Today and tomorrow over this Easter weekend, my tips are as much for me as they are for you, and may involve some more thinking out loud.
What do you do to rest & recover so that you can stay on top of your game? What’s the best fiction book you’ve read in the last year?
Join the conversation below and I love to hear your thoughts!
Jono Clegg Sales Success Stories Interview
Reach vs. Relationships on LinkedIn
Daily Sales Podcast
Sales Success Stories
Sales Success Summit
Sales Success Stories Book
B2B Sales Mentors Book
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today and tomorrow over this Easter weekend my tips are as much for me as they are for you, and may involve some more thinking out loud. Especially after how much the conversation prompted by my Reach vs. Relationships piece on LinkedIn has helped evolve my thinking.
So today I thought I’d talk a bit about rest & recovery. It was Jono Clegg, the former olympian turned medical device sales rep who I interviewed on Sales Success Stories who really got me thinking about this after he talked about how much he prioritizes recovery in his own approach.
Personally, I have sort of a macro and a micro issue going on. From a macro perspective it’s looking like I probably won’t get my first vacation until close to the halfway point in the year. Spring Break for my kids this year happened to be the same week as the biggest conference of the year for my company where I’m typically managing conversations and other interactions with over half of my clients. So I sent them to Harry Potter World in Orlando while I went to work in Las Vegas, and yes that was the Vegas trip where I got sick afterwards and lost my voice.
Then on a micro level, this week was one of those crazy travel weeks. The trip to Vancouver was super productive, but according to my Fitbit, I slept for 3:15 on Tuesday, 4:15 on Wednesday and 5:08 on Thursday and then to add insult to injury, waking up at 2:45 am to catch a 6:15 am International flight home wasn’t a lot of fun after all of that.
So personally I’m looking for a bit of reprieve. Sleep is probably the first thing I need to work on. I’m looking at backing off my usual 4:30 am wake-up time for a week or two to make sure I get back into that 7-8 hours of sleep zone where I perform best. Unfortunately, that’s probably going to have to wait another week because my travel next week has me spending a bit of time on both coasts. Tomorrow I’m actually going to delve into the travel side of things, so these two tips will probably go together pretty nicely.
The other thing that’s fallen off a bit for me is exercise. Not completely and mostly that’s because of the travel and because my default exercise right now is my Peloton. That bike doesn’t exactly fit into my carry-on, and I really haven’t been doing anything else on the road lately. You wouldn’t think that exercise fits into the rest & recovery category, but for me it totally does. I find I’m way more sane and have significantly more energy when I make time to get a workout in and Jono when I talked with him. It was kind the same think, right? He learned this strategy from training as an Olympian, right? When resting is, and recovering is not an exercising but from a sales perspective, exercising is a great way to recover, maybe not rest, but it’s like energy that’s come out of it.
Beyond that, I really need to find more ways to incorporate more short, but restful periods into my schedule since a real vacation probably isn’t in the cards until at least June. One thing I’ve been doing there is listening to or reading more fiction. I have a tendency to read non-fiction almost exclusively but am realizing that it’s just causing me to think about the same stuff all the time and I never really turn off. Apparently, I’m making the transition to fiction kind of slowly because the book I’m finishing right now is actually non-fiction. It’s called Bad Blood and is about the Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes collapse. It reads a bit like a Thriller, so it’s a good gateway drug. I also listened to Old Man’s War which was pretty good and if you have some great fiction recommendations please bring them on. I’m totally game right now.
I’m also thinking about experimenting with meditation for a few minutes each day as well. Again just different ideas to incorporate short recovery periods knowing that I’m not gonna be able to take a full week off for a bit of time.
This tip is one where I’d really, really, really like to hear from you. What do you do to rest & recover so that you can stay on top of your game? What’s the best fiction book you’ve read in the last year? I’ll even take personal advice and suggestions since that’s basically how I set this whole thing up.
Join the conversation at DailySales.Tips/91 Then come back tomorrow for part two of this discussion where I’ll talk about travel techniques and maintaining your sanity on the road.