Overworked? 4 Signs You Need to Recharge

Take a cue from endurance athletes: Here are four ways to tell you're about to hit a performance wall. by Jeff Haden in INC.

Sometimes it’s obvious we need a break, but in most cases we figure it out too late. When you work double-digit hours and Sundays are no longer a day of rest, feeling overworked can become the new normal. Even so you’ll eventually hit a wall, and when that happens it can take days and even weeks to recover the enthusiasm, creativity, and motivation you’ve lost.

Fortunately a few of the same techniques endurance athletes use to detect the need for additional recovery can be used to indicate when you need to recharge your work batteries. Where elite athletes are concerned, chronic overtraining can actually defeat the fitness purpose and result in decreased stamina, power, and speed; sometimes the harder they work the slower they get.

The same thing happens to us when we’re overworked. We put in more hours to compensate… and get even less done. So how can you tell the difference between feeling overworked and really overworking yourself?

I asked Jeremiah Bishop for some simple techniques anyone can use to avoid hitting a wall. Jeremiah is a professional mountain bike rider for Cannondale Factory Racing. He's a twelve-time member of the U.S. national team and is to mountain bike racing what an NBA All-Star is to basketball (except he’s currently not out on strike).

Here are ways to ensure you stay at your professional best:

Check your resting heart rate. Every day, before you get out of bed, take your pulse. (There are plenty of free apps that make it easy. Some even log results.) Most of the time your heart rate will stay within a few beats per minute. But when you’re overworked and stressed your body sends more oxygen to your body and brain by increasing your heart rate. (The same thing happens when athletes overtrain and their bodies struggle to recover.) If your heart rate is up in the morning, do whatever it takes to get a little extra rest or sleep that night.

Check your emotions. Having a bad day? Feeling irritable and short-tempered? If you can’t put your finger on a specific reason why, chronic stress and fatigue may have triggered a physiological response and sent more cortisol and less dopamine to your brain. Willing yourself to be in a better mood won’t overcome the impact of chemistry, and in extreme cases the only cure is a break.

Check your weight. Lose or gain more than a percent of body weight from one day to the next and something’s wrong. Maybe yesterday was incredibly stressful and you failed to notice you didn’t eat and drink enough… or maybe you failed to notice just how much you actually ate. Lack of nourishment and hydration can put the hurt on higher-level mental functions (which may be why when we’re overworked and feeling stressed we instinctively want to perform routine, less complex tasks.) And eating too much food—well, we all know the impact of that.

Check your, um, output. Urine color can indicate a lack of hydration (although sometimes it indicates you created really expensive urine after eating a ton of vitamins your body could not absorb.) The lighter the color the more hydrated you are. Hydration is a good thing. Proper hydration aids the absorption of nutrients and helps increase energy levels. If your urine is darker than usual the cure is simple: Drink a lot of water.

The key is to monitor each of these over a period of time so you develop a feel for what is normal for you. Pay special attention on weekends and vacations, and if you notice a dramatic change, especially a positive one, that’s a sure sign you need to change your workday routine.

Don’t say this sounds like something only elite athletes need to worry about. We all want to be the best we can possibly be, no matter what our profession, and whenever we slam into the workload wall we are far from our best.

And don’t say you don’t have the time to take a short break or get a little more sleep. You owe it to yourself to find a way.

Eventually your mind and your body will hit a wall and make you, so why not do take care of yourself, and improve your performance, on your terms?

In between motivation

Do you remember how the last sales training motivated you to read more about sales and spend more time planning and preparing your calls and visits?

Remember how that seemed exactly what you wanted for about two weeks and how your focus trailed off again two weeks later?

Remember how your colleague hit a 200K deal and that woke you up again and made you read more articles and prepare your calls again, for about two weeks?

This is what we call FOCUS.
In one of my previous articles, I discussed the Reticular Activating System and how you can 'teach' your brain to focus on the things that are necessary to reach your goals.

Needless to say that if your goals aren't clear to begin with, you'll have a hard time focusing.

So...you find yourself in between focus-peaks.
How do you re-focus and switch ON again?

You can't be switched on everyday and all day, you may argue.
Well, I would agree that you have to balance your efforts in order to continuously be at your best. And emptying your energy and brain reservoirs certainly isn't the way to go.

