Some things in life don’t seem to make sense. If you’re caught in the ocean’s under-toe, don’t resist, but instead save yourself by swimming horizontally to the shore with the ocean’s pull. If you want to effectively snow ski down the side of a mountain, you must lean forward or if you ever find yourself in a skid, driving experts advise you to do two things: steer into the skid and don’t hit the brakes (I’ll add that to my list just below the “play dead if you encounter a bear” rule). Advice like these instances are counter intuitive to our feelings. Fearing a pull, who wouldn’t immediately swim to shore? Bracing for a fall, why wouldn’t you want to lean back on your heals? Launching into a 360 degree spin, it makes perfect sense to reflexively hit the brakes and steer away from the oncoming ditch and when you do, you only make the situation worse. If you want to be more effective and save yourself, you must go in the same direction of the very thing you want to get out of. 

When you feel your sales career is hitting the skids take action that is counter-intuitive to your feelings. Steer into the skid and don’t let up. You have more than the blink of an eye to make a correction toward your career’s intending path. Accidents in sales rarely happen suddenly; it’s our non-reaction to the tugs of the under-toe of seemingly minor transgressions that lead to a major pile-up on our road to success. 

In sales, it’s a natural reaction to want to preserve what’s left of our tattered ego and self-esteem. It seems as though it was just last week, we had the hot hand- we wore the lucky shoes and wrote with the profit pen. Now that same hot hand is back slapping all of efforts-everything we try to do is in vain-every customer hates us or is buried in their trade, the inventory mix is all wrong, F&I has no interest in getting our deals bought, and the manufacture won’t put any rebates on the hood of the car-“If they’d give me more rebates, I could easily sell more cars,” we rationalize. It’s not that you suddenly got unlucky, instead of working harder,you let up and intuitively hit the brakes, steering away from your skid to save yourself… and made it worse. 

Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going.” When the shoe is dealing you a bad hand, keep playing the game. In the final straws of No after No-seemingly from every customer-when your mind is telling you to go sit down and ride out the day, don’t let up, go find your next opportunity.Your next win is resting in the folds of your losses, but you’ve got to find it.

Body builders lift incredible amounts of weights and push their bodies to extreme limits to obtain a physique like no other-similarly you must brain-build your career by lifting huge amounts of rejections, failures, and set backs to build your mental toughness. Your mind will give out before your body will-force it with a one more mentality- one more phone call, one more Up, one more referral.

It’s always too soon to let up-elites are discovered because they incessantly tried once more; they did not give up until they found what it was they were looking for.

Run with the struggle-it’ll always give up if you don’t.