back in 2016 at our Acquisition Symposium. Once a year I would have a speaker come in on mindset and grit would be 10 minutes of that presentation and we actually had a speaker, the 2020 Live IES Speaker was scheduled to come in in October and that was going to be our one session on mindset. Now we’re doing a webcast every week, you’re the eighth speaker that we’ve had just on Optimal Sales Mindset and you’re getting really deep into the critical elements. We talked about grit, we talked about resilience, we just talked about adaptability, these are new concepts to a lot of people. People might have heard Angela Duckworth or some of the other people who have done some work on grit. What does the C stand for in GRACE?
Marissa Levin: The C is Connection. Before we get to that, these are the reflection questions that you all can do on your own in terms of adaptability. Thinking of a time in your life when life changed quickly, how did you respond? When you find the changes on the horizon, what is your natural state of mind? That’s really important for you guys to think about because if you naturally resist it, this is something that you know that you can work on and we’ve got exercises for you to do that. The last question: what are some moments in your life where an unexpected change led to an outcome or result that pleasantly surprised you?
The reason I put that question is because I’m coaching and mentoring right now a recent college grad who was supposed to work for a company, he had an amazing job lined up and that company ended up filing for bankruptcy. He’s going to end up going to law school, but I’ve been coaching him about that and about leaning into what the new opportunities are when one door closes, super important to have that attitude. What we did when we unpacked where his anxiety around this was, was that he went through, as a little kid, a lot of change and I said to him, “But how did everything turn out?” and he’s like, “It actually turned out really well.” I said, “Then why would you be so afraid of going down a new path?” and he’s like, “You’re right, I’m not really sure why I have a lot of anxiety.”
A lot of times when things don’t work out the way we envision them, that’s where the anxiety creeps in and if we really sit with that we realize that maybe we don’t need to be so anxious about it. Maybe if we just opened ourselves up and be open to what’s actually going to happen then we won’t struggle so much. I have a rule of thumb with my life that I’d much rather approach challenges from a place of calm than chaos and we always have that choice. One of my other mantras is that patience has a way of untangling everything. When we can just relax and lean into it all, there’s a balance about the best way to predict the future is to create it, and that is absolutely true but we also have to trust the process. This is for such a bigger conversation, Fred, but it’s really important that the people on the phone do this type of introspective work.
I know you said that I can push it to 250, I want to make sure that I get to all the content here and I’m certainly available for questions after. The C is for Connection. I want you to pay attention to that first bullet, “Human connection is an energy exchange.” Emotion is energy in motion, that’s what emotion stands for. Human connection is an energy exchange between people who are paying attention to one another and we all have been in those situations where we’ve been ‘connected’ with people but we absolutely feel like we are not being seen, we’re not being heard, they’re hearing every third word that we’re saying. They’re not with us, they’re with us but they’re not really with us.
Connection happens when we are truly with one another and as sales leaders, you know that this has never been more important. You need to be fully engaged with your sales teams, you need to be fully engaged with your customers so when you are with them, are you really with them? Brene Brown is one of the experts on vulnerability and on connection, you guys can read her quote but it truly is about the energy that exists between people. What are you doing to show up where your people that are counting on you truly feel connected to you, and that it’s true authenticity and genuine connection? Focusing on that is right there, if you don’t do anything else and you only focus on the quality and the depth of the connection with the people that you’re connecting with and that are in your life, if you do nothing else from this presentation, that alone will make a difference.
Fred Diamond: We have a question here. We’re all in virtual worlds, you and I are both in Northern Virginia right now which is in phase 1 of the reopening but people are still going to have to be six feet apart and a lot of the office buildings are not going to open up till probably September. We’ve heard from some of our members who have said that their office isn’t going to open until 2021 so what are your suggestions for building that connectivity right now when you can’t be within 6 feet of each other or you don’t want to take a risk of going somewhere? There’s no cure for the virus, there’s no massive testing so what could people be doing today to effectively build this connectivity?
Marissa Levin: We’ve done a presentation on this and we’ve given our clients very specific strategies making sure that they aren’t just calling to check in on tasks that have to be done. Not just calling in to get status report on how a project is doing or even just for a team meeting, but as you mentioned, pick up the phone and see how they’re doing. Make a commitment to actually call them and say, “I’m not calling to check in about work, I’m calling to check in about you.” A couple of other really creative ideas that we’ve implemented with our clients, for Cinco de Mayo our client sent a gift package to all their employees that had a margarita mix, it had salsa, it had chips, it was literally a Cinco de Mayo package that they sent out. People probably don’t know this but I run a company called Women’s CEO Round Table and we’ve got 15 women CEO’s in there for a year-long cohort.
My partner and I just sent really nice neck pillows that they can throw in the microwave, they’re from a spa, they can heat them up for two minutes, they smell like lavender, it literally creates a virtual spa experience. We sent those neck pillows to all of our members, I think we got them for like $8 dollars each. There’s things that you can do on a small scale, there’s things you can do on a large scale but it really is about getting creative on how you can connect with people and make them feel seen, heard and understood. My partner and I were like, “Should we support a small business and send something from a bakery?” and I said, “Let’s not do that because we don’t know what allergies are out there, we also know that everybody’s been quarant-eating, everybody’s eating a lot during this quarantine, let’s not add to that.” We did something healthy and we sent the little spa package but they’re so many ways you can get creative to stay connected.