However, if you have clear goals, and you have established that those goals will make you happy - you DO have endless energy to pursue those goals.
Quantify your goals and recreate what that means in the number of deals you will need to close in order for you to reach your goal. Quantify how many quotes/business offers you typically need to have in your pipeline for you to expect that amount of business in signed deals. Quantify how many calls you need to make to get to that number of quotes. And break it down per quarter, per month, per week and per business day.

If you calculate that you need 40 calls per day to get 10 deals that will meet your monthly target - not your boss's - YOUR target, then wasting time chatting at the coffee machine may seem a lot less attractive all of a sudden.

With that said, if you DID make your 40 calls, there IS time to reward yourself and take a bit of steam off by chatting with coworkers, playing ping-pong or other leisure.

So, what about the In Between?
How can I regain my focus and energy if I am in between those peaks of attention?

PLAN your daily, weekly, monthly infuse of motivational support, interesting sales tricks, and mentoring conversation.

If you want to make progress, why just rely on your own discipline and insights, why not ask for someone else's help.
If it's a direct sales colleague - all the better. You probably both have the same issue. If you think someone else at your firm, or your ex-boss may be of great value and offer good insight and self-reflection, why don't you plan for a breakfast meeting to start the day energized?

The conclusion is:
You can wait for your sales manager or CEO to motivate you, but ultimately you are chasing your own dreams, and there's no-one more capable and interested in achieving those goals than you. You just need to make it happen.

Make it happen!


Happy selling,


www.salesguru.nl

Repost: Mount Everest

Last night, I woke up early because of my jetlag.
Around 3.15 am it occurred to me (the weirdest thoughts come up at night) that getting started in sales has some similarities with climbing the Mount Everest.

A couple of months ago, my good friend Marco Hoogerland (an amazing mental coach for top athletes, including top-notch football players, world and european champions and olympic athletes) hosted an evening event with Robert de Vries.

Robert de Vries is a Dutch climber, and one of few men that has endured the severities of reaching the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain on earth.
Robert presented his movie to the in-crowd, accompanied by stories and many questions of the dazzled audience. What an unbelievable performance - I was stunned by his humbling and riveting story.

It also occurred to me that you have to be somewhat crazy/selfish to reach the absolute top.
Many things have to be left behind (sometimes even relationships with loved ones) to achieve the goals at hand. I am not saying anyone should.

I am just saying that my observation of the journey and end-line to these unbelievable achievements seem to have some commonly shared factors:

Dedication, focus, taking risk, preparation, training, endurance, persistance, triomph, glory, and hardship. It doesn't come for free...

It seemed to me that getting started in full-commissioned sales is somewhat like climbing (albeit more comfortable perhaps).

Sales isn't easy...
You can see the top, but have no idea (yet) how to get there.

Considering the following:
- No gear when starting (job knowlegde, product knowledge, industry knowlegde)
- Some are already trained when they start, some aren't.
Trained (experienced) people may have an advantage to reach the top sooner, but it may also hinder them in a way, because they might think they know it all and get reckless/careless while climbing is dangerous.
- You earn your climbing gear (product/job/industry knowledge) along the way, as you proceed through the basecamps.
- Some will fall or go back
- Some get stuck in snow storms and have to wait a while and watch weather conditions before they can proceed to the next camp.
- It is hard work, no matter how experienced you are - you will still have to walk the walk.
- You need your co-climbers, so be a good colleague
- It's great at the top, but anything below doesn't satisfy your dreams, so you may have to endure dissatisfaction, or disappointment when things aren't going as smooth as you had hoped for.
- Getting to the top may not be fun, but there's no easy way there. You have to pass through all basecamps
- Sherpa's (mgmt? finance? administrative colleagues?) can do a lot of the work, but you will still have to climb yourself.
- If your goal is to reach the top, you can't stop when others are not making it.


So:
- Prepare (create prospect lists, organize your approach, create a plan, work the plan)
- Train (read, learn, ask, look around, copy, whatever makes you improve)
- Focus on your goal (top of the ranks)
- Be lead by the leader (pick your example)
- Persist (be relentless)

Dream about the impossible becoming possible by putting the first step in the right direction

Don't let yourself down

Be tough when it gets tough

Take the hardships like a man: it comes with the journey

Celebrate the basecamps, so you can enjoy the journey too

Learn from the winners, not the whiners.





If this doesn't make sense to you: it was late ;-)

Enjoy

[ This is a reposted message from 2008 on www.salesguru.nl]