Here’s some questions that you guys will be able to reflect on, on connection and empathy. You’ll get these when you get the presentation but really important to think about how you’ve shown up for other people and how it made you feel. Remember, the best way to find ourselves is to lose ourselves in the service of others. How have you helped other people and how have you shown up for them? Then how are there times when you really felt supported and understood, how did that help you cope with a challenge? These are ways that we can reconnect with our own ability to be connected, compassionate and empathetic and never has there been such a need for leaders of all types, sales leaders, organizational leaders, to be compassionate and empathetic. This has to be one of the top priorities of leadership right now. Those are some of the questions.
On this page what we’ve done is we’ve compiled a few best practices on how you can become gritty, how you can tap into your resilience, how you can be sure that you’re embracing adaptability and leading from a place of connection, compassion and empathy. If you think about your leadership and your communications in this framework, it will absolutely deepen your relationships. I want to just mention something, Fred, this is really important. We’re going to move through all of this, I’m really optimistic for 2021, I’ve always believed that we need to have breakdowns to have breakthroughs, you need to have destruction before you have creation, we’re all going to move through this and our organizations will rebound, will survive and will thrive. The way that we are treating people now, the way that we’re treating our employees, the way that we’re treating our customers, what we’re doing today matters because when things change and get better, they’re going to have choices of other places to work, they’re going to have other companies that they can work with and the way you treat them now will determine if they stay.
People will remember how you showed up when things are difficult so it’s super important that you live and lead and communicate with GRACE in all times. I just love this quote that the higher a man is in his grace, the lower he will be in his own esteem. When we live with grace we stay connected to others. We are not nearly as important as maybe we think we are, we truly have to stay connected and engaged with those in our lives. So, for the resources there’s a whole library here that you’ll be able to access. I write for Inc Magazine as well, there’s a whole bunch of articles on dealing with leadership and crisis, self-care, these are some of my podcasts that I love. My company, we also have the culture podcast which we’re going to be relaunching to really talk about culture in the era of COVID and rebuilding democracy and society, and then these are some really good Ted Talks on how to develop emotional courage, some of my favorite blog books and meditation and mindfulness programs, all of these are things that people are going to be able to use to help build their mindset.
This is just information on our organization, on how to engage with us, we have a full online scale academy, we have a whole program on how to master your mindset, we have culture consulting, online coaching, all sorts of ways to engage with us online to make sure that your people are as engaged and happy as possible and your company has as healthy of a culture as possible. That’s just some information on our scale academy and some of the modules and additional resources and this is how you find me, I’m on LinkedIn, that’s my big platform, I am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram but I don’t really check them. LinkedIn is where to get me and some books as well that we’ve written. That’s what I’ve got, Fred and it is 2:43 [laughs].
Fred Diamond: Marissa, I want to thank you so much. We do have a couple questions here so let’s get to them.
Marissa Levin: Great, let’s do it.
Fred Diamond: Someone said here, “I was one of the people that said I’m concerned more often than not and I am not a leader in my organization. What should I do?” Is it comfortable for someone who’s in the organization to reach out to their leader or should they seek other counsel? What would be some of your advice for someone who’s not a CEO or not a sales leader but is struggling right now for whatever the reasons might be?
Marissa Levin: I live my life from a place of ‘and’, not ‘or’. When you said, “Should they seek counsel or go to their leader?” the answer for both is yes. The most important thing to be doing right now is to know that you’re not alone at all, that there are so many people going through what you’re going through and when we become part of the universe, the universe becomes part of us. What I mean by that is when you put yourself out there and you let people know that you need help, whether it’s your friends, your family or your coworkers, your supervisors, people are here for you.
Make sure that you’re not telling yourself a story that you’re alone because you’re not alone, there are so many resources available whether it’s clergy or whether it’s online support, there are counters and therapists that are providing free online counseling just to get people through this. You have friends, you have family members, the worst thing that you can do is to tell yourself that you’re alone. I’ll put myself out there, if you feel that there’s no one else that you can talk to, email me, get in touch with me, I will get on a call with you specifically to help you develop some strategies so that you can shift your mindset and I hope that you’ll use the resources in the presentation because they’re going to help, too.
Fred Diamond: Marissa, I want to thank you again for all the work that you do, not just for the last 45 minutes for our audience but for all the people that you serve and the thousands of leaders that you’ve helped to grow their companies and you’re going to continue to help grow. I’m going to put you on the spot here, you’ve given us so many things that people can do. People are attending our webcast and they’re looking for something to do now, we’re not doing sessions on how to be a better prospector in the future, it’s like what can you do today on June 4th, 2020 at 2:45 p.m. Sum up one thing or two, if you want to say, that people should do – and don’t be broad as in, “Be a better connector.”
Marissa Levin: No, I’m going to be specific. I’m going to mention two things. Earlier in the presentation I talked about the importance of making the list of what you should start and making the list of what you should stop and I’ll give clues to that. Focus on the things you can control, things that you can control are your diet, the food that you are taking in. Are you drinking enough water? Are you drinking alcohol, which a depressant? I’m not a drinker, it’s a depressant so thinking about the substances, the food that you’re taking into your body. Are you exercising and getting fresh air? Are you calling people to feel connected to them? What about the content that you are digesting? Is your social media feed filled with negative rhetoric? Are you obsessed with what’s happening in the news?
We all need to make sure that we’ve got some buffers so I would really focus on creating that list of what are things that I can add to my life that are going to bring in positivity and what are the things that I should take out from my life to protect my positivity. That’s the first thing and then the second thing, I will reinforce it again, it’s so important to ask for help. You do not need to go through this alone at all, so think about who you have and Fred, I meant it, if someone needs support and they feel they can’t talk to anyone, they can absolutely reach out to me.____
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